This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 27th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Have we gotten Malthus all wrong?

The Economist known for his dire suggestions about the long-term prospects for humanity,

was he really just a cautious optimist?

Ross Emmett directs the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty at Arizona State.

We spoke last month in Phoenix about

Malthus as a predictor of not subsistence-level farming, but of the value of institutions.

Malthus is known for one thing and that is that given a certain amount of

human resources and given a certain amount of productivity that those humans can engage in,

that we can never get too far from subsistence level that there's always this looming collapse of the

ability to feed ourselves to care for for ourselves that could have catastrophic results for humanity.

Now people on the left often will look at this Malthusian view and say,

look, we can't get above our raisin.

There are a lot of people who call for zero population growth

because based in part on what Malthus articulated. But you pitch

Malthus as not this sort of doomsayer, you pitch him as a cautious optimist.

And so what in this popular narrative about Thomas Robert Malthus, Robert Malthus, Bob Malthus, whatever you want to call him.

You know, how does that, how do you, how do you square those two things?

His friend's called him Bob, so I go with the Robert side because I'm a friend and

Malthus well let me start at the beginning perhaps Robert made a mistake right at the very beginning by not following his instinct.

He says to his friends later that if he could have used logarithmic functions when presenting the postulate, when presenting the

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