


Yet Malthus and his followers were wrong, wrong, wrong. Not just because they were unlucky that the world turned out nicer than they thought; that keeping babies alive proved a better way of getting birth rates down than encouraging them to die; not just because technology came to the rescue; but because Malthusians have repeatedly made the mistake of thinking of resources as static, finite things that would "run out". They thought growth meant using up a fixed heap of land, metals, water, nitrogen, phosphate, oil, and so forth. They thought the birth of a calf was a good thing because it added to the world's resources, but the birth of a baby was a bad thing because it added to the mouths to feed.

This completely misunderstood the nature of a resource, which only becomes a resource thanks to human ingenuity. So uranium oxide is not a resource before nuclear power. Shale oil was not a resource till horizontal fracking. Steel was not easily recyclable till the electric-arc furnace. Nitrogen in the air was not a resource till the Haber process. The productivity of land was transformed by fertiliser so globally we now use 65% less land to produce the same amount of food as 50 years ago. And a baby is a resource too: a brain as well as a mouth.

The few economists, such as Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg, who tried to point this out to the Malthusian scientists, and who argued that economic growth was not the cumulative use of resources but the increase of productivity—doing more with less—were called imbeciles or had pies thrown in their faces for their trouble. But they were right again and again, as population and prosperity grew together to levels that the Malthusians kept saying were impossible.

"It is unrealistic to suppose that there will be increases in agricultural production adequate to meet forecast demands for food, said a long list of scientific stars in a British book called A Blueprint for Survival in 1972. "Farmers can no longer keep up with rising demand for food and famine is inevitable," said Lester Brown in 1974. (World food production has since doubled and famine is largely history—except where dictators create it).
