The doctrines of Thomas Robert Malthus have experienced a recent resurgence in both academic and popular discourse. Fifteen to twenty years ago, one might have thought that Julian Simon’s optimism had proven correct. Resource prices had been falling since the end of World War II and economies around the world were moving toward market reforms. Yet, today we see a different world. There have been three food-price spikes in the last six years, many resource prices have been rising since the early 1990s, and economic growth in the developed world seems to have slowed down. The proposition of “peak oil” is debated with seriousness. Furthermore, the world must double its food production by 2050 to feed the growing populations of Africa and South Asia, and it is not obvious this can be accomplished, given that many yields are rising only slowly. Climate change lurks as a major danger. It’s not that we are all headed back to brute subsistence, but still the constraints of the physical world bind more than most economists had expected in the 1980s or early 1990s.

The revolution in perspective is clear but, for economists, the question is whether we can explain how and why so much has changed so quickly.

Enter From Malthus’ Stagnation to Sustained Growth. Here we have a series of essays that attempt to resurrect Malthusian perspectives—broadly construed—for our understanding of economic growth. The overall messages are that energy supplies and demography have been significant driving forces behind economic growth, at least since the Industrial Revolution. You can think of this book as outlining what economic history looks like—post-Malthus—in a fundamentally Malthusian world.

I am very much persuaded that the nineteenth-century mobilization of fossil fuels represented a turning point in European and global history, as argued in several of the book’s essays. More recently, the world has found that the end of the global era of cheap energy in 1973 has proved to be a turning point in our ability to command physical reality and accelerate transportation speeds, two areas in which the modern world is somewhat lacking.

Other parts of this book focus fruitfully on demographics, although, overall, I wished for more attention devoted to “the quality of children” and their education, rather than just population numbers. The missing variable in Malthusian theories is culture, or education, or, as Deirdre McCloskey presents it, bourgeois ideology, call it what you will. I wished that at least one essay in this book would have tried to make these materialist and ideological perspectives concordant and put within a single, overarching framework.

Edgardo Bucciarelli and Gianfranco Giulioni have produced an especially interesting essay. They integrate Malthusian frameworks with the argument of Charles Karelis that many poor people face a “poverty trap,” characterized by an unwillingness to rise above catastrophic circumstances; “why fix just one dent in your car when there are many?” is the underlying intuition in these models. Combining the poverty-trap idea and the Malthusian idea makes for some new and interesting dynamic possibilities for economic growth paths.

If I have any overarching complaint, it is that many of the essays seem underdeveloped. They start off being interesting, stay interesting, and then suddenly end. The essays sell the basic Malthusian approach, convincingly for the most part, but the authors take less care to organize their contributions around their new and novel contributions. The book, thus, comes across as having some repetition and as not always pinning down the relevant frontier issues, as might be seen by a skeptic.

Finally, the genesis of the book itself suggests the relevance of a Ricardian rather than a Malthusian model. Printing and distribution have never been cheaper in the age of the Internet, and, thus, a Malthusian model would predict that the price of written output should fall. Yet, this volume sells for $100 hardcover and $80 Kindle on Amazon. The essays were first from a published issue of Rivista di Politica Economica, which is also not free or even readily available through JSTOR. Rent is still with us, and that will make the Malthusian slog all the tougher.