Thomas Malthus

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Thomas Robert Malthus
Born
February, 1766
Surrey, England

The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, FRS (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.

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Life

Malthus was born to a prosperous family. His father Daniel was a personal friend of the philosopher and skeptic 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. His students affectionately referred to him as "Pop", or "Population" Malthus. In 1818, he was selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Malthus refused to have his portrait done until 1833 because of embarrassment over a hare lip. This was then corrected by surgery, and Malthus was considered very handsome. Malthus also had a cleft palate (inside his mouth) that affected his speech. These cleft related birth defects were relatively common in his family.

Malthus was buried at Bath Abbey in England.

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Principle of population

Malthus's views were largely developed in reaction to the optimistic views of his father and his associates, notably Rousseau and William Godwin. Malthus's essay was also in response to the views of the Marquis de Condorcet. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, Malthus made the famous prediction that population would outrun food supply, leading to a decrease in food per person. (Case & Fair, 1999: 790).

"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."

This Principle of Population 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, 8, etc.).

Only natural causes (eg. accidents and old age), misery (war, pestilence, and above all famine), moral restraint and vice (which for Malthus included infanticide, murder, contraception and homosexuality) could check excessive population growth. See Malthusian catastrophe for more information.

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 some claim degenerated the conditions of the poor in England, but may have discouraged increases in poverty.

Malthus himself noted that many people misrepresented his theory, and took pains to point out that he did not just predict future catastrophe. He argued "...this constantly subsisting cause of periodical misery has existed ever since we have had any histories of mankind, does exist at present, and will for ever continue to exist, unless some decided change takes place in the physical constitution of our nature."

Thus, Malthus regarded his Principle of Population as an explanation of the past and the present situation of humanity, as well as a prediction of our future.

Additionally, many have argued that Malthus did not recognise the human capacity to increase our 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."

However, see criticism below.

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Malthus’ Evolutionary System

Eight major points regarding evolution found in the 1798 Essay:

  • Population level is severely limited by subsistence
  • When the means of subsistence increases, population increases
  • Population pressures stimulate increases in productivity
  • Increases in productivity stimulates further population growth
  • Since this productivity can never keep up with the potential of population growth for long, there must be strong checks on population to keep it in line with carrying capacity.
  • It is through individual cost/benefit decisions regarding sex, work, and children that population and production are expanded or contracted.
  • Positive checks will come into operation as population exceeds subsistence level.
  • The nature of these checks will have significant effect on the rest of the sociocultural system--Malthus points to misery, vice, and poverty. (Frank W. Elwell)
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The influence of Malthus

The influence of Malthus's theory of population was very great. Michael H. Hart published a book called The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History in 1978 which placed Malthus at number 80 in this worldwide ranking. Ironically, Malthus did not make the top 100 Greatest Britons (nor did he make the 100 Worst Britons).

At Haileybury Malthus developed a theory of demand supply mismatches which he called gluts. Considered ridiculous at the time, his theory was a precursor to later theories about the Great Depression, and to the works of admirer and economist John Maynard Keynes.

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. Malthus has been widely admired by, and has influenced, a number of other notable economists such as David Ricardo (whom Malthus knew personally) and Alfred Marshall.

A distinguished early convert was British Prime Minister, William Pitt The Younger. In the 1830s Malthus' writings strongly influenced Whig reforms which overturned Tory paternalism and brought in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834..

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 modern Census being conducted in 1801.

Malthus was proud to include amongst the earliest converts to his population theory the leading creationist and natural theologian,, Archdeacon William Paley whose Natural Theology was first published in 1802. Both men regarded Malthus' Principle of Population as additional proof of the existence of a deity.

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

Malthus’ idea of man’s “Struggle for existence” had decisive 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 is the catalyst by which natural selection produces the “survival of the fittest”, a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer (Spiegel 282) 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 philospher" (Letter to J.D. Hooker 5th June, 1860) and wrote in his notebook that "Malthus on Man should be studied". Wallace called Malthus' essay "...the most important book I read..." and considered it "the most interesting coincidence" that both he and Darwin were independently led to the theory of evolution through reading Malthus.

Thanks to Malthus, Darwin recognised the significance of intraspecies competition between populations of the same species (eg. the lamb and the lamb), not just interspecies competition between species (eg. the lion and the lamb). Malthusian population thinking also explained how an incipient species could become a blown species in a very short timeframe.

The significance of Malthus' influence on Darwin was perhaps best highlighted by Robert M. Young (Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture, 1965), Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies at Sheffield University, England.

Founder of UNESCO, evolutionist and Humanist, Julian Huxley wrote of "The Crowded World" in his Evolutionary Humanism (1964), calling for a World Population Policy. Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control , population control and overpopulation. Today world organisations such as the United Nations Population Fund acknowledge that the debate over how many people the Earth can support effectively started with Malthus.

Karl Marx' social determinism has its roots in Malthus’ theory as well. Marx however rejected Darwin’s biological determinism and instead embraced social determinism (in other words one’s decisions are made as a direct reaction to one’s circumstances). He saw social ills as caused by unjust or faulty institutions and social arrangements in large part caused by capitalism.

As result of Malthus’ ideas almost all ninetenth-century economists had to acknowledge and come to a decision on his views. He forced economists to take sides and even form classifications new.

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

Malthus is widely regarded as the founder of modern demography. Malthus had proposed his Principle of Population as a universal natural law for all species, not just humans. Instead, today, his theory is widely regarded as only an approximate natural law of population dynamics for all species. This is because it can be proven that nothing can sustain exponential growth at a constant rate indefinitely.

Nonetheless, Malthus continues to openly inspire and influence even futuristic visions, such as those of K Eric Drexler relating to space advocacy and molecular nanotechnology. As Drexler put it in Engines of Creation: "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 a 1,500 times on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy", which promotes sustainable living and explains the mathematics of overpopulation.

The Malthusian growth model now bears Malthus' name. The logistic function of Pierre Francois Verhulst results in the well known S-curve. Yet the logistic growth model favoured by so many critics of the Malthusian growth model was created by Verhulst in 1838 only after reading Malthus' essay.

Malthus' arithmetic model of food supply is almost universally rejected as it can be clearly demonstrated that food supply has kept pace with population for the past two centuries (see Criticisms below).

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Criticisms of Malthus

William Godwin responded to Malthus' 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 , the essayist William Hazlitt (Malthus And The Liberties Of The Poor, 1807) and economists John Stuart Mill and Nassau William Senior (Two Lectures on Population , 1829), and moralist William Cobbett. Also of note wasTrue Law of Population (1845) by politician Thomas Doubleday, an adherent of Cobbett's views.

The highpoint of opposition to Malthus' 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 was actually 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.

Engels called Malthus' theory "...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."

Despite the Russian famine of 1921, and the Soviet-made 1932-1933 famine of Holodomor, Communists in general continued to oppose Malthus' theory. The official Soviet spokesman at the 1954 United Nations conference on population in Rome, T.V. Ryabushkin claimed "...In a socialist country...the problem of excessive population no longer arises...the Malthusian theory is completely wrong..."

The Chinese Communist Party thus proved overconfident in its Great Leap Forward and their ability to feed China's population, resulting in the Three Years of Natural Disasters (1959-1961). Later China then instituted the misnamed one child policy, in a reversal of its former views on population control.

Evolutionists John Maynard Smith and Ronald Fisher were both critical of Malthus' theory, though it was Fisher who referred to the growth rate r (used in equations such as the logistic function) as the Malthusian parameter. Fisher referred to "...a relic of creationist philosophy..." in observing the fecundity of nature and deducing (as Darwin did) that this therefore drove natural selection. Smith doubted that famine was the great leveller that Malthus insisted it was.

Ecologist Professor Garrett Hardin was critical of Malthus' hardness of heart in what he termed The Feast of Malthus in the magazine Social Contract. The offending passage of Malthus' essay appeared in the 2nd edition only. Hardin's last book The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia (1999), was a warning about the threat of overpopulation to the Earth's sustainable economic future.

Many 20th century economists, such as Julian Lincoln Simon, have criticised Malthus' 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 (see below) and the expansion of the market economy, division of labor, and stock of capital goods. Such arguments are echoed by skeptical environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg. Malthus is thus regarded by some such as British physicist John Maddox as little more than a failed prophet of doom.

To date, the most sustained and trenchant critique of Malthusian doctrine and its influence on policy is from anthropologist Eric Ross. In The Malthus Factor: Population, Poverty, and Politics in Capitalist Development, Ross depicts Malthus's work as a pseudo-scientific rationalization of the social inequities produced by the Industrial Revolution, anti-immigration movements, the eugenics movement, the various international development movements.

Recent research and significant empirical evidence have showed Malthus' predictions to be flawed. For example, the population has continued to grow, yet the prices of resources and foods relative to wages has decreased, indicating the supply of food (and resources) has grown relative to population size. This paradox can be easily resolved because Malthus made two assumptions which are, to one degree or another, flawed.

First, it is widely acknowledged that population growth is almost never exponential, but instead influenced by so many factors that no simple mathematical model can describe it. Demography since Malthus's time show that population growth rates flatten and then invert as a function of economic prosperity. Malthus lived in the time when England went through a geometric growth before birth rates flattened, and he failed to study the large populations in Asia which existed over multiple millennia where such flattening of birth rates has been evident.

Second, the growth of food production has never been restricted to the rudimentary processes Malthus described. Twentieth-century researchers have provided thorough documentation of the process of agricultural intensification (pioneered by economist Ester Boserup) by which production is raised in response to population increases and market demands. Production has also been expanded greatly by societal and technological advances in agriculture such as the Neolithic Revolution, British Agricultural Revolution, and the Green Revolution, food supply has outgrown population and is expected to continue doing so by the Food and Agriculture Organization. However this growth has been based heavily on a finite resource, petrochemicals, and may yet prove unsustainable. (Some debate exists on the extent to which Genetically Modified Crops will contribute to continued agricultural growth.) However, the market economy - defined as mutually beneficial exchange between decentralized actors - is responsible for great increases in productivity, and is internally sustainable. Likewise, Malthus clearly underestimated the power of the human capacity to increase the means of human subsistence on Earth. For example, Malthus did not fully understand the additional leeway built into the agricultural system - diets composed of different kinds of foods can have a wide range of different land-use efficiencies.

The Catholic Encyclopedia is highly critical of Malthus, claiming that the whole theory was pre-empted in 1790 by "Gianmaria Ortes", a Venetian friar, in a work entitled, "Reflessioni sulla populazione per rapporto all' economia nazionale." The Catholic Encylopedia lists those Catholic economists that reject Malthusian theory:

Aside from a section of the Socialists, the most important group of writers rejecting the Malthusian theory have been Catholic economists, such as Liberatore, Devas, Pesch, Antoine.

The Catholic Encylopedia argues that "...he contributed absolutely nothing of value to human knowledge or welfare." and dismisses fears of overpopulation proposing "...that the proper remedies were to be sought in better social and industrial arrangements, a better distribution of wealth, and improved moral and religious education.".

However, the Catholic Church is opposed to Birth control and Population control, a position it shares with Malthus.

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Epitaph

Sacred to the memory of the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus, long known to the lettered world by his admirable writings on the social branches of political economy, particularly by his essay on population.

One of the best men and truest philosophers of any age or country, raised by native dignity of mind above the misrepresentation of the ignorant and the neglect of the great, he lived a serene and happy life devoted to the pursuit and communication of truth.

Supported by a calm but firm conviction of the usefulness of his labors.

Content with the approbation of the wise and good.

His writings will be a lasting monument of the extent and correctness of his understanding.

The spotless integrity of his principles, the equity and candour of his nature, his sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of heart, his benevolence and his piety are still dearer recollections of his family and friends.

Born Feb 14 1766 Died 29 Dec 1834.

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See also

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Further reading

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References

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External links

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