Malthusianism

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Thomas Robert Malthus, detail of an engraving after a portrait by J. Linnell, 1833.

Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Company Ltd.

Malthusianism, economic theory advanced by the English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), according to which population growth will always tend to outpace the supply of food. First presented by Malthus in his anonymous pamphlet An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798), Malthusianism represents a form of economic pessimism that challenges utopian notions of the perfectibility of human societies, as exemplified in the work of the English anarchist philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836). In Malthus’s view, a human society free of coercive restraints is an impossible ideal, because the threat of population growth will always be present. Increases in population, if unchecked, will take place in a geometric progression, while the means of subsistence will increase in only an arithmetic progression. A society’s population, therefore, will always expand to the limit of subsistence.

(Read Thomas Malthus’s 1824 Britannica essay on population.)

The argument presented in the first edition of Malthus’s work on population was essentially abstract and analytic. After further reading and travels in Europe, Malthus produced a subsequent edition (1803), expanding the pamphlet of 1798 into a longer book and adding much factual material and illustration to his thesis. He collected information on one country that had plentiful land (the United States) and estimated that its population was doubling in less than 25 years. He attributed the far lower rates of European population growth to “preventive checks,” giving special emphasis to the characteristic late-marriage pattern of western Europe, which he called “moral restraint.” Other preventive checks to which he alluded included birth control, abortion, adultery, and homosexuality—all of which, as an Anglican minister, he considered immoral.

According to Malthus, societies that ignored the imperative for moral restraint—delayed marriage and celibacy for adults until they were economically able to support their children—would suffer the deplorable “positive checks” of war, famine, and epidemic, the avoidance of which should be every society’s goal. From this humane concern about the sufferings from positive checks arose Malthus’s admonition that poor laws (i.e., legal measures that provided relief to the poor) and charity must not cause their beneficiaries to relax their moral restraint or increase their fertility, lest such humanitarian gestures become perversely counterproductive.

Malthusianism exerted an important influence upon the ideas of classical and neoclassical economists, demographers, and evolutionary biologists, led by Charles Darwin. Moreover, the evidence and analyses produced by Malthus dominated scientific discussion of population during his lifetime. Then again, a fundamental criticism of Malthus was his failure to appreciate the ongoing British agricultural revolution, which eventually caused food production to meet or exceed population growth and made prosperity possible for a larger number of people. Malthus also failed to anticipate the widespread use of contraceptives, which brought about a decline in the fertility rate.