On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Tom Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> I would agree about Daly's Malthusian tendencies. I don't endorse that. > With Malthusianism and anti-Malthusianism there is always the danger of > throwing out the baby with the bathwater -- or even throwing out the baby > and drinking the dirty bathwater. Apologists for capital are fond of using > what is dismal in Malthus as a pretext to disparage the very idea of > biophysical limits to the accumulation of capital. Some of Malthus's > analysis is valid (albeit not original). It's the good stuff that the > anti-Malthusians are most eager to dispense with. > Several thoughts on Malthus. - Is there a "baby" in Malthus' thinking that is worth retaining while flushing the dirty bathwater? His central insight of geometrical growth in population vs arithmetic growth in food is entirely unoriginal. Worse, to the extent that it is true, it is trivial and tautological. (Was it Engels who remarked that according to Malthus' "law", the world is overpopulated if there are only two people alive?) - Do Malthus' ideas work better for non-human species than for human populations? I understand that there are successful models in population biology based on the idea that numbers of a species increase until it hits a resource limit. - Malthus' most important legacy was undoubtedly his influence on Charles Darwin. Does the prestige of Darwin's theory explain the amazing persistence of Malthus' ideas? Btw there is a very nice quote about the immortality of Malthus attributed to Herman Daly: "Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead." -raghu.
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
