Thomas Malthus

(1766-1834) Sociological Theory Department of Sociology and Anthropology
UMD

Thomas Malthus's Essay on Population

Born near Guildford, Surrey, England in 1766
From a well-off family
Educated from 1784 at Jesus College, Cambridge where he achieved distinguished marks in his mathematical studies
Ordained as an Anglican cleric in 1797 despite having an inconvenient speech impediment. He became curate of the parish of Albury in Surrey in 1798 and held this post for a short time.
Main contribution published anonymously
"An Essay on the Principle of Population" in 1798
populations tend to increase faster than the supply of food available
"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power compared to the second".

" The number of labourers also being above the proportion of work in the market, the price of labor must tend towards a decrease; while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise".
Inevitability of poverty contradicted prevailing belief that a society's fertility would lead to economic progress
William Pitt proposed that poor relief should give special consideration to the encouragement of large families as "those who, after having enriched their country with a number of children, have a claim upon its assistance for their support."
Malthus's theory used as an argument against efforts to better the condition of the poor.
Malthus suggested to ease the pain and misery of the poor that, try to cut the birth rate in society.

Population growth: Preventative checks reduced the birth rate (moral restraint {higher class}, vice and birth control {lower classes}); positive checks (famine, misery, plague and war) increased the death rate.

It is an evident truth that, whatever may be the rate of increase in the means of subsistence, the increase in population must be limited by it, at least after the food has been divided into the smallest shares that will support life. All the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons. ... To act consistently, therefore, we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operation of nature in producing this mortality, and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use.

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases: and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders. If by these and similar means the annual mortality were increased ... we might probably every one of us marry at the age of puberty and yet few be absolutely starved.

The Essay on the Principles of Population encouraged the first systematic demographic studies
Both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace admitted that the food scarcities regarded as being normal by Malthus had been of key influence on their seperate development of theories of the evolutionary Origin of Species.
From 1805 until his death Malthus was Professor of Modern History and Political Economy at the newly established college of the East India Company at Haileybury. This appointment may have been the first professional post in Economics held by anyone till this point in time.

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Copyright: © 2001, John Hamlin
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