Thomas Malthus

The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus (February, 1766 – December 23, 1834), who is usually known as Thomas Malthus, although he preferred to be known as "Robert Malthus," was an English demographer and political economist best known for his pessimistic but highly influential views. Although it is popularly assumed that it was these pessimistic views that gave economics the nickname Dismal Science, the phrase was actually coined by the historian Thomas Carlyle in reference to an anti-slavery essay written by John Stuart Mill.

Life

Malthus was born to a prosperous family. His father was a personal friend of the philosopher and sceptic David Hume and an acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The young Malthus was educated at home until his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1784. There he studied many subjects and took prizes in English declamation, Latin and Greek. His principal subject was mathematics. He earned a masters degree in 1791 and was elected a fellow of Jesus College two years later. In 1797, he was ordained and became an Anglican country parson.

Malthus married in 1804; he and his wife had 3 children. In 1805 he became Britain's (and possibly the world's) first professor in political economy at the East India Company College at Haileybury in Hertfordshire. Here, he developed a theory of demand supply mismatches which he called gluts. Considered ridiculous at the time, his theory was later confirmed by the Great Depression and works of John Maynard Keynes.

Malthus was buried at Bath Abbey in England.

Demographic theory

Malthus's views were largely developed in reaction to the optimistic views of his father and his associates, notably Rousseau and William Godwin. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, Malthus predicted population would outrun food supply, leading to a decrease in food per person. This prediction was based on the idea that population if unchecked increases at a geometric rate (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc.) whereas the food supply grows at an arithmetic rate (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.) (See Malthusian catastrophe for more information.) Only misery, moral restraint and vice (which for Malthus included contraception) could check excessive population growth. Malthus favoured "moral restraint" (including late marriage and sexual abstinence) as a check on population growth. However, it is worth noting that Malthus proposed this only for the working and poor classes. Thus, the lower social classes took a great deal of responsibility for societal ills, according to his theory. Essentially what this resulted in was the promotion of legislation which degenerated the conditions of the poor in England.

The Influence of Malthus

The influence of Malthus's theory of population was very great. Previously, high fertility had been considered an economic plus since it increased the number of workers available to the economy. Malthus, however, looked at fertility from a new perspective and convinced most economists that even though high fertility might increase the gross output it tended to reduce output per capita. Many 20th century economists, such as Julian Simon, have criticised such conclusions. They note that despite the predictions of Malthus and the Neo-Malthusians, massive geometric population growth in the 20th century has not resulted in a Malthusian catastrophe, largely due to the influence of technological advances (especially the green revolution).

In the 1830s his writings strongly influenced Whig reforms which overturned Tory paternalism and brought in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Malthus's theory was also a key influence on both of the co-founders of modern evolutionary theory Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin, in his book The Origin of Species, called his theory an application of the doctrines of Malthus in an area without the complicating factor of human intelligence. Wallace considered it "the most interesting coincidence" that both he and Darwin were independently led to the theory of evolution through reading Malthus. Ironically, given Malthus's own opposition to contraception, his work was also a strong influence on Francis Place (1771–1854), whose Neo-Malthusian movement was the first to advocate contraception.

Concerns about Malthus's theory also helped promote the idea of a national population Census in the UK. Government official John Rickman was instrumental in the first Census being conducted in 1801.

Malthus was, of course, wrong in thinking that sexual abstinence could have a significant effect on human population growth. The condom, on the other hand, and especially the birth control pill, have prevented the Malthusian catastrophe throughout much of the world. In many nations population has stabilized, technology has increased the food supply, and even the poor usually have enough to eat. Those parts of the world in which birth control is illegal, unpopular, or considered immoral, however, continue to suffer from growing populations and a shrinking food supply.

Malthus continues to have considerable influence to this day, despite a large number of both liberal and conservative thinkers who still assert that overpopulation is not a problem. Many liberals think that blaming hunger on overpopulation is a case of blaming the victim. Many conservatives think that overpopulation is used as an excuse for contraception, which they consider immoral. One famous book about the population explosion is Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. Erlich predicted, in the late 1960s, that hundreds of millions would die from a coming overpopulation crisis in the seventies, and that by 1980 life expectancy in the US would be only 42 years. Critics of the idea that overpopulation is a problem often cite this book as proof that predictions of a population explosion are wrong. And yet, the world population continues to grow exponentially, and a child dies of starvation every fifteen seconds.

Critics of Malthus

Theoretical and political critiques of Malthus and Malthusian thinking emerged soon after the publication of the first Essay on Population, most notably in the work of the reformist industrialist Robert Owen and the essayist William Hazlitt. The highpoint of opposition to Malthus's ideas in the middle of the nineteenth century was the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who argued that what Malthus saw as the problem of the pressure of population on the means of production was, in fact, that of the pressure of the means of production on population. They thus viewed it in terms of their concept of the labor reserve army. In other words, the seeming excess of population that Malthus attributed to the seemingly innate disposition of the poor to reproduce beyond their means was actually a product of the very dynamic of capitalist economy. For a review of the historical development of Malthusian thinking and its role in the evolution of capitalist society through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century, see Eric B. Ross's The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development (1998).