🌾 How technology broke Malthusian theory

What is Malthusian theory, Technology saves humanity.

This is article 4 of 7 for The Tech Progressive writers community, where we will post 1 article a day for 7 days.

After discussing with a friend the David Attenborough documentary “A Life on Our Planet”, I am questioning whether the growth of humans endangers our earth and our own life existence.

We are living in a time where population is at an all time high, growing almost 30x in the last 1000 years (from 270 million in the year 1000 to 7.8 billion in 2020). Will our species survive the next 1000 years?

Some theories such as the one from the economist Thomas Malthus suggest that we won't.

Let’s see if technology can break this curse.

👴 What is Malthusian theory?

Malthusian theory believes that the rapid growth of population will outweigh food production, resulting in disease, famine, and war. He claimed that farmland was insufficient to feed the increasing world population. 

His theory was well adopted in the 1800’s in the times of Charles Darwin and again in the 1900’s when 2 biggest wars of our history happened. This theory is based on an exponential increase in population, a slow increase in food production, and a decrease in resources (see graph below). 

Source: Environmental history resources

However, we humans are creative species. If we are bacteria on a petri dish, we will stop reproducing when it is full. But as humans, we can break the boundary using technology.

🚜 Technology saves humanity

As our population increases, we have also increased the well being of people around the globe, abundance of food and longer life expectancy.

Here are some examples to keep us optimistic about the future and break Malthusian theory:

• New farming techniques has increased farming output exponentially, as we have seen in the British agricultural revolution in the 1700 or the post war America in the 1950s. This frees up a lot of people to work on other productive work.

• India solved its mass famine in the 1960s by planting the new dwarf wheat variation (shorter and stronger to fend off diseases), an extraordinary work of Norman Bourlag, an American scientist who later won the nobel peace prize. Now many of the biggest tech companies in the world are led by Indian born CEO.

• The Netherlands, a nation 3x smaller than the state of New York, is the world's 2nd biggest exporter of agriculture though only 2% of the labor force works in Agriculture. Thanks to technology such as robot fruit pickers and floating farm.

Source: Adobe stock

Conclusion

As a tech progressive society, we need to be rationally optimistic. Population growth should be a feature, not a bug.

We need to equip the future generation with good education and technology literacy, to help solve our problems. 

Thanks for reading this article and enjoy the weather ☀️.