Too Many, Too Few: Malthusianisation and The Politics of Population Anxiety 

Demographic speculation rarely presents itself as such. Dressed in rigorous scientific language, it depicts futures with a certainty that facts alone cannot shake. But treating populations as aggregates erases the social and historical reality of people’s lives – narrowing not only what is studied but what can be imagined. 

Until a decade ago, European publics were told there were too many people on the planet. Population bombs, carrying capacities breached, the Global South reproducing itself into planetary catastrophe. Today, the same publics are told there are too few. Collapsing fertility, ageing societies, depopulating regions, civilisational decline. Elon Musk warns that “population collapse” is a greater threat to humanity than climate change. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni made defending the “natural family” a priority of her government. Her former Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orbán, financed motherhood with tax breaks (all the while fortifying his country’s southern border against those who might repopulate it). Somewhere between the two alarms, the narrative shifted. The underlying logic did not.  

I spent years writing and speaking about the first panic, dismantling the overpopulation myth, showing audiences that consumption, not reproduction, drives emissions; that the wealthiest 10 per cent of humanity is responsible for two-thirds of global warming; that blaming fertility in the Global South is a way of protecting the consumption patterns of the Global North. But I eventually realised that demographic thinking functions as a reflex. It arrives already formed, wrapped around an anxiety, unmoved by facts that come afterwards. When the overpopulation panic quietly dissolved and was replaced, almost overnight, with its mirror image, the reflex had not weakened. It had simply found a new vehicle. The fear of too many and the fear of too few are not opposing positions – they are the same operation. 

I call this operation Malthusianisation: the discursive, affective, and institutional process through which the structural outcomes of political, economic, and ecological systems are transformed into demographic problems. In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), English clergyman and political economist Thomas Robert Malthus argued that population grows geometrically while food supply grows arithmetically, making famine and disease inevitable correctives. He opposed poverty relief on the grounds that it encouraged reproduction among the poor. His framework has shaped two centuries of debate on resources, fertility, and welfare and lent its name to a recurring style of catastrophist reasoning. Malthusianisation is not the passive inheritance of an old idea but an active, ongoing process that turns housing crises into immigration problems, climate breakdown into calls for stricter border policing, the effects of inequality into integration failure, and political choices into population inevitabilities. Its survival has never depended on it being true; rather, its usefulness keeps it in circulation.  

Numbers and fear   

The language of demography rarely presents itself as overtly ideological. Nor does it speak in a single voice. On the one hand, there is the language of projections, ratios, dependency curves, and carrying capacities: technical, measured; the sober – apparently neutral – management of numbers. On the other hand, there is a vocabulary – always in circulation – of invasion, flood, replacement, and collapse: visceral, urgent, and difficult to contest without appearing naïve. Neither register would be sufficient on its own. The technical voice alone would be dry and contestable; the visceral voice alone would be politically embarrassing. Together, however, the two registers make exclusion feel both reasoned and necessary, each reinforcing the other so effectively that they become difficult to disentangle.  

Consider the way contemporary European policy frames migration. The EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted in 2024, speaks at length about solidarity, burden sharing, and dignified procedures, while formalising accelerated border screenings and return partnerships with third countries whose human rights records remain largely unaddressed. The emphasis on figures – arrivals, capacities, ratios – creates an impression of technical necessity, while the political nature of the choices being made is quietly displaced. Like sections of an orchestra, numbers provide the melody of legitimacy, and fear beats the timpani of urgency. The ensemble is what allows policies that would otherwise be controversial to pass as pragmatic responses to demographic realities.  

The unease that attaches itself to demographic change is not a response to data; eight billion is a number nobody can hold in their mind. This is why attempts to correct demographic claims through empirical evidence so often fail.  

Politicians who warn of demographic decline or cultural replacement legitimise anxieties that were already looking for a political home. The effect is cumulative.

Politicians who warn of demographic decline or cultural replacement legitimise anxieties that were already looking for a political home. The effect is cumulative. Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders’ warnings about “ethnic replacement”,1 French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s rhetoric of civilisational survival, Orbán’s cry for more Hungarian babies: these are not arguments in the conventional sense but rather invitations to feel. And once those feelings are activated, they become remarkably resistant to correction. What begins as speculation about demographic futures – projections about who will be born, who will arrive, and what kind of society will result – gradually takes on the appearance of common sense. In this way, demographic narratives become self-reinforcing: they shape the perceptions through which they are interpreted.  

Time plays a crucial role in sustaining this dynamic. Demographic crises are almost always projected onto a future that is close enough to demand immediate attention, yet distant enough to avoid direct verification. Malthus gave catastrophe a few decades to materialise; Paul Ehrlich, who died this year without ever seeing the famines he promised for the 1970s, gave his predictions a few years to come true. Today’s demographers meanwhile project comfortably to 2050 or 2100, and pronatalist think tanks hold “natal conferences” with tech billionaires forecasting demographic winters with a precision that would embarrass a serious statistician.2  

The horizon shifts, but the structure remains. Each failed prediction becomes the basis for the next, recalibrated but never abandoned. This produces a state of permanent urgency in which extraordinary measures, border militarisation, reproductive incentives, and migration control can be justified as emergency responses, only to become normalised over time.  

Politics in disguise   

Much of the authority of demographic reasoning relies on the appearance of scientific neutrality. Population variables circulate through climate models, migration forecasts, development frameworks, and carbon accounting systems. The sophistication of the modelling gives an impression of precision, obscuring the assumptions embedded within it. However, what is presented as neutral actually belongs to a particular tradition of Western science, carrying with it a particular worldview. For example, a 2024 fertility study by The Lancet was widely reported as evidence of imminent demographic collapse. Stripped of its methodological caveats, it entered public discussion as a clean prediction rather than a probabilistic projection under contested assumptions.3

The translation of political processes into demographic terms obscures the decisions that produce them. 

When complex social and ecological dynamics are reduced to numerical indicators, what is gained in clarity is often lost in context. Yet it is precisely this simplification of demographic reasoning to a question of “how many” that allows it to travel so effectively across domains, from climate discourse to migration policy and development planning. This reflects particular ideas about scarcity, limits, and responsibility – ideas that determine whose reproduction is framed as a problem and whose is considered a duty. These frameworks do political work precisely because they appear not to. It is a kind of trompe-l’œil: politics painted so carefully that the viewer sees only demography.  

At the same time, the translation of political processes into demographic terms obscures the decisions that produce them. For example, the disagreements on asylum policy that led to the collapse of the Dutch coalition government in 2023 were widely presented in terms of housing and welfare pressures, as if these pressures were not the outcomes of long-term policy choices. Similarly, Spain’s rural depopulation is often framed as an inevitable trajectory rather than the result of economic restructuring and policy choices favouring urban centres. In each case, the shift from political to demographic language alters the terrain of debate. What might otherwise be contested as a matter of policy becomes accepted as a matter of fact. A fact of demography.  

Recurring frames   

Another reason this logic proves so difficult to dispel is that it travels, in different forms, across the political spectrum. Versions of it appear in progressive discourse, too. In February 2026, Valérie Tanghe, a Club of Rome member and candidate for the presidency of the Flemish Green party, told a journalist that the main reason the Earth is under such pressure is that there are so many of us.4 Tanghe lost the vote by a considerable margin. But it is telling that such a framing could be advanced, without controversy, by a Green party candidate.  

Arguments about sustainability that focus on limiting population growth often reproduce assumptions about scarcity and responsibility that are similar to those found in more overtly Malthusian narratives. As American birth control activist Margaret Sanger once wrote, birth control is “practically identical in ideal with the final aims of eugenics".5 She was not being cynical, merely articulating a continuity that remains uncomfortable to acknowledge.  

The capacity for adaptation of Malthusian reasoning is reinforced by the movement of ideas across institutional boundaries and careers. Concepts developed in one context – academic research, policy analysis, political campaigning – are taken up in others, without losing their core assumptions. Individuals and organisations move between these spaces as well, carrying with them particular ways of framing problems and solutions. The Washington-based Population Reference Bureau, founded in 1929 by eugenicist Guy Irving Burch, had rebranded itself as environmentalist by the 1960s without changing its mathematical models, only its vocabulary.  

More recently, the trajectory of Fabrice Leggeri illustrates this dynamic. Leggeri ran Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, between 2015 and 2022, a period during which journalists, NGOs, and the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) documented systematic illegal pushbacks at the Greek border with Turkey, along the Evros River and in the Aegean. He resigned in 2022 after an OLAF investigation concluded that serious misconduct had occurred on his watch. In February 2024, however, he reappeared on the list for the European elections of the French far-right Rassemblement National (RN). He told the press that he was committed to fighting the “migratory overload", which European institutions “do not consider a problem, but rather a project”.6 He was elected to the European Parliament and now sits on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, helping to shape the migration policy he once enforced. The same man, the same logic. Only the uniform has changed.  

Populations as tools   

Running through all of this is a deeper transformation that concerns the way populations themselves are conceptualised. Groups are increasingly understood as aggregates defined by demographic attributes: size, growth rate, age structure, mobility. This abstraction facilitates a mode of governance in which populations can be managed, redistributed, or contained according to strategic considerations. Depending on the needs of the moment, the same group can be framed as economically necessary and culturally dangerous within the same policy framework. What disappears in this process is the social and historical reality of people’s lives. They become flows to be regulated, burdens to be shared, or threats to be mitigated.  

In certain contexts, populations are even instrumentalised within broader political conflicts, directed towards or away from borders as part of strategic manoeuvring. In 2020, when Turkey opened the border along the Evros River to put pressure on the European Union, Greek police pushed people back, some stripped, some beaten, while Athens described them as a “hybrid threat”. The same happened in 2021 at the Polish border with Belarus, with the latter doing the pushing and Poland responding by building a wall and suspending asylum rights.  

The language used to describe demographic dynamics both reflects and reinforces this instrumentalisation. The result is a form of governance in which populations themselves become tools. They are deployed, managed, and negotiated in ways that would be difficult to justify without the seemingly objective language of demography. This is not an accidental by-product of policy but a consequence of a way of thinking that frames populations as variables to be optimised rather than as communities to be engaged. And yet, for all its apparent coherence, this way of thinking rests on a set of exclusions that are rarely made explicit.  

Naming suppression   

In 1377, a North African scholar named Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah, a work that contained a sophisticated theory of population, economic cycles, and civilisational change. His model was cyclical. It maintained that populations rise and fall depending on political cohesion, economic specialisation, and the trust holding communities together.  

Ibn Khaldun’s concept of ‘umran understood population not as a pressure against a fixed wall but as a generative force, the substance from which wealth, culture, and political life are made. Meanwhile, his ‘asabiyyah, the solidarity that holds a community together, located the source of civilisational renewal not at the centre but at the margins, among those pushed to the edge by incumbent powers. Together, these terms outline a moral economy of population, in which labour, justice, and political life are inseparable from the question of how many people a society contains.  

Non-Western frameworks have been systematically excluded from demographic thought. 

Over four centuries later, Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population flattened the demographic question into a single, linear collision between fertility and resources. The logic underlying his theory still shapes Western understandings and anxieties around demographics, whereas Ibn Khaldun’s thought was all but forgotten. Demographic research has quietly built walls around what counts as knowledge, and those walls hold across curricula, citation networks, and funding structures without anyone ever needing to defend them explicitly. Non-Western frameworks have been systematically excluded from demographic thought.  

When Ibn Khaldun does appear in Western scholarship, he is usually cast as a precursor, a prefiguration, a curiosity who happened to anticipate certain European ideas, stripped of the Islamic intellectual tradition that gives his framework its coherence. The centuries of Islamic scholarship that subsequently developed his thought remain invisible, producing the illusion that demographic thinking emerged fully formed from the European Enlightenment. This narrowing of the field shapes not only what is studied but what can be imagined. Naming all of this will not, by itself, bring it down. Malthusianisation is not held in place by ignorance alone. It is sustained by institutions, by feelings, by coalitions, and by centuries of suppressed alternatives. But naming is the condition for everything else. You cannot refuse a logic you cannot see, and demographic governance has always depended, more than it would ever admit, on remaining invisible: on appearing not as a political project but as a neutral, technical response to demographic facts. But behind the numbers, there is always a set of choices about what counts as a problem – and for whom