Thomas Robert Malthus

Background

Thomas Robert Malthus was born on February 13, 1766, in Westcott, England, United Kingdom. He was the sixth child of seven born to Daniel Malthus and his wife, the former Henrietta Catherine Graham. He grew up in The Rookery, a country house in Westcott, near Dorking in Surrey. Malthus was bullied from an early age because of his syndactyly, or webbed feet. This sparked his controversial ideas about eugenics. His father Daniel Malthus was a gentleman of good family and independent means and a friend of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Education

The young Malthus received his education at home in Bramcote, Nottinghamshire, and then at the Warrington Academy from 1782. Warrington was a dissenting academy, which closed in 1783; Malthus continued for a period to be tutored by Gilbert Wakefield. Malthus entered Jesus College, Cambridge in 1784.

Daniel Malthus, a scholar and a friend and admirer of Rousseau, provided a stimulating home life and education for the boy, and later sent him to study with Richard Graves at Claverton and at the Dissenting Academy of Warrington under Gilbert Wakefield.

In 1784 Malthus went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, where his tutor was William Frend. He read for the mathematical tripos and graduated in 1788, being ninth wrangler; but he also read widely in French and English history and literature and in Newtonian physics. He had already shown his interest in the practical rather than the abstract. He took the Master of Arts degree in 1791 and was elected a Fellow of Jesus College two years later. He played games and lived a full social life, apparently unaffected by his cleft palate and harelip. The friends he made at Cambridge influenced the rest of his life; the most important was William Otter (1768-1840), later bishop of Chichester. Malthus and Otter traveled extensively in Europe and maintained the relationship after their marriages.

Career

Malthus followed graduation with ordination, but more in the tradition of the younger sons of English gentry entering the Church than as a step consistent with his intellectual development. For some years he held a curacy at Okewood Chapel in Surrey, near the home of his parents at Albury, and was active in his pastoral functions from 1792 to 1794. He showed a genuine interest in and concern for the local people and an understanding of their problems, a sympathy which makes surprising his later references to the laboring class almost as though they were a community apart. From 1803 until his death he held a sinecure as rector of Walesbury in Lincolnshire.

In 1799 Malthus and Otter, together with friends from Jesus College, E. D. Clarke and J. M. Cripps, traveled through northern Germany and Norway. Afterward Malthus and Otter went on to Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Malthus’ detailed diaries of these journeys provided some of the evidence he needed to develop his theory of population growth. Clarke also published a record of his travels. In 1800 Malthus’ parents died; by 1802 he was traveling again, this time in France and Switzerland, in a party that included his cousin Harriet Eckersall.

Jesus College elected Malthus to a fellowship in 1793, and he was resident intermittently until he had to resign upon his marriage to Harriet Eckersall in 1804. About the time of Malthus’ marriage, the East India Company founded a new college, first at Hertford and then at Haileybury, to give a general education to staff members before they went on service overseas. The first known professorship of history and political economy was established there, and Malthus was invited to fill the post. He took it up in 1805, and it gave him the security of a home and an income that enabled him to spend the rest of his life writing and lecturing.

In order to teach political economy, Malthus needed to extend his knowledge. He wrote two pamphlets on the Corn Laws (1814, 1815); a short, unexceptionable tract on rent (1815); statements on Haileybury (1813, 1817); and a major work, Principles of Political Economy (1820). This included an analogy of his population theory with the quantity of funds designed for the maintenance of labor and the prudential habits of the laboring classes.

In 1819 the Royal Society elected Malthus to a fellowship. He was also a member of the French Institute and the Berlin Academy, and a founding member of the Statistical Society (1834). In 1827 he was called upon to give evidence on emigration before a committee of the House of Commons.

Malthus’ first writing was an unpublished pamphlet, The Crisis (extracts are quoted by Otter). Stimulated by Pitt’s Poor Law Bill of 1796, he supported the proposal for children’s allowances, but was already expressing unease at the current idea that an increases in population was desirable.

The style of the essay - short paragraphs, pungent sentences, and an elegant but matter-of-fact air - undoubtedly contributed to the impact of the work on a community already deeply concerned with the social problems of the Industrial Revolution. It was also brief - only some 50,000 words - and the edition seems to have been small, since the work is now rare.

Malthus’ next publication, The present High Price of Provisions (1800), again published anonymously, returned to the problems of poor relief.

The second and greatly expanded edition of the Principle of Population was published in 1803 and carried the author’s name. Later editions of the Essay were rewritten and included new appendixes of evidence, until the sixth edition (1826) required three volumes and contained some 250,000 words. Malthus’ last statement on population was his Summary View of the Principle of Population (1830), rewritten from an article he had done for the 1824 supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was condensed again to some 20,000 words, but by now it contained a greater element of social comment. There is not only the observation of tendencies but also reference to the bad structure of society and the unfavorable distribution of wealth. There have been numerous reprints and translations. Malthus has been widely read, but he has also been widely misquoted or quoted out of context. His observations have been interpreted by both his supposed followers and his enemies with overtones which suggest that his work is prescriptive rather than descriptive.

Achievements

• Thomas Malthus was one of the most important English economic theorists of the early nineteenth century. He is best known for his influential work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published anonymously in 1798 but reissued in six editions by 1826. Malthus was elected to the Royal Society in 1819, the Political Economy Club in 1821, and the Royal Society of Literature in 1824. He was also admitted to the Statistical Society of London in 1834, the French Academy of Sciences in 1833, and the Royal Academy of Berlin the same year.
  
  Malthus's book proved valuable for Charles Darwin as he began to formulate his concept of natural selection through the struggle for existence. However bitter and distorted the controversy has been, Malthus’ achievement was to show that population studies, although overlaid with emotional and often irrational influences, can be examined and analyzed empirically, discussed on a rational basis, and ultimately can form the subject of positive policymaking.

Works

More photos

• book

  • An Essay on the Principle of Population

    (This controversial work is notable for influencing Charle...)

    1798
  • Nature and Progress of Rent 1815
  • Principles of Political Economy 1820
  • Observations on the effects of the corn laws 1814
  • The present high price of provisions 1800
  • The Measure of Value Stated and Illustrated 1823

Religion

Malthus was an Anglican priest.

Politics

Malthus criticized the Poor Laws for leading to inflation rather than improving the well-being of the poor. He supported taxes on grain imports (the Corn Laws), because food security was more important than maximizing wealth.

Views

Malthus was not the first to propound the theory that population tends to increase proportionately faster than the supply of food - and he freely acknowledged that he was not - nor was the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, published anonymously in 1798, a fully worked-out thesis. He wrote: “I had for some time been aware that population and food increased in different ratios; and a vague opinion had been floating in my mind that they could only be kept equal by some species of misery or vice.”

Stimulated by doubts about Pitt’s policy and by publications of William Godwin, Condorect, and others, malthus hammered out the Essay in discussions with his father, who accepted Godwin’s belief in the potential immortality and perfectibility of man. Countering apparently rosy visions, Malthus swung to pessimism about the inevitability of poverty and the irresponsibility of the poor, an attitude which his opponents called inhuman. These observations were based at least partially on experience, for he had, as a curate, seen how in the country many births were registered but few deaths, yet, as he said, “sons of labourers are very apt to be stunted in their growth, and are a long while arriving at maturity.”

The central argument of the Essay lies in two postulates: “That food is necessary to the existence of man”; “That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state”; and four conclusions:

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of those two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence.

The postulates are taken as self-evident; the deduced consequences are examined in more detail, including the various checks on population, such as postponed marriage, infant mortality, epidemics, and famine. He presented no numerical data to support either the tendency to geometrical rate of growth of the population or the arithmetical rate of growth of food supply; these suppositions are reasonable but largely intuitive.

Malthus seems also to have failed to realize that although the existence of checks is a firm deduction, there is no reason to suppose that they operate constantly.

Malthus realized that he needed more evidence to support his views and that he had not taken sufficient account of the effects of rising standards of living. He therefore listened to criticisms and used information gathered on his travels in Europe, information which tended to be observational rather than numerical. For example, he correlated the poverty of fishermen in Drontheim with their earlier marriages and larger families - in contrast with the people of the interior parts of the country - without considering other possible variables. In his next publication he made the case that linking poor relief to the cost of grain resulted in driving the price even higher. He also pointed out that whereas previously grain had been exported, there was no longer enough to go round; and therefore, assuming that agricultural production had increased or at least not declined, the population must have increased. The first census in Great Britain (1801) tended to confirm this assertion.

The second and greatly expanded edition of the Principle of Population provided the theoretical framework to the conclusions of the first Essay, with several additional chapters, including information from China and Japan as well as from countries he had visited. The argument was rewritten in terms more academic if less immediate. He explained that “everything depends on the relative proportions between population and food, and not on the absolute number of people,” and that when the absolute quantity of provisions is increased, the number of consumers more than keeps up with it. If, therefore, he argued, it is not possible to maintain the production of food to satisfy the population, then the population must be kept down to the level of food; failure will result in deprivation and misery. He then went on to reexamine positive and preventive checks, introducing the new idea of voluntary “natural restraint” by late marriage and sexual abstinence before marriage. He does not seem to have considered abstinence after marriage and was strongly opposed to both abortion and contraception.

Malthus appears to have ignored the point that any average must have many examples above the average. Visualizing a progressive increase in the proportion of the dependent population under the laws then in effect, he admitted to being “really unable to suggest any provision which would effectually secure us against an approach to the evils here contemplated, and not be open to the objection of violating our promises to the poor.” Probably this pamphlet was widely read and was a main source of the image of Malthus as a pessimist and supporter of laissez-faire political economy. He was an analyst, not a creator of imaginative legislation; and the problems he dealt with are still with us in one form or another. He was at least more clear than some politicians about “our promises to the poor.” Nothing came of whitebread’s bill in its original form, and Malthus had produced no constructive amendments, so the law remained unchanged until the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), which abolished relief outside the workhouses that were to be set up under boards of guardians for those qualified and willing to live there.

More cheerfully and positively, in his Principles of political Economy (1820) Malthus was proposing investment in public works and private luxury as a means of increasing effective demand, and hence as a palliative to economic distress. The nation, he thought, must balance the power to produce and the will to consume.

After all the accretions on Malthusian principles, it was perhaps natural that Marx and Engels should have seen Malthus as an advocate of repressive treatment of the working class, rather than appreciating his anticipation of their own belief that the demand for labor regulates population.

Membership

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  Royal Society , United Kigdom

• Political Economy Club , United Kigdom

• 

  Royal Society of Literature , United Kingdom

• 

  Statistical Society of London , United Kingdom

• 

  French Academy of Sciences , France

• Royal Academy of Berlin , Germany

Personality

From Malthus's writings, one receives the impression of an inflexible fanatic and possibly a misanthrope, but everyone who met Malthus found him kind and benevolent. He tall and good-looking, but with a cleft lip and palate.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Adam Smith

Connections

On 13 March 1804, Thomas Robert Malthus married Harriet Eckersall, daughter of John Eckersall of Claverton House, near Bath. They had one son, Henry, who followed his father into the ministry, and two daughters: Emily, who married, and Lucy, who died before her father. Although their life was quiet, Robert and Henrietta Malthus traveled and entertained their many friends, including David Ricardo, Harriet Martineau, Otter, and William Empson, who was also at Haileybury. Malthus managed, in spite of the controversy flowing around him, to keep a reputation as a warm, charming, and lively companion.

Father:

Daniel Malthus

Mother:

Henrietta Catherine Graham

Son:

Henry Malthus

Daughter:

Emily Malthus

Daughter:

Lucille Malthus

Friend:

William Otter

William Otter was a lifelong friend of Malthus since Cambridge, later bishop of Chichester. Malthus and Otter traveled extensively in Europe and maintained the relationship after their marriages. Malthus’ son, Henry, married Otter’s daughter Sophia. Otter probably wrote the memorial to Malthus in Bath Abbey, and he certainly wrote the “Memoir” published with the second edition of the Principles of Political Economy.

teacher:

Gilbert Wakefield

Friend:

David Ricardo

Ricardo and Malthus are known as opponents in their views on the political economy. They did not meet until 1811 but formed a valuable friendship.

References

• Thomas Robert Malthus
  2018
• Thomas Robert Malthus: Critical Assessments
  1986
• Malthus: A Very Short Introduction
  2013
• The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population
  2016