Malthus, Thomas Robert
Malthus, Thomas Robert
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was born ten years before the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and his work as an economist belongs to the broad tradition established by Smith’s treatise. After being privately educated, Malthus entered Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship at the age of 27. He took orders in 1797 and held a curacy for a short period. He married in 1805 and shortly thereafter was appointed professor of modern history and political economy at the East India Company’s college at Haileybury, the first appointment of its kind in England. He died at Haileybury in 1834, the year that saw the passage of a new poor law inspired by his writings.
Malthus’ father was a friend of Rousseau and shared the optimistic belief of Condorcet and William Godwin that nothing stood in the way of a regime of ideal equality but private ignorance and public inertia: propaganda and education were therefore the means for bringing about perfect happiness. The younger Malthus disagreed and argued that the effort to realize the perfect human society would always founder on the tendency of population to outrun the food supply. His father urged him to put his ideas on paper, and in 1798 Malthus published a long pamphet entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society; With Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. There was nothing original in Malthus’ argument. It had all been said before, albeit with less force. Nevertheless, Malthus was attacking the dominant contemporary view, which saw under-population rather than overpopulation as a problem. When the first census, in 1801, produced evidence of a sharp rise in population growth in recent decades, Malthus decided to take advantage of the change in the climate of opinion by turning his pamphlet into a book (published in 1803) with a new subtitle that implied a change in emphasis: A View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness With an Inquiry Into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions. What had started out as an occasional tract against certain dangerous ideas held by some contemporary thinkers had become a full-scale treatise on the subject of demography. Further revised editions of the book were published at regular intervals during his lifetime, the sixth edition appearing in 1826.
Although Malthus’ fame in the nineteenth century was based squarely on his theory of population, his modern reputation with economists rests rather on his prescient opposition to the Ricardian doctrine of the impossibility of “general gluts.” As Keynes put it in The General Theory: “Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain,” in consequence of which, “The great puzzle of Effective Demand with which Malthus had wrestled vanished from economic literature” (1936, p. 32). Malthus’ ideas on gluts, or, as we would now say, business depressions, were embodied in his Principles of Political Economy, first published in 1820. Other minor but significant publications on strictly economic questions are An Inquiry Into the Nature and Progress of Rent (1815); The Measure of Value Stated and Illustrated (1823); and Definitions in Political Economy(1827).
Demographic ideas Malthus’ theory of population is baldly stated in the first two chapters of the Essay. These pages are brilliantly written in terse phrases and striking images, and they help us to understand why the book captured the imagination of its first readers, rousing a storm of controversy that never died down during Malthus’ lifetime. The thesis itself is familiar enough, although all of its implications are not immediately evident: population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio, while the food supply at best increases in an arithmetical ratio; hence, population tends to increase up to the limits of “the means of subsistence.” This is the principle of population that Malthus maintained against all his critics. He realized, of course, that in the real world there are checks that prevent population from increasing beyond the food supply. The checks are of two kinds: “positive” checks that show up in the death rate, such as war, famine, and pestilence; and “preventive checks” that show up in the birth rate, such as abortions, infanticide, and birth control. Both checks are the consequences of lack of food, which may, indeed, be regarded as the ulti-mate check on population growth that is always in operation.
Such was Malthus’ argument in the first edition of the Essay. Its weakness was quickly discovered by Godwin, who pointed out that the working classes in the richer countries seemed to be maintaining themselves at a level considerably above the physical minimum of existence, without benefit of either the positive or the preventive checks. Malthus, realizing that he had trapped himself by denying the possibility of any rise in the standard of living, quietly gave way in the second edition of the Essay by recognizing the existence of a new preventive check, namely, “moral restraint.” He defined “moral restraint” as postponement of the age of marriage accompanied by strict sexual continence before marriage, and, while the other checks were frequently described as “misery” or “vice,” the new preventive check was allowed to stand alone without any pejorative tag attached to it. For the first time a hopeful note crept into the argument, although Malthus himself always remained profoundly pessimistic about the capacity of mankind to regulate its numbers by the exercise of prudential restraint. Few readers realized that he had really abandoned his original thesis, and Malthus did nothing to help them appreciate the escape clause thai had now been built into the doctrine.
Any critic who produced evidence of subsistence increasing faster than population without signs of “misery” or “vice” was silenced by the logical implication that the working class must be practicing “moral restraint,” a phenomenon included in trie theory. This left the critic with no reply other than to show that the average age of marriage had not increased or that the rate of illegitimate births had not fallen. Since contemporary population statistics were not adequate to verify such assertions, Malthus had furnished himself with an impregnable defense. There were a few critics who attacked the theory by questioning the notion that birth control constitutes “vice.” Malthus’ argument here was simply that birth control must be wrong, since man, being naturally indolent, could hardly be expected to work or save if it were made so easy for him to escape the consequences of his “natural passions.” He was confident of the support of contemporary opinion in lightly dismissing what were later called neo-Malthusian checks, “both on account of their immorality and their tendency to remove a necessary stimulus to industry” ([1798] page 512 in 1878 edition).
Some hostile critics realized the futility of denying that unchecked populations tend to increase at a geometrical rate, inasmuch as no one had ever observed the growth of an unchecked population. Instead, they attacked the idea that the food supply could not possibly keep pace with the irrepressible tide of population. Here Malthus had recourse to the principle of diminishing returns in agriculture —in fact, he was one of the first to state this general principle in so many words. Since this principle soon became an integral part of orthodox political economy via Ricardo’s theory of rent, it was difficult to criticize Malthus on this score [see Ricardo]. We realize now that Malthus was actu-ally appealing not to the impeccable Ricardian law of diminishing returns to variable factor increments in a situation of given technical knowledge, but to a questionable historical law of diminishing returns from technical progress in agriculture. But the distinction between statics and dynamics was so little understood in those days—even Ricardo switched easily from static analysis to historical generalization, sometimes in the same sentence— that Malthus had no difficulty in meeting criticism along these lines.
The utter simplicity and familiarity of the ideas involved, calling neither for new concepts nor fornew facts, was the essence of Malthus’ popular appeal. All he seemed to be doing was to bring together a few familiar facts of life and to deduce the necessary consequences of these facts. Surely it was true that population nearly always multiplied up to the limits of the available food supply. And surely, where living standards had improved, the gain was necessarily precarious and always liable to disappear in a new spurt of population growth. Was it not self-evident that an unchecked multiplication of human beings must quickly lead to an impossible situation, whatever the plausible rate of increase of the means of subsistence? The contrast that Malthus drew between the two kinds of mathematical progression carried the hypnotic persuasive power of an advertising slogan. It was easy to see—“a slight acquaintance with numbers will show,” as Malthus said—that even the smallest finite sum growing at the smallest compound rate must eventually overwhelm even the largest possible finite sum growing at the highest simple rate, so that, whatever the initial situation, there must soon be “standing room only.” Quod erat demonstrandum I
It did not hurt the Malthusian theory that it justified the resistance of the upper classes to all efforts to reform existing social and political institutions : for if poverty had its roots in the unequal race between population and subsistence, only the working class itself, by practicing prudential restraint, could improve its own conditions. Even the working-class newspapers of the day accepted the desirability of prudential restraint and condemned birth control devices. The Malthusian theory of population was widely appealing: it neatly explained the existence of poverty; it exposed the visionary panaceas of reformers; it enabled everyone to pontificate on questions of public policy; it rationalized the subsistence theory of wages, to which all contemporary economists subscribed; lastly, it underlay Ricardo’s preoccupation with the land-using bias of economic progress, and Ricardo was the foremost economist of the day. Any one of these factors would have been enough to make a theory influential. Put together, they fully account for Malthus’ astonishing success, a success that has few parallels in the history of ideas.
Despite all the attractive features of the Malthusian theory, it is doubtful, however, whether it would have received so wide a hearing if there had not also been a population explosion in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Strangely enough, when Malthus published the first edition of the Essay in 1798, he shared the general belief of his day that the population of England had actually increased little in the eighteenth century. The census of 1801 showed how wrong everyone had been, and later generations credited Malthus with prophetic foresight in warning of the dangers of overpopulation as early as 1798. But, in fact, Malthus made no effort, nor was it his intention, to explain the unprecedented population explosion, even in the later versions of the Essay. Furthermore, it is evident that he did not provide the tools for such an explanation. The Malthusian theory emphasizes birth and marriage rates, whereas the population explosion of the 1780s was a more complicated phenomenon of rising birth rates in new factory districts and falling death rates in rural areas and congested towns. Unfortunately, the demographic data of the period, based as they are on defective registration of baptisms and burials, are so unreliable that modern authorities are still not agreed on whether the industrial revolution largely created its own labor force by a demand pull on births or whether improved sanitation, nutrition, and housing produced a supply push through a fall in the death rate. The fact remains, however, that Malthus makes a poor guide to the causes of the population explosion that gave such prominence to his views.
Permanent influence Malthus’ magisterial influence on public opinion lasted until the last decades of the nineteenth century. By that time, the record of sustained economic growth, the rise in the standard of living, and the decline in fertility in Western countries made disparagement of the Malthusian doctrine as common as praise had been before. Every schoolboy at the turn of the twentieth century could prove that Malthus had gone wrong by underestimating both the potentialities of technical progress and the possibility of family limitation by birth control devices. As far as it goes, of course, this is a perfectly valid refutation of the Malthusian theory, but it is so obvious now that it is hardly worth stating. One can make a much stronger case against Malthus.
The Malthusian theory of population is a perfect example of metaphysics masquerading as science. So long as we hold with Malthus that birth control is morally reprehensible, the history of population growth in the last two centuries proves him right: nothing has stemmed the tide of human numbers but “misery” and “vice.” If, on the other hand, we consider birth control morally defensible, Malthus is vindicated again: “moral restraint” in the larger sense of the phrase is one of the checks that has limited the tendency of population to outstrip the food supply. The Malthusian theory cannot be refuted because it can be applied to any actual or any conceivable population change: it purports to say something about the real world, and what it says must be true by definition of its own terms.
By the 1920s, the Malthusian theory had lost almost all of its earlier prestige. Indeed, the Malthusian specter of overpopulation had given way to the Keynesian specter of underpopulation. But since World War II, the problem of underdeveloped countries has brought Malthus back into favor. Most underdeveloped countries today have the worst of both worlds: the typical high birth rates of agrarian economies and the typical low death rates of urbanized industrialized economies. Economic development will in time cure these difficulties, as they were cured in industrial Europe, but for the next few generations these countries face the alternative of the Malthusian checks of famine and disease or voluntary family limitation in opposition to prevailing religious mores. The name of Malthus is still bandied about in debates on population policies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, although it is difficult to believe that the Malthusian theory has much relevance to the discussion of modern population problems. It sheds no light on the causes of decliningfertility in developing societies; it tells us little about the demographic relationship between fertility and mortality; it is silent on the economic and social consequences of changes in the age distribution of a population; and it is of no help in framing policies for areas of heavy population pressure. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the revival of interest in the Malthusian doctrine in our own day makes it one of the longest-lived social theories of all times. And, popular interest apart, demographers can never ignore him or forget him, for, with all his errors, Malthus put the problem of population growth on the map.
Mark Blaug
[For the historical context of Malthus’ work, see Income and Employment Theory; Population,article On Population Theories;and the biography of Condorcet.For discussion of the subsequent development of Malthus’ ideas, see Population,articles On Optimum Population Theoryand Population Policies;and the biographies of Ricardoand Marx.]
WORKS BY MALTHUS
(1798) 1960 On Population. New York: Modern Library.-> First published in pamphlet form as An Essay on the Principle of Population. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Irwin.
1815 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Progress of Rent, and the Principles by Which It Is Regulated. London: Murray.
(1820) 1964 Principles of Political Economy Considered With a View to Their Practical Application. 2d ed. New York: Kelley.
1823 The Measure of Value Stated and Illustrated, With an Application of It to the Alterations in the Value of the English Currency Since 1790. London: Murray.
1827 Definitions in Political Economy. London: Murray.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blaug, Mark 1962 Economic Theory in Retrospect. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. -> Reviews the theoretical issues in the inconclusive debate between Ricardo and Malthus, and lists additional readings on both sides of the question. Also considers Malthus’ employment theory.
Bonar, James (1885) 1924 Malthus and His Work. 2d ed. London: Allen … Unwin; New York: Macmillan.
Boner, H. A. 1955 Hungry Generations: The 19th-century Case Against Malthusianism. New York: King’s Crown Press; Oxford Univ. Press.
Cannan, Edwin (1893) 1953 A History of the Theories of Production and Distribution in English Political Economy From 1776 to 1848. 3d ed. London and New York: Staples.
Glass, D. V. (editor) 1953 Introduction to Malthus. London: Watts; New York: Wiley. -* Contains useful background material, as well as a reprint of Malthus’ “Summary View of the Principle of Population,” which he contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1830.
Keynes, John Maynard 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan.
Mccleary, George F. 1953 The Malthusian Population Theory. London: Faber. -? Contains a spirited defense of Malthus’ ideas on population.
Newman, James R. 1956 Commentary on Thomas Robert Malthus. Volume 2, pages 1189–1191 in James R. Newman (editor), The World of Mathematics: A Small Library of the Literature of Mathematics From A’h-mose the Scribe to Albert Einstein. New York: Simon … Schuster.
Smith, Kenneth 1951 The Malthusian Controversy. London: Routledge. -? Reviews the great nineteenth-century debate on the Malthusian doctrine.
United Nations, Department OF Social Affairs, Population Division 1953 The Determinants and Con-sequences of Population Trends. Population Studies, No. 17. New York: United Nations. -> Covers succinctly the history of population theory before and after Malthus.