Tyler Cowen: Reexamining Malthusian Theories for a Post-Pandemic World

Let's do this.

Yay!

Okay, we are recording. So welcome to our first Super Salon in 2021. We went from a very crazy year to a potentially even crazier one, but I'm sure Tyler will have a more concrete idea about that than I might have. I am assisted by Anton Troynikov tonight, who is a fellow InterInsect host, and he's famously the co-host of the Scientific Freedom Book Club, which Arno Schenk, who's also here. We are also joined by a bunch of other interns, like, hosts. I can see David McDougall from London is here, Etienne is here from Montreal. I think Bronwyn is joining us from Johannesburg. Matt Clifford is here from Oxford. So we are, as usual, quite an international bunch, and I'm really excited to see what we will arrive at. I'm going to drop the mic at Anton. Just to give him a chance to enjoy himself as well. And then Tyler, the floor is yours. Oh, and by the way, sorry, just to give a bit of a housekeeping thing, just use your raised hand bravely. We will keep an eye on that, and it's not going to be very much sliced into two discrete portions, this event, so you will probably get a chance to speak even if you just raise your hand randomly when you have something important to add.

Thanks, Ana. And yeah, hello everybody. Some of you will know me, others will get to know me in the course of this panel discussion with Tyler Cowen. I'm very excited to have Tyler on and discuss Malthus with us. As we said in the sort of the preamble or the intro text to the Salon, Malthus and his ideas underpin quite a lot of socio-political and economic thinking. And let's see how that might extend into our present and also into our future. And yeah, just on the mention of housekeeping, Zoom's raise hands tool, which is I think what Anna was referring to, because I've had participants in our salons before literally raise their hand. We can't see all your pictures at once, so that might not work. The raise hands tool gets moved around. I think right now it's behind the more hamburger menu. So if you'd like to raise your hand, that's the place to do it. At this point—

Arno already raised his hand, so it's possible. Thank you for testing the software.

I'll take this point to just hand off to Tyler Cowen and get this thing going. So off you go.

Malthus is one of my favorite economists. I believe he's one of the most important thinkers, yet it's remarkable how rarely people read Malthus. They read Marx, they read Adam Smith, they read Hayek, and I've been thinking, well, why not Malthus? One reason Malthus is so interesting is he is the economist who was obsessed with sex. What can be uninteresting about that? Furthermore, he is the economist who is obsessed with food. So food, sex, and he was a reverend, so he has all of the ingredients of an interesting thinker.

Do you think it's just he was open, he was openly obsessed with these things? Everybody else was just thinking about it.

Absolutely. And he wrote about them his whole life. Uh, so it's remarkable how much to this day we use the word Malthusian. You see it in the press all the time, in educated conversation. So I thought what we should all do is go back and read just a slice of Malthus to get a sense of what he's all about. And I'm going to give you no more than 15 minutes, my take on what it means when an economist is obsessed with sex and with food openly. It's very different from what you often hear when you hear the word Malthusian. But most people, they hear Malthus, Malthusian, and they think gloom and doom. We're all going to die. The world is coming to an end, or whatever version of this you might have in the back of your mind. This is not really what Malthus said. But let me give you a bit of chronology here. There are different editions of Malthus's main book, Essay on Population. So you read an excerpt from the 1826 edition. The first edition, it's very important, it's 1798. So Malthus, he's this young guy, he has a stutter, he has a lisp, he doesn't seem to be socially adept, and his father is a man of the Enlightenment. His father is good friends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is obsessed with equality. His father is a good friend with William Godwin, who is a kind of utopian who thinks there'll just be the forward march of progress. So Malthus is hearing all this at home. He thinks it's BS and he rebels. And in 1798, he publishes this pamphlet anonymously, and it's all about population and food. And this pamphlet, it kind of is the doom and gloom version of Malthus, and he basically says, well, population is just going to keep on going up in linear fashion, right? People, in essence, breed like rabbits in the early Malthusian model, yet agriculture itself is subject to diminishing returns. The best lands give you a lot of food, you cultivate more lands, it's harder and harder to get as much food as what you got from the best lands. So there's a big crash, people are going to end up dying, we're doomed for some mix of periodic starvation, and you'll always have enough people to keep wages at subsistence. It truly is a doom and gloom picture. So people who think Malthus is doom and gloom, they're not just making it up, but they're not perfectly informed either. Because Malthus was super smart, learned very quickly, his mind was really a marvel. We can get back to this. But by 1803, another edition comes. So Malthus took in all the different criticisms. The 1803 and all the later editions, they are much more sophisticated than that. Malthus says these should really be thought of as new books. He's changed his mind. There are endless statements of Malthus saying, "This doesn't mean doom and gloom. Civilization can get better. People can improve their lot. Education is important," and so on and so on.. But subject to constraints, Malthus is still a theorist of constraints, and he sets up in the pages I had you read what I would call the Malthusian trilemma. And this, I think, is the most important point of Malthus. It's basically in one sentence toward the end of the reading that you all have done, and Malthus says, look, you can— there's still this tension between the desire for sex and limited food supply, you can have what he calls moral restraint. The typical form of moral restraint is you marry at age 28 instead of age 22. In Malthus's time— not everyone knows this— at least in England, the average age of marriage was about 28 for men, 26 for women. So moral restraint, like, was a thing. It was not impossible. Malthus himself realized, as an economist openly obsessed with sex, that, like, up until age 28, you're not actually morally restrained. You're up to whatever. Who knows what people are doing on the farm, right? But you weren't necessarily breeding children. You might have been visiting prostitutes or whatever you were doing. But you weren't having too many kids. And if you're not having too many kids, you can make do with your food supply and you can improve people's living standards, right? So for Malthus, moral restraint is a possibility, but he stresses it's really very hard, but the world he lived in had some fair degree of it, so he didn't think it was impossible. The other alternative for Malthus is what he called vice, which took many forms. But vice, the simplest way to think of vice is that society is like one big London brothel. So there's a lot of sex. I read Malthus as realizing prostitutes used some kind of birth control. Maybe it was just infanticide. Or sophisticated version of a rhythm method, or whatever you think they did, or not having the kind of intercourse that can lead to children being born. But Malthus saw vice as a very plausible and indeed possibly likely alternative, that the urge for sex is so strong— and yes, as I started by saying, Malthus was openly obsessed with sex— you can satisfy it using vice,, and that's an alternative to moral restraint. But Malthus looked down on vice because vice in his time, it did mean something like organizing society like a big London brothel. And in 1798, 1803, 1826, I mean, obviously I wasn't around then, but from what I read, a London brothel was a totally disgusting, repulsive place. Both practically, epidemiologically, one might say morally, not a pleasant option. So Malthus is not embracing vice, but he's saying, look, it's an option. And I think he's at least willing to consider that vice is better than starvation. And then the third option for Malthus is what he calls misery, and that is starvation or pandemics. Pandemics were now a bit more familiar with than we used to be. And what Malthus is saying is societies have to choose: is it moral restraint, is it vice, or is it misery? That's the trilemma. It's one of the three. And what he's pointing out is there's not any easy way out of this trap. Now, when people today rebut Malthus, I think if they haven't read him carefully, they're like, oh, this guy didn't see the Industrial Revolution or fossil fuels or I've read Julian Simon, there's all this progress study stuff, and we're just going to have a big cornucopia of stuff, and you know, we're going to eat chocolate all day long, or you know, whatever. I mean, I don't think Malthus understood how much wealth there would be, but he definitely understood we might have more wealth. I don't think Malthus overlooked that. I think what Malthus overlooked, and Anna today had a wonderful, brilliant tweet pointing this out exactly, what Malthus overlooked is that the technologies of vice would change so that we would have an alternative of vice that would not be as bad as the London brothel. So what are the technologies of vice today? Anna, I think, mentioned three. One was pornography, right, which whether or not you think it's a vice— I think Malthus did— there's different kinds of drugs, and of course there are computer games, all as substitutes for having children. And again, the point isn't whether you think it's a vice, but it counts as those set of things that gets you not to have children. And the point is, whatever you think exactly of all those things, like smoking marijuana and staying at home and not going on a date, I would submit it really is a lot better than organizing society like a London brothel, even though it's not really where I want to see the world being headed. So Malthus's mistake, if that's the word, is simply he underestimated the powers of markets to tame and neutralize vice. Another form of vice, I would say, is the campus dorm. There's a lot of sex there. Some of it is coerced or semi-coerced. Some of it may be in a gray zone where everyone's been drinking. A lot of it with birth control. Again, you're all going to have different opinions about campus sex. Probably a few of you have had it. But again, Malthus would have thought it was vice. Malthus was a reverend, right? And, you know, reading a lot of people, I'm a Straussian, I think there are these secret codes in what they said, but I read just about everything Malthus wrote, including his private letters. There's no reason to believe Malthus was a Straussian. With Malthus, I think what you read is what Malthus really thought, and he's pretty clear, and when he changes his mind on things over the years, he's pretty clear about that. So Malthus was not a Straussian. He was a reverend. So he's the person who laid out, like, What is the key dilemma? What are the choices before us? Another way of putting it is you can think that Malthus is saying you can have a sort of successful society either if people are very, very good or if people are bad, and it's hard to find these intermediate points. Or another way to put it is there are like the laws of sex and there are the laws of food., but each of them enacted collectively, they're not entirely consistent, and it gives rise to clashes over resources, because sex can sort of work more quickly than food can. So, I mean, that's just my very basic take on Malthus, but I'll just say a few things. So he sees food as the binding constraint, and that's fine, it clearly was in his time. But a more contemporary reading of Malthus, you could think it's the ability of the atmosphere to absorb carbon, you could think it's biodiversity, you could point to any number of environmental issues and it could be consistent with the Malthusian framework. So be willing to generalize from the simple problem of food alone, and when you view it that way, again, the chance that Malthus was right is quite a bit higher.. You can also view Malthus as being a theorist of robots. So he talked about human sex— didn't have robots back then— but like the cost of feeding robots, building robots, keeping them fed with electricity, that also interacts with wages. So Malthus in a sense is saying, look, you think market economies are dynamic? Yeah, they're really dynamic, but they're dynamic at building robots. Just like people are dynamic at having sex. And like at some margin these robots are going to lower wages and also create environmental problems. That's another more general reading of Malthus. It's clearly not in his words, but a mere hop, skip, and a jump, and it's easy enough to imagine the Malthus of 2021, I think, would have said exactly that. Two other things interesting about Malthus, and we can get to much, much more But one is just how multicultural a thinker Malthus was. Now I know probably none of you, or not many of you, read the whole book, which is long. But most of the book is actually about empirics, and Malthus talks about all the different societies in the world. And at first he says like rude things about like the indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. Today it would get him canceled. Of course, back then it was fine. But you read these sections as a whole, Malthus is a total revisionist. He's actually slamming the West. He's actually saying, look, you people think you're so great, but you look at your European societies, you look at these ancient Greeks and Romans that you so blah, blah, blah about, oh, they're so wonderful, and they're ruled by the exact same principles as the Tierra del Fuegans, the people in Africa, the people wherever you want to look. So kind of analytically, Malthus was this radical egalitarian, and part of the book was to say Europeans, Englishmen, white people, however you want to break it down, you folk are not special. You're just obsessed with sex like everyone else, and you're going to meet the same fate, and you're subject to the same constraints. So don't be thrown by some of the, like, cancelable rhetoric. Malthus is on the right side of a lot of issues. He was strongly opposed to slavery. He worked a bit with William Wilberforce to oppose slavery. He was good on a whole lot of issues. Malthus also was a precursor of Keynes. Now, I'm not a Keynesian in every way, but the idea that depressions, recessions could be caused by shortfalls in aggregate demand, he was the first person to lay that out in a coherent way. That's a big, big contribution. So Malthus had a lot of things to say about economics that were highly valuable, whether or not you agree with each and every one. Truly a brilliant person. The final thing I'll say, this is just for age of social media. Malthus had a very famous correspondence with David Ricardo. At that time, Malthus and David Ricardo were England's two greatest economists. Malthus was a believing Anglican reverend. David Ricardo was a Jew whose family had come from Spain and then the Netherlands. And they became best of friends, and over a period of over a decade wrote each other letters. And if you're disillusioned at social media today, or some of your email correspondences that collapse into my goodness, whatever, Read the letters between Ricardo and Malthus. They're perfectly preserved, they're online, open access. They're in the collected works of Ricardo, not the collected works of Malthus, but they're there. You can Google to them. Liberty Fund, collected works of Ricardo, volumes 6 through 9. Every letter is a gem. They're such polite debaters. They're always arranging to try to see each other. As a model of how to interact, how to have a friendship, how to have intellectual engagement. It was like the true inter-intellect of its day. And they just debated these issues and then got together. They at least pretended their wives were best friends too. Maybe they were, I don't know. But if you're ever down by the state of social media and want to read like an antidote, I would just say turn to this very wonderful correspondence Some of it does require you to know about the time, but it also teaches you about the time. And I think Malthus often is at his best, and Ricardo, in that correspondence where they're just bouncing ideas back and forth each other, debating, admitting when they're wrong, trying to steelman the other person's arguments. All the stuff we talk about today, like how it should be, they were doing like in 1811. And that to me is really inspiring. Now there's much more to be said and will be said, but I think over Zoom when one person goes on and on and on, like, that's not the spirit of Malthus and Ricardo, which is inter-intellect exchange back and forth. So with all that, I will stop for now and turn it over to Anna and Anton.

Wow, thank you so much. You know, I was kind of wondering— I know you kind of explained it to me why Malthus, right? Because to my very strict take on what Tyler should talk about at Intersex Loans was anything you want, and you said Malthus. And I was really wondering, you know, that beyond what we discussed, you know, was there anything else motivating your choice? And I think it's very clear now that beyond just unearthing, you know, an oft-discussed but rarely read, you know, giant of economic thought, we have far more areas of relevance here, potentially, than what we might have thought. So I definitely will dive into the correspondence and imagine Malthus as an Interact host who would be as brilliant and divisive as we would probably expect him to be. Thank you so much. Anton, any notes?

Yeah, I'm going to come straight at this. So I'm definitely not a Straussian. I don't have the patience. Patience to read between the lines. And I tend to take what people write at face value. So I have to sort of come straight at this and ask pretty much directly, what about Robert Solow and exogenous growth and an increasing marginal product due to technical progress? Where would you say Malthus would stand on this given the recent economic history of our world?

In the Solow model, ideas are generated at some rate. That's the A in his model. It's sometimes called total factor productivity. Malthus is very aware that there's innovation. He doesn't believe in a static world. He just thinks there's some medium term or maybe long term where the more innovation you get, the more you press on your environment in some way. And in his time it was food, but it doesn't— have to be food. So I don't read Solow as refuting Malthus. I do read Solow as giving us a weapon against Malthus, but Malthus understood very clearly— it's one of the things I think he got the best— that every critic who had an answer to the Malthusian dilemma was also pointing out factors that over time would make the dilemma even worse. So Malthus thought if we had good policy if we educated people, if we had enough moral restraint, that living standards over time could indeed rise slowly. I think he underestimated they could actually rise pretty rapidly, say as they have in China. But again, whether Malthus was wrong, I think we still don't know. He might have been right. And I would say this: for 99% of human history, clearly Malthus is right. Like Europe in 1700 is not richer than Europe at the birth of Christ. So, or take the Stone Age or anything in between. No matter how wrong you think Malthus is, he's still right about more than 99% of human history. And how many other economists can say that? Like say you love Hayek, you love Friedman, you love Keynes. They're all correct, if they are correct, about less than 1% of human history. And the other 99% belongs to Malthus. That's pretty amazing. We don't take that seriously enough.

I don't refute that in any way. What I'm mostly interested in is have we broken from Malthus or not. And one, so sort of one counterpoint to my own argument here in the tradition of correspondence we've just discussed is Solow's model neglects this thing that we often do see happening as total factor productivity increases is that if you find a more efficient way to utilize a given resource, it actually produces more demand for that resource rather than less because it reduces the price. And in that sense, we sort of return to the same limits that Malthus was discussing. Basically, I want to understand whether or not we've made it out of the box yet. And how will we know?

I don't think we'll ever know, but I find it striking how many people actually are Malthusians. So take Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. They seem obsessed with settling Mars. I don't think it's just a PR thing. I believe they're sincere. Maybe if we can settle Mars, some Malthusian constraint goes away for a long, long time. So if you think settling Mars is important, you're almost by definition a Malthusian. No one calls those guys Malthusians, but it seems to me they are. So just how much Malthus lives on, re-emerges— the people who nominally claim they're the most optimistic are actually often the most Malthusian. Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, another guy deeply interested in settling Mars, If you are, you must think there's some really scarce factors here on Earth that are going to bind us. So the funny convergence between the kind of mega utopians and the Malthusians, they kind of circle around and meet up at the other side.

Like with all ideologies, right? But what's really interesting to me is that you mentioned Musk, and his brother is an agricultural innovator, right? Like they are growing, you know, beetroots from the wall. Under artificial light. I mean, surely that's going to come in handy on Mars, but that's a really great proof for how the questions of land and growing enough food to look after the population, that has not really been resolved. You don't have to go into Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Other Character Stories to look at the little sci-fi examples of 70% real tuna set on the packaging in 20 years due to just the scarcity of that resource. So, you know, that's, to me, that's very interesting. But what I think we don't really talk about, or we haven't really addressed tonight yet, and I will then go to Rafia and Peter, just really wondering about this, is the question of social engineering and really open almost, you know, they are the thinkers before eugenics became a no-no. And they have a tone to them that might seem a bit scary to be read today. And I think Malthus is— I mean, he's talking about different strata of society and the, you know, the increase of numbers of populations at different strata. And that can seem a little bit worrying, perhaps, for the thinkers of today who may be reluctant to talk so openly about social engineering at that level. So I don't know what your thoughts about both the food production and the social engineering aspects, but I think that would be really interesting to touch upon.

It's very interesting that Malthus quite explicitly discusses social engineering and eugenics. And even though at this point there's no Darwin, there's no Mendel, what Malthus says is very sophisticated, and it seems he had spoken with animal breeders He says he thinks that through eugenics you can make people taller or affect some of their physical characteristics, maybe the color of their hair, but he said when it comes to making people smarter or more restrained, he thinks eugenics is quite limited, that there are at best small gains, and if you try too hard, you will end up with people badly screwed up in some other way. Now I'm not sure this quite has been tested, but this is a very modern contemporary view that if you just like try to breed people for intelligence, you would end up with a certain kind of inbreeding and different diseases, and it wouldn't necessarily go very well. So just how many of the different options Malthus considered. I might add another Malthusian was Keynes. Keynes was obsessed with Malthus. He wrote a biographical sketch of Malthus, which I think is online. It's maybe the single best thing written about Malthus. And Keynes mostly agreed with Malthus, but Keynes thought that eugenics would work and give us better people, and that was his way out of the Malthusian dilemma. But Malthus on eugenics in 1803, I think, is more perceptive than Keynes was at any time in his lifetime. That it's not some kind of free lunch where you can just elevate people and obviously make them better.

Thank you so much. Excellent French horror movie, Crimson Rivers, about social engineering for smarter people in a small French Alpine campus town. Much recommending it for anybody who might consider it. And then you will probably have to leave the lights on when you sleep. Rafi, go.

Hello, Tyler. My question is about the trilemma. And I guess the— I don't know if this is an adage or if I made it up based on what I've heard, but men who don't have children make war. So in the virtue category, you've got men not getting married until they're 28. In the vice category, you've got men having sex with prostitutes or goats until they're 28. But in both categories, they don't have that taming function that women or children give them in the classical and chauvinistic sense. Do you think that that is an issue where it's like all paths lead to misery? Because if there isn't— if there is only virtue or only vice, then men are going to make more.

Malthus wrote about this very directly, and he understood exactly the issues you're laying out. And Malthus said one of the main reasons to— we needed to understand why he, Malthus, was correct was to avoid war. And that moral restraint also meant that you were sufficiently content with your unmarried lot, that you had a way of dealing with it. Almost theologically, and that you could bear this state of affairs with a minimum, maybe not zero vice, but a minimum of vice, a minimum of unrest. And he saw this as truly very difficult. I mean, think of Malthus as like the Book of Genesis and original sin, but with some economics piled on. But he was very interested in international relations. I wouldn't say he was a complete pacifist, but he was quite anti-war. Very skeptical about the Napoleonic Wars, and he saw maintenance of a peaceful international order as one of his main contributions, actually, that we needed to understand the social dilemma to solve it, to stop young men from wanting to go to war over land and food because they were desperate or restless or had nothing to lose or whatever it would be. And that's an aspect of Malthus, by the way, that Keynes picks up on So when you read Keynes's description in Economic Consequences of the Peace, maybe it's chapter 2, like why Europe had all these wars, it's very much a Malthusian account and he basically says as much.

So just to make sure I understand, it's basically the counterargument is Malthus is saying wars that happen over scarcity, that's what I'm solving for. There are also wars that happen over this human psychological drive for conquering the world. And those need to be conquered by what he's calling virtue and contentment.

Yes. Which ideally should be Christian.

Got it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. It's interesting because I read the other way around, that it's married men who make the most money of all demographics. Apparently having a bunch of children and a wife at home is a good motivator to ask for a raise. Thank you so much. Peter, Peter Easton, do you want to? Jump in.

Yeah, so, so instead of Solow, the economist I was thinking about is Gary Becker, which is not unusual of me, and, and the idea of a quantity-quality trade-off when it comes to children. So you get richer and then you, you, you make fewer children, but you educate your children more. So this idea of human importance of human capital that is quantity-quality trade-off. And I think when Malthus suggests that educating people is kind of one way out of misery, it kind of turned out to be right, but maybe not for the same reasons he was thinking about. But I don't know whether there is anything else in Malthus, because I didn't read that much Malthus, about the role of education or whether he has anticipated any of these thoughts.

Again, I think you have to look at Malthus over time. If you go to the 1798 edition, it's just not that sophisticated. It's like he wants to throw a poke at his dad, like, "Dad, you can't have your utopia." But especially if you read Malthus's pamphlets on Ireland, a very practical problem. Ireland back then was desperately poor, and he visited Ireland, I think it was 1821, and he still applies his population ideas to Ireland. But the notion that progress is possible, education is important, education will make us more productive and ease the constraints of food supply, and Ireland truly can be much better off, it's all very clearly there. And again, no Straussian issue. It seems really clear as day to me, and what's in his correspondence, what's in the pamphlets, matches up very closely. And I— he did believe in progress, and he thought it could be stable. But again, just think of the Book of Genesis. If you're going to read Malthus, the best place to start is the Bible. He was a reverend, and the Bible was the most important book back then, even for non-reverends. The Bible and Adam Smith, and that's what Malthus is integrating. So in the Bible, especially Genesis but not only, there's a lot of chaos, a lot of civilizations falling, empires collapsing, tribes going to war. So he wasn't dismissing that, he knew that was the normal state of mankind, but he was hoping to find like this razor-edge path where humans as a whole could end up somewhere better. Than what was in the Book of Genesis. And he thought like following Malthusian doctrine was the only possible way to get there. Very arrogant in its own way.

Yeah.

I was wondering, what, uh, what do you think about the arts? Did you see that as a healthy channeling of enthusiasm, uh, for vice, or did you see it as a, as an inspiration for vice?

I can't recall anything in Malthus where he discusses the arts. I haven't literally read all of Malthus, but I've read most of it. My sense of him as a human is he was brilliant but somewhat narrow. What he really loved was to debate economics and social theory, and he would do that endlessly. It motivated him much more than theology. And he thought he had figured out something so important and just would spend the rest of his life talking to the world about it. And again, I think he was always a true believer, but it was not— while it was his main influence, it was not his main motivator. I get no sense when I read Malthus writing about other parts of the world that he thinks it's important to like convert them to Christianity. He actually thinks it's a somewhat futile endeavor. Like, this isn't going to get you out of my dilemma. So in that sense, he's a very secular thinker.

Thank you so much. This is so interesting. And in that sense, he might also be a very kind of forward-looking thinker, right? Many followed afterwards who didn't talk about this part of human nature. But I'm also kind of laughing to myself. I know we discussed this. Bill Bryson has an amazing book called At Home about the history of our kind of domestic lives. And there is a little aside in the book about the institution of English vicars and the intellectual revolutions that led to that. You just had these very intelligent people around the country in the UK having all the money and time to, you know, breed Jack Russell Terriers or come up with Bayesian, you know, statistics or other inventions. Darwin's family would also be a really good A really good example of that. Thank you so much. Nabil, I'm going to come to you. Anybody who wishes to chime in here, please turn on your video and use your name just so we know who you are before we go to you. Thank you so much. Nabil, go.

Hey, yeah. So I'm thinking about that Althusserian trilemma and the way that we can sort of like fit modern events into one of those three categories, I'm sort of having trouble thinking of what the counterfactual could be then. Like, what would it look like if Malthus was wrong?

If Malthus was wrong, we could all be richer and we could all be virtuous and lots of us and we never run out of food. And we all do, you know, like whatever our reverend told us to do.

And so since the— right, so since the world population is 7 times what it was then, I guess I'm trying to figure out like at what point does it tip? But right, we're not all virtuous and we don't meet all of the criteria.

But look, I do think he was wrong. And what I think he was wrong about is he didn't see that we could make vice better than the vice he saw in his England. So again, to be clear, I think he was wrong, but he was wrong in a different way from what you usually hear. Today's vices to me are so much better than a world of starvation that I would just say, given how we use the terms, like, we should just opt for vice, full speed ahead. You know, let's triple down on vice.

I can't wait to quote you out of context, Tyler, after this event. Thank you so much. I'm going to throw the mic at André. Thank you so much for your patience. And then back at Anton.

So we've been having a very interesting discussion so far about food, but I frankly don't think food is an interesting issue at this juncture. So I'd like to propose kind of a different set of dilemmas, which is that in the Malthusian world, instilling virtue or vice in enough people is kind of good enough. Because you really care about the aggregate. But in a modern world, we're very asymmetric. So the problem is that even if 99.9% of the population is virtuous, just 0.1% of the population could ruin it for everyone else because of modern technology, whether that is various forms of bioterrorism or nuclear war or whatever. So technology kind of— changes the set of constraints. On the one hand, it alleviates the constraint on the average, but then it opens us up to a lot more tail risk. And I think that is probably the impetus for the desire to colonize Mars as well. It's not— I mean, eventually, presumably, the resources of the Earth are not finite, so maybe we'll run out of food eventually in billions of years or something. But I think the desire to go to Mars now is not at all driven by food, or at least that's what it seems like.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think it's other environmental issues. That said, the world has to make an awful lot of progress to feed all the people who are on the way. And while I think we will do it, I don't take that for granted. Uh, there is There are serious issues with increasing agricultural productivity enough to feed the forthcoming populations of Africa most of all and South Asia second of all.

I mean, I just, I guess as a retort, I mean, as an economist, wouldn't you expect that because there will be increased returns to food production, uh, we will develop more land to produce food. I mean, Malthus already had this model in mind, but it doesn't seem like population growth is gonna continue at an exponential level in the way that it had in those past times. So, um, so then we're kind of in a world where population is maybe growing linearly and and even if our technology is growing linearly, that those kind of match up with each other. I agree that it's not a given that there will be able to provide all the food, but at the same time, it doesn't seem unlikely.

Yeah, I would bet on the food. And obviously, like, Canada is going to be fine. But you look at a country like Niger, I think a typical family still has 7 kids. It's extremely poor. Climate change is likely to hit it hard. There's still something to Malthus's literal scenario, though clearly not for much of the world.

We can still ruin a land, a fertile land, even if we are fewer, right? And let's not forget, like, the difference between, you know, food and sex is that if somebody shows you a really beautiful video of a cake, that's not going to be a lot of help. So there is an ontological difference here between how self-contained the road to satisfaction can become and other considerations. Thank you so much, Anton. I will give the mic back to you, and then we will go to Arno, Sean, Harry, and Bronwyn.

Sure, sure. Thank you, Anna. I want to revisit a point that we touched on a little bit earlier in sort of discussing how these people who we consider to be sort of optimistic types of visionaries are actually Malthusian at their roots. And what I'd like to do is actually flip that around and take a look at some of the pessimistic ideologies that we've seen come from Malthusian route in the past. And sort of, I've spoken to you about this a little bit, Anna, in planning the salon, and I'd like to put it to Tyler as well, in that one result in human society of accepting the Malthusian thesis is to push back the catastrophes that he writes about or has proposed. And accept that the dilemma exists, but put it off and put it off, and hopefully we can outrun it. That's the optimistic approach. The pessimistic approach, which has been capitulated in politics and in ideology since Malthus, is always like, okay, we accept that the catastrophe is coming. We accept that there's not a lot that can actually be done about it in the long run, but we are very interested in— And so what this means is that there's a finitary world that needs to be divided among people. And the question always arises, well, how should that world be divided? And of course, there's always justification why the world ought to be divided in ways that benefit us and not you. And I wonder, what I wanted to put to you was this question of even if Malthus is correct, does it serve us as a society to believe he is? And if, you know, 'cause it clearly could also lead to war even if you accept the entire Malthusian hypothesis. If he was attempting to prevent war, he didn't do a very good job. Given that immediately the question gets asked, well, who should own the resources that do exist and how should they be allocated? And I just wonder sort of, you know, what are the ideological results of the Malthusian route? How do we navigate the consequences of these beliefs at societal scale?

I'm not sure if that is a question for me, I think the way Malthus viewed it is that if we could become self-aware about all these problems, that was our one chance of finding a way out of the box. And he also had the view— this goes back a bit to Anna's earlier question— like, for Malthus, culture really, really matters, but it's not culture in terms of the arts. For Malthus, culture means one thing: It's how the sexes treat each other and their kids. It's all about sex and family. Is there infanticide? When do you marry? How cooperative are the husband and wife? Like, that was all that mattered to culture. That's a very radical view. It's not personally my view, but I find it a fascinating view. Even though I don't agree with it, I don't think it's obviously wrong. So just that Malthus forces us to ask the question. Like other than all this sex stuff, like come on, what is it about culture that really matters? Like maybe it's not that much. And that to me is a very formidable challenge to we moderns because we're all culture this, culture that, right? My goodness, you see it everywhere you look. And Malthus is very hardcore. He's like, no, I'm going to be a bit reductionist here. You've got to show me that it matters. It's really all about gender. So in this funny way, the kind of truly contemporary gender theorists, radical left types who think everything's about gender. Malthus is their true precursor. Obviously he's way more conservative, but they are just, probably without knowing it, pulling it straight out of Malthus.

Well, so the thing about that is I don't think you're wrong. I think that this lever of sex, family, and gender is very important even in our own culture, regardless of how we repackaged it. Package it. But those drives are easily co-opted by all sorts of broader state and social drives. I mean, whenever the state wants to do something, it's saying that it's doing it for the good of the family. And if you're a state and a polity that believes that there is no escape from the Malthusian box, then that surely leads to conflict.

I once wrote a blog post, which you can Google to, and I think it was titled Why don't people have more sex? And this is a very interesting paradox for an economist because economists believe there are gains from trade. If you're married, there should be low transactions costs. If you're not married, especially with apps, there should still be pretty low transactions costs. Yeah, harder in a pandemic, but look, you can just have sex. And I forget the numbers, but the percentage of time people spend having sex married or not, it's really quite low. And it's sort of supposed to be the most pleasurable thing, right? And yet we're not actually that interested in it. So that to me is another way in which the Malthusian vision is incomplete. And I wonder if he wasn't projecting, uh, because actually people don't seem that interested in sex. Malthus, by the way, he married at age 38, which is true moral restraint. If I recall correctly, he had 3 kids, but this is one thing that's interesting: none of his kids had any other kids. I don't know why that is, but they kind of set out to refute their dad the way Malthus set out to refute his dad. And the way they did that, whether intentionally or not, was They had no more kids. They're like, we're not going to be part of this arithmetical process. We're going to show you, Dad. So he had no grandkids.

Actually, I was thinking about this today as I was preparing for the salon, and I read your blog post. And, you know, there was a fantastic article in The Atlantic as well last year about why millennials and Gen Z just stopped having sex. Right. And I argued at the time that, you know, the title of this article should have been "You Do You," but this was not accepted by The Atlantic. And I, you know, I keep thinking about this, the children of men argument, that in some weird way contraception killed this off for us. And the forbiddenness and the looming possibility of making babies was what kind of weirdly drove this whole thing for the past couple of millions of years, and then it's just one of the hobbies, then people find better hobbies to do. And I was thinking whether the argument could be constructed in a way where you argue that fulfilling hard work is the antidote to vice, but the cause of vice is not boredom, as people would argue to me at my Catholic school growing up, But it's misery, right? If you had the kind of life that Malthus describes in his works, then your life was a very kind of Hobbesian hell, right? And perhaps sex and food and the other kind of bottom of Maslow pyramid pleasures were the escapes, right? If you have a generally pleasurable life with a lot of comfort and you are not propelled to— I mean, unless you are really kind of deeply motivated for whatever reason, you're not proper to engage in the fulfilling hard work, then you will just find kind of mediocre contentment, and you'll be more kind of quantitative than qualitative about the acquisition thereof. This was just a shower thought. Any notes on this before I actually throw the mic at Arno, who was so patient and—

I just have one thing on that. Some of the latter parts of Malthus read remarkably like Freud. I don't think it's his main argument, but he talks about repression and death drives and conflicts within the will. I don't know if Freud read Malthus. I'm not— I'm very far from an expert on Freud, but if you really dig into Malthus and just look at some of the digressions, at times later on you'll think you're reading Freud. Very striking to me.

Interesting. It's probably because in the Napoleonic times towards the end of his life, the world turned pretty dialectic, right? So kind of starting to see the world as foundation and image, or will and image, that later on kind of caused that famed repercussion culminating in Marxism and then the Frankfurt School. So that seems like a normal stop to me to have a Freudian era in Malthus's life. I'm pretty sure Freud read everything, right? He was a pretty, um, you know, all that, um, all the stimulants made him very, a very active reader. Um, thank you so much. Um, Arno, do you want to, uh, jump in about Freud, food, sex, any, any Belker?

It's kind of related to— well, I have two things on my mind. One is quite related to what Anton was talking about, but I'm not sure it's a specific enough question, so I apologize in advance. But the, uh, The thing that in the Malthusian trilemma, obviously each one, the kind of institutions that surrounds a world that is based around each one of these either moral restraint, vice, or misery, right? They have other side effects. So maybe you can say Christianity has all these effects on maybe religiousness or commercial institutions. And I was wondering basically whether, I haven't read very much about this, whether he explores those kinds of side effects of it's not just the moral restraint itself, it's, um, you have all these, these additional like societal structure things that come from choosing one path over the other, um, and whether there's anything about what, what is society that is based around I'll just assume I shouldn't respond to each and every point, so—

Okay, people make other points. Sure, sure, sure. Okay, Sean, do you want to jump in? Sean, great to see you.

Good to be here. Very, very, uh, excited to be here. Um, so The observation I have over the last year being stuck inside, mostly with young kids ranging from young teenage to grade school, is related to the question. And there's an acceleration of— Tyler, to your point, the inability to predict just how much vice would expand into other spots. Tyler Cowen: And so just, is there a thought around— advice is accelerating, and I don't mean it like in the kind of shameful way. It is way, way easier to entertain yourself in many, many different ways. And just the difference between, say, my 16-year-old and my 11-year-old— my 16-year-old doesn't have quite as many ways to entertain himself as my 11-year-old does, because my 11-year-old has started earlier on the sorts of things that are more interesting now while trapped inside. And now 10% of his life has been stuck inside. And so he's able to entertain himself on stuff where it's— we're long beyond the phase where you'd say, why don't you go outside and play? It's better for you and more interesting. It's actually not, and it's not even close. What he's able to do on, on, on his phones, it's much more interesting. And so there's like, if you think about the trilemma and the different seasons where there was dominant things Is there an impact? Like, what's the net impact of a massive acceleration of vice in the sense of the word that you're using, and not just like that pornography is everywhere and anytime on your device, in your pocket if you need it? But I don't know what the net effect of that much acceleration of just how easy it is to enjoy yourself. And to your point earlier, Anna, like, my other observation is that It's not boredom that yields the more extreme rings of it. Like, when I've— in times where I've had extreme boredom, reading a book was fine. But in times when I was going through suffering or grief, the, the need for more extreme vice was there. And so to me, all of that— like, the question is, what happens if we keep accelerating vice at the pace that we are? Does it eat the other— like, does the trilemma hold? Does it eat the other parts of it?

For me, it's a new case both for and against markets. So there's so many cases for markets that we know, like markets give us more wealth, maybe markets give us greater peace, maybe you know the list, right? We've all debated these, but the Malthusian case, kind of in the meta-Malthusian case, is markets improve vice. And Hayek never put it that way. Milton Friedman, who was a very square guy, he never put it that way. He and Rose, like, that was it. Milton was not out whatever. He worked on monetary theory or Rose was cooking for him. So markets improve vice. Huge case for markets that's hardly ever brought up. But here's the issue, and you're getting at this already. If you improve vice too much, it sucks people away from non-vice. And at some margin that's a problem. Like, what if video games get to be too good, or Netflix? Fortunately Netflix is boring, but what if it had on so many good shows that was all you did? So you don't want to improve vice too much. You want institutions that improve vice enough so that you don't live in a 19th century London brothel, but that don't improve vice too much. And just to think about the social problem in that way, I find really very illuminating. And that's what you get from Malthus.

We've seen that with drugs, right? I mean, drugs have improved beyond measure, right? If you are a cannabis smoker, I hear, then there are a lot of different things available that do different things to you. And they come from, you know, trying to serve the market, right? And I'm also reminded, I think Niall Ferguson writes about how the competition among churches in the US drove to more addictive churches, and you can drive down the road and you have all these, you know, neon-lit loud churches, which is, you know, probably not the case in a French village where there is one place of worship. It's the case in Italy, though, and if you look at Italian architecture, you can tell that, you know, they were heavily trying to outcompete each other from water to water. I have to take the mic to Bronwyn because I can see that she's dying to jump in at Markets Improvised, and then I will go to Harry. Is that okay, Harry? I'm just like switching the order of you guys. So Bronwyn, I'm throwing the mic at Joanna's back.

Only if you don't mind, I suppose I've got two sort of comments. I don't know if they're questions so much as comments. And the first one would be, like, given my educational background, also the way I was sort of brought up, I do tend to think quite a lot in terms of the virtue side of that whole trilemma, and also in terms of what it actually means. Because is virtue even still in play, virtue or morality, as a corner in that trilemma in a very secular world? I'm not sure that secular morality even holds a point in that triangle, because for me, definitely my observations, the secular morality is more to do with how other people are behaving, not how you yourself are behaving. And only really the sort of faith-based faiths are able to prop up that corner with any sort of reliability to change actual individual behavior. That's an observation, so I'm not sure if you've got a comment on that. That whole corner just seems to be very, very weak at the moment. So I don't know if there is a substitute or an alternative that can prop that up. And the other one would be how the balance is shifting in different parts of the world. I mean, we've been speaking now about, you know, like vices getting better, virtue, as I'm saying, is probably getting a bit worse if you want to look at that whole thing. But that's a very Western developed world kind of lens, and where we're actually seeing population growth, we have really neither of those options. I mean, we don't have porn, great porn, great pulls in terms of both recreational or reproductive controls, or PSPs to escape into in the parts of the world where you really need something to break those cycles. So we sort of heading into like divergent futures where you've got very different trilemmas playing out in different parts of the world, which is obviously going to lead to some sorts of conflicts because the sort of people in Central Africa with very high birth rates are not the people that are going to be getting onto the first ships to go to Mars whenever that sort of opens up. So I suppose that would be my two sort of observations on the instability of that whole structure at the moment.

Yeah, those are great points. Anna, next comment?

Thank you so much. So, Henry, the floor is yours, and then we will go to Sarah. So we will go to the UK now and then to Berlin.

Hi everyone. I had a question about kind of the evolution of Malthus's worldview, I guess, because he publishes the first edition in 1798, so presumably he was thinking about it for a few years before then, and then there's a sort of 32-year gap between the first and the last edition, and then he lives for a few more years after that, so I think he dies in 1834. Do we see in his writing That's sort of a long enough time period that presumably if he's predicting population is growing geometrically, then after, after that amount of time, presumably he would have had been able to sort of get some sense of whether his predictions were starting to bear out. Do we see in his writing a sense that he feels he is being proven right by events and population growth? Because I'm looking at this graph of UK population growth and French population growth, and it's, it's interesting how slowly the population of the British Isles and of, um, really, it really, it's, it's almost like a hockey stick. And hockey stick, ironically, is about halfway between the first and last editions. So I could sort of see it as, you know, maybe he, you know, if you look at the historical data, it doesn't really look like at least the population of Britain is seesawing between sort of growth and, um, growth and sort of hitting sort of natural limits. But then, yeah, it is interesting how there's this hockey stick that kind of kicks in. It doesn't seem to kick in until after the first edition is published. So, um, yeah, I'm just interested to, to get your thoughts from having read more of what Malthus wrote than me.

This is passionately debated at the time. Let me give you numbers. In England, the population in 1750 was 5.9 million. In 1800, it was 8.7 million. It's a big increase, biggest increase in Europe, and living standards did fine. Another comparison: from 1550 to 1800, English population went up 280%. For the rest of Western Europe—France, Spain, Netherlands, what we now call Netherlands—it went up only 80%. So Malthus was living in a time where English population truly was rising, and he knew this was a problem for his theory, and he writes about it. And he basically says, well, we're not sure about the numbers, or maybe the problems only lie around the corner. And William Godwin replied to Malthus with with a 600-page rebuttal, which is online and free, by the way. Godwin was Malthus's original target. And so much of Godwin's reply is, look, these numbers have been going up quite a bit for a while. He didn't know the exact correct numbers that we know now, but he sort of, he knew the basic outlines of what was happening. It was obvious in England, right? More people, hard to hide. —and Godwin's response focused on exactly this point, like, "Hey, Malthus, the numbers are way up. Things are okay. What's your problem?" And the people who said that, I mean, essentially they were correct, right? You might think, "Oh, you know, 50 years global warming will do us all in." Well, maybe, but the catastrophic version of Malthus, it clearly was wrong even before Malthus wrote it.

His tweet didn't age well.

The tweet didn't age well.

But he didn't delete it, he kept on revising it. There's another big difference in Malthus over time. After the Napoleonic Wars, he really writes much, much more about currencies, macro, exchange rates, depressions, and a lot of what he says is very smart. But that becomes his new obsession. That and population you can think of as his two things. The third would be trade, which we can talk about. One other point I'd like to make we haven't brought up yet is Malthus and China is a major connection. So the Chinese one-child policy, which has had a major, major impact on the whole world and most of all China, that was very directly inspired by Malthus. So if you're wondering, do ideas matter? I mean, my goodness, the world's most populous country does this, and they cite Malthus. Malthus himself was obsessed with China, and it's the longest single section in his essay. And a lot of the people in the Enlightenment, especially Voltaire but many others, they're like, oh, China's great, monarchy is great, China has figured these things out, the French should copy China. Malthus somewhat inaccurately describes China as just another Malthusian mess, and he says, well, China may be a slightly higher living standards than much of Europe, but it's because they practice so much infanticide, and China has opted for extreme vice. He was wrong about how much infanticide the Chinese practice, but he understood it was an issue for his theory He needed to take account of it, and he made some very definite claims about China that were not by any means completely correct. So the whole China-Malthus connection is a huge topic of its own, but it is a truly significant matter to this day.

Thank you so much. I think we could definitely do a salon about China and Malthus. Sorry, who— It was me, Anna, hi.

What I wanted to jump in here is it's a very interesting observation with respect to what Godwin and others said at the time. And one way to evaluate the predictive power of any theory, regardless of whether it's economic or social or historical, is if you were transported into some other time, and we sort of brought this up earlier as well about Malthus being in the present day, brought— so if you were transported to some other time in human history and you were a— like, your claims and predictions could not be falsified at that time either. It's, it's, it's a really big open question about what predictive power, if any, your theory actually has if it remains constant no matter where you stand along that curve, right? And, and this, this is kind of— and this is kind of similar to the problem with The so-called probabilistic doomsday argument about basically there's a prob— there's a Bayesian probabilistic argument that you can make that essentially computes the total number of humans that will be born ever under the assumption that basically you are equally likely to be born at any given time weighted by population. The thing is, is in the doomsday argument, as with some of Malthus's theories in my opinion is, you can make that exact same argument at every point in human history and arrive at a different number. And so if you can do that, does this really have sufficient predictive weight and sufficient predictive power? Also, I mean, it's also unclear. And I think this really gets down to a lot of what people are saying is we can't tell, or within Malthus's theory itself, there doesn't seem to be any way to tell whether he was right or wrong in the long run.

Uh, okay, I guess Tyler maybe isn't gonna— okay, so I'll just go. Um, yeah, I was just wondering, um, I mean, I'm— I, I kind of hear things that, um, I want to sort out the agential view of whatever some, some theorists thinks versus the, um, the more, uh, the view of like top-down authoritarianism. So, you know, because it's all presented as in like, well, people just voluntarily had one kid on their own, you know, versus a set of elites that actually dictated how reproduction was going to happen. So, and I'm not, I'm not clear where Malthus stands on it, and I'm not clear where economists stand on this. Like, it just, especially in the U.S., so much economy stuff is, is driven by this, like, everybody's a free, you know, free will, the assumption of free will, um, for individuals.

We're going to collect these. I keep recalling, we just did a reading of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia with Interintellect hosts. Actually Bronwyn here was playing Hannah Jarvis, and there is this brilliant line delivered to the professor that, you know, if you publish your research and you don't get refuted during your life, then you won. If it's posterity, maybe that's only true about, you know, when you write fabrications about Byron. But maybe it's also true to some degree about doomsday scenarios. If you don't predict an actual date, a specific date during your lifetime when it cannot happen, then for as long as you are concerned, everything is fine. Thank you so much. And I'm going to go to Andy. Hi, Andy.

Thank you for your patience. Hello. Yeah, no, that didn't feel like it was too long. It was highly engaging. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, so last night I, upon Curtis Jarvin's recommendation, watched the movie Logan's Run from 1974. And I'm not sure who has seen it, but it instantly went on to—

Love it. That's brilliant. The costumes as well.

Mm-hmm. And I read the critical response at the time to it. And it was quite like, "Ah, this is absurd. This is, what is this? This is like a, you know, they took too much LSD and then just, you know, like made this colorful movie." It didn't really, I think it wasn't the time for it to really have the, maybe the impact on the mind that it did. And there were all sorts of little secrets and gems in it, but it's relevant because, you know, if you're not familiar with the movie, Basically, it's the year 2274. Humanity lives in geodesic domes, and they solved a— well, perhaps there was a Malthusian crisis in the outside world. We're on Earth, you know, it's the same Earth. It's not, not a different planet. And to solve overpopulation, they have this like death cult-like game they play where they all sort of die at the age of 30. And when you die, it's like this ceremony, and they call it renewal, and it's a freaking insane depiction. I read the plot, but there's no predicting, you know, the way that they put it into the film. The way it's depicted is really, really beautiful, and I highly recommend watching it. So It is highly, I think, relevant to this discussion because similar to— like, they made this arbitrary call, right? They're just like, someone— you don't know who set up this system. You don't— you're just— you're dropped into the world as it is. But they made this arbitrary call to, like, form this death cult. It's a hedonistic sort of death cult and solve their problem. And overpopulation doesn't exist. You know, they have some sort of, like, artificial womb type stuff. So like, no one— like, like, sex is purely eroticism and hedonism. It's not for procreation. They— at the end of the movie, um, well, I don't know how much I should spoil, but they get out, okay? So two— they escape, this, this guy and his— and his, his— this one beautiful woman. This— the, the guy that was sort of like the cop of the city and was sort of preventing people from waking up was the one who woke up. And it was beautiful. It's early echoes of The Matrix. It honestly gives you a lot of the same vibes but in way less of a dystopic, like '90s punk way, you know. It's far more optimistic at the end. It made me grin, you know. I didn't grin watching The Matrix and feel like my heart heart was warm. It was like romantic. So I'm never gonna forget the experience I had last night. And it just, I think what I take away, what's real, bringing it back to Malthus and relevant to this discussion was, I think that if what I've learned from it is perhaps if a society imposes an arbitrary sort of like limit to overpopulation, such as what they did where everyone just dies at 30 and, you know, they've changed the world, then perhaps the human spirit, um, will break out at some point. That's what I, that's what I took away. And there's a lot— I, I am still processing it, you know, this was 12 hours ago, but that's sort of what I took away from this. And, um, uh, I'm I'm a member of sort of like Gen Z, I'm 24 years old, and I just also want to share that this is really an incredible time for my generation, and there's an energy going around right now that hasn't quite really— like, it's hard to convey unless you're like in the group chat with your friends, but just the optimism of Logan's Run combined with all the chaos and like fun and memes that we're seeing today sort of has given me a lot of hope. And so just wanted to share that.

Thanks. Thanks so much, Andy. I definitely think that, you know, a lot of the Malthusian thinking kind of reaches us through science fiction. And as you were talking about this, I was immediately thinking about Rick and Morty, you know, the planet where the women are the bosses. And, you know, I'm here if you'd We Need to Talk. And, you know, the planet that was taken over during the Great Passive Aggression. For Rick and Morty fans, this is an inside joke. But also Aldous Huxley was a Malthusian, or at least heavily influenced when writing Brave New World. And they have— the women have the Malthusian device on them with the contraceptive pills, and that's how they guarantee their lifestyle. But we have Mad Max or Luc Besson's Le Dernier Combat, which is about a shortage of women and the war that breaks out as a consequence. I think that's in Besson's We Have Ruined the Environment, and that's when it happens. So definitely a lot of fictitious worlds to turn to when we want to, you know, play with these ideas. Tyler, do you have any notes on science fiction whatsoever? I know you love full Victorian novels. I don't know how— what's your take on science fiction in general? I would think you have a a note on that being, you know, one of the great ambassadors of progress studies.

Well, science fiction, as noted already, is remarkably Malthusian. Often you're in new environments where you've busted out of some of the old constraints, right? You've settled a planet or something, but Malthusian dilemmas kick in again. Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars series, science fiction and Malthus It's a dissertation I think someone hasn't written yet, but there's a great deal there. Just two biographical points I wanted to make about Malthus, not directed at any particular comment, but first, the name Malthus comes originally from malt house, which of course is a place of vice. Malthus presumably knew this, so the notion that Malthus is a theorist of vice, I get a kick out of that. Given that his father hung out with Godwin and Rousseau, I mean, this 18th century, odds are his father was screwing around like crazy, frankly. So there's some big Freudian element in Malthus's own theory. He's seeing what his parents did, I think, and reacting to it. But one other thing of interest, I believe Malthus was the first economist to hold a tenured chair in the teaching of economics.. And after he worked as a reverend for much of his life, he had a chair in political economy teaching at the East India College, which trained the bureaucrats of the East India Company to run India, which was a terrible mistake in my view. But that's another interesting biological— I'm sorry, biographical fact about Malthus. He was the first professional economist that I know of.

Thank you so much. And we know from Anton How's new book how the word improvement captivated that era, and everybody was trying to improve on society and perhaps their parents' behavior with whatever tools they had. Thank you so much. Neville, do you want to— oh, sorry, Anton, were you going to jump in? No? Okay, so then we go to Neville and then Dave White.

Thank you so much. Thanks. So I'm still on this kind of initial point, and maybe it's a bit of a reductionist view, but I'm basically just taking this Malthusian crisis as no matter what you do, you'll never be able to produce enough to support an unlimited population, which will just keep growing. You have to use virtue or vice or subject yourself to misery not to run out of food. And so given that as perhaps a flawed but sort of base assumption, then I'm wondering where that sort of intersects with, Tyler, your Great Stagnation, because it almost makes that seem like a sort of rational response, especially in light of your, like, Malthus underestimated how good we'd make the vice. And if you look at a graph of population growth over time, it's like right around that— what is the Great Stagnation? Is like early '70s, like '72, '73. '83. So it's like the hockey stick kind of growth in population starts just before that. And if you think like, so our— if productivity growth slowed right around then, and what have we done instead? We've invented the internet. We went from, you know, 2 or 3 or 5 channels to a billion channels, YouTube, Twitch, everything always on. So we've just, instead of just trying to make more stuff over the last 50 years now, we've just been getting really, really good at distracting ourselves 24 hours a day. And I just wonder how you look at the Great Stagnation and how that, you know, what's like the— is there a causal relationship with this sort of Malthusian view there?

I think a lot of the advances of the 20th century were manufacturing. We made more stuff, we built more things. That was great. It slowed down quite a bit in the '70s. I think we're at a new cusp where the big advances are in biomedical technology, most prominently this year mRNA vaccines, but there are many other things in the works, like there's a malaria vaccine. It's probably going to be quite effective. So the new technologies on the way, they're going to be great at increasing the number of people, uh, but they won't per se necessarily help us grow more food. So we're entering a new era in this race where a lot of people who are dying now, they're just not going to die. Sickle cell anemia, CRISPR is probably going to take care of that. Malaria gone. You figure dengue is only a matter of time. Uh, coronavirus, we were making remarkable progress. So that will be very interesting to see, even if you're pretty optimistic about food. Production, and indeed I am, we just might get so much better at people production and saving their lives. I don't know, there's some chance we're in another Malthusian era soon.

Thank you so much. Dave, do you want to jump in?

I think it's Seth's turn.

Do you mind if I jump in now?

To sort of riff on André's point from earlier and to try to sort of save Malthus for those of us who are more cornucopiads rather than Malthusians and think, you know, actually we can make a lot of stuff and people really aren't in super danger in the long run of being underfed and starving. What about we look at one of Malthus's contemporaries across the— or maybe soon after him and look at, oh my God, Democracy in America guy, who points out that like the revolution happened because in France, because desire, the growth in people's desires outran the growth of society of produce. So then moving from the Malthusian trap, which is population and need is going to grow so fast that we can't keep up. Now it's just desire is growing so fast that we can't keep up. And then we get back to what we've been talking about, which is desire management, and how do we keep people's desires from getting so extreme that either, you know, they get distracted from improving society or we fall into some sort of horrible decadence.

Thank you, thank you so much. Yes, I think we've been kind of tiptoeing around the word decadence. Throughout the Salon, which is supposed to be a bit decadent, right? We like to say that, oh, an Intrintech Salon, it should be in the evening, it should be the last thing you do today. You know, it's entertainment, right? And there's something very liberating about not having to reach a conclusion necessarily. I always tell my hosts to keep things complicated as their main job. Thank you so much. Anton, take the mic.

Yeah, I just, you know, I wanted to speak to this from another point of view. This reminds me of the Rat Park. Our discussion around here reminds me a little bit of the Rat Park experiments and the social degradation there in this so-called utopia. In other words, where fundamental needs were met. And in that experiment, it almost seemed like vice couldn't outstrip strip some problem with unlimited resources. Although lately that experiment has been pretty roundly criticized in its setup, but it kind of seems that even in a society where basic living conditions are met for everybody without the chance to develop new vices or with— so it kind of seems like as needs are met, the ability to do things in a sort of moral binding way is reduced. And if you outstrip the capacity to create new stabilizing vices, you end up with something resembling a social collapse. So maybe there's more than one kind of decadent society, I guess, is where I was going with that.

Thank you so much, Dave. And then Peter Easton.

So I think I had just two things that I wanted to, I guess, probe you about. So I guess Malthus's principal argument rests on differential rates between production and people being making, but what's somewhat different about our time as compared to his time is that the ability for us to extract information about those rates is much improved, we have much more ability to assess how fast each of those things are going. And so I guess I'm curious as to your thoughts about what that means in terms of, in a very gross way, social control. And then I guess the other point— no, I'll just leave it there. Thank you.

This gets to the China and Malthus point. So China, even before the reforms, gathered a great deal of information on its citizens. A lot of the Maoists decided they were just headed for way too many people, and they said, "We need to put the brakes on this." And they had a one-child policy. By no means was it uniformly enforced, not at all, but it did make a difference. I think by one estimate, it led to was it 300 million fewer Chinese over some period of time? It's a lot of people, right? So during Malthus's time, he talks quite a bit like, what is it we know about population? What is it we don't know? Even Hume earlier had written about this. Smith writes about this. People not being sure how many people there are or were, it's one of the main things people debate for many decades.— in British discourse. And now we just don't debate it anymore. We mostly know. And they couldn't do a lot of social engineering because they were highly uncertain about basic facts and just how late it is that good data, good census data, good economic data come. It's a really big difference, I think, between the modern world and most of the 19th century world. We take it a bit for granted, but it does matter. And China now is clearly well past anywhere else in the world, or almost anywhere but like UAE or maybe Singapore. And I would say in a bad way, there's way too much surveillance in China, but they do use that information all the time. It's partly how they've controlled coronavirus. I mean, there are serious trade-offs in there that we ought to come to terms with.

Do you think, Tyler, that during our lifetime we will see a kind of reverse one-child policy anywhere in the world? I mean, you know, in Western Europe this is a huge problem. Russia?

Well, we do already, including in China. So the Chinese have not only dropped one-child policy, but they're trying to encourage births with almost no success, I might add, which is itself interesting for any Malthusian. Singapore has been at this for a long time, especially for their ethnic Chinese. They arranged these dating cruises. Seems to have no effect. Oddly, the one country that has made birth subsidies work somewhat well is France. I don't know why it has worked for them, but the French have gotten their TFR back up to 2. I don't think that's mainly an immigrants effect. A lot of countries are trying pretty hard to get more people to pay their pensions, if nothing else.

Hungary is a really good example, right? I mean, my country, we have this horrible kind of jokey way of putting it, which is "Amiha diarion nelson," which is "Gotta stop talking and start birthing," as like what's the duty for a woman. And this is kind of entering, you know, just the discourse as a thing one must do. But yes, I was thinking less of, you know, forms of encouragement and more the level of restriction and enforcement that the one-child policy entailed. Great, Peter, I'm glad that we are hopping to Budapest after this little note on the Hungarian policies, and then we will go to I think Henry again and then Zee have their hands up.

Yeah, so I just wanted to add to Tyler's point about life extension. So I think it's very interesting that when we were in a Malthusian trap, it was because other people got kind of— like, Malthus was obsessed with sex, but many people were also obsessed with sex and food and so on. And right now it's like And I think it has to do something with the returns on human capital, really. The thing I was talking about in my earlier comments is that human return on human capital, education and so on, is high. Then, uh, it's basically worse to have fewer, fewer children but smarter children. So, and at the same time, you also live longer and you also spend more moral life extension. And so there are these interesting complementarities there. And it's interesting that if we get to another Malthusian trap, it won't be because we make too many children. It's because we are kind of live longer, basically. So I think it was a very good point, I think Tyler made.

No, just that.

Yeah, anything else? Sorry, I didn't want to interrupt, uh, I, I just wasn't sure.

Uh, I'll just add two quick things. One is, you know, the new Biden proposal is $3,600 per kid. Uh, that's going to encourage more births. However you feel about that, it's very much a live issue. They're probably going to do it. Just another thing that strikes me on Malthus and science fiction, if you're fans of Frank Herbert and Dune, that's a story where water rather than food is the constraint, but you know water and food tend to go together, but that would be yet another example of how Malthusian our literature has been.

It's kind of strange to imagine, I think, in our idealistic Western lifestyles that, you know, 'Oh, how did mommy and daddy, or mommy and mommy, or daddy and daddy meet? Well, we really loved each other and then we had you. And then, you know, how did I come to be? Well, there was a government, you know, tax plan and we really wanted a garden, so we made another child.' Good for you. Of course, from a strictly Parfitian angle, that would be still amazing and great news, but there's something narratively dismaying about it. Nevertheless, thank you so much. Henry, we go back to you. Congratulations. Actually, Henry is, if I'm correct, you are breeding animals, right? It's like there are little goats or lambs or some other thing that I don't recognize because I'm just very much in downtown areas.

Oh, I mean, it's more my father. I'm the sort of product of the son that ran off to the the city. I'm just, I'm literally farming. The only thing I'm farming is his hard work for content on Twitter. I'm interested to know Tyler—

In a way Twitter is like a little garden, right? That you decorate the shrubs so that the neighborhood can see it.

Exactly. I'm interested to know Tyler whether if we transported you back to 1810 or whatever, and maybe, maybe you're cast in the second season of Bridgerton or something, um, and there's a dinner party and you, you, let's say you were born in 1780 or so, so, um, do you think you would be there defending Malthus, or would you be one of, no, knowing only what was known up until 1810, would you, would you be a Malthusian or a or would you be sort of praising William Godwin? And if it's Malthus who you would defend, does that mean the sort of Ebenezer Scrooge stereotype of the sort of, you know, well, if they're going to die, they should die quickly and, you know, limit the surplus population— does that mean that those kind of people are sort of underrated, or at least our idea of them? Because it seems that if you do believe that we're sort of heading towards a sort of demographic crunch and there'll be sort of something catastrophic, then maybe they are underrated or that worldview is underrated. It's a good question.

If I were put back then, my instinct is to think I would have been an anti-Malthusian. And just if you take my life as I know it, when I was, say, 14, when I had a lot of intuitions and not as much data as I now know, I was very much an optimist about economic growth. So I think that's my natural temperament, whether that's the correct temperament or not. And the earlier me probably would have been anti-Malthusian, is my best guess. One important point, Malthus on the Poor Laws. So the early Malthus criticizes the Poor Laws. He says, "If you just pay these people, you're going to get more people, you won't help them." So Malthus is often considered this very mean guy, but I think that's a mischaracterization. For one thing, Malthus later on said, "Well, there's a way we could improve the Poor Laws that wouldn't be so bad." But even Malthus at the time, he didn't say let the people die. He had a list of 5 or 6 other policies to help these people. Like giving them government jobs, for instance, or easing labor mobility, or ending depressions by stabilizing aggregate demand. He had a lot of ideas for helping those people. Now, you can debate whether or not those were the right ideas. In my view, they're actually pretty plausible. But to think that Malthus and a lot of those other people just wanted these people to die is wrong. I think they were wrong about the Poor Laws, but they were not fundamentally meanies. Is the way I would put it.

Do you think that Malthus's strict views on benefits, on government benefits, are slightly responsible for some of his unpopularity today? Absolutely, people misread him.

The one thing Malthus really insisted upon is you should not give a married couple higher benefits than a single person. And again, I think he was wrong. But I don't think he did it because he wanted to see people die. He had a whole list of other remedies that he thought would be more effective.

Thank you so much. I'm going to go to Z. Thank you so much for the video.

Hi Tyler, a couple questions. So is one way to state Malthus's point that there are limits to growth Some of those limits are feedback effects from growth itself, say pollution, population growth, increased tail risks, even certain political problems. And some of those limits are hard limits, heat death of the universe, some sort of physical limitation. Maybe we'll find ways around them somehow, who knows. And Malthus's argument is just that the limits imposed by these kinds of growth-related feedback effects are, to use your words, underrated or somehow more real or challenging than we give them credit for, as they are more likely to occur in, say, the medium term and have catastrophic impacts. And they oftentimes arise from, from human behavior, which is, uh, harder to think clearly about than some of these hard limits, perhaps. If that is right, what are the rules for spotting Malthusian limits as opposed to hard limits? And then the second question is, and what does the existence of these sorts of Malthusian limits say about the efficiency of markets? Does it just confirm that Coase is right? We aren't doing a good enough job assigning property rights to people. I know you're kind of bearish on a carbon tax, so I'd be interested in your thoughts on that. Finally, I think the intersection of Malthus, China, and sci-fi is some parts, though not all, of the three-body problem, right?

Sure. There's a lot in what you bring up. If we're going to update Malthus, I think we should update moral restraint— so rather than marrying when you're 28 rather than 22, maybe moral restraint is you buy an electric car, you buy a hybrid, you live a green life, whatever that means. And there's some narrow path where that can solve a particular problem, but Malthus, who obviously knew the Bible, was pretty skeptical, but he still wanted to point out what that path was in the hope we would follow it. Again, you just see that Malthusian argument so, so, so many times today. Malthus, to me, has a more subtle version of it than the people who just preach it, which I think tends to be counterproductive. And ironically, Malthus was literally a preacher, but he gives the descriptive subtle version to try to instruct people rather than the preachy version. That like, yes, there are these various limits, There is, technically speaking, a path forward if we all do the right thing, but my goodness, I know the story of Adam and Eve and I'm not going to quite bet on that one. I'm going to refresh my water. I'll be back in 2 minutes. I'll hear 80% of what you say in the meantime, but if you don't see me on the screen, don't worry, I'm around.

Thank you so much. Keep on talking, please. I was just thinking how, you know, when one calls for moral restraint or anything to do with morality, you assume a certain consensus over what morality is or what good or bad is, right? And when you lived in societies governed by religion, even if you personally were not sure what these are, you had a pretty large book to help you make up your mind about it. And when we think about moral restraints today, my first question is like, which morals? What are we talking about? Are we talking about some kind of Aristotelian virtue, just lead a good life and have— perform good actions and everything will be fine? Or do you want to go deeper? Do you want to go more metaphysical?. And so that might be a problem when trying to design them. Anton, Joe?

For me, this dichotomy between morals and vice is obviously in the original essay was framed in Malthus' language as a reverend and the product of what those words meant in the time. But for me, it's more like voluntary versus involuntary. Decision-making among people and populations. So for me, what vice refers to here is something like, you know, we sort of like bring it to Malthus's time. It's like, well, you know, humans wanna have sex. So we're just gonna lean really hard into that. And we're gonna have prostitution, we're gonna have pornography and all of that, right? Whereas moral restraint is like, well, I'm actually just gonna wait longer voluntarily sort of take on this burden. And so vice in the broader sense would be like, okay, well, humans have this drive for killing and using maximum amounts of resources and being really inefficient and things of that. So in that sense, you relieve that vice by substituting something that's relatively harmless in the Malthusian sense, but still satisfies. Whereas in the sense of moral restraint, like Tyler mentioned, about choosing to drive an electric car, choosing to be vegetarian. That's something that one must make a choice about. So that's like the dichotomy to me. Perhaps I've misinterpreted.

I mean, in Christian theology and any theologies, voluntarily chosen restrictions are at a completely different level than you're just forced to be good. Which is not driven by your free will and therefore doesn't count as a decision, and you will go to heaven less. Tyler, do you have any notes on the murky definitions of contemporary morality, which might cause some difficulties when we try to, you know, regulate them or improve them?

Well, to go back to the Bible, the Book of Genesis, it's striking to me there is a section on technology which considers in a sense the Malthusian dilemma. So the building of the Tower of Babel and machines in a sense that like with this act of building all things are possible, but that collapses. And I would say it collapses because people are quarrelsome. And one thing Malthus to me is a bit too silent on is just how intrinsically quarrelsome are people. That they're intrinsic sinners, I get, but quarrelsome is a little more specific. So you get this question in Tocqueville. So for Tocqueville, at least Americans were intrinsically too conformist and complacent. We're not quarrelsome enough. Uh, Book of Genesis, people are too quarrelsome. Also in Exodus. Uh, I'm not quite sure what the Malthusian view on that is. In Malthus, the the texts.

I mean, he himself loved and sought debate, right? So we can imagine that he saw it very close to home. Thank you so much, Jonathan. I will pass the mic to you. Thank you so much for your patience. And then Alex.

I was just going to add to your point, which I thought was really interesting, which is the changing definition of moral restraint through time. I can certainly imagine Malthus being a preacher in the 1800s, there's a very clear line between what moral restraint and what vice is. And these are opposite behaviors that do not overlap. But to Tyler's point that he did not, he did not foresee how technological development could sort of water down vice to a sense of less harmful ways to feed a sex drive without necessarily adding to the population level. And we get to a point today where something like birth control is clearly a technological, um, addition to our species that allows for a tremendous amount of sex without a lot of population. But combined with the desire of wealthier, more prosperous, more educated people to choose to have fewer children, which is clearly a type of moral restraint, but they're very often using the tool of birth control. And so in that sense, moral restraint and vice sort of merge or overlap or have a gray area where they're both solving the Malthusian problem. I just thought that was interesting how the definitions change over 200 years.

One question I have for the group, which, you know, anyone could feel free to address, is I just wonder, reading Malthus, to what extent do men and women today read this book differently? It's just an open-ended question. I don't have any data on it. Obviously, I'm a man, but if anyone had any insight on that, I'd be curious to hear it.

Fortunately, here we're safe from cancelable rhetoric. Yeah, one thing that's striking—

We disabled the YouTube comments. I guarantee there will be no YouTube comments. Okay.

When you look at some of the criticisms of Malthus at the time, One of the big criticisms is he wants to take away the womanliness of women, that what it means to be a woman is to be able to be fertile and reproduce and have your 5 kids. Maybe one of them will die, but that's what women want, that's what women should want. And here's this tyrant who's come along and he's kind of castrating the women. So to speak. Now I just don't think you would hear that criticism very much today, but that was very common in the early 19th century.

I mean, it makes sense if you don't have contraception and the only method to regulate birth numbers is through abstinence, then you can argue that, you know, women will just remain unmarried and they will not have you know, physical relationships with people. And that can seem like that. But I'm also thinking— my first thought when you asked, I was thinking about the prohibition and how the whole prohibition today seems almost impossible to have passed, but it was the women who wanted it. And there are some— I think there are a lot of, you know, restraints that when they apply to private life, they can really only be passed won by women. You don't have to go to Lizzie Strata to think that a guy can write whatever he wants in his book about economics if the women don't decide collectively that, no, we actually want birth control, thank you. It's going to just be an idea. So in that sense, I think if anything, women took a more practical take on this question and brought it from the theoretical or the area of numbers to reality. Anybody else? Dave, does this relate to this? Dave McDougall, it relates to this?

I think it's a semi-direct response, so I'll try it. One thing we've skirted around, and I don't feel like I've fully wrapped my head around Malthus as sort of a moral thinker. Like, obviously he's religious outside of his economics work. The, you know, I've just read the excerpt that you proposed today, Tyler, and I've been sort of grappling with, like, to what degree he's judgmental of vice as a solution to these problems and what the kind of moral aspect of it is. And just if I could maybe add another kind of sub-question here. I was wondering if— like, I was trying to imagine a universe where there could be a Catholic Malthus instead of an Anglican one, and I sort of couldn't wrap my head around it. And I was— yeah, I just wanted to explore, like, the degree to which he engages with the moral questions as opposed to what I consider to be the quite practical elements that were foregrounded in the little excerpts that I've been able to read.

Thank you so much. These are the last questions actually, so I'm going to go to Alex to make sure that he has had his time. Thank you so much for your patience, and then we will slowly start wrapping it up. So just think, is there anything else on your chest that must be shared? We will make time for you. Thanks, Alex.

Mine's a little more almost like a comment than a question.

So it's coming up of two things that people have said. So one of them was Malthus was right for 95% of history, and then suddenly he stopped being right because the underlying dynamics changed. And then we've been talking a lot about like the moral virtues and kind of the moral actions that you should take. But all of those, just like Malthus's reading, are mostly based on retrospective looks at what happened in history. And we know these kinds of pathos are wrong, therefore we should be taking these, or at least one interpretation of it, we should be taking this course of action instead because it's the more moral one. That helps us in, for example, for population dynamics or in the case of not having too many children. And one of the examples Tyler Cowen brought up was moral actions now might be more in terms of getting an electric car or having less of CO2 emissions. But those are only— we only know about those after the fact, after they've happened. I'm wondering, how can we— to what sense can we try to escape this Malthusian trap if new issues come up and we don't know about kind of the directions that we should be, the moral path we should be taking until after we've taken the wrong ones and seen that, of course, seen where that's led.

Thank you so much for the comment. Anton, any, uh, any notes on this?

Um, no, I mean, this has all been fascinating, and there's so, there's so much more depth and dimensionality to this, um, than one might see at an initial reading. So it's, it's been really a fantastic discussion.

Thank you so much.

Yes, I still do believe that until we figured out, you know, going— getting by without eating and the kind of birthing robots on Enric and Morsi, these questions will remain highly relevant. My closing question to you, Tyler, and again, you know, if you have very brief notes on it, the audience is of course very welcome to to chime in, would be, you know, we keep talking about the— our increasing understanding of all these constraints and how, you know, we can reinterpret Malthus and understand that he was right with a twist. Are there— do you have any intuitions around constraints that we might not be aware of at all? Is there something looming in the future, like the Great Filter in Bostrom's writing, something that is almost another plane or in another dimension of thinking that we don't expect, that, you know, Roland Emmerich never made a movie about, that maybe some people are starting to think about and on the fringes of academia or the Twitter sphere? And if so, is there any strain of that thinking that you deem to be worthy of looking into?

Well, I think the major risks by and large are not surprises. So the great empires that have fallen, it's oversimplifying to say it's warfare and environment, but for the most part, I think it's warfare and environment. So environment is Malthusian. Warfare is maybe about the intrinsic quarrelsomeness of human beings and how that interacts with technology. That is not mostly a Malthusian theme. I suppose my personal view is, say, to see nuclear war as a bigger risk than climate change, though they're both quite significant. I don't think true black swan risks are where it's at right now. The known risks are bad enough, and it's not obvious to me how good a job we are doing with them. And I see by the response to the pandemic People's ability to exercise moral restraint to address the pandemic has, in most countries, not been so great, especially in the West, and I think we should take that very seriously as a negative with respect to Malthusian problems. One other point I would make about Malthus that we hadn't brought up is reading Malthus was the inspiration for both Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace to develop their theories of evolution. They both said that by reading Malthus, the notion of numbers ebbing or flowing and changing with circumstances was the key breakthrough that led them to think through natural selection. So one lesson in Malthus, which was not seen by Malthus but clearly seen by Darwin and Wallace, is just that in a Malthusian world, like, what people are is going to change over time. So as a possible risk, uh, if you're going to add a third one, it's that human beings will evolve over time. I genuinely have no idea how they will evolve, but it is possible they will not change for the better. And then you come back to Darwin and Wallace being integrated with Malthus, the Chinese themselves, Singaporeans greatly having this concern. Sometimes it is called dysgenics, and that's a kind of post-Malthusian theme. But once you're thinking in Malthusian terms, I think you can be led to see its importance very readily.

Thank you so much. I think this is a beautiful place to end with a little note to Newton or Leibniz, depending on who you ask. Thank you so much, Tyler Cowen. Any closing remarks from Anton or Tyler before we just thank the audience for the amazing questions and the hilarious chat that was happening in parallel to this discussion? I will send it to you, Tyler. I will send you the same chat. Just fantastic sense of humor, I think, coming from all over the world. Brilliant. Hard to keep a straight face sometimes when you are talking about some big moral question and then you see the chat during an Interns Axelon. Thank you so much.

Anton, do you want to— Yeah, I just want to basically say thank you to Tyler and everyone else. We definitely had this discussion very much in the spirit of what we do in Interintellect Salons. And so it's been illuminating and challenging and a lot to say and a lot to think about. And I hope everybody comes away from it a little bit richer, whether or not agricultural production outpaces that richness.

Thank you so much.

I would thank you all, but I would just say in closing, whatever else you take away from Malthus, to take him as an intellectual model. He was clear, he changed his mind a lot, he was quite open about explaining why he changed his mind, he engaged with his critics. That's a big part of who Malthus was. He had a reputation for being a very nice man, an agreeable person. He seemed to do his best to raise his family and have good friends. So if you're looking for a role model, Malthus is not the worst place to start.

He has one of the most adoring epitaphs I've ever seen in my life. It briefly made me wonder whether he had written it, but I hear it was his family. Thank you so much. And Tyler, as always—

That would be a trick. That would be a trick.

Yeah, yeah, I'm just gonna leave it in your will, like, this should be on my grave. I was amazing. Everybody loved me. I love, you know, discovering fellow inter-intellects long dead and understanding that what we do here is not in any way new. We are just reviving a good old tradition of coming together and bringing our very different opinions, sometimes our different politics, our different academic disciplines or professional fields and, and just having a lot of fun talking about interesting things. Tyler, as always, thank you so much for your long-standing support of Interintellect. We love you back, and I will, with some minor adjustments, this video will soon be shared with you so you can go back and take it in again. Thank you so much, and great to have had so many old friends here, but also to have met a lot of new faces. Great to, great to have been hanging out with you. Take care, guys. Good night. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you, Anton. Bye.