Principles of Population: Thomas Robert Malthus

By

Evaristo Torres

Econ 500: History of Economic Thought

A long time ago in a far away place

Malthus, Thomas Robert (17661834) 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 (Winch, 619).
Thomas Malthus (1766 -1834) was a political economist and Enlightenment thinker who
observed the growing population with increasing concern. To explain poverty, dearth and famine
he wrote a famous essay at the end of the 18th century entitled An Essay on the Principle of
Population (James).
Malthus saw his argument as providing a reputation for the idea that you could change
society. That was the pattern purpose of his theory, but almost always this purpose gets lost in
contemporary explanations. He is always going head to head with Godwin; Godwin is the
anarchist who is convinced we can create a better social order. That we can get rid of private
property and we can get rid of governments private property to create some anarchist socialist
system and create just order, this is what Godwin was trying to say. Godwin held that a
cultivated person is less eager to gratify his senses, and when sustenance is no longer available,
humans will "probably cease to propagate. The whole will be a people of men and not of
children." Concurrently, "the term of human life may be prolonged by the immediate operation
of the intellect beyond any limits which we are able to assign."
Godwin's prolonged interaction with T. R. Malthus began with the first edition of Essay
on the Principle of Population (1798), which judged Godwin's portrait of the future as no more
than "a beautiful phantom of the imagination." Within days Godwin wrote Malthus, and they met
to discuss their differences. Godwin agreed to drop the word "perfectibility," and Malthus

conceded that, unlike other species, humans can apply their reason and avoid the dire effects of a
limited food supply; the second and subsequent editions of Malthus's book in effect
acknowledged that Godwin's criticism was well based (Petersen, 468). Malthus had to disagree
with Godwin and said, No, we are always going to experience a class divided society. This is
problematic because this idea begins to permeate discussions about capitalism. The one thing
about capitalism that is good corresponds to nature of the human species. That somehow we are
here to resolve with competition, and capitalism at least lets us see that is compatible with which
we are. Malthus was the first to give vent to this way of thinking.
In the case of Malthus, he is not primarily concerned with capitalism, because it didnt
have a name just yet, but the idea of class divided societies. In the particular notion that private
property was the basis for all class divisions and the reason that the wealthy were wealthy was
because they were able to restrain their animal impulses and swirl away all those bits and pieces
of problem that they needed to survive off the future. As the poor, they squandered whatever
little property that they had and were allowing their impulses to dominate their behavior. The
nature of these class divided societies have changed over time and have never been the same.
Private property, as we know it, is a fairly recent phenomenon, since the end of feudal
ages. Private property was basically non-existent in this due era. Malthus is using property as
specific meaning to the economist of this time period, and was always understood by the general
public. When the classical economist use the term property owning class, they dont mean
anyone who owns a shirt or glasses has property. These are items of consumption; of course we
own them. In any historical time period people have always taken for granted that the utensil that
you use to feed yourself is your, we might call it property, but thats not the way economist
thought about it. Property inevitably means productive property. Owning a business, this is

what they had in mind, so in other words the property owning class is The business class. In
our culture the fear of communism is still sufficiently wide spread, that the common working
class person in our culture often times misinterprets communism as them not having their own
pair of jeans or refrigerator to store their food. Its only productive property that Malthus talks
about. This is virtually how all-classical economist explain communism.
There is a way in which Malthus idea of population goes against the limits of nature to
produce things. We are currently living in a period where sensible economist are suggesting that
we might hit the fan in about 100 years and things might not go so well for the economy. Our
children might experience this bad outcome and it can possibly be the end our species. It
wouldnt be the first time in the history of the world if look at the history. Its a possibility and
we are the only ones responsible if that is the outcome. We do a good job of polluting the
environment, and melting the icecaps. In this sense there is a fundamental reality that Malthus
was trying to get at.
There is another issue about our income. As soon as our income is above subsistence,
then the urge to procreate dominates us, (males is particular) start to look around to see if they
can get married and star a family and so forth. The problem with this argument is that it doesnt
fit in with the facts. The people who are in the upper end of the social economic scale are who
inevitably have the smaller families, not larger families. Its the other way around. The poor
family tends to be larger family. It contradicts where Malthus was trying to get at. In the second
edition of his work, published in 1803, Malthus recommended moral restraint, defined as the
abstaining from marriage till we are in a condition to support a family, with a perfectly moral
conduct during that period, as a principle measure to deal with the portent of redundant
numbers. Moral restraint, moreover, instead of militating against a new educational

responsibility, underscored its benefits. Though known as one of the architects of individualism,
and generally favoring liberty of choice on the part of the individual, he saw the need for
government leadership in this area; in other words, the establishment of natural system of
education (Levin, 225). In other words, Malthus means that one should not procreate unless
financially stable. When Malthus talks about the limits of nature ability to produce things, he
ignores their mode of technology. 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 (Winch, 219-220) Later on when the classicalist adopt this
theory, they do begin to introduce the concept of technology they way of improving natures
ability to produce goods and services. Even in this context they still believe in diminishing
returns. 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 (Winch, 620). One
of the ways to think about Malthus is that human population is growing and a portion of this
population is working with nature to produce more food to feed this populations and it will bump
up the growth of the population. Eventually we will have poverty once again in the population.
We can forestall this if in the process of economic growth we are always coming along with new
technology that would make labor more productive at the margin. The classicalist tended to not
see this as a powerful argument; they always saw nature as a dominant thing that will upset the
limits.
Malthus sets this tradition, which dominates the entire classical period and
emerges to this very day. This is a tradition which argues that the average wage rate in an
economy. This is determined exogenously, meaning outside this thing that we call the economy.
The aggregate wage is the result of the demand in supply for labor. There is this thing called the
labor market and the demand for labor is determined by all the businesses in the society and that
the supply of labor is represents all those who are entering the labor force. We have this supply
and demand curve and these two things determine the wage rate. This way of thinking is called
indigenously determined wage rate, the wage rate is a result of a thing going on inside the

economy. This is not what Malthus is saying; he is saying that wage rate is set by something
outside the economy. In this particular context its the going conception of what subsistence
happens to be. The way to think of it is that the economy moves in response to this wage rate. In
the early versions of Malthus, he imagines that subsistence is physical subsistence. How much
money will the average worker need to be able to purchase a bundle of food that will provide
him or her with the energy to be able to continue working in the factory. Later on Malthus
modifies his argument and he introduces the cultural subsistence. There wages tend to move to a
position what will allow the average worker to be able to live at the levels considered minimally
necessary given the cultural content of the society. Its still and exogenous theory, but it is a little
softer. It also implies that the exogenous factor isnt just technology, but it is also institutions. If
you accept an exogenous interpretation of wages, then you are going to be more likely to look for
institutions that can change them. Among the institution that can change that would be the law.
The government can say that the minimum wage is a certain amount. That provides the
economy with an average minimum wage. They can say what the working conditions can be or
businesses can hire workers that work 8 a day, not 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. That is also
another exogenous factor. If you look at statistics from Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages of nonsupervisory workers over the long run, from the end of WWII until around 1973, wages are
consistently rising. They are doing really well, a time period where the wages of the working
class were above subsistence. The content of subsistence was gradually moving up. Since then,
the wages of non-supervisory workers are literally the same as they were in 1973. We have been
in a period of stagnation ever since. We had a much more active state that was willing to raise the
minimum wage over time, adjusting it for inflation.

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