Now it seems that this idea is extreme and impossible, but in the history of mankind, this view has been praised as a scientific theory by many people. In order to understand its origin and development, we will start with a man named Malthus and his faithful disciple Thanos.
Thanos Thanos, a giant, is famous for "Thanos snapping his fingers". Personal label: Believer of Malthus Trap, staunch advocate and executor of family planning work, director of Cosmic Family Planning Committee.
Many years ago, Titan experienced a disastrous transformation. They are overpopulated and their resources are running out. Thanos suggested that they should wipe out half the population at random to survive the disaster. However, everyone rejected his idea, regarded him as a madman and exiled him.
In the end, Titan died. In order to prevent this tragedy from happening again, Thanos decided to wipe out half of the life randomly selected from all the planets in the universe, so as to save the balance of the planets. After Thanos collected six infinite gems, he wiped out half the creatures in the universe with a flick of his finger.
Thomas robert malthus is a British demographer and political economist. Famous for its population theory. Malthus was born into a rich family. His father Daniel is a friend of david hume and Jean jean jacques Rousseaux. His father advocated that changing the social system could solve social problems, and Malthus took a pessimistic stance on this issue.
In order to refute his father's argument, Malthus published Population Theory at the age of 32 in 1798, and reprinted it in 1803. This book is regarded as the pioneering work of population science.
The main points of population theory are as follows:
Malthus pointed out that the exponential growth of population will lead to food shortage sooner or later, and eventually there will be famine, plague, war, etc., which will reduce the population. The increased population will always be eliminated in some way, and the population cannot exceed the corresponding level of agricultural development. This is called the Malthusian disaster, also known as the Malthusian trap.
The intersection in the above figure is the largest population that the social economy can bear. If the population exceeds this value, catastrophic events will occur and the population will decrease. This is called the Malthus Trap's population ceiling, or Malthus ceiling.
According to Malthus' theory, famine, plague, etc. It will inevitably happen after the population increases, and the population will always decrease in some way, which is determined by the natural law of population. And this decrease in population is beneficial to the overall development of society.
For example, the Black Death occurred in medieval Europe.
13rd century is the golden age of medieval Europe. At that time, trade was booming and population grew rapidly. The population of England has doubled, from more than 2 million to 5 million.
The good times did not last long, and the population growth gradually exceeded the economic productivity and reached the Malthusian ceiling. Rent has gone up, but because of the increase in labor force, the poor are competing to reduce their salaries in order to compete for jobs. With the decrease of income, people's demand for goods began to decline. In order to feed the growing population, people even cultivate barren land. More and more seeds are planted in the ground, but the harvest is getting less and less.
Soon, the famine really came. During the rainy summer from 13 15 to 13 17, the wheat yield in northern Europe suddenly decreased by more than half. In the next few years, crops continued to fail, and cattle also became plague, resulting in more land waste. Population growth stagnated for 30 years, until the Black Death (plague) broke out in the 1930s in 14, and the population completely collapsed. In just a few years, 30%~60% of the total population in Europe died of the Black Death.
The picture below shows that the Black Death spread from 1346 to 1353 in Europe.
At that time, the Black Death was no different from social death, which turned people into hell. However, many scholars in later generations regarded the Black Death as an opportunity for the transformation and development of European society. After the Black Death, European civilization embarked on a different development path. At first, the social transformation that seemed very difficult suddenly became smooth sailing because of the Black Death.
/kloc-At the beginning of the 4th century, Europe was in an economic transition zone. Due to the population explosion, labor costs are falling. Because the labor force is too cheap, employers don't even buy ox carts, let alone develop advanced technology. Society has entered a labor-intensive development mode, which is called "industrious revolution". This model has no resistance to disasters such as famine.
After the plague, due to the decrease of population, people began to seek advanced technology to make up for the decrease of workers, and more and more advanced technologies appeared. Europe finally embarked on the capital-intensive road and gave up the labor-intensive track.
The rampant plague also broke the autocratic position of the Catholic Church and had an important impact on the Renaissance, the Religious Reform and even the Enlightenment, thus changing the development direction of European civilization.
From this perspective, Malthus' theory seems to conform to the law of social development. Let's look at another example, which happened after Malthus's population theory was put forward.
The Great Famine in Ireland, commonly known as the Potato Famine, occurred between 1845 and 1852. The main cause of famine is late blight caused by an oomycete called Phytophthora, which will lead to potato rot and then crop failure. In these seven years, the population of Ireland under British rule has decreased by nearly a quarter.
Potatoes were brought back to Europe by the Spanish in the second half of the16th century, and the British sent them to their earliest colony, Ireland, which is the nearest to him.
Potatoes originated from barren, low night temperature, dry and short-lived environment, and adapted well to wet, cloudy and cold Ireland. Compared with wheat and barley, the yield of potatoes is much higher, which makes more and more Irish people choose to grow potatoes. Potatoes have high yield and rich nutrition. With the popularization of potato planting, the population of Ireland has increased rapidly. In the 50 years from 1780 to 1840, the population of Ireland has soared from 4 million to 8 million.
With the explosion of population, problems have arisen. At that time, two-thirds of Ireland's population were tenant farmers who lived on agriculture. In addition, the Irish heritage is evenly distributed among scholars, which leads to smaller and smaller land area for everyone. Therefore, they can only grow potatoes to support their families. Due to the increase of population and the decrease of labor cost, Irish farmers have also entered the development mode of Europe at the beginning of14th century: labor-intensive and self-sufficient production mode. They gave up new tools and relied mainly on manpower for planting and transportation. Such a productivity model, in the face of large-scale potato production reduction, the consequences can be imagined.
Sculpture on the banks of the Li Fei River commemorating the Irish Famine;
In the18-19th century, potato failure in Ireland was actually very common. However, the great famine in 1845 was particularly serious, which was closely related to the response measures of the British colonial government at that time.
I don't know if it was influenced by Malthus' demography, but the British media regarded this disaster as a warning from God to Irish people's "luxury" and "carefree" life. The British government's approach to famine can be described as indifference or even looting in troubled waters. They gave little aid to Ireland and allowed Irish crops to be exported continuously. /kloc-when crop failure occurred in Ireland in 0/780, the British government banned the export of Irish crops in order to prevent famine, regardless of the pressure of nobles and businessmen; However, when the famine occurred, the British government did not issue an order prohibiting the export of grain, and a large number of crops were still sent to heavily guarded ports and exported to England.
If we look at these two examples carefully, we will find that the increase of population is indeed a prelude to disaster, but the fundamental reason why the whole society can't bear the disaster is to give up the development of technology and degenerate into a self-sufficient labor-intensive mode of production.
In the agricultural and social history of mankind, there have been many cases of returning to self-sufficiency.
/kloc-this was the case in Japan in the 0/8th century. At that time, due to the rapid expansion of population, land became scarce and labor was very cheap. It is more economical to cultivate land by manpower than to leave precious land to cattle and horses for grazing. Gradually, almost no one in the country knows what a plow is. Cattle and horses are extremely scarce, and transportation and irrigation depend entirely on manpower. Japan miraculously gave up technology and trade and returned to a state of self-sufficiency, that is, a labor-intensive and industrious revolution.
The book Rational Optimist attributes this degradation to the degradation of exchange and professional division (exchange and professional division will bring trade prosperity and technological innovation). Improving the degree of professional division of labor can make limited resources support more people. On the other hand, if the exchange becomes difficult, people will reduce the division of labor, so even if the population does not increase, there will be a population crisis. Malthus crisis is not the direct result of population growth, but the weakening of professional division of labor.
The upper population limit of Malthus trap is not determined by the carrying capacity of land, but by the carrying capacity of economy to population.
During the industrial revolution, Britain was lucky to escape the Malthusian trap. During the period from 1750 to 100, the population of Britain increased from 7.5 million to 21000. However, with the increasingly fine division of labor, trade is more prosperous, science and technology are developing rapidly, and the economic growth rate far exceeds the population growth rate. Although the land area of Britain has not changed, the economic capacity of carrying population has greatly improved.
Relying on the abundant raw materials brought by global trade, the exploitation and utilization of fossil energy coal, and endless new technologies, at the end of the industrial revolution, Britain crossed the Malthusian trap and successfully improved its population and living standards.
Later, Malthus could not guess the development trend of population: after the industrial revolution, about 100 years later, the trend of "two highs and one low (high birth rate, high mortality rate and low growth rate)" in western population growth was gradually replaced by the trend of "three lows (low birth rate, low mortality rate and low growth rate)".
This is true not only in Europe where the economy is the first to develop, but also in Asian countries. In Bangladesh, the average number of children per woman was 6.8 in 1955, and it will drop to 2.7 in 20 10. In Sri Lanka, where family planning was not practiced, the fertility rate also dropped from 5.77 in 1955 to 1.88, which was basically the same as that in China, where family planning was practiced in the same period.
Because people's life expectancy has been extended, the child mortality rate has dropped, and the world population expansion will continue for some time, but the world population birth rate is declining. Now the whole world is in the second half of the "demographic transition" from high fertility to low fertility and low mortality.
The book Rational Optimist devotes a chapter to analyze how we escaped from the Malthusian trap from the perspective of human economic development. The book concludes that when the division of labor reaches the point where all individuals exchange goods and services with each other and no longer rely on self-sufficiency, the explosion of mankind will stop. As the country becomes richer, healthier, more educated, more urbanized and freer, the birth rate will drop. Economic freedom has actually created a pair of invisible and kind hands of population control.
Malthus's population theory was published with controversy. Engels called Malthus' theory "... the most ruthless and barbaric theory in existence, a desperate system that destroyed all the beautiful words such as loving yourself and loving the citizens of the world." "
Ironically, when Malthus' theory was published, it was during the industrial revolution in his own country, Britain, and it was the great economic development brought about by the industrial revolution that made his theory bankrupt.
Malthus's population theory is not suitable for human society, but it is very suitable for other species in the biological world. His theory has a great influence on a man who has made great contributions to human science-Darwin. Darwin said in the origin of species that his theory is the application of Malthusian theory in a field without human intelligence intervention. Darwin was an admirer of Malthus all his life and called him a "great philosopher".
Reference:
Thomas Robert Malthus
2. Population theory
3. "Rational Optimist" Matt ridley
4. Black Death
5. Irish potato crisis
6. The Great Famine in Ireland
7 or 2 minutes to introduce you to Malthus' theory of population.