Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Ransom, Malthus, and the Malthusians who came after him were socially and politically conservative. Malthus was against birth control, viewing it as against God’s plan for humans. He was against social welfare programs for the poor, viewing them as self-defeating. British leaders who justified their policies based on Malthus’s thinking were conservatives. By contrast, socialists and leftists loathed Malthus. Marx and Engels called him a “stain on the human race.” Malthus, in their view, had made an avoidable situation look inevitable, or “natural.”59 In his 1879 book, Progress and Poverty, the progressive American thinker Henry George attacked Malthus as a defender of inequality. “What gave Malthus his popularity among the ruling classes,” George wrote, “was the fact that he furnished a plausible reason for the assumption that some have a better right to existence than others.”60 But then, after World War II, Malthusianism switched sides and became a left-wing political movement in the form of environmentalism, while anti-Malthusianism became a right-wing political movement in the form of libertarian, pro-business, free market conservatism.