Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/29

 THE REVERSAL OF MALTHUS I 5

share of the general abundance. In other words, there is no lack of supply, but only of individual power to obtain a share of such supply. Even this element is not important enough to constitute any great factor in economic speculation. If all the people in the world who are known or supposed not to have enough and proper food, clothing or shelter were fully supplied with these necessaries, there would hardly be an appreciable diminution of the existing store.

As a consequence, we are facing for the first time in the world's history this condition: The world is able to produce, and actually does produce, more food than is needed to meet the requirements of the population of the globe. More wheat, corn, rice, meat and other staple food -products are raised every year than can possibly be consumed. One-fourth of the arable lands of the United States might be abandoned and the world still have enough. The immediate issue of this con- dition is the fall in prices of farm-products and a necessary result of this fall in the price of farm products is a declension in farm values.

A hundred years ago Malthus put forth the theory, which has been almost universally accepted as a fundamental axiom of political economy from that time to the present, that the sum total of human labor applicable to the productive capacity of the earth is insufficient to supply the material needs of its popu- lation. In other words, he formulated the theory that popula- tion increases in a geometrical ratio, while the world's capacity to supply them increased only in an arithmetical ratio. The terms in which this doctrine was propounded are fanciful in the extreme and their author only contended that they were approximately true that population increased more rapidly than the capacity to supply their wants. Today we are facing a situation which seems to be an exact converse of the premises on which this hypothesis was based one apparently establishing the fact that the world's labor, applied to and supplementing the natural capacity of the earth, has already produced more than enough of life's necessities to supply the actual popula-