Two Great Famines and Their Aftermath

[This is part of my series on Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population,” first published in 1798. You can find an overview of all my posts here that I will keep updated: “Synopsis: What’s Wrong with the Malthusian Argument?”]

In this post, I would like to compare the demographic consequences of two famines that have earned the epithet “great.” The Irish Great Famine from 1845 to 1849, and the Great Famine in Europe from 1315 to 1317. Both dragged on for a few years afterwards. In the latter case another horrible event struck Europe after another generation: the Black Death, which broke out in the Caucasus in 1346, reached Turkey and the South of Europe (Greece, Bulgaria, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, France, and the Baleares) in the next year, from where it swept the whole continent until about the early 1350s.

Malthusians can see the bright side here, but I can’t. There is no “sittlicher Nährwert” (moral nutritional value) in all of this. It was only bad. You need that like a hole in your head. When you read about it, eg. in the Wikipedia entries that I have linked to it is heart-rending. I am really glad that I live in another time, and somewhat higher real incomes for those who survived were perhaps only a token compensation for the suffering. So, “I would like to compare” is more of a phrase that is hard to avoid. Still, there are some interesting conclusions that contradict the Malthusian argument here.

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One thing you will often find in accounts of the two Great Famines is that they were the result of “overpopulation,” a typically Malthusian explanation. I write the word in scare quotes deliberately because I think it is nonsense. “Overpopulation” is the silly concern that there could be too much population over the longer run than a given food supply. That’s just not possible. The problem is always too little food for a given population, and that is not a demographic outcome, but results from events that people could not prepare for, either because they were extraordinary or because a population was hindered to deal with the problem. Natural catastrophes like the eruption of a volcano around the world and the impact on the climate, plant diseases, wars, or political machinations are common causes here.

As for the Great Famine in the 14th century, the plausible reason was the eruption of Mount Tarawera in New Zealand in 1315. Of course, noone could foresee this in Europe. You plant enough to feed yourself and also perhaps a reserve for a bad harvest. But there were three consecutive years where crops failed. At some point, people had to throw in the towel and eat the seed grain, which sent them further downwards on the spiral. What did not help either was that around 1300 also the Little Ice Age had begun that lasted until around 1850. Unbeknownst to the population, there was also a longer-run deterioration that went in the wrong direction.

As for the Irish Great Famine, it was a mold, Phytophthora infestans, that came in from America and devastated the harvest as “potato blight.” That hit the population in Ireland particularly hard, but also in Scotland or on the continent, eg. in Belgium, Germany, and also somewhat France where the potato was one of the main staples for the population. Yields crashed by about half for years on end, sometimes even by more than 80%. Noone could foresee this. What made it worse was that at the same time also other crops fell short (for data, see here). The death toll was particularly high in Ireland with an estimated 1 million deaths, but some 40,000 died in Belgium and Germany each and another 10,000 in France. The Scottish Highlands suffered also badly, but had only a rather low population of about 200,000 people, so absolute numbers could not be as large.

Famines kill people mostly not by starvation directly. Our bodies try to save on energy, and one pernicious effect here is that the immune system becomes weak. Hence diseases can not only befall an individual, they can also spread like wildfire in an undernourished population. In Ireland, typhus from 1847 on was especially lethal. It also followed those who tried to emigrate, a phenomenon that was called “coffin ships,” and that eventually triggered also epidemics in North America.

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As already noted, this is all good news for Malthusians. They might shrug and tell you how they have always warned about “overpopulation”, and now it is: Told you so! Of course, noone can prepare for several years where harvests come in way below what you can expect. If a meteor hit our planet and made agriculture impossible for a few years, we would have the same problem. And since you cannot always store up food for a decade, this is just a risk that cannot be avoided. Less population would not help because that does not mean that people now build up huge reserves that may just rot away in 99 out of 100 years. You have “overpopulation” at any level, and so this is just another word for population.

The idea that there could be more population over the longer run than there is food for is absurd. That cannot happen by definition because humans die with no food in about two months. So, to observe a population at some level over time just means that there was enough food to feed them. It cannot be otherwise. The population of Ireland had been at pre-crisis levels for decades. The same was also true for the population in 14th century Europe. It was definitely possible to produce enough food for such a population on a regular basis. Famine was the outcome of totally unexpected events, and in the case of Ireland, also deliberate decisions to do braindead things on top like demanding that starved-out people had to physically work for their poor relief.

The reaction of British politicians was mixed, but mostly a failure of the utmost order to address the situation if not — sped on by Malthusian thinking in quite a few cases — deliberately callous. On the positive side, Sir Robert Peel brought maize in from America. But he had to do it secretly. He also went against his party, the Tories, and abolished the Corn Laws. But then the next Whig government under Lord Russell retrenched from this and only sluggishly reacted with some palliatives as the catastrophe progressed. There is a discussion whether this was a genocide. As far as I can tell, there was no deliberate plan, but for many it was a welcome side effect, so maybe there is something to this. (Addendum: I don’t think it was by the definition, I mean the mindset.)

Charles Trevelyan, the Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, remarked that the famine was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.” and called the Irish “selfish, perverse and turbulent” in this context. In his view, starvation was a “direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence” and: “Supreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil.” (Quotes via Matt Ridley here, no endorsement otherwise.) The reaction to another Great Famine, this time in the South India from 1876 to 1878 with about 5.5 million deaths, was also informed by Malthusian thinking as with other famines in the country. The viceroy, Lord Lytton, halted private relief efforts because: “The Indian population has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.” (Quote again via Matt Ridley.)

But then famine really is a blessing in disguise for Malthusians. Those who survive have it better and that is the only way it can work. However, that conjures the next conclusion for Malthusians up: The population will just use this windfall again and have more children. So they are soon back to square one. Yet, and that is the interesting thing: That was not what happened with the two Great Famines.

Here are the data for how the size of the population in Ireland (only the Republic ex Northern Ireland) developed from 1841 on when it reached its peak with about 6.5 million people (including Northern Ireland: more than 8 million). That is the blue line:

The yellow line is for the population of England from 1310 on when it also reached its maximum size of 5.6 million (data from Gregory Clark). I have indexed it to the population size in Ireland for 1841 and shifted the time also to this date. Horrible as the Great Famine in the 14th century was, the Irish Great Famine seems worse, but the Black Death then makes up for this. The population decline in Ireland was also due to emigration of about 1 million people, a choice that the English in the Middle Ages did not have. The remarkable part here is that the population keeps falling in both cases for more than a century. As it looks it might have continued on this course also in Ireland, but then probably the spectacular rise of the Celtic Tiger after World War II led to population growth, and later also immigration.

Some of the decrease is an echo from lower fertility, which went down by a third. There was also a similar effect in other countries, eg. in Belgium and in Germany, but only by about 10% or so. Lower fertility and emigration then leads to a momentum effect when not only the people are gone, but also their children and grandchildren. So you should expect some stickiness for about half a century. However, shrinkage goes on for half or even one century afterwards. And curiously, the net effect in spite of the different timing is almost the same in both cases. I would not put too much weight on the exact values that seem almost identical. That may be accidental, but the ballpark is similar: the two populations about halve.

It was really so that people in the 15th century had rather high real incomes compared to before the catastrophe. Also real incomes in Ireland held up when the famine was gone. Still in both cases that did not induce the population growth that Malthusians would confidently predict. That came only much later. It took England until about 1650 to get back to its pre-crisis population size, ie. 300 years. With fertility of 1.91 these days, ie. below the replacement level, it does not look like Ireland will recover to its former level, and if so probably only because of immigration.

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Malthusians like Gregory Clark have an explanation, and it is always the same one with them: It must have been very high mortality for more than a century. He points to further outbreaks of the plague. However, those were local and not as devastating. To fill the gap here, you would have to show that mortality kept running on a similarly high level for a century. I don’t think that is true. There would be some historical record of this.

And even then, that cannot work if the Malthusian argument is true. Human fertility is made to deal with high mortality. A level of eight or even more is possible for a population. Now, to have shrinkage, you would have to prove mortality of more than 75% until adult age with fertility of eight. However, that has never happened for populations over the long run, it was probably also not so in England after the mid-14th century.

And this explanation cannot be true for Ireland where we have reliable data. The country remained certainly poor for a long time, but it did not suffer from such high mortality that cancelled out very high fertility. Maybe I miss something here, but there was no continuing famine until the 1950s? Emigration was heavy in the 19th century, and that may explain a lot. But then why did the population not grow back to over 6.5 million people anyway? It was certainly possible to feed so many from agriculture in Ireland alone. And if the Malthusian argument were true that should have happened. But it didn’t.

There is also another very curious observation here. As I have begun to explain in one of my posts, the move from pre-industrial to modern conditions appears to result in population growth by a factor of about 12 with rather little variation around it over the long run. I will analyze this more in detail in another post. Now, you may object that the Irish are a counter-example. But they aren’t. Emigration is the missing link here:

A whopping 70 to 80 million people claim Irish ancestry worldwide, some 40 million in the US, 14 million in the UK, 7 million in Australia, and 4.5 million in Canada. Ireland is only the fourth largest country in this row with about 6.5 million if you add in Northern Ireland. I am unsure whether you should compare those of Irish descent only to the population of the Republic or of the whole island. But then this is in the right ballpark, with 6.5 million or 8 million people in 1841 minus perhaps 1 million.

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How to explain the above graph then if the Malthusian explanation does not work?

There may also be other approaches, but my take is that populations target a certain size that depends on their level of distress. As I will explain in another post, my hunch is that there is a slow estimation in the background that is updated with new information that comes in, some kind of an exponential smoothing that measure the downside. A famine is an extreme case of distress, directly and indirectly, and so I would expect that the Irish in the 19th and the English in the 14th century raised their estimate for the level of distress massively. And that would then induce a much lower target size, apparently of about half what it was before.

One conclusion then has to be that this estimate is very sluggish and is handed down over the generations. Of course, this cannot be in some explicit way. But then children might just infer it from the behavior of their parents and of society at large, not the least from the population target that is pursued. In this way, there could be a pretty long-run effect of a catastrophe. Good news works only by the absence of bad news, and so it takes some time before it sinks in. As it seems, it takes about a century or more to shake off the specter of another catastrophe. Only then the target size goes up again, and the population grows.

My explanation is also that the level of distress is centered on nutrition, but includes proxies like disease that may contain additional information about the status of a population. Famines should then have a direct impact and also an indirect one. What the population does is set a much higher buffer than before to be on the safe side when a catastrophe strikes again. That’s why real incomes go up, but do not induce “population pressure” (another meaningless buzzword from Malthusians). The population implicitly lives in fear. And although higher real incomes are nice, people do not eat the buffer up with more children. When things are better than expected for a long time, the population infers that it could now also do with less of a buffer and begins to grow, not because it inevitably must, but as a reaction to an improvement.

If my interpretation is broadly correct — certainly an assumption that I will have to argue for — then the Malthusian joy about famines and epidemics is misplaced. Yes, real incomes rose, but the population was still not really as relaxed as it might seem. So also the aftermath was bad, not just the calamity itself. No reason to look on the bright side of death here. It is hard to track this down in the data, but my hunch is that you could perhaps find reverberations of the underlying unease in the literature of the time or other cultural phenomena. “Es saß ihnen in den Knochen” as one would say in German: It sat in the bones for them.

Even if I am totally wrong about all this, my point still stands that both observations: the long decrease in population despite rising and then high real incomes and the regularity of population growth over the longer run completely contradict the Malthusian argument. I found Gregory Clark’s book “A Farewell to Alms” very funny in this regard, how he gets around this blatant refutation. When the population of England starts to grow from a low in about 1450 again, it does so against the backdrop of falling real incomes. Everything is exactly opposite to his explanation. But then the Malthusian argument is unfalsifiable, and so this doesn’t faze Clark.

So much for now, I will pursue this and other conclusions in further posts. Stay tuned …