#thomas malthus

[doctorfriend79]

Thomas Malthus

[bajablastflavoredsaxreed]

I FUCKING HATE THOMAS MALTHUS BTW. HIS STUPID ASS GRAPH AND LACK OF ACCOUNTING FOR HUMAN TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND HIS SMUG ASS FACE ENRAGE ME. EVERY TIME I HEAR HIS NAME IN A CIVICS CLASS I PRAY TO WHATEVER DEITY MAY BE OUT THERE TO MAKE MY LIFE AS SHORT AS HIS FORESIGHT

[oddlyunadventurous]

The existence of Boss Baby implies the existence of the fictitious commodities of Baby Land, Baby Money and Baby Labour, three constructs which were accepted as real in order to usher in the utopian project of Baby Market Economy.

[rabbiteartrans]

The most confusing part about the "hail Malthus" at the end of Urinetown is...

Throughout the show... as far as i've noticed, overpopulation as a theme is never so much as hinted at, especially as a cause of the drought. In fact it's made pretty explicitly clear there IS tons of water still - notably in the song 'Mr. Cladwell', the sky being filled with dark grey clouds, aka WATER! It just pretty much NEVER rains. It's an ecological disaster born from the effects of climate change.

And that's not even the only aspect of the show that seemingly stands in opposition to a Malthusian reading. (That sentence is possibly the most pretentious i've ever sounded).

If anything the show seems to hold a lot of anti-capitalist (pro-communist you might even say) messages.

Caldwell and his cronies are pretty clearly shown to be money-grubbing scumbags putting on a show of using their funds to further a common goal of the masses (finding a long-term solution to the drought) while actually just hoarding wealth and paying off governmental figures and law officers to keep the working class under their collective thumb for the sake of draining more from them. The proletariat rising up against the bourgeoisie is,, kinda the whole point of the show!

And the first act of said uprising is.. well, taking over the local pay-toilet and therefore disrupting Caldwell's revenue stream. Seizing the means of production as it were. Even locking themselves inside it at one point when The Rich(tm) come cracking down on them.

Urinetown also very obviously has a TON of Brechtian influences. Brecht famously being a pretty starch communist and never shying away from promoting such messages in his work.

And yknow, getting to the point of this point... Karl Marx, the fuckin Daddy Big Dick of Communism(tm)? Fucking HATED Malthus and his bullshit theories. So Brecht very much would have too.

There are only really 2 moments in the show where it strays away at all from this sorta reading:

Right after Snuff That Girl where they seem to imply that like.... the rich are victims of a widespread smear campaign?? ("Let's bring our message of hate to the entire world!" "Easy, friend, a message like ours works best under extremely unbalanced circumstances." "Such as we have right here?" "Exactly. Now, get the rope.")

At the very end where all the water is used up and they essentially say Cladwell was Right ("As cruel as Caldwell B. Cladwell was, his measures effectively regulated water consumption, sparing the town the same fate as the phantom Urinetown."), and end the show with a shout of "Hail Malthus!".

Curiously though, even in that final scene there's still a through-line of anti-capitalist sentiment. The only surviving Rich Bitch, Mister McQueen, "opened a bottling factory just outside of Brasília, which did rather well until the Amazon dried up. Then he moved". Odd detail to throw in at the very end, no? I never even noticed McQueen, a very minor side character, did survive until re-reading the script just today. I interpret it as a show that the influences of capitalism, of bottling up this natural resource and selling it, is what's CAUSING the devastation in the first place. The Amazon was still holding on despite the drought somehow, until little bastard McQueen, the final remaining vestiges of Cladwell's previous empire, gets to it. Earlier, Cladwell also mentions (re: Senator Fipp's metaphorically filthy hands) "you can wash them soon enough! Wash them by the banks of the Rio del Rio". I could find no information on what the fuck that is! It isn't... any real river or anything. But Rio does translate from portuguese to "river" so I assume he just meant "the rivers of Río" - so there's established even more places still flush with water.

That's actually another running plot-line in the show. Cladwell's Rich Bitches (including the cops) repeatedly talk about how they're going to move to Rio de Janeiro with their hordes throughout both acts. It's also mentioned he's spent "a lifetime building this company" - his whole bare minimum 40 year life. A company dedicated to running these public toilets and controlling water consumption. Something necessary for a drought.. that's only lasted 20 years. He also says (re:establishing his company's stronghold on the local water supply) "twenty years ago we came to the people of this community". We, as an established company. Presenting himself as an outsider, not already part of the local community. Righhhht when the drought began.

What i'm getting at here is a theory of Cladwell, as a representation of Capitalistic greed, taking advantage of the rapidly worsening climate crisis and manipulating circumstances to create an absurdly extreme water extreme shortage and make mountains of cash under the guise of humanitarianism. Then the plan was, when this area's people have been bled dry of all they have, move on to Rio. Most of them die of course but that plan lives on with McQueen... who then moves on to somewhere else. The pattern continues.

Um.. this kinda just devolved into Urinetown Conspiracy Theories huh

My point is, the views of the show on capitalism and corporations and the bourgeoisie are clear as day despite a couple questionable tidbits - theyre parasites, and what good they claim to do for you is only so you can keep feeding them til you're empty.

The end result of the people using up all their water after Cladwell is gone and dying isn't a Malthusian trap, it's a Tragedy of the Commons (a situation where individuals in a group given free reign to a resource will selfishly abuse that privilege, causing depletion). A whole thing that is equally shitty but does have some actual like.. real-world applications at least at a base level.

So... yeah, I don't believe that Urinetown is trying to promote a Malthusian mindset at all.

.... so why the "Hail Malthus"?? Idfk!

Closest I could give ya is maybe it's an ironic shout-out, mocking the ideas of Malthus by giving an ending greatly resembling a Malthusian trap to a story that basks in an opposing ideology. Like fuckin... Nintendo releasing a Mario game all about going fast and saving the world from an evil scientist and going "wow Sonic's great huh everyone? ;)"

Idk, thinking up analogies is hard.

Sorry for this being so long and rambly - i've been researching abd mulling over and bashing out this post for like.... minimum 3.5 hours by now and it's nearly 4am

I hope it made sense (disclaimer: i'm a moron, take every piece of information here with a grain of salt probably) and uhhh if anyone reading this has any further insights???? Lemme know, this has been Killing Me

Edit:

I do wish people would stop interacting with this bcnffnfndfn

It's Bad and Dumb and Humiliating

also schniggles' comment is Correct

[teachanarchy]

Watch "How Populations Grow and Change: Crash Course Geography #33" on YouTube

[evilelitest2]

So I've been reading up on demographics changes and what that means towards work place policy, gender equality, wage reform and from what i gathered the 20th century was the worst century in modern history. We added nearly 7 billion people in 100 years worldwide and that on top of all the other shit that went down is contributing to the problems we have now. Not to sound like an anti-natalist but if we had a smaller global population of less than a billion things might be easier to deal with.

Honestly the population issue isn't really the main problem we have going forward. Like a lot of people talk about overpopulation like it is a major issue, but it really isn't for 2 reasons

1) Our environmental issues are caused by over consumption, not over population. Like the Nation of the US (Population 330 million) has a far bigger environmental impact than China (1.3 billion). Cutting down on fossile fuel output and increasing the efficency of food yields does more than worrying about the population.

2) The population overall is going to go down, populations boom when preindustrial societies suddenly get access to modern medicines while still having a pre industrial birthrate, but as the children grow up in an industrial societiy and later a post industrial society, they start to have less and less kids. China has the largest population in the world now, but their younger generation is smaller than the one before it and that is smaller than the one before that ect ect. This happened in England way back when, the population boomed and then it decreased.

Be careful actually, a ton of fascists try to use population worry as a recruiting ground (so called Eco Fascists, watch out for them). sadly the MCU has done a great job recruiting for them.

[jojorabbit1999]

Malthus’s theory proving itself right now.

[rarityistheogpunk]

Goodnight to almost everyone except Thomas Malthus and his many, many stans