Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Malthus sees the inability of Spanish America and British Ireland to cope with ‘indolence’ as a vicious circle. By the end of the nineteenth century, a similar conflict between ‘indolent smallholdings’ that survived on potatoes and grain trading enterprises arose again in eastern Prussia and western Poland. The German colonisers considered the Slav villages unproductive; disposing of state aid, the settlers exploited or ousted the Polish peasants just as the English had done to the Irish. The young sociologist Max Weber provided the scientific justification for this ‘internal colonisation’ (as this process was called by the Prussians). His early writings contained racist constructions along the lines of Slav indolence. 12

A less gifted writer than Hume or Smith, Malthus had broader historic experience. The further the reader delves into Principles of Political Economy , the more he sees Malthus’s sympathy for the ‘labouring classes’ and his distrust of the rich landowners. The wealth of a nation depends not only on the creation of capital but also on its distribution. ‘A very large proprietor, surrounded by very poor peasants, presents a distribution of property most unfavourable to effectual demand.’ 13 No matter how refined the owner of several estates, he is not going to renovate his castle every year. But if he gives out land to forty farmers, they could create demand by giving work to a great number of artisans and traders. The greatest secret of the wealth of nations stays with the ‘middle classes’; only they are capable of creating effectual demand, paying for goods and services with their own work. Thus Malthus, the prophet of crises and catastrophes, at the end of his life discovered the economic significance of the middle class.

In his appreciation of Malthus, Keynes compared him to Ricardo, whose formal laws of price formation defined the future of economics. With no hesitation, Keynes preferred the ‘vaguer intuitions of Malthus’ to Ricardo’s simplifying analytics: ‘by taking up the tale much nearer its conclusion, [Malthus] had a firmer hold on what may be expected in the real world.’ While Ricardo constrained economics ‘in an artificial groove’, wrote Keynes, Malthus had ‘disclosed a Devil’ of critical thought. Economic theories had practical consequences. ‘If only Malthus, instead of Ricardo, had been the parent stem from which nineteenth-century economics proceeded, what a much wiser and richer place the world would be to-day!’ 14

Jevons

Refuting Malthus’s predictions, the aggregate product of the fields, mines and colonies of the British Empire grew so rapidly that it far outstripped the population’s growth. The main source of this development was coal. When Malthus wrote his Essay , a thousand Newcomen engines were already at work in English mines and James Watt had patented his new engine. Malthus was not interested in coal and had nothing to say about steam; but, in his time, coal was about to play as significant a role in the English economy as grain.

When coal definitively overtook grain, the Malthusian logic of resource panic was promptly transferred to coal. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons wrote The Coal Question , in which he warned of the imminent exhaustion of coal supplies in the British Isles. According to Jevons, between 1800 and 1865 the population of England had doubled but the production of coal has increased by a factor of eight. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the population had been growing by 10 per cent every ten years, and the consumption of foodstuffs in England had grown correspondingly. But the urban population was growing much faster – it was doubling every twenty-eight years, almost as rapidly as the population of North America had been growing in the time of Malthus. The amount of coal being extracted was growing even more quickly, wrote Jevons. It was not the increase in grain production but the growth of the coal industry which gave rise to the unprecedented expansion of English towns. Digging deep into the earth to create coal mines was like exploring the American frontier, or even ‘the further shore of our Black Indies’. Or, no less triumphally: ‘We are like settlers spreading in a rich new country of which the boundaries are as yet unknown and unfelt.’ 15 Jevons states that the development of industry and the switch to free trade offers a way out of the Malthusian trap: bread is now exchanged for goods produced with the help of coal. But then Jevons takes a step back. The end of coal is inevitable and imminent. Reserves are finite, and there is a limit to how deep mines can go; every metre deeper made coal more dangerous to extract and more expensive. Neither could the efficiency of coal combustion develop indefinitely. Granted, steam engines – mine pumps, railway engines, river steamers, steam-powered ploughs – became more efficient as time went on: they consumed less coal per unit of work produced. But there were more and more such machines and the country needed more and more coal. At this point Jevons formulated a new paradox: every step that increases the efficiency of a natural resource only increases its consumption.