THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS (1766-2834)
Malthus was interested in everything about population. He accumulates births,
deaths, marriage and childbearing ages, and economic factors that contribute to
longevity. Its main contribution is to highlight the relationship between food supply and
population. Humans are not overpopulate to the point of starvation, he argues, simply
because people change their behavior in the face of economic incentives. Noting that
while food production tends to increase in a series of counts, populations tend to
increase naturally at (faster) geometric rates, Malthus argues that it is not surprising
that people are thus choosing to reduce (or "check") population growth. People can
increase food production, Malthus thought, only by slow, difficult methods such as
reclamation of unused land or intensive agriculture; But they can examine population
growth more effectively by marrying once, using contraception, emigrating, or, in more
extreme circumstances, switching to reduced health care, tolerance of socially
malignant diseases or poor living conditions, war, or even infanticide. Malthus was
fascinated not by the inevitability of human death, but by why humans did not die in
the face of such an overwhelming obstacle. As an economist, he learned the response
to incentives.
Malthus is arguably the most misunderstood economist of all time. The adjective
"Malthus" used today to describe the pessimistic prediction of the key death steps of
humans destined for starvation through overpopulation. When the hypothesis was first
stated in his best-selling An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), the
commotion was caused by the instantaneous overshadowing of the inspiration
between noneconomists among fellow economists. So indisputably and simply is an
illustration of his side-by-side comparison of arithmetic and geometry increasing the
slower-food series of the population which is often taken out of context and highlighted
as his main observation. The observation is, indeed, so it is actually easy to forget the
true conclusion of Malthus: that since humans are not all hungry, economic choices
must be at work, and it is the duty of an economist to study those choices.
Malthus addressed other issues. The Principles of Political Economy (1820) was
the first text to describe the schedule of demand as separate from the quantity
requested at a given price. The exposition of the demand curve clarified the debate
about the law and the say gluts (which he objected to in the long run on the grounds
that the market adjusted). His work centers on the contrast between the long-term, as
exemplified by population growth, and the short-term, reflected in cyclical events such
as those affecting agriculture. Writing before the industrial revolution, Malthus did not
fully appreciate the impact of technology (i.e., pesticides, refrigeration, mechanical
agricultural equipment, and increased crop yields) on food production.
Malthus died in 1834, before seeing the economy marked as "the science of the
gloom." The phrase, coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1849 to demean John Stuart Mill, is
often mistakenly thought to refer to Malthus's contribution to the economy of population
growth.
Thomas Robert Malthus studied philosophy and mathematics at St. John's
University, Cambridge. Although he is known for his dire warnings against
overpopulation, Malthus is not against population growth per se. Instead, it opposes
growth that will surpass the food supply. He predicted that the population would grow
geometrically, while the food supply would increase only by a series of counts,
resulting in mass starvation. His apocalyptic vision and subsistence theory of wages
(wages would fall to the minimum necessary to retain workers because high wages
induced population growth) helped to stigmatize economics as "a grim science."
Writing before the industrial revolution, Malthus could not fully appreciate the
impact of technology (i.e., pesticides, refrigeration, mechanical agricultural equipment,
and improved crop yields) on food production. Further discrediting the claim is the fact
that life expectancy has almost doubled, from forty years over time to more than
seventy years today. Although the famine continued, it was more often political
upheavals, rather than population growth, that made people hungry.
Although Malthus foresees a catastrophic undersupply of commodities in the
long term, he believes there may be a general oversupply in the short term. These
oversupplies, which he called "gluts," are now called recessions or depressions.
