“ It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms… women murdering their bastard children.”Ī particular problem is that children are an expense for years before their parents can get any return on the investment they can’t afford in the first place: A Modest Proposal starts with grim descriptions of extreme poverty and hunger in Ireland: I also discovered that seventy years before Malthus’ book, Jonathan Swift had a different solution to the problem of overpopulation. The world is finite, resources are scarce, Kenneth Boulding’s poem, from a 20th century environmental angle, seemed to agree: And before that, we’ll be too poor to buy what food there is, because population growth will increase the labour supply and drive down wages. Image: Linear versus exponential growth ( Source.) Because population grows exponentially, whereas the ability of humans to feed themselves grows only arithmetically/ linearly. It was depressing, as the gist seemed to be that we’re all going to die. When I was an undergraduate, Thomas Malthus’ 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population was on the geography curriculum, and as a studious student, I read (some of) it. I watch the Jonathan Swift girl rant and rave and I drool thinking about delicious Irish babies in a white wine sauce.

But my daughter is 11, I am 45, it's late on Saturday night and I don't have it in me. This is where I wanted to pause live TV to tell my daughter about the original Swift, about A Modest Proposal - how our current American culture screams for someone like him to write about our never-ending race problem, our soul sucking capitalism-at-any-cost, our failed PAC-fueled political system. It's Halloween week and of course the thematic drum of cheap scares and slutty costumes (those of you dads that have 11 year old girls know what it is like to take a knee at the end of the show to have a side-bar chat about this topic alone) plays large when midway through the episode a six year old girl dressed like a failing barrister circa 1735 comes firing on stage screaming at her parents because they got her a Jonathan Swift costume instead of the requested Taylor Swift. Last night my daughter asked me to watch what passes for comedy to pre-teens on Nickelodeon a show low on laughs but high on laugh track.

Swift jonathan a modest proposal