MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT

(1766–1834)

Thomas Robert Malthus was a demographer, political economist, and Christian moral scientist. He was educated privately up to the age of 16 and then sent to a dissenting academy prior to entry into Cambridge, where, from 1784 to 1788, he undertook the course of studies designed to prepare him as a clergyman in the Church of England. These studies centered on theology, history, and mathematics, including Newtonian mechanics. Malthus first became a curate near the family home in Surrey, later adding a living in Lincolnshire. He retained these livings when he was appointed to a professorship at the East India College, Haileybury, in 1805, the post he held for the rest of his life.

It was during his initial period as a rural clergyman that Malthus composed his first published work: 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, published in 1798. This anonymous work was originally intended to cast doubt on the doctrine of human perfectibility. By invoking a well-established principle, that population always expands in response to improvements in the supply of subsistence goods, Malthus showed that any attempt to create an ideal society in which altruism and common property rights prevailed would be undermined by its inability to cope with the resulting population pressure. In a context dominated by the hopes aroused by the French Revolution, this amounted to an assertion of the greater power of bioeconomic factors over human agency.

Malthus gave mathematical form to the principle by contrasting a maximum potential rate of population increase, the geometric ratio, with a posited arithmetic rate of increase in subsistence. But this deductive framework had an empirical foundation. Malthus employed Benjamin Franklin's figures for the increase in American population, under conditions in which subsistence posed no limits, to demonstrate that doubling was possible within 25 years. By contrast with his opponents he believed that his conclusions were the result of following a Newtonian procedure of arguing from observed effects to possible causes, rather than by speculating about the possible effects of known causes.

At this stage, Malthus had not yet reached the level of analysis that would later lead him to be called the founding father of modern demography. Indeed, his estimates of the rate of increase in the British population, like those of most of his contemporaries, were wide of the mark. He believed that it was doubling every 200 years, when it became clear, after the first census evidence collected from 1801 onwards, that it was doing so every 55 years. Thus, although Malthus was an acute observer of rural poverty, he was not, initially at least, reacting to the rapid population increase researchers now know to have been taking place. The special quality of his findings can be found in his contention that population pressure on living standards was "imminent and immediate." His opponents had maintained that while agriculture was in its present underdeveloped state there was no population problem. Although population pressure might threaten living standards at some distant point in the future, it would then be possible to remedy this by improvements in technology and re-course to birth control. Malthus, by contrast, held that the living standards of those who lived by labor had always been, and would remain, under pressure; that positive checks affecting mortality rates were still in operation in most parts of the world; and that preventive checks affecting marriage habits and birth rates were currently in operation in Western Europe and North America.

It followed from the immediacy of the population principle that attention needed to be focused on the way in which these checks operated to maintain the balance between population and available subsistence. In the polemical first edition of his Essay, Mal-thus treated all forms of check as varieties of "misery and vice." In the second much larger and more thoroughly empirical version published in 1803, commonly called the Second Essay, he introduced the idea of a virtuous check–moral restraint. This entailed postponement of marriage together with strict sexual continence during the waiting period. The second essay bore a new subtitle that signaled Malthus's endorsement of more positive solutions, partly via encouragements to individual prudence, partly via changes in social and political institutions. It became An Essay on the Principle of Population; or 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.

As a Christian moralist, Malthus thought it was his task to propose checks and institutional reforms that would reduce the harmful effect of population pressure on morals and happiness, even where this involved choosing the lesser of two evils. Since Mal-thus regarded birth control within marriage as a vicious practice, he cannot be described as a neo-Malthusian, the position adopted by many of his secular-minded followers. Prudishness plays no part here: he was opposed to birth control on the grounds that such "unnatural" expedients ran contrary to God's beneficent design in placing human-kind under the right degree of pressure to ensure its development. It follows that use of the term "Malthusian devil" (as some have characterized what they consider the pessimistic aspects of Malthus's theories) is peculiarly inappropriate as a description of Malthus's own way of thinking. There had to be a reason why a beneficent Providence had endowed humanity with the sexual passion. It was to provide a spur to advance civilization by finding those means of living with its consequences that were consonant with human kind's long-term happiness. It also follows that Malthus was not an anti-populationist (that is, he did not oppose an increase in population or advocate a decrease) but rather, was a theorist of optimal population growth, inquiring into that relationship between the various physical and moral variables that would produce the best result. For this reason it is not entirely anachronistic to describe him as an early theorist of sustainable development.

Although Malthus was accused of propounding a form of bioeconomic determinism that ignored cultural variables, his mature procedure belies this charge. Once possessed of a fundamental natural law, inquiry could be centered on the surrounding circumstances–social, economic, and cultural–that determined how the law operated in any given setting. By appealing to the evidence provided by historians of the ancient world, and anthropological findings based on travel literature, as well as the new census material and other inquiries into the condition of the poor, Malthus established himself as a demographer in the modern vein: someone committed not merely to an examination of the relationship between births, deaths, and marriages, but to the cultural factors brought to light by other evidence on modes of life.

Studies of the response of population to wages and prices entailed lags that could generate cycles or fluctuations, during which there would be periods of maladjustment and market disequilibrium. Malthus was more impressed by these "irregular movements" than his friend and rival economist, David Ricardo: hence many of the disagreements over the causes of economic growth and the reasons for postwar depression that feature in their correspondence and in Malthus's attempt to provide an alternative to Ricardian economics in his Principles of Political Economy of 1820. This also explains J. M. Keynes's interest in Malthus in the 1920s and 1930s when he was formulating his own attack on economic orthodoxy.

Historical demographers have added greatly to our understanding by stressing the agrarian or essentially pre-industrial nature of Malthus's analysis of population problems. His arithmetic ratio became the basis for the law of diminishing returns, a proposition that dominated political economy up to John Stuart Mill, and has made a reappearance in the works of ecologists concerned with the global limits to growth. Malthus was one of the first to recognize the significance of what became known as the Western European marriage system of delayed marriage and hence lower birth rates. He also came to recognize one of the main features of the demographic transition. Higher incomes might lead not to more children, but to more goods and leisure. Comforts and luxuries could bring with them a desire to protect high and rising standards of living.

MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED WORKS BY THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS.