Malthus and Modern Times

Proceedings of the European Studies Conference, 2019

Malthus' very name is associated with pessimism-only somewhat undeservedly so. Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, appeared toward the end of a tumultuous decade in Great Britain. Where Adam Smith, in his 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, had imagined a commercial society harmoniously regulated by the operations of a self-regulating market generating self-sustaining growth, the vision of the economy which Malthus presented some two decades later was rather more grim, at least for the poor majority. Lacking a theoretical rigor on par with his peers, Malthus' Essay was nevertheless soon recognized as the second foundational work of Political Economy behind Smith's Inquiry. This paper will seek to situate Malthus in his time and will argue that his popularity with ruling landed elites can be explained by their need for a champion in the debates on economic theory and by his round condemnation of the poor as the agents of their own suffering by overpopulating.

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

Ecozon@ 9.1 (2018): 1-10.

Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2012

Aristotle defined science as the cognition of causes. Although some modern historians prefer not to speak about laws of history, no one denies the presence of cause and effect relations in the historical process: denial of the causal determination of past events would have deprived history of the right to call itself a science. The famous sociologist E. Durkheim wrote that his tory can be viewed as a science only to the degree to which it explains the world [1, p. II]. Is modern historical science able to explain the world? In my opinion, at least partially, it does explain the world because it makes it possible to single out the main causes that determine historical events, which are called the driving forces of history or factors of the historical process. Although historians have been unable thus far to explain many details of past events, the role of one of such factors, demographic, seems to have been studied to a sufficient extent at present. The most important stage in the development of demography, the beginning of studies on the problem of overpopulation, is associated with the name of the English scientist of the 18th-19th centuries T. Malthus. The main thesis formulated by Malthus is that "the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence." Population growth leads to food shortages, which provoke a rise in prices and rents and a decrease in real wages and consumption. In turn, a decrease in consumption stops population growth or reduces it down to a level determined by the means of subsistence (or below). Under these condi tions, food becomes available, wages increase, and consumption grows; however, the process then repeats itself, and, as a consequence, population increases and decreases alternately [2]. Malthus' ideas were accepted by the most promi nent economists of "classical economics," such as J. B. Say and J. Mill, while D. Ricardo included these provisions in his theory of wages, a consequence of which was that the overarching theory was called Malthusian-Ricardian [3]. Importantly, both Malthus and Ricardo initially spoke about repeated variations in population, i.e., about demographic cycles. Note that the oscillation of population should be accompa nied by the oscillation of prices, rent, profit, and real wages, which led to the conclusion that the entire eco nomic process was oscillatory by nature (Fig. 1). World War I, famine, and the revolutions of 1917-1922 gave new life to Malthus' ideas. For example, the outstanding economist J.M. Keynes, having analyzed statistical data, showed that, on the eve of the war, Europe had shown signs of overpopulation, and this

Recent Economic Thought, 1988

It has been a long time since the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus has been seen primarily as the discoverer of the principal cause of poverty as well as the nature of its effective cure. Writing in 1892, after the Courts of Law had been forced to deal with neo-Malthusianism, Charles Drysdale of the Malthusian League began his introduction to The Ufe and Writings ofT. R. Malthus as follows: The Lord Chief Justice of England has pronounced that it is an irrefragable truth, and that all parties who have studied such questions know, since the days of the Rev. T. R. Malthus, that the great cause of indigence is the tendency thi.t population has to increase faster than agriculture can furnish food [Drysdale, 1892, p. 1]. Nor do we consider the roster of eminent names who have accepted the truth of the Malthusian theory of population as sufficient grounds for thinking of this theory as Malthus' principal contribution to economics. The great Principle of Population has been examined carefully and accepted as a splendid discovery by the master minds of all countries since the discoverer's death in 1834. To say that it is looked upon as axiomatic by the two Mills, by

Australian Economic Papers, 1992

Research supported by SSHRCC and the University of Manitoba. The author is grateful to all who have made comments on previous drafts, especially Robert Dorfman, Samuel Hollander, Donald Winch and two anonymous referees. 203 204 AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC PAPERS JUNE to grow. Arguments forged in the heat of polemic are tested by criticism. Those which prove robust may eventually count as 'contributions to knowledge'. The economic analysis of the Essay on Population is founded upon the famous 'ratios' of food and population growth. The 'ratios' imply diminishing returns, as Marshall (1920, p.179, n.1) maintained against Cannan (1903, p.144). Diminishing returns without a production function are like a grin without a cat. Given competitive factor pricingwhich Malthus accepteda diminishing-returns production function implies rent. Seventeen years after the First Essay Malthus (1815) was among those who discovered the relation between diminishing returns and rent. Samuelson (1947, pp.296-98) was the first to specify a Malthusian production function. Five years later Stigler (1952, p.190) showed that the ratios implied a logarithmic form of this function.

European Demographic Information Bulletin, 1980

Thomas Robert Malthus was one of the few, demographers who was aware of the fact that the ‘natural desire to have children’ can be manipulated by man’s reason, i.e. that this desire in reality is not natural at all. When formulating his “principle of population”, Malthus, however, denounced the use of man’s reason and applied instead their ‘natural desire for children’ for a particular calculation of population policy, which has not been recognized sufficiently by interpreters of his population theory. Our paper demonstrates that Malthus’ fear that men would not procreate sufficiently was at least as large as his well-known fear of the misery of increasing population and that he, therefore, had to propagate moral restraint, not contraception as check to population.ABSTRACT

Hamilton Historical, 2023

Robert Malthus’ 1803 Essay perpetuated multiple political myths about indigenous peoples, not because Malthus had malicious intent to speak about these people negatively, but because his views aligned comfortably with his greater society in metropolitan England. Whether the myth at hand was indigenous indolence, infanticide, or cannibalism, Mathus unconsciously supported them in his aim to create a universal human history where population was the solely important variable, similar to how his contemporary stadial theorists wrote their histories. Because his sources on indigenous peoples were popular, accepted, and respected in his society, Malthus’ discourse on indigenous peoples did not divert from his society’s norm. While Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population is no longer a reputable work of demography, it instead offers insight into how English society around the turn of the nineteenth-century viewed far-off people who lived in distant worlds.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1987

Journal of Political Ecology, 2021