Thomas Robert Malthus has had a very long run. Issuing his first essay on population in 1798, he has persuaded millions of people that the world is threatened by overpopulation.
“The effect of Malthusianism was immediate and dramatic,” writes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. “For half a century social attitudes and policies were decisively shaped by the new turn of thought.”[1] And the impact continues.
Until November I had never read Malthus’s essay.[2] To my surprise, it is a delightful essay—-clearly written, easy to read, a relatively short book. (Subsequent editions were more ponderous, I understand.)
Malthus is thoughtful and civil—deferential toward Adam Smith in spite of a disagreement and polite toward the two men whose arguments he demolished, William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. The essay is full of plain-spoken metaphors (using examples such as watches and telescopes)[3] and full of common sense.
The strange thing is this: Not only was his claim about population vs. food production wrong, as we now know from 120 years of experience, his argument for it was just armchair theorizing. Continue reading “The Marketing Genius of T. R. Malthus”
As I have stated before, historians are often influenced by what’s going on around them when they write about the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, the newly-independent countries looked as though they might experience their own industrial revolutions. That led to an interest among historians in the early Industrial Revolution. [1]
Economists caught the enthusiasm, too. They viewed the great potential of these countries and expected an Industrial Revolution—what W. W. Rostow called these countires’ “take-off.” [2] But that period of enthusiasm was followed by disillusionment. It turned out that many countries failed to achieve the take-off that seemed right at their doorstep.
I suggest that the economists were looking at the wrong things.
More than 20 years ago in an article for the Journal of Private Enterprise [3] I wrote about economists’ views of development as reflected in Paul Samuelson’s famous textbook. (That’s the one you probably read in your first economics class if you are of a certain age.)
I looked at Samuelson’s treatment of international development in four editions of the textbook, 1951, 1961, 1964, 1985. In them he reveals both his own views and those of other leading development economists.
For years I’ve heard about the academic pressure to publish. Now, as a graduate student, I’ve come across some results of that pressure. These are books that make an interesting subject dull.[1] I’ll consider one of them, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, in this post.
To be sure, my professors have taken pains to assign only books they consider important and relevant, the “cream of the crop.” (One professor advised his class that if we didn’t like these, we would hate the ones he had rejected.) Nevertheless, a few clunkers come through. Well, I consider them clunkers. As an editor (current and past), I am frustrated when I see tremendous talent combined with disappointing execution.
The book I’m commenting on was praised on its cover as “superior and fascinating.” It reflects enormous research (12 years’ worth), including meticulous gathering of visual artifacts across two continents and several centuries. And it exhibits heroic efforts to come up with new interpretations. But, in my view, its impact is restricted by having to meet the academic goals that lead to tenure and full professorship.
Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World[2]is the story of how tobacco and chocolate, substances that were part of pre-Columbian social and religious rituals in Mexico and Central America, became popular products in Europe during the 1600s.
Historians and economists think differently. Historians tend to be self-effacing and tentative; economists are bold.
Let me illustrate this by a statement from a historian introducing a modern way of looking at the Black Death: The new microbiology . . . opens up entirely new questions, ones we did not previously know we needed to ask.”[1]
Notice: . . . opens up entirely new questions . . . not answers.
The following statement is from two path-breaking economists. “This book explains that unique historical achievement, the rise of the Western World.”[2]
