Thomas Malthus

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

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Thomas Malthuswas an English economist and demographer who is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. This thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism.

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

Malthus was born into a prosperous family. His father, a friend of the Scottish philosopher and skeptic David Hume, was deeply influenced by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book Émile (1762) may have been the source of the elder Malthus’s liberal ideas about educating his son. The young Malthus was educated largely at home until his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784. There he studied a wide range of subjects and took prizes in Latin and Greek, graduating in 1788. He earned his master of arts degree in 1791, was elected a fellow of Jesus College in 1793, and took holy orders in 1797. His unpublished pamphlet “The Crisis,” written in 1796, supported the newly proposed Poor Laws, which recommended establishing workhouses for the impoverished. This view ran somewhat counter to the views on poverty and population that Malthus published two years later.

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Thomas Malthus, 1806.

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In 1804 Malthus married Harriet Eckersall, and in 1805 he became a professor of history and political economy at the East India Company’s college at Haileybury, Hertfordshire. It was the first time in Great Britain that the words political economy had been used to designate an academic office. Malthus lived quietly at Haileybury for the remainder of his life, except for a visit to Ireland in 1817 and a trip to the Continent in 1825. In 1811 he met and became close friends with the English economist David Ricardo.

In 1819 Malthus was elected a fellow of the Royal Society; in 1821 he joined the Political Economy Club, whose members included Ricardo and the Scottish economist James Mill; and in 1824 he was elected one of the 10 royal associates of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1833 he was elected to the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and to the Royal Academy of Berlin. Malthus was one of the cofounders, in 1834, of the Statistical Society of London.

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Title page of an 1806 edition of Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population.

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In 1798 Malthus published anonymously the first edition of 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. The work received wide notice. Briefly, crudely, yet strikingly, Malthus argued that infinite human hopes for social happiness must be vain, for population will always tend to outrun the growth of production. The increase of population will take place, if unchecked, in a geometric progression, while the means of subsistence will increase in only an arithmetic progression. Population will always expand to the limit of subsistence. Only “vice” (including “the commission of war”), “misery” (including famine or want of food and ill health), and “moral restraint” (i.e., abstinence) could check this excessive growth.

Malthus’s thought reflects a reaction, amiably conducted, to his father’s views and to the doctrines of the French Revolution and its supporters, such as the English radical philosopher William Godwin. Widely read for such works as Political Justice (1793), Godwin took for granted the perfectibility of humankind and looked to a millennium in which rational people would live prosperously and harmoniously without laws and institutions. Unlike Godwin (or, earlier, Rousseau), who viewed human affairs from a theoretical standpoint, Malthus was essentially an empiricist and took as his starting point the harsh realities of his time. His reaction developed in the tradition of British economics, which would today be considered sociological (see economic sociology).

Malthus was an economic pessimist, viewing poverty as humanity’s inescapable lot. The argument in the first edition of his work on population is essentially abstract and analytic. After further reading and travels in Europe, Malthus produced a subsequent edition (1803), expanding the long pamphlet of 1798 into a longer book and adding much factual material and illustration to his thesis. At no point, even up to the final and massive sixth edition of 1826, did he ever adequately set out his premises or examine their logical status. Nor did he handle his factual and statistical materials with much critical or statistical rigour, even though statisticians in Europe and Great Britain had developed increasingly sophisticated techniques during Malthus’s lifetime. The 20th-century American sociologist and demographer Kingsley Davis remarked that, while Malthus’s theories were based on a strong empirical foundation, they tended to be weakest in their empiricism and strongest in their theoretical formulation. For better or worse, the Malthusian theory of population was, nevertheless, incorporated into theoretical systems of economics. It acted as a brake on economic optimism, helped to justify a theory of wages based on the wage earner’s minimum cost of subsistence, and discouraged traditional forms of charity.

The Malthusian theory of population made a strong and immediate impact on British social policy. It had been believed that fertility itself added to national wealth; the Poor Laws perhaps encouraged large families with their doles. If they had “never existed,” wrote Malthus, “though there might have been a few more instances of severe distress, the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present.” These laws limited the mobility of labour, he said, and encouraged fecundity and should be abolished. For the most unfortunate it might be reasonable to establish workhouses—not “comfortable asylums” but places in which “fare should be hard” and “severe distress…find some alleviation.”

He continued publishing a variety of pamphlets and tracts on economics. In an approach less rigorous than Ricardo’s, Malthus discussed the problem of price determination in terms of an institutionally determined “effective demand,” a phrase that he invented. In his summary Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their Practical Application (1820), Malthus went so far as to propose public works and private luxury investment as possible solutions for economic distress through their ability to increase demand and prosperity. He criticized those who valued thrift as a virtue knowing no limit; to the contrary, he argued that “the principles of saving, pushed to excess, would destroy the motive to production.” To maximize wealth, a nation had to balance “the power to produce and the will to consume.” In fact, Malthus, as an economist concerned with what he called the problem of “gluts” (or, as they would be called today, the problems of economic recession or depression), can be said to have anticipated the economic discoveries made by the English economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s.

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.

W. Otter, “Memoir,” preface to the 2nd ed. of the Principles of Political Economy (1836), is still a basis for any biography. James Bonar, Malthus and His Work (1885, reprinted and expanded 1924, reprinted 1966), is the major work of 19th-century scholarship, illuminated by very wide learning. John Maynard Keynes, “Robert Malthus: The First of the Cambridge Economists,” in Essays in Biography (new ed., 1951, reissued 1963), is charming and of great importance in the rehabilitation of Malthus as a major economic theorist. D.V. Glass (ed.), Introduction to Malthus (1953, reissued 1959), contains “A Summary View of the Principle of Population,” an important letter on the Poor Laws by Malthus, a very full bibliography on the Malthusian question in the 19th century, and three useful essays discussing Malthus in historical perspective. Anthony Flew, “The Structure of Malthus’ Population Theory,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 35:1–20 (1957), and the same author’s edited version of Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1970, reissued 1985), were contributed by a critic and philosopher who has brought both logical rigour and sympathy to the clarification of Malthus’s analysis. Philip Morris Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan (eds.), The Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal (1959, reissued 1964), though partly out of date, is a most useful single introduction to modern population studies and the issues raised by Malthus. Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy (1951, reprinted 1978); and D.E.C. Eversley, Social Theories of Fertility and the Malthusian Debate (1959, reprinted 1975), are two admirable and scholarly discussions of all the issues surrounding the Malthusian population theory. Also useful is Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996, reissued 1998).