Malthus and Boserup turned upside down: the odd story of demo-economics modelling

Abstract

Malthus was not a mathematician but he provided in few sentences a very fine view of the relationship between population, resources and technical improvement, a view summarized in the well-known competition between arithmetical and geometrical progressions. After him, Quetelet and Verhulst formulated a more mathematical view at the expense of the true process envisioned by the English scholar. More recently, the economists, starting with Solow until R.D. Lee went further away from Malthus’s ideas in the name of mathematics and mainstream economics. In fact, we see in this paper, they went as far as to inverse the scheme of Malthus into its opposite, putting in face of it a “boserupian” model, itself inverting the ideas of the great agrarian and human scientist, Ester Boserup. Such a process, where elegant mathematics respects more the current social theory than the crude facts, is quite illustratory of a way of dealing with social and economic dynamics by introducing the time in the formulae instead of coping with the complexity of the reality. In this case, progress in mathematics is paralleled with loss of contact with the real world.