Malthus Up to Date
AYRES, C. E.
Malthus Up to Date The Challenge of Man's Future. By Harrison Brown. Viking. 290 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by C. E. Ayres Professor of Economics, the University of Texas During the nine years that...
...Brown's intimate knowledge of the achievements of contemporary science leads him to estimate the possible food production of the earth at something like twenty-five times the present output...
...Moreover, anxiety over the remoter future is by no means assuaged by our distress over the more immediate dangers implicit in The Bomb and the cold war...
...These years have witnessed unprecedented stirrings among the vast populations of Asia...
...Because the human flood their imaginations conjure up threatens to extinguish the totality of civilization as we know it, they see it as an absolute: uniquely disastrous, uniquely insoluble...
...In this connection, he argues that the Industrial Revolution, to which we owe the present economy, was the result of a long series of historical accidents, and that we have no ground for assuming that such a development would be repeated following total collapse of our present industrial system...
...and in the field of mineral resources, as of food production, the oceans represent a vast and virtually untapped reservoir of wealth...
...Furthermore, he doesn't depict the population problem even by implication as insoluble...
...Can industrial society survive atomic bombing...
...Reviewed by C. E. Ayres Professor of Economics, the University of Texas During the nine years that have elapsed since the end of the war, general public concern over the population problem has risen to a new peak of intensity...
...His social horizon likewise is considerably wider than that of ordinary Malthusians...
...Whereas other population experts are prone to minimize the food and other resources of the earth, Dr...
...However, knowing is one thing and effective application of knowledge is quite another...
...Indeed, the chapters on food supply, energy sources and mineral resources are among the most interesting and informative in the book...
...But writers on the subject of population do seem to suffer from a sort of occupational disease that of unmitigated gloom...
...Brown in effect reverses Malthus's formula, making energy rather than food the limiting factor on population growth...
...Will limited war erupt into total war...
...In this literature, Harrison Brown's Challenge of Mans Future stands out as an exception to the general rule...
...This situation has given rise to a number of books which have further intensified public anxiety over the future of Western civilization...
...On the contrary, the solution is birth control...
...Brown sees the uncontrolled increase of population as only one of a group of closely related hazards...
...And shall we escape these dangers only to be engulfed in a tidal wave of uncontrollably spawning human beings...
...Perhaps because he is a chemist and former staff member of the Oak Ridge Plutonium Project and the University of Chicago Institute for Nuclear Studies and has already written a book on the threat of total war (though he is only 37), Dr...
...In the end, therefore, every aspect of our problem the organizational requirements of a complex industrial society no less than the pressure of teeming population calls for steadily increasing mental and social flexibility...
...Nevertheless, recovery of minerals from sea water (as well as production of fresh water from the oceans) calls for very great expenditures of energy: and...
...Thus, he has a keen appreciation of the extreme delicacy of the complex mechanism of industrial society, and consequently of the danger that any cataclysmic breakdown resulting from atomic war might be total...
...No doubt, there are many reasons for this heightening of interest and anxiety...
...In the field of energy production, atomic fission and sunlight are the principal avenues of future production...
...There is also the possibility that our efforts to keep the present system going may lead to steadily increasing regimentation, and thence to progressive rigidity, inflexibility in the face of changing conditions, and collapse...
...But even here he doesn't exaggerate...
...Obviously, the problem is a genuine and a serious one...
...Thus, the author foresees a time when "the "sea industries' will dwarf all existing mining operations...
...and not merely to the knowledge we have acquired as individuals, but to the wisdom of the community...
...since present scientific knowledge justifies an estimate of energy production sufficient only for a population of about 7 billion...
...In short, though the increase of population beyond the bounds of the earth's resources may be the ultimate danger, the challenge is to the mind...
...I don't mean to deprecate either the books or the concern...
...One of the outstanding merits of The Challenge of Man's Future is the candor with which the author discusses the difficulties of making our knowledge of birth control effective in the face of the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church, the policies of nationalistic governments, and the mores of illiterate peoples...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 20
