ESSAY: THOMAS MALTHUS

Born: 13-Feb-1766
Birthplace: Rookery, near Dorking, Surrey, England
Died: 29-Dec-1834
Location of death: St. Catherine, near Bath, England
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Buried, Bath Abbey, Bath, England
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Occupation: Economist
Nationality: England

What many know, at least those with an elementary knowledge of economics or politics, is that Malthus is the surname of a man, who, a couple of hundred years back, said that man, sooner or later, universally, will run up against himself; that the population of mankind will eventually outstrip man's ability to supply himself with the necessities of life. The Malthusian doctrine, as stated in "Essay on the Principle of Population," was expressed as follows: "population increases in a geometric ratio, while the means of subsistence increases in an arithmetic ratio." Well, that seems plain enough, and perfectly understandable, if there is too many people and not enough food, then, certainly, there is going to be problems. Malthus developed his theory, at least to this extent: that left alone, no matter all the problems short of worldwide catastrophe, humankind will survive, as, nature has a natural way to cut population levels: "crime, disease, war, and vice," being, the necessary checks on population." This proposition, as was made by Malthus in 1798, was to cause quite a public stir, then, and yet today.

The English economist Thomas Robert Malthus, b. Feb. 14, 1766, d. Dec. 29, 1834, was one of the earliest thinkers to study population growth as it relates to general human welfare. After studying philosophy, mathematics, and theology at Cambridge 1784-88, Malthus took holy orders 1790 and became 1805 professor of history and political economy at East India College near London.

Surviving portraits and descriptions by contemporaries indicate that he was tall and handsome, with dark eyes and wavy hair, but with a hare-lip and cleft palate. In the turbulent 1790s, he took a moderate political position, opposing some Establishment policies as well as what he regarded as the excesses of the radicals. His first published work was his famous essay on the Principle of Population, which appeared anonymously in 1798 and was published in five further editions during his lifetime.

In 1805 he was appointed to the East India College in Hertford as ‘Professor of General History, Politics, Commerce and Finance’, a title later shortened to ‘Professor of Political Economy’. The college was originally situated in Hertford Castle. In 1809 it moved to purpose-built premises in Haileybury, near Hertford, where Malthus’s residence is still preserved. The role of the college was to educate young men of from sixteen to eighteen for the Indian Civil Service, at a time when the East India Company administered India. Attendance was generally for four six-month terms. Although the College was not a university proper, its academic posts were relatively well rewarded and held in some esteem.

Malthus was the first person in Britain to bear the title of Professor of Political Economy. Malthus developed a friendship with David Ricardo and they had a long and illuminating correspondence. In contrast to his friend, Malthus supported the retention of the protectionist Corn Laws. After his famous Essay, he published his Principles of Political Economy in 1820 and his Definitions in Political Economy in 1827.

Although Malthus's youth was dominated by the Enlightenment belief in the rationality of man and the perfectibility of society, the unfolding Industrial Revolution was making it increasingly apparent that society was changing and not necessarily for the better. In 1798, Malthus anonymously published An Essay on the Principle of Population, As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society. It was an attack on William Godwin's and the marquis de Condorcet's theories of eternal human progress.

Malthus had undoubtedly the great merit of having called public attention in a striking and impressive way to a subject which had neither theoretically nor practically been sufficiently considered. But he and his followers appear to have greatly exaggerated both the magnitude and the urgency of the dangers to which they pointed. In their conceptions a single social imperfection assumed such portentous dimensions that it seemed to over cloud the whole heaven and threaten the world with ruin. This doubtless arose from his having at first omitted altogether from his view of the question the great counteracting agency of moral restraint. Because a force exists, capable, if unchecked, of producing certain results, it does not follow that those results are imminent or even possible in the sphere of experience. A body thrown from the hand would, under the single impulse of projection, move for ever in a straight line; but it would not be reasonable to take special action for the prevention of this result, ignoring the fact that it will be sufficiently counteracted by the other forces which will come into play. And such other forces exist in the case we are considering. If the inherent energy of the principle of population is measured by the rate at which numbers increase under the most favorable circumstances, surely the force of less favorable circumstances, acting through prudential or altruistic motives, is measured by the great difference between this maximum rate and those which are observed to prevail in most European countries. Under a rational system of institutions, the adaptation of numbers to the means available for their support is effected by the felt or anticipated pressure of circumstances and the fear of social degradation, within a tolerable degree of approximation to what is desirable. To bring the result nearer to the just standard, a higher measure of popular enlightenment and more serious habits of moral reflection ought indeed to be encouraged. But it is the duty of the individual to his possible offspring, and not any vague notions as to the pressure of the national population on subsistence that will be adequate to influence conduct.

Malthus's Essay on Population, which he revised and enlarged four times between 1803 and 1826, was his most influential and most controversial work. Malthus was not the first to discuss a link between population growth and poverty, or to discuss checks to population growth, but the Essay on Population was distinctive in its systematic construction of theory and its aim to impact public policy. It was originally written in response to two essays. An Inquiry into Political Justice 1793 by William Godwin, and Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind 1795 by Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet that advanced the notion of the eventual perfection of society, which Malthus found overly optimistic. Central to Malthus's thought was his observation that, Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. In other words, population increases at a much faster rate than the means to support it unless population growth is checked.

Checks include population growth inhibitors in the form of “vice” such as contraception, and population reducers in the form of “misery” such as disease or famine. The second edition of the Essay on Population 1806 was expanded to nearly four times the length of the original. The changes incorporated empirical evidence gleaned from Malthus's tour of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, France, and Switzerland, and his study of their populations and crops. It also included a means to control population other than through misery and vice: moral restraint, or voluntary abstinence from sex. In the Essay on Population, Malthus maintained that alleviating some of the oppressive conditions of the poor was ultimately useless, for if conditions were made better the poor would respond by having more children, introducing the problem of sustaining them. The solution was to instill in the lower classes the desire for a higher standard of living, the achievement of which was made possible only by choosing to have a smaller family and practicing moral restraint.

Malthus's theories were highly controversial in his own time. Liberals and radicals among early Romantic writers attacked his suggestion that the problems of the poor were caused by their reproductive practices, and his belief that poor relief did more harm than good in alleviating those problems. Modern critics have been divided between those who claim Malthus's theories have been misunderstood and those who echo earlier critics in charging that his theories supported an economic system based on inequality. G. J. Cady, in his assessment of American reaction to Malthusianism, states that misperceptions of Malthusian theory abound, maintaining that he was unable to locate, within the large body of American responses, a single text “correct enough, and at the same time comprehensive enough, to provide a point of reference from which the other American comments might have been viewed.” Cady reports that in general, American opinion was not favorable, but cautions that in most cases “the Americans appear to have been criticizing, not the doctrine of Malthus, but their own or, worse yet, someone else's interpretation of it.” Antony Flew , similarly suggests that “what Malthus himself actually advocated differs in important ways from what has become associated with his name.” Flew reports that, for example, while Malthus attacked the Poor Law and rejected the utopian schemes advanced by Condorcet and Godwin, he never conceived of his theories “as providing a warrant for abandoning piecemeal and realistic efforts for improvement,” as has been charged by many of his critics. Marilyn Gaull also suggests that Malthus's theories have been misunderstood and oversimplified: “It is unfortunate that the whole complex argument of the Essay is usually reduced to the geometrical/arithmetic ratio Malthus used to illustrate what he called a ‘tendency’ to reproduce at a greater rate than resources.”

Representing the other side of the critical controversy is Eric B. Ross, who discusses Malthus's many revisions and expansions of the original 1798 essay in response to changing conditions in England and Europe. All of the versions, according to Ross, served the same purpose, which was to legitimize and preserve the unequal distribution of private property then in place. Malthus, in Ross's view, not only offered the authority of natural law in defence of established property relations, but created a general explanatory framework which was to prove one of the most enduring bulwarks against any argument for the mitigation of economic or social injustice.Tim Fulford situates Malthus's theories within the context of the earlier writings of Edmund Burke; however, according to Fulford, Malthus extended Burke's arguments about poverty to the next stage. Whereas Burke claimed it was outside the provenance of government to interfere with the laws of nature and the laws of God by providing poor relief, for Malthus “poverty became not simply a calamity that laborers suffered, not simply an instance of a general human vulnerability before God, but the fault of the laborers themselves for breaking the natural and divine law.” According to Ross, Malthus's influence endures to the present day, continuing to provide justification for economic inequality and discouraging efforts to reform such inequalities or alleviate the suffering of the poor.

Malthus argued that the standard of living of the masses cannot be improved because "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man." Population, he asserted, when unchecked by war, famine, or disease, would increase by a geometric ratio but subsistence only by an arithmetic one. Malthus's identification of population growth as an obstacle to human progress was bitterly resisted in the Enlightenment climate of the day, and his theories which greatly influenced classical economists like his friend David Ricardo were interpreted as opposing social reform. In 1803, Malthus published a revised edition of his work, in which he added "moral restraint"ate marriage and abstinence as a factor that might limit population growth, and he provided empirical evidence to back up his theories.

In the middle of the 19th century neo-Malthusianism emerged, a movement that, partly influenced by Robert Owen, advocated birth control for the poor. The appearance of Dr. George Drysdale's Elements of Social Science in 1854, and the founding of the Malthusian League in 1877, laid the foundation of the movement. The league was disbanded in 1927.

Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and related works has been widely misinterpreted as an apologia for the immorality of an imperfect world. In particular, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels subjected Malthus to several venomous attacks, which both belittled Malthus’s theoretical achievement and dismissed him as an apologist for the landed aristocracy. On the contrary, while conservative in some of his views, Malthus was of independent mind and did not condone many of the evils of his time. Contrary to the simplistic misinterpretation that Malthus condoned the ills of the world, for Malthus evil was something to be fought. His Essay is a warning that without evil to struggle against, the virtuous may become complacent or inert.
As John Pullen 1981 and others have argued, to understand Malthus’s contribution it is necessary to examine the natural theology that permeates his Essay. Malthus addresses a key problem faced by all believers: why should a wise and caring God plan or allow the existence of such wickedness and suffering in the world? Malthus’s answer is that the intended role of evil is to energize us for the struggle for good. As Malthus put it in the first edition of his Essay: ‘Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state’. Hence the principle of population was more than the divergence of an arithmetic and a geometric series; it provided the spur to constructive activity and development.

By extension, Malthus explained diversity, sub optimality, error and struggle in the natural Sphere. Malthus saw ‘the infinite variety of nature’ which ‘cannot exist without inferior parts, or apparent blemishes’. This ontological diversity was seen as having an essential and ultimately beneficial role in God’s creation. The function of such diversity and struggle was to enable the development of improved forms. Without such a contest, no species would be impelled to improve itself. Without the test of struggle, and the failure or even death of some, there would be no successful development of the population as a whole.

For Malthus, good is invigorated by evil and life is replenished through death. Scarcity of resources is at the core of Malthusian theory. With limited resources/food and a perpetually growing population, Malthus describes an unsustainable system in which population always grows faster than subsistence levels on earth. . Examples of preventive checks would be abstaining from premarital sex or posing marriages in times of economic difficulty. Oddly enough, Malthus opposed the use of contraceptives since he was very religious and conservative He opposed the Poor Laws, which would be comparable to the Social Security System or welfare system in the U.S. today. He believed programs such as this encouraged population growth but did not provide comparable increases in food production to support such growth. The reasoning behind the growth was that poorer couples no longer felt hindered by their poor economic standing to postpone starting a family, thus decreasing birth rates. They would also be able to have more children because of the Poor Laws. Malthus basically saw poverty as one type of preventive check.

Malthus' proof of the growth of the food supply in an arithmetic ratio was even less supported. He dismissed the possibility of geometric growth of the food supply as contrary to all our knowledge of the qualities of land, and proposed instead that, at most, the producer of the land could be increased every twenty-five years by an amount equal to its present production, justifying this with the statement, "The most enthusiastic speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this,. This illustrates a persistent weakness in Malthus' "proof"; namely, his apparent love of theory and disregard for more convincing empirical evidence.

Accepting Malthus' ideas of the relative growth rates of the population and the food supply, the next, and perhaps more important stage of his argument is the analysis of the consequences of this hypothesis. Within several twenty-five year generations, the population, if unchecked, would far surpass the available food supply: "In two centuries and a quarter, the population would be to the means of subsistence as 512 to 10: in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable, though the produce in that time would have increased to an immense extent,”. The effects of these vast differences are easy to predict for plants and animals: excess population would be cut down by lack of food. But with intelligent, reasoning human beings, the prediction is made more difficult.

Malthus first classified the checks on the growth of human population into two broad categories: positive and preventative checks. The positive checks were active in nature, and included such things as disease, war, and the most powerful check of all, famine. These were simple, effective, and brutal means of reducing population, the same found throughout nature. A population of plants might be pushed back by an encroaching weed, a situation analogous to war; deer may starve to death in an unusually snowy winter; and disease and plague can be imagined spreading through any conceivable population, though most especially in areas of high population density, where the disease is easily transmitted. The effects of the positive checks were dramatic and easy to see, but no less significant were what Malthus termed the preventative checks:"The laborer who earns eighteen pence a day and lives with some degree of comfort as a single man, will hesitate a little before he divides that pittance among four or five, which seems to be just sufficient for one," stated Malthus. This idea that a human can look ahead to the possibility of future difficulties, perhaps choosing not to have children rather than simply reproducing blindly, is the basic form of the preventative check. According to Malthus, similar restraints, primarily economic in nature, exist at all levels of society, though they increase in strength as one goes down the societal ladder. A nobleman had little to prevent him from having a family; his wealth would more than likely be sufficient to support many offspring, though they would be a slight drain on his finances. However, in the case of a man well educated but only barely wealthy enough to maintain his upper-class status, the financial burden of children would perhaps be enough to drive him down into the society of common trades people, a sacrifice he may be unwilling to make. These same trades people, Malthus states, are encouraged to postpone marriage until later in life, when they have established themselves with a farm or business of their own a late marriage, of course, would provide far less time to bear children. Stepping down further, into the ranks of the laborers, Malthus sees not only diminished social standing, but also the possibility of incurring the dreaded positive checks, as reasons to hold off marriage. At the lower ranks of society are the preventative checks strongest, as only the common man must face the real possibility of being unable to feed his children. It was here, at the low end of society, that Malthus saw the force of his checks to population acting in full force, being responsible, in the long run, for the undisputed misery and discontent of the lower classes.

Malthus was not content with one classification system for his checks or, perhaps, in the overwhelming disorganization of the first Essay, dashed off at the spur of the moment as it were, he simply lost track of the fact that he had, in fact, developed two parallel systems. The second, which took a more moralistic view, divided checks into misery and vice. This system, like the first, was exclusive, all checks falling into one category or the other: "In short," stated Malthus, "it is difficult to conceive any check to population which does not come under the description of some species of misery or vice," Roughly speaking, these were checks visited upon man by the outside world, and checks which came from man himself. Misery included such things as hunger, poverty, and disease. "Vice," was a concept which Malthus, with sensibilities typical of the time, was reluctant to define closely. The closest he came to defining vice explicitly was not until the publication of A Summary View, wherein he listed the checks of vice that operated in a preventative manner: "the sort of intercourse which renders some of the women of large towns unprolific; a general corruption of morals with regard to the sex, which has a similar effect; unnatural passions and improper arts to prevent the consequences of irregular connections,”. With these delicate terms, Malthus referred to prostitution, venereal disease, homosexuality, and, notably, abortion and birth control.

I personally believe that Malthus’ theory was right. In the world today there are many issues arising due to increase of food prices and food shortages. Population growth is evidently surpassing production. Food prices are soaring, supplies are very tight and already we have seen some very intense food protests flare up around the globe this year. When people don’t have enough to eat, they tend to become very desperate, and unfortunately it looks like the global food situation is not going to improve much any time soon. Right now the world is really struggling to feed itself, and with each passing day there are even more mouths to feed. It is being projected that the population of the world will reach 9 billion people by the year 2050. There are already way too many people starving to death around the globe, and unfortunately starvation is only going to become more rampant as food supplies get even tighter. Some of the key foods producing provinces in China are facing their worst drought in 200 years. Flooding has absolutely devastated agricultural production in Australia and Brazil this winter. Russia is still trying to recover from the horrific drought of last summer. Global weather patterns have gone haywire over the past 12 months, and this is putting immense pressure on a global food system that was already on the verge of a major breakdown. Food stockpiles all over the world are disturbingly low at this point. If a major global famine broke out not even the United States would be able to last for long. The U.S. government is supposed to be keeping a lot of food stockpiled in the event of an emergency, but right now a desperate scramble for food is beginning. Quite a few nations that used to be huge food exporters are now importing a lot of their food. Prices for staples such as wheat, corn and soybeans are absolutely soaring, and the UN is projecting that they will continue to rise rapidly throughout 2011.

Evidence very vividly presented through the media provides evidence that Malthus’ theory was right. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. corn reserves will drop to a 15 year low by the end of 2011, The United Nations says that the global price of food hit another in the month of January, Russia, one of the largest wheat producers on the entire globe, is still feeling the effects of last summer’s scorching temperatures. In fact, Russia is actually importing wheat this winter to sustain its cattle herds and China is also affected. China is busy preparing for a “severe, long-lasting drought” that is projected to have a huge impact on several provinces. In fact, Chinese state media says that the eastern province of Shandong is dealing with the worst drought it has seen in 200 years. The provinces being affected by this severe drought grow approximately two-thirds of the wheat in China. Russia, one of the largest wheat producers on the entire globe, is still feeling the effects of last summer’s scorching temperatures. In fact, Russia is actually importing wheat this winter to sustain its cattle herds.

As food has become increasingly scarce around the world, many companies have started using whatever kinds of “fillers” that they can think of in their “food” products. For example, Raw that some companies in China have actually been mass producing “fake rice” that is made partly of plastic. According to one Chinese Restaurant Association official, eating three bowls of this fake rice is the equivalent of consuming an entire plastic bag.

We definitely have a ‘people’ problem. While Westernized societies are addressing this by voluntarily keeping down their populations to manageable levels, and China does it with involuntary birth-restriction measures; other countries just produce new humans indiscriminately without worrying even for one day how these next generations will survive. The world now is beginning to suffer from a global Easter Island Syndrome. We are eating up all our resources and becoming increasingly violent societies where the fight for survival is becoming increasingly fierce. Especially island-nations such as Haiti now suffer massively from overpopulation and thus also Easter Island syndrome and most of the African continent south of the Sahara does as well. The incredibly high level of violence in South Africa and its collapsing local-food production all are symptoms which cannot be overcome until the population stops producing so many children which can’t be fed, can’t be housed, can’t be educated and can’t be supported by their parents.

The answer Malthus settled upon was that, in the divine plan, human suffering was not meaningless evil, but only a path to a greater good yet to come. A world where there was no pain would provide no stimulus to mental and spiritual growth, and would lead to a race of mankind grown lazy and stupid with lack of exertion. "The heart that has never known sorrow," said Malthus, "itself will seldom be feelingly alive to the pains and pleasures, the wants and wishes, of its fellow beings,”. Some suffering was necessary for true goodness to appear, argued Malthus, for in a world without evil, of what significance is good? The petty misery caused by Malthus' checks was part of a divine plan, calculated so that, in the end, it would produce the "greatest possible quantity of good,”. It is ironic that an essay begun with the express purpose of disproving a hypothesis of human perfectibility on earth, and maintaining throughout that suffering is inevitable, should end with such an optimistic statement.

Despite disorganization, mathematical weaknesses, and an almost complete lack of supporting evidence, Malthus' first Essay was still an extremely important work, with influences extending to the present day. The ideas expressed by Malthus were read by Darwin, and played a major role in Darwin's development of the theory of evolution. Malthus' economic ideas are visible today as the Law of Diminishing Returns, a principle articulated by David Ricardo but originally expressed, albeit implicitly, in the Essay on Population . And, of course, though Malthus himself would no doubt be dismayed, the dark image of the future he depicted played a major role in the gradual acceptance of the "improper arts" of birth control.

Interestingly, Malthus himself is today famous as much for being wrong as for being right. In the Western world today, there is little sign of encroaching Malthusian population pressures. Despite advancement in technological innovation in agriculture and other areas in food production war, famine and starvation is still on the rise. Food prices continue to soar high in the sky. Thomas Malthus was right.