List Mania: The Top Five New Malthusians
24th November 2011
“The New Malthusians” sounds like the name of a new wave or punk band, but just as new wave is old school, there is never anything new about Malthusianism no matter how many times it gets punked. Only the band members change.
When the world’s population reached the estimated 7 billion mark a few weeks ago, the most famous Malthusian of modern times, Paul Ehrlich, made a few encore appearances for old time’s sake, but for the most part Ehrlich and his generation of Malthusian rock stars, such as Garrett Hardin, Lester Brown, and the Club of Rome, appear about a fresh as Keith Richards after a 7 am wake up call. The old guys really need to be retired (well, actually, Garrett Hardin is long dead anyway), to make room for the new kids. The criteria for making the list are simple: a winner’s Malthusianism has to be essentially unmodulated from the older kind, be relentlessly monotonic, be extremely lucrative, and/or a pretext for increased centralized political power.