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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

Malthusian model is the basics of modern understanding of historical populations. See, for example, Gregory Clark’s “Farewell to Alms”. The population very much reproduces itself geometrically (or at least used to for most of history), and the growth in food supply was much slower. In effect, the historical populations quickly hit the equilibria, and oscillated around Malthusian limit. Compare, for example, rapid population growth of colonial America, with very lackluster growth of population of England during the same time (and even then, the growth in England was partially fueled by food imports from America).

> What is that "kind of economics"?

Marx’s “Capital” is the bullshit kind of economics. If anything, it is the butt joke of economists today.

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You can't possibly believe the model that population grows until food is depleted at the margin, it's obviously wrong.

What stopped the world population from hitting 8 billion in year 1 AD already then? Why did population of British Isles was under 1 million at the time, instead of over 70 million today? You can’t explain this without Malthusian arguments.

In a Malthusian model there would be a larger share of poor and starving as food becomes more abundant, because remember necessarily population outgrows food production.

The Malthusian model predicts forever growing extreme poverty as a share of population.

You've demonstrated that you've fallen for the popular misconception of Malthusian theory. It's not that food is "depleted at the margin" as in people starve until death rates go up. What actually happens at the margin is, lacking in sufficient resources to comfortably do so, people forego having kids. Perhaps, in olden times, lacking the prosperity to get the fathers permission in marriage.

It is not true, as both societies with no food have kids and societes with plenty of food don't have kids.

They have only a tenuous correlation at best.

> Marx’s “Capital” is the bullshit kind of economics. If anything, it is the butt joke of economists today.

Compared to what? Not other mid-19th century economic works... Marx published Capital prior to the so-called "Marginal Revolution" that presaged the emergence of Neoclassical economics - i.e. the first era of economic thought generally compatible with modern theory, so it's basically meaningless to claim that his views are derided by economists today.

Compared to "The Wealth of Nations", for example, which had much better economic analysis, despite being published a greater part of a century earlier. Ideas of Smith, Ricardo, or Bastiat predate Marx, and are very favorably cited today by modern economists. Marx's, not really.

It sounds like you mean to say that Smith, Ricardo, and Bastiat are more popular in casual online discussions of economics or economic history, because they aren't any more relevant to contemporary academic economics than Marx is. In fact, as products of the same classical era, they shared some of the same problematic views, including adhering to the labor theory of value, that would discredit Marx's economics.

Of course, any of those names would necessarily be more agreeable to modern economists by nature of not being inherently anti-capitalist, but that's no credit to their scholarship. If anything, extending the our gaze beyond the realm of the contemporary field of economics would reveal that Marx far outpaces these other names in citation value.

> It sounds like you mean to say that Smith, Ricardo, and Bastiat are more popular in casual online discussions of economics or economic history, because they aren't any more relevant to contemporary academic economics than Marx is.

No, I meant exactly what I said. Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, for example, remains being part of foundation of modern understanding of international trade. Every economics textbook teaches it. Same with Bastiat’s broken window fallacy. If their writings don’t get explicit citations in published papers, it’s for the same reason Pythagoras or Euclid don’t get citations in modern mathematics either: their results are so foundational that everyone knows them.

> If anything, extending the our gaze beyond the realm of the contemporary field of economics would reveal that Marx far outpaces these other names in citation value.

Of course, people keep citing Marx. Not economists though, or if they do, not favorably.

> No, I meant exactly what I said.

Ah, well then I will continue to be puzzled by your response - i.e. why you think any of the classical "economists" you've named are so much better qualified than Marx to critique Malthus (going back to the original premise of this discussion).

Adam Smith is, of course, famous for being the first "economist," but his legacy isn't the result of him being particularly accurate (nor are his actual economic views very clear or citation-worthy). What did Bastiat even produce that could be cited by economists today? Of course the broken window fallacy is popular in Econ. 101 textbooks, as well as with the Austrians and in the free-market blogosphere, but it's not citable research. Ricardo was a seminal figure in the development of modern economic thought, but he was also a product of his era who was wildly wrong about lots of things. Moreover, Marx was familiar with his work, both adopting and critiquing parts of it throughout his career, so it seems a bit peculiar to lionize Ricardo while portraying Marx as incapable of offering a critique of Malthus.

Let me clarify it then. The poster I responded to claimed that Malthus is a butt joke of economics, which is patently false, and to support that, he cited Marx, whose economic theory is in fact a butt joke of economics. Is that clear now?

I can see what you've written, but I'm having trouble with the level of certainty you ascribe to what is surely a highly-subjective claim. It's not at all clear that Malthus is not (or hasn't been), at least partially, a "butt joke of economics", nor is it clear that Marxian economics' heterodox status today has any bearing on the quality of Marx's critique of Malthus.

Both Marx and Malthus have present-day adherents, though current positions have evolved well beyond those of their progenitors, but they've both also been widely panned. Obviously, the fact that neither mass global starvation nor global communism have overwhelmed humanity makes it easy to critique the pair, at least on a superficial level. You might suggest taking a more nuanced examination of their legacies, but I think that would reveal this entire discussion's lack of intelligibility. Perhaps you'd like to take a nuanced view of Malthus, but view Marx superficially?

Economists do not cite Malthus either.

You’re wrong. I already mentioned Gregory Clark, who cites Malthus often. You can use Google Scholar for more.

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