An Essay on the Principle of Population

An Essay on the Principle of Population #1

by Thomas Robert Malthus

Around 1796, Mr. Malthus, an English gentleman, had finished reading a book that confidently predicted human life would continue to grow richer, more comfortable and more secure, and that nothing could stop the march of progress. He discussed this theme with his son, Thomas, and Thomas ardently disagreed with both his father and the book he had been reading, along with the entire idea of unending human progress. Mr. Malthus suggested that he write down his objections so that they could discuss them point-by-point. Not long after, Thomas returned with a rather long essay. His father was so impressed that he urged his son to have it published. And so, in 1798, appeared An Essay on Population, by British political economist and demographer THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS (1766-1834). Though it was attacked at the time and ridiculed for many years afterward, it has remained one of the most influential works in the English language on the general checks and balances of the world's population and its necessary control. This is a replica of the 1826 sixth edition. Volume 1 includes: Book I: "Of the Checks to the Population in the Less Civilised Parts of the World and in Past Times" and Book II: "Of the Checks to the Population in the Different States of Modern Europe."

Genres: Economics

324 pages, Hardcover

First published January 11, 2010

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

[Teddy Dodger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is supposedly Malthus at his more mellow and less ridiculous compared to 1798. But he still essentially wants to blame poverty on the poor having too many kids, and sees a system of national education as the solution.

What a guy

[Amiv · Rating 5 out of 5]

As is well-known, Malthus starts with book with two postulata (food supply grows linearly and population can grow exponentially), and from those reasons that an important task of any group of people inhabiting a land is to keep its population up to the level of subsistence, and stop it from growing further. And this is about as far as he goes in the first part of the original essay, but in the first volume of revised versions, he goes on to look at how people from every corner of the world have done this, and while his depth is certainly lacking and his language (savage, barbaric, etc.) reflects his time, the breadth he covers while still nominally extrapolating from those two postulata is remarkable.
In this work, he sets a precedent for two among the greatest thinkers in the 19th century: Darwin and Marx. The parallels with Darwin are obvious, as almost every species by evolution is adapted to maintain its population: large animals and those less likely to be attacked reproduce less often, lest they eat all the food in their environment, while smaller animals with lots of predators can reproduce like rabbits. The more interesting thing is that someone realized that cultures adapt to their environments and, as a part of that, keep their populations in line before someone realized animals did. I believe at some point Malthus theorizes that cultures that can't contain their population would all die of famine, while those that can't get a high enough population will be conquered by those who do. He at least points to the latter when he discusses Siberia. A sort of rudimentary social darwinism, in effect.
In understanding the ways cultures work according to only a couple principles, scientific in their nature, Malthus also sets a precedent for Marx. Indeed, Malthus often talks of the impact of class on the distribution of food, and has a lengthy discourse on it in his chapter on the checks to population on Rome, when the Italian peninsula was depopulated because, in summary, the landowners owned all the land, while they weren't reproducing near fast enough to populate the peninsula, and the poor subsisted on corn doles which weren't enough to support a family. While you could refine this by going even further back to the economic conditions and relations of production that would lead to such an outcome, as Marx lays the foundations for, Malthus at least begins to understand history and culture according to science.
For these reasons, I believe Malthus' essay was ahead of its time, and his analyses of different groups and the way they check their populations, while limited by the small data available at the time, is genius.