MALTHUS RETURNS.

MALTHUS RETURNS. Niall Ferguson, an outstanding historian, one of whose specialties is in financial history, invokes the name of Malthus here in suggesting that there will be food shortages in the next fifty years because of population growth. It is easy to construct a Malthusian model. One assumes a fixed amount of some resource and a growth rate for something important that needs that resource. Or one can choose a small growth rate for the resource and a large growth rate for something important that needs the resource. The model predicts a disaster. In the seventies, the Club of Rome used this kind of model to predict different kinds of disaster. This wikipedia article says, “The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth….. Published in 1972,…. it predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil.” It has been 35 years since LIMITS TO GROWTH was published and world economic growth has continued. Malthusian models still are current and predictions of peak oil are still common.