> He was proven wrong in that what he predicted didn't happen.
Not really my point. Malthus was wrong about a future food crisis, but that doesn't invalidate the tools he used to make that prediction. Re-read the first line of my original post, it's pretty clearly about the theory and not his predictions.
The underlying idea is that population growth outpaced food production, and we know it is bad for food consumption exceed production.
> And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential
You're also missing the forest for the trees: agriculture and population growth can be any two functions for the idea to work, so long as the agriculture function starts higher than the population function (technically there is a third function implicitly here connecting population growth to food consumption) and grows slower. Population growth was approximately exponential, and food production was approximately linear. This is a sufficient condition to forecast future changes. Pick any overfit function you'd like for food or population as it was known to Europe in the 1790s, and you will arrive to the same conclusion if you do not "cheat" and allow for magical technology advances in 50 years.
> How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
Math would have to change to the point that subtracting consumption from production no longer leads to a negative number for me to consider him "wrong."
Now, I wouldn't say his model was relevant to famine after technology changed, because it no longer was useful for that particular thing. But the core notion of "if demand grows faster than supply, you will eventually hit a crisis when they intercept" is a pretty clear-cut conclusion to draw.
It is a bit odd for a thread to get this heated over a pretty simple economic theory that stopped being relevant a century ago. Is there some political side to Malthus I am missing?
Not really my point. Malthus was wrong about a future food crisis, but that doesn't invalidate the tools he used to make that prediction. Re-read the first line of my original post, it's pretty clearly about the theory and not his predictions.
The underlying idea is that population growth outpaced food production, and we know it is bad for food consumption exceed production.
> And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential
You're also missing the forest for the trees: agriculture and population growth can be any two functions for the idea to work, so long as the agriculture function starts higher than the population function (technically there is a third function implicitly here connecting population growth to food consumption) and grows slower. Population growth was approximately exponential, and food production was approximately linear. This is a sufficient condition to forecast future changes. Pick any overfit function you'd like for food or population as it was known to Europe in the 1790s, and you will arrive to the same conclusion if you do not "cheat" and allow for magical technology advances in 50 years.
> How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
Math would have to change to the point that subtracting consumption from production no longer leads to a negative number for me to consider him "wrong."
Now, I wouldn't say his model was relevant to famine after technology changed, because it no longer was useful for that particular thing. But the core notion of "if demand grows faster than supply, you will eventually hit a crisis when they intercept" is a pretty clear-cut conclusion to draw.
It is a bit odd for a thread to get this heated over a pretty simple economic theory that stopped being relevant a century ago. Is there some political side to Malthus I am missing?