The Pandemic and Climate Crisis Have Shown the Costs of Inaction

The first techno-futurist bestseller, published in France in 1795 and quickly translated into English and other languages, envisioned not only longer life spans, increased agricultural productivity, and more efficient use of resources but also wiser citizens and better governance. Lending poignancy to this last prediction, the author of the Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, the Marquis de Condorcet, wrote it while he was in hiding from the Jacobin radicals who seized control of the French Revolution from mid-1793 to mid-1794. Condorcet, a mathematician-turned-scientific-administrator who’d briefly risen to political power in the middle stages of the revolution, died on the run not long after finishing the book. It was “a singular instance of the attachment of a man to principles, which every day’s experience was so fatally for himself contradicting,” quipped English clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus.

Malthus wrote this in the 1798 first edition of his famous An Essay on the Principle of Population, which name-checked Condorcet in the subtitle and set out to refute the late Frenchman’s optimism. “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio,” Malthus argued. “Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.” (Example: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc., vs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) The inevitable consequence: “misery and vice.”