Malthus and Empire

 This piece by Paul Krugman explores why empires - like the one Trump is seemingly proposing - are not worth the cost. There was the mercantilist argument centuries ago, that gold was money and therefore balance of trade was wealth, so empires were needed to insure favorable balances of trade. As Krugman notes in passing, this was based on a Malthusian view of the world.

Thomas Malthus famously argued that societies (or rather economies) would expand to the limit of their food supply and then begin to starve to death or fight wars for more food, all of which had the effect of bringing the population back into balance with its food supply. Malthusian economics of scarcity are no longer really a thing, as the industrial revolution and the industrialization of agriculture rendered old limits on food supply obsolete. 

Neo-Malthusians, if you can call them that, apply Malthus' Economics of Scarcity to energy and fresh water today. Energy can be addressed via renewables and nuclear energy, but we seem to have hardened into partisan and ideological stances on that. It's not just America, Germany shuttered their nuclear power plants to bad effect. 

Still, there's always a Malthusian Dark Lord lurking about, explaining why scarcity is about to lead to societal collapse.

At certain times and certain places, there is no doubt that these Malthusian concepts do come into play, but globally speaking, it is not a problem of capacity, but a political problem as to why we don't solve these issues. 

All of which is a winding road that leads me to the various Edge Lords and Trad shitpoasters who populate the internet. They are embracing this Malthusian idea of scarcity and collapse, which is why they point with glee to every tragedy as the precursor for the moment the old order crumbles and they arise through their very special specialness to become our new Overlords, because they read a book on farming or some shit. 

The other form it takes is manifested in the novel I'm reading, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. I'm about a third of the way through it, but it's about someone trying to infiltrate a sort of enviro-anarchist group. So far, it's her machinations interspersed with the musings of the sage who inspires the eco-terrorists (if that's what they turn out to be). He waxes rhapsodic about Neanderthals, for instance.

Beginning, in some ways, with Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens (a book I couldn't finish it was so bad), there is this romanticized version of pre-history where people were awesome until they settled down and started farming. In fact, agriculture did start this Malthusian cycle of growth and collapse centered on the food supply. The idea, though, that this Malthusian constraint did not apply to hunter-gatherers is absurd. Bands of nomads were not kept small with meticulous family planning. It was infanticide or the disruption in menstruation that hunger can bring. People started farming because it gave them steady access to food. 

Yes, there were many downsides to this, especially the domestication of animals that vectored disease into humans. It also led to that Malthusian dynamic of growth and decline - a growth that did not happen under the old hunter-gatherer economy. 

So, Malthus - an economist very few study or take seriously anymore, except as an historical relic - is still alive. He's alive in the eco-doomerism of those who think it's all going to unravel and we are a few decades away from Mad Max. He's alive, also, in the typically right wing fantasies of those who imagine this collapse leading to their elevation as emperors of the new order. 

He's also alive, maybe, in Donald Trump's view of Imperial America. I say maybe, because I really believe all this blathering nonsense about Canada and Greenland and Panama is just Trump trying to prove that he's president and not Elon Musk. That's 90% of his motivation. He calls the tune and the media starts dancing.

However, the fact that these bonkers examples were his distractors is because Trump's vision of the economy is very much from Malthus' time. It's a mercantilist zero-sum economy, and fuck you, Adam Smith. It's about tariffs as protectionism regardless of the economic costs, and tariffs only work - to the degree they do - when married to empire.

When I described Trump as a reactionary in previous years, I was thinking he wanted to take us back to the 1950s. I was wrong. He wants to take us back to the 1850s.