Catching up with some reading yesterday, I was struck by something Tyler Cowen, one of my favourite economists, said in response to a question about the Malthusian trap, a recurrent fixation of mine. It is the penultimate question in this lot.
Cowen takes what I consider an unnecessarily flip attitude to a very real problem.
Eventually the world will end, and somewhere along the line wages and living standards will be quite low. But until that happens, Malthus isn’t a very useful guide to food and living standards.
Even more astonishing, he cites India’s terrific increase in food production, thanks to the Green Revolution, without wondering why it is that the country still has such very high levels of child malnutrition and stunting.
The real problem is bad institutions, such as are found in North Korea, so our worst enemy is ourselves, not some oppressive force of population multiplication.
Malthus’ point, of course, is not that humans increase oppressively; it is that they do so more rapidly than agricultural productivity. Leave that aside. Is it all really the fault of bad institutions? And if so, why single out North Korea? Why not India?
The problem is that Malthus inspires agricultural scientists, who then develop technologies that “solve” the problem, proving Malthus wrong in the process. Malthus had a self-defeating prophesy, “a prediction that prevents what it predicts from happening”. Cowen takes that as a reason to focus more on institutions. However, the fact that the Green Revolution was needed, according to Cowen, actually confirms that Malthus was right to warn, although his predictions didn’t come true, fortunately.
Esther Boserup showed that historically growing populations tend to intensify agricultural production. Still, it is people who are doing this. It doesn’t happen automatically. That it tends to happen historically, doesn’t mean that we now can keep our arms crossed.
This doesn’t mean it is wrong to focus on institutions, though. I think it is very wrong to oppose the Malthusian/Boserupian argument to an argument about institutions. We needRev. Malthus and Esther Boserup as much as we need Amartya Sen.
Sen showed that hunger is not about aggregate food production. It is about access to food. And this is about institutions, in the broad sense. To get access to food, some people grow it for themselves. So helping those farmers is crucial for food security. For others, it is crucial to have school meals, decent salaries, relatively cheap food or at least stable food prices.
The point for agricultural research is that it is not enough to focus only on boosting output. Research choices have implications for access to food. For instance, in many cases breeding for small-scale producers (who consume most of what they grow) may be more effective for food security than breeding for commercial agriculture, even though the latter may be more effective in terms of productivity gains.
Absolutely! Once again, the futile opposition of extremes is not helpful. We need good institutions and good agriculture.
Nice site here, and thanks for linking mine every so often. It looks like our interests greatly overlap.
I don’t call it institutions, I call it policy. And yes, almost everything going on in agriculture today is determined by a combination of policy, the economics of supply and demand, and the remaining small share holder farming of survival.
What I keep asking myself is if policy will ever become right. I think not. Never.
I tend to agree with you, although of course the policy-makers, and those whom they serve, presumably think policy is right right now.