Shah and Malthus

Shah mostly just points out technical flaws in Malthus’s essay; he agrees that while population increase will more than likely increase poverty rates, with low wages for labor, the rich would get richer. He alludes to the rich being a minority occupying an “affluent territory centered in the middle of the mesa, with a barbed wire fence around them” while the poor begin to crowd around them in a sea of poverty, breeding until they “push each other off the edge of the mesa.” Shah presents a second scenario not unlike the French Revolution, where the poor majorit seize the affluence and the mesa becomes a free-for-all mess of poverty. Famine is another important factor because as Malthus had mentioned, it serves as a check on population. The more people there are, the more our resources dwindle. Although Shah mentions this theory is valid—although maybe underestimating food production and consumerism—he points out that Malthus was wrong in his timing. Now, the problems of dwindling resources are quite real, but at the time Malthus’s was writing his essay, there was an entire new frontier underway. North and South America would become gateways for resources and food in the nineteenth century, which Shah claims postponed the Malthusian outcome. Shah ends his essay on a perplexing note, claiming that as Western Europe became prosperous, “fertility rates fell.” Thus the predicted Malthusian outcome may be void due to completely natural reasons.