On Folk Malthusianism

Near the end of The Origins of Political Order (previously discussed here), Fukuyama launches into an extended discussion of Malthusianism. Since YIMBYs love to hate on Malthusianism, I read this section with great interest.

For those who aren’t familiar, Thomas Robert Malthus was a theorist of the late 18th/early 19th century who posited that there are natural limits to human population growth. Both economic growth and population growth are inevitably zero-sum: beyond a certain point, no group of individuals in a particular biome can expand without causing another group to suffer. I’ll let Fukuyama provide the summary of Malthus’s main argument:

The below figure from Origins gives us a handy elaboration of the “Malthusian trap.” Increasing economic output causes the population to grow, straining the local ecosystem; this, in turn, causes economic output to slow, which leads to a whole host of nasty consequences. But once those nasty consequences have caused the population to fall below a certain level, output begins to rise again.

Like a lot of closed logical systems, there’s something intuitively appealing about this model. It also resonates with the modern world’s ecological anxieties, since it implies that climate change is our just punishment for having grown too much, too fast. Perhaps most importantly, Malthusianism has the alluring whiff of forbidden knowledge, since its implications are so bracingly grim. There’s a reason why one of the main bad guys in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is basically Space Malthus.

To the above list, Fukuyama adds another reason for Malthus’s staying power: he was sort of right, at least for most of human history. As another chart in Origins illustrates, Europe’s GDP per capita was more or less stagnant between 400 CE and 1000 CE, and only rose relatively modestly for the next 800 years after that. While technological innovation accounts for some of those gains, kingdoms mostly accumulated wealth through “extensive” rather than “intensive” development: that is, conquering territory and brutalizing other kingdoms was a surer ticket to economic growth than investing in local industry.

Malthus, says Fukuyama, wasn’t wrong; he just had unfortunate timing. Right as Malthus was publishing his fairly accurate model of how things had gone for most of human history, the Industrial Revolution was rendering that model obsolete. The sudden discovery of new energy sources and new modes of production made intensive production more profitable than it had ever been. Per capita GDP went asymptotic.

Nonetheless, Malthusianism lives on—not as a model for how things were, but for how they are. In the post-war era, anxiety about environmental degradation and seemingly unsustainable increases in economic productivity contributed to the rise of a “degrowth” movement. To prevent ecological collapse, the degrowthers argued, we would need to impose constraints on economic output.

Degrowthers scored some major policy victories between the 1960s and the 1990s. In major cities across the United States, they successfully spearheaded a wave of downzonings to cap population growth. But perhaps their most enduring victory was ideological: to this day, folk Malthusianism is the fundamental premise of NIMBYism. It is not uncommon for NIMBYs to argue that their city has already hit the natural limits on its growth, and that any additional housing will lead to the sort of degradation and disorder you would expect in a standard Malthusian trap model. Or to put it more colloquially, [Los Angeles/San Francisco/New York] is “full.”

Needless to say, these cities are not full, and they are certainly not overflowing. They may have reached the limits of their zoned capacity, but that is because of the aforementioned downzonings. The City of Los Angeles, for example, used to have loose enough zoning to accommodate housing for up to 10 million people; over time, successive downzonings made it illegal to build homes for more than 4 million. See the below chart from UCLA’s Lewis Center.

Keeping zoned capacity so close to the city’s actual population has made its housing market extremely inelastic. When more people demand housing in Los Angeles, the city is unable to accommodate them. But that’s not because the city has hit any natural limit to density—among global cities, it is not especially dense. Instead, Los Angeles is bumping up against an artificial, self-imposed limit on its ability to house people.

The funny thing is that those limits were imposed by the same political coalitions—sometimes literally the same people—who now pretend they represent some immutable law of nature. This is folk Malthusianism in a nutshell: a dogmatic insistence that any given scenario is inherently zero-sum, coupled with a policy program that artificially imposes zero-sum logic.

While folk Malthusianism often cloaks itself in progressive rhetoric about sustainability and resistance to capital, it is fundamentally a conservative—even reactionary—ideology. In a world governed by zero-sum logic, no productive enterprise can benefit a particular group without making every other group poorer. It’s hard to understand how broad-based social solidarity could be possible in a world like that. And indeed, folk Malthusianism is obsessed with drawing battle lines between supposedly immortal enemies: homeowners versus renters, town versus gown, long-term residents versus newcomers.

The zero-sum world of folk Malthusian fever dreams is a nasty and brutish place. Fortunately, we don’t need to live in it.