An Inquiry Into the Nature and Progress of Rent, and the Principles by Which it is Regulated

by Thomas Robert Malthus

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Genres: Economics, Essays

56 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1815

About the author

The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus FRS was an English cleric and scholar, influential in the fields of political economy and demography. Malthus himself used only his middle name Robert.

His An Essay on the Principle of Population observed that sooner or later population will be checked by famine and disease, leading to what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible. He thought that the dangers of population growth precluded progress towards a utopian society: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man". As an Anglican cleric, Malthus saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behaviour. Malthus wrote:

That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,
That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and,
That the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.

Malthus placed the longer-term stability of the economy above short-term expediency. He criticized the Poor Laws, and (alone among important contemporary economists) supported the Corn Laws, which introduced a system of taxes on British imports of wheat. His views became influential, and controversial, across economic, political, social and scientific thought. Pioneers of evolutionary biology read him, notably Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. He remains a much-debated writer.

Reviews

[Charles Sheard · Rating 1 out of 5]

Many of the same false presumptions, but none of the occasional cogent comments, found in his more famous An Essay on the Principle of Population, this essay has the added burden of being poorly written overall. The only bright point was the inclusion and reference to David Buchanan's words in his 1814 edition of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which of course were possibly the motivation behind Malthus's poor rebuttal.

[Phani Tholeti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unnecessarily complex and compound sentences tying to confound the reader. If the logic is true and simple, the sentences should be equally simple. The population essay is neat on that count, but not this - and though most of the logic feels right, there are places where the assumptions just don't feel reasonable. And mostly it seems to be written in support of the landed class, rather than as an impartial study.