Some ideas are so tempting that not even facts stand in their way. That’s why the truly terrible ideas of Thomas Malthus continue to haunt our politics and policies. They’re behind a new book, “The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century” and its easily disprovable premises.

Reason Magazine’s Ronald Bailey has an insightful review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, and he supports something we’ve long argued – that famine, in this day and age, is a purely political event. Hunger exists, but humanity’s ability to grow and distribute food is so far advanced that it shouldn’t.

“In the late 18th century, Robert Thomas Malthus argued that human population growth would always outstrip food production, thus perpetually condemning some portion of humanity to famine,” Bailey writes. “His disciples today are now pointing to recent steep increases in food prices as harbingers of a new age of scarcity.”

It’s true that food prices have been increasing.

“In real terms, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s price index crested in 2011 at 60 percent above its 2005 price levels,” Bailey writes. “Farmers around the world predictably reacted to the higher prices by growing more food. World cereal production rose from 2,348 million tons in 2011 to 2,540 million tons today. Since the 2011 peak, food prices have been drifting downward, although they remain 18 percent higher than they were a decade or so ago.”

There are exceptions – but they are exceptions resulting from political doctrines and decisions, rather than our ability to feed people. North Korea is on the brink of famine. Venezuela is on the verge of food riots as its store shelves remain empty.

Even when drought occurs, our system of food assistance is so well developed that widespread humanitarian disaster only occurs where the kleptocrats are stealing the food to sell to their own people (as in much of sub-Saharan Africa).

But there are bothersome facts, easily ignored by the true believers.

“Now comes the neo-Malthusian journalist David Rieff,” Bailey reports. “He argues in ‘The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century’ that ‘if significant changes to the global food system are not made, a crisis of absolute global food supply could occur sometime between 2030 and 2050.'”

Let’s look at the history of such claims. Remember Paul Ehrlich and his book “The Population Bomb?”

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote in his influential 1968 book. “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

There would be 4 billion deaths from hunger in the 1970s, he prophesied – including 65 million Americans.

It didn’t happen then, and it’s not happening now.

In fact, Mr. Bailey’s own book, “The End of Doom,” shows that scientific advances will allow us to feed 9 to 10 billion people by mid-century, using less farmland.

Will the Malthusians give up then?