Thomas Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus

Name: Thomas Robert Malthus

Birth: February 13, 1766 (Surrey, England)
Death: December 23, 1834 (aged 68) (Bath, England)
Nationality: British
Field: demography, macroeconomics, evolutionary economics
Influences: Adam Smith, David Ricardo
William Godwin, Marquis de Condorcet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David
Opposed:
Ricardo
Charles Darwin, Francis Place, Garrett Hardin, John Maynard Keynes,
Influenced:
Pierre Francois Verhulst, Alfred Russel Wallace
Contributions: Malthusian growth model

The English demographer and political economist Thomas Robert Malthus, FRS (13 February
1766 – 23 December 1834),[1] has become arguably best-known for his influential views on
population growth. He famously emphasised the potential for populations to rise steeply.

Modern commentators generally refer to him as Thomas Malthus, but during his lifetime he
went by his middle name, Robert.

Life

Thomas Robert Malthus, the second son of eight children (six of them girls) born to Daniel and
Henrietta Malthus near Guildford, Surrey, came into a prosperous family, with his father a
personal friend of the philosopher David Hume and an acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The young Malthus restudied many subjects and took prizes in English declamation, Latin and
Greek, but he majored in mathematics. He earned a masters degree in 1791 and won election as a
fellow of Jesus College two years later. In 1797, he took orders and became an Anglican country
parson.

Malthus married his first-cousin once removed, Harriet Eckersall, on April 12, 1804, and had
three children: Henry, Emily and Lucy. In 1805 he became Britain's first professor in political
economy at the East India Company College (now known as Haileybury) at Hertford Heath, near
Hertford in Hertfordshire. His students affectionately referred to him as "Pop" or "Population"
Malthus. (One student in particular, Graham Fischer, wrote a responsive essay concerning
population growth and criticizing many of the ideas proposed by Thomas Malthus. Dr. Tom
Klein, a future professor of his, later publicized Fischer's essay.) In 1818 Malthus became a
Fellow of the Royal Society.

Malthus refused to have his portrait painted until 1833 because of embarrassment over a cleft lip.
After surgical correction, Malthus then became considered "handsome." Malthus also had a cleft
palate (inside his mouth) that affected his speech. These cleft-releived his education at home in
Bramcote, Nottinghamshire and at the Disseated birth defects occurred relatively commonly in
his family.

Malthus lies buried at Bath Abbey in England.

[edit] The Principle of Population

Between 1798 and 1826 Malthus published six editions of his famous treatise, An Essay on the
Principle of Population, updating each edition to incorporate new material, to address criticism,
and to convey changes in his own perspective on the subject. He wrote the original text in
reaction to the optimism of his father and his father's associates, (notably Rousseau) regarding
the future improvement of society. Malthus also constructed his case as a specific response to
writings of William Godwin (1756-1836) and of the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794).

Malthus regarded ideals of future improvement in the lot of humanity with skepticism,
considering that throughout history a segment of every human population seemed relegated to
poverty. He explained this phenomenon by pointing out that population growth generally
preceded expansion of the population's resources, in particular the primary resource of food:

"...in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment is so
strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population. This constant effort as
constantly tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great
permanent amelioration of their condition."
"The way in which, these effects are produced seems to be this. We will suppose the means of
subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort
towards population... increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are
increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions must now be divided
among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse,
and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of labourers also being above the
proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease, while the
price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder
to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to
marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand. In the
mean time the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased
industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land, to turn up
fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage, till ultimately
the means of subsistence become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from
which we set out. The situation of the labourer being then again tolerably comfortable, the
restraints to population are in some degree loosened, and the same retrograde and progressive
movements with respect to happiness are repeated."

Malthus also saw that societies through history had experienced at one time or another
epidemics, famines, or wars: events that masked the fundamental problem of populations
overstretching their resource limitations:

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man,
that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are
active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of
destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of
extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and
sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic
inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food
of the world."

To give a mathematical perspective to his observations, Malthus proposed the idea that
population, if unchecked, increases at a geometric rate (i.e. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), whereas the food-
supply grows at an arithmetic rate (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc.).

In the first edition of the Essay, Malthus suggested that only natural causes (such as accidents
and old age), misery (war, pestilence, plague, and above all famine) [Book I, Ch. 2], and vice
(which for Malthus included infanticide, murder, contraception and homosexuality)[citation needed]
could check excessive population-growth. In the second and subsequent editions, Malthus raised
the possibility of moral restraint (marrying late or not at all, coupled with sexual abstinence prior
to, and outside of, marriage) as a check on the growth of population. (Others [attribution needed]
criticised him, however, for implying that restraint applied only to the working and poor classes.)
He also proposed the gradual abolition of poor laws that gave no incentive to birth control,
supporting instead private charity.

Malthus took offence at criticism that he lacked a caring attitude towards the situation of the
poor. He wrote in an addition to the 1817 edition:

"I have written a chapter expressly on the practical direction of our charity; and in detached
passages elsewhere have paid a just tribute to the exalted virtue of benevolence. To those who
have read these parts of my work, and have attended to the general tone and spirit of the whole, I
willingly appeal, if they are but tolerably candid, against these charges ... which intimate that I
would root out the virtues of charity and benevolence without regard to the exaltation which they
bestow on the moral dignity of our nature.... (p. 607)[2]

Some[attribution needed] have argued that Malthus did not fully recognise the human capacity to
increase food supply. On this subject Malthus wrote: "The main peculiarity which distinguishes
man from other animals, is the means of his support, is the power which he possesses of very
greatly increasing these means."[citation needed]

[edit] Malthus's expectations of growth in population

Since 1800, global food production has generally kept pace with population growth, but
increasing numbers of humans call for new ways "to increase yields while preserving natural
habitats and biodiversity".[3]

Elwell states that Malthus made no specific prediction regarding the future; and that what some
interpret as prediction merely constituted Malthus's illustration of the power of geometric (or
exponential) population growth compared to the arithmetic growth of food-production. [4] Rather
than predicting the future, the Essay offers an evolutionary social theory. Eight major points
regarding evolution appear in the 1798 Essay:[5]

1. subsistence severely limits population-level

2. when the means of subsistence increases, population increases

3. population-pressures stimulate increases in productivity

4. increases in productivity stimulate further population-growth

 5. since this productivity can not keep up with the potential of population growth for long,
population requires strong checks to keep it in line with carrying-capacity

6. individual cost/benefit decisions regarding sex, work, and children determine the
expansion or contraction of population and production

7. checks will come into operation as population exceeds subsistence-level

8. the nature of these checks will have significant effect on the rest of the sociocultural
system — Malthus points specifically to misery, vice, and poverty

Malthusian theory has had great influence on evolutionary theory, both in biology (as
acknowledged by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace) and in the social sciences (compare
Herbert Spencer). Malthus's population theory has also profoundly affected the modern-day
ecological-evolutionary social theory of Gerhard Lenski and Marvin Harris. He can thus rank as
a key contributing element of the canon of socioeconomic theory.

[edit] Influence

Malthus's theory of population has proven very influential. In 1978 Michael H. Hart published a
book called The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, which placed
Malthus at number 80 in this worldwide ranking.

At Haileybury, Malthus developed a theory of demand-supply mismatches which he called gluts.

Considered ridiculous at the time, his theory foreshadowed later theories about the Great
Depression, and the works of admirer and economist John Maynard Keynes.

Before Malthus, commentators had regarded high fertility as an economic advantage, 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. A number of other notable
economists, such as David Ricardo (whom Malthus knew personally) and Alfred Marshall
admired Malthus and/or came under his influence.

A distinguished early convert to Malthusianism, British Prime Minister William Pitt The
Younger (in office: 1783 - 1801 and 1804 - 1806), after reading the work of Malthus promptly
withdrew a bill he had introduced that called for the extension of Poor Relief. Pitt also launched
the first modern census in the UK (conducted in 1801). In the 1830s Malthus's writings strongly
influenced Whig reforms which overturned Tory paternalism and brought in the Poor Law
Amendment Act of 1834.
Concerns about Malthus's theory helped promote the idea of a national population census in the
UK. Government official John Rickman became instrumental in the carrying out of the first
modern British census in 1801.

Malthus took pride in the fact that some of the earliest converts to his population theory included
the leading creationist and natural theologian, Archdeacon William Paley, whose Natural
Theology first appeared in 1802. Both men regarded Malthus's Principle of Population as
additional proof of the existence of a deity.

Ironically, given Malthus's own opposition to contraception, his work exercised a strong
influence on Francis Place (1771–1854), whose Neo-Malthusian movement became the first to
advocate contraception. Place published his Illustrations and Proofs of the Principles of
Population in 1822.

Malthus's idea of man's "struggle for existence" had an influence on Charles Darwin and the
theory of evolution. Other scientists related this idea to plants and animals, which helped to
define a piece of the evolutionary puzzle. This struggle for existence of all creatures provides the
catalyst by which natural selection produces the "survival of the fittest", a phrase coined by
Herbert Spencer.[6] 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.
Darwin, a life-long admirer of Malthus, referred to Malthus as "that great philosopher"[7] and
wrote in his notebook that "Malthus on Man should be studied". Wallace called Malthus's essay
"...the most important book I read..." and considered it "the most interesting coincidence" that
reading Malthus led both himself and Darwin, independently, towards the idea of evolution.

Thanks to Malthus, Darwin recognized the significance of competition between populations of

the same species, as well as the importance of competition between species. Malthusian thinking
on population also explained how an incipient species could become a full-blown species in a
very short time-frame. Robert M. Young, Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies
at Sheffield University in England, perhaps best highlighted the significance of Malthus's
influence on Darwin in Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture in 1965.

The first Director-General of UNESCO, evolutionist and humanist Julian Huxley, wrote of "The
Crowded World" in his Evolutionary Humanism (1964), calling for a "World Population Policy".
Huxley openly criticised Communist and Roman Catholic attitudes to birth control , population
control and overpopulation. Today world organizations such as the United Nations Population
Fund acknowledge that the debate over how many people the Earth can support effectively
started with Malthus.
Julian Huxley's brother, the author Aldous Huxley, in his book Brave New World, refers to
Malthusian theories on population. The inhabitants of his novel use a popular form of birth
control known as the "Malthusian Belt". The females in the novel, including the female
protagonist Lenina Crowne, mention it frequently.

Malthus continues to have considerable influence to this day. Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The
Population Bomb(1968), furnishes a recent example of this. (Ehrlich predicted, in the late 1960s,
that hundreds of millions would die from a coming overpopulation-crisis in the 1970s, and that
by 1980 inhabitants of the United States would have a life-expectancy of only 42 years.) Other
examples of applied Malthusianism include the 1972 book The Limits to Growth published by
the Club of Rome, and the Global 2000 report to the then President of the United States of
America Jimmy Carter. Science-fiction author Isaac Asimov issued many appeals for population-
control reflecting the perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R.
Ehrlich.

More recently, a school of "neo-Malthusian" scholars has begun to link population and
economics to a third variable, political change and political violence, and to show how the
variables interact. In the early 1980s, James Goldstone linked population variables to the English
Revolution and David Lempert devised a model of demographics, economics, and political
change in the multi-ethnic country of Mauritius. Goldstone has since modeled other revolutions
by looking at demographics and economics and Lempert has explained Stalin's purges and the
Russian Revolution of 1917 in terms of demographic factors that drive political economy. Ted
Robert Gurr has also modeled political violence, such as in the Palestinian territories and in
Rwanda/Congo (two of the world's regions of most rapidly-growing population) using similar
variables in several comparative cases. These approaches compete with explanations of events as
a result of political ideology and suggest that political ideology as a construct follows
demographic forces.

Many regard Malthus as the founder of modern demography. Malthus proposed his Principle of
Population as a universal natural law for all species, not just humans. Instead, today,
commentators widely regard his theory as only an approximate natural law of population
dynamics for all species: this because scientists have proven that nothing can sustain exponential
growth at a constant rate indefinitely.

Nonetheless, Malthus continues to openly inspire and influence futuristic visions, such as those
of K Eric Drexler relating to space advocacy and molecular nanotechnology. As Drexler put it in
Engines of Creation (1986): "In a sense, opening space will burst our limits to growth, since we
know of no end to the universe. Nevertheless, Malthus was essentially right."
Malthus has also inspired retired physics professor, Albert Bartlett, to lecture over 1,500 times
on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy", promoting sustainable living and explaining the
mathematics of overpopulation.

The Malthusian growth model now bears Malthus's name. The logistic function of Pierre
Francois Verhulst (1804-1849) results in the well-known S-curve. Verhulst developed the
logistic growth model favored by so many critics of the Malthusian growth model in 1838 only
after reading Malthus's essay.

Some commentators have disputed the efficacy of Malthus's arithmetic model of food-supply,
noting that food supply has kept pace with population for the past two centuries.

Malthus's position as professor at the British East India Company training college, which he held
until his death in 1834, gave his theories considerable influence over Britain's administration of
India through most of the 19th century, continuing even under the Raj after the Company's
dissolution in 1858. In a major result of this influence, the official response to India's periodic
famines (which had occurred every decade or two for centuries) became one of not entirely
benign neglect: the authorities regarded the famines as necessary to keep the "excess" population
in check. In some cases administrators even banned private efforts to transport food into famine-
stricken areas. However, this "Malthusian" policy did not take account of the enormous
economic damage done by such famines through loss of human capital, collapse of credit
structures and financial institutions, and the destruction of physical capital (especially in the form
of livestock), social infrastructure and commercial relationships. As a (presumably unintended)
consequence, production often did not recover to pre-famine levels in the affected areas for a
decade or more after each disaster, well after the replacement of the lost population.

Malthusian theory also influenced British policies in Ireland during the 1840s: the government
neglected relief-measures during the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849), seeing mass starvation as
a natural and inevitable consequence of the island's supposed over-population.

Although many people assume[citation needed] that Malthus's pessimistic views gave economics the
nickname "the Dismal Science", the historian Thomas Carlyle actually coined the phrase in 1849
in reference to laissez-faire economic theories in general.
Criticism

Contemporaries of Malthus
William Godwin responded to Malthus's criticisms of his own arguments with On Population
(1820).

Other 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, of the essayist William Hazlitt[8] and of the economists John Stuart
Mill and Nassau William Senior,[9] and moralist William Cobbett. Note also True Law of
Population (1845) by politician Thomas Doubleday, an adherent of Cobbett's views.

Marxist
Much opposition to Malthus's ideas came in the middle of the nineteenth century with the
writings of Karl Marx (Capital, 1867) and Friedrich Engels (Outlines of a Critique of Political
Economy, 1844), who argued that what Malthus saw as the problem of the pressure of population
on the means of production actually represented the pressure of the means of production on
population. They thus viewed it in terms of their concept of the reserve army of labour. In other
words, the seeming excess of population that Malthus attributed to the seemingly innate
disposition of the poor to reproduce beyond their means actually emerged as a product of the
very dynamic of capitalist economy.

Engels called Malthus's hypothesis "...the crudest, most barbarous theory that ever existed, a
system of despair which struck down all those beautiful phrases about love thy neighbour and
world citizenship."

Vladimir I. Lenin sharply criticized Malthusian theory and its neo-Malthusian version,[10] calling
it a "reactionary doctrine" and "an attempt on the part of bourgeois ideologists to exonerate
capitalism and to prove the inevitability of privation and misery for the working class under any
social system".

Biological

Biologist Ronald Fisher expressed criticism of the use of Malthus's theory as a basis for the
theory of natural selection.[11] John Maynard Smith criticised Malthus's hypothesis, doubting that
famine functioned as the great leveler that Malthus saw it as.

Cornucopian
Some 19th-century economists believed that improvements in the division and specialization of
labor, increased capital investment, and other factors had rendered some of Malthus's warnings
implausible. In the absence of any improvement in technology or increase of capital equipment,
an increased supply of labor may have a synergistic effect on productivity that overcomes the
law of diminishing returns. As American land-economist Henry George observed with
characteristic piquancy in dismissing Malthus: "Both the jay hawk and the man eat chickens; but
the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens."

Many 20th-century economists, such as Julian Lincoln Simon, have also criticised Malthus's
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 and the expansion of the market economy,
division of labor, and stock of capital goods. The skeptical environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg,
echoes such arguments. Some[citation needed], such as British physicist John Maddox, thus regard
Malthus as a failed prophet of doom.[citation needed]

Anthropological
In The Malthus Factor: Population, Poverty, and Politics in Capitalist Development,
anthropologist Eric Ross depicts Malthus's work as a rationalization of the social inequities
produced by the Industrial Revolution, anti-immigration movements, the eugenics movement and
the various international development movements.

Economic
Malthus argued that as wages increase within an economy, the birth-rate increases while the
death-rate decreases. He reasoned that high incomes allowed people to have sufficient means to
raise their children, thus resulting in greater desire to have more children which increases the
population. In addition, high incomes also allowed people to afford proper medication to fight
off potentially harmful diseases, thus decreasing the death-rate. As a result, wage-increases
caused population to grow as the birth-rate increases and the death-rate decreases. He further
argued that as the supply of labor increases with the increased population-growth at a constant
labor demand, the wages earned would decrease eventually to subsistence, where the birth-rate
equals the death-rate, resulting in no growth in population. However, the world generally has
experienced quite a different result than the one Malthus predicted. During the late 19th and
early 20th century, the population (and wages) increased as the industrial revolution gathered
pace. However, birth rates in highly-developed nations have dropped to bare replacement-levels,
such that many Western nations like the US and Canada only grow due to immigration, and
Japan faces a declining population when the post-World War II generation dies off.
Malthus assumed a constant labor-demand in his assessment of England, and in doing so he
ignored the effects of industrialization. As the world became more industrialized, the level of
technology and production grew, causing an increase in labor-demand. Thus, even though labor-
supply increased, so did the demand for labor. In fact, the labor-demand arguably increased more
than the supply, as measured by the historically observed increase in real wages globally with
population growth.