Restoring a reputation

Here's a question. In which book do these words appear?:

Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasure may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life...The superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiety, than in their being more real and essential...I have very frequently taken up a book and almost as frequently gone to sleep over it; but when I pass an evening with a gay party, or a pretty woman, I feel alive, and in spirits, and truly enjoy my existence.

The answer is....

...Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population.
Yup, the so-called miseryguts himself.
This shows that Malthus was, as Sandra Peart says, the "most maligned and misunderstood of all economists" - and there's some stiff competition for that title.
As Sandra says, Malthus did not predict that population growth would lead to death and war as people fought over scarce food. Instead, he thought people would foresee being unable to afford large families, and so would not have them:

The preventive check to population in this country operates, though with varied force, through all the classes of the community.

What's more, Malthus's famous pessimism about the growth in food production was, at the time he wrote,  justified by the facts.
Much of the Essay is devoted to criticizing the optimism of Godwin and Condorcet, who thought technical progress or human improvement could overcome physical limits upon the world's population. Malthus preferred empirical evidence to speculation - and the evidence, as it existed at the time, supported his pessimism. As Brad De Long shows here, until the 18th century (the Essay appeared in 1798), output per person barely grew at all. Most people in the 18th century lived on the edge of subsistence - as they had since the birth of mankind (which was longer ago than Malthus believed).
But we now know that the limits to population growth were less pressing than Malthus thought. Technical progress has come to the rescue, even though it hadn't in the centuries before Mathus wrote.
At this time of year especially, there's a nice lesson here. Sometimes, pessimism - however rationally based in the facts - can be wrong, and optimism - however irrational - can be right.
Merry Christmas, everyone.

Comments

[ivan]

Looks a lot like the stock market boom over the past decade, with Robert Shiller as the rational prophet of doom this time and again technological progress coming (in part) at the rescue. Brad DeLong has the story: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/12/musings_on_asse.html

[Robert Schwartz]

Thirty years before Malthus, Smith thought differently:

AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS;
BY ADAM SMITH, LL.D. AND F.R.S. OF LONDON AND EDINBURGH:
FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
EDINBURGH: 1776

BOOK II. OF THE NATURE, ACCUMULATION, AND EMPLOYMENT OF STOCK.

CHAPTER III. OF THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL, OR OF PRODUCTIVE AND
UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR.

But though the profusion of government must, undoubtedly, have retarded the natural progress of England towards wealth and improvement, it has not been able to stop it. The annual produce of its land and labour is, undoubtedly, much greater at present than it was either at the Restoration or at the Revolution. The capital, therefore, annually employed in cultivating this land, and in maintaining this labour, must likewise be much greater. In the midst of all the exactions of government, this capital has been silently and gradually accumulated by the private frugality and good conduct of individuals, by their universal, continual, and uninterrupted effort to better their own condition. It is this effort, protected by law and allowed by liberty to exert itself in the manner that is most advantageous, which has maintained the progress of England towards opulence and improvement in almost all former times, and which, it is to be hoped, will do so in all future times.

===========================
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195002660/002-7061163-5659257
Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White discuses technological (including agricultural) advances made in Europe during the Middle Ages. The author has a technological determinism that I find unattractive, but I think he makes the case that Europeans were better feed, clothed and housed at the end of the Middle Ages than they were at the beginning.

[angry_economist]

Ah its our very own economists' 'A Christmas Carol', with Malthus our Scrooge who has been reborn in our eyes as a generous partygoer!

What a fine Christmas story!

There will always be cranks who wear "The End is Nigh" signs - economics has them like most other walks of life.

[dearieme]

Eat turkey. They are animals like us, so if we multiply "geometrically" so do they. It's vegetarians who are in trouble in the Malthus scenario. Drink and be of good cheer too.

[Chris Brooke]

"Thirty years before Malthus, Smith thought differently..."

Gareth Stedman Jones also emphasises the sharp disagreements between Malthus and Smith in his discussion of the Essay in his recent An End to Poverty? (which I'm currently half way through):

*** "In essence, the attack on Condorcet was little more than the specification of a larger but generally unavowed object of attack, the stance towards labourers adopted by Adam Smith himself. Smith accepted as a truism that 'the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men...'. But this did not mean that the poor only worked when pushed by 'necessity'. Among the reasons Smith gave for his support for high wages was that the labourer was likely to be encouraged 'by the comfortable hope of bettering his condition'. 'Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent and expeditious, than where they are low.' Conversely, as he argued about the dissenting clergy in The Wealth of Nations, 'fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government...' ... Smith never employed the notion of 'indolence' in connection with the labouring poor - this he reserved for depictions of the landed classes and the established clergy...

... In Malthus's Essay there was a palpable shift. In his opinion, 'the labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving, they seldom exercise it...' ... Unlike Smith's poor, who were brought within the norms of civil society by sympathy, neighbourhood, custom and education, Malthus's poor, even when they knew better, were governed by 'their bodily cravings' - 'the cravings of hunger, the love of liquor, the desire of possessing a beautiful woman.' ***

(from pp.97-9)