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Thomas Robert Malthus was the founding father of population theory of classical economics and his most well-known work AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION was initially published in 1798. Malthus was often misinterpreted, but his views became popular again in the 20th century with the advent of Keynesian economics.
Malthus made essential contributions to classical economics and he has been called the most influential classical economist along with Adam Smith, John Keynes, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. John Keynes called him the "first of the Cambridge economists". In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes praised Malthus's understanding of an economy's difficulties in maintaining full employment.
Malthus founded the population theory of classic economics. He told the world that population would increase in an exponential way. On the other hand, food supply could only increase to a certain point due to the limitation of land productivity and other factors. Are Malthus's ideas totally irrelevant today? Not at all. The fact remains that the world population keeps increasing, and will keep increasing. An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent was Malthus’s work to address rent and its regulation that they were favourite subjects of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx.
Malthus’s work also influenced Charles Darwin and John Keynes, two of the greatest thinkers. Charles Darwin pioneered evolution theory through his book On the Origin of Species and his theory influenced not only biology but also economics and sociology.
This is a must-read book for people who are also interested in the deepest thoughts and views about the core economic subjects such as rent and regulation by Thomas Malthus, one of the greatest thinkers on the planet.
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.
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.
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.