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Thomas Malthus

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         Thomas Robert Malthus
   Born February 13, 1766
        Surrey, England
   Died December 23, 1834
        Haileybury, Hertford, England

   Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, FRS ( February 13, 1766 – December 23,
   1834), usually known as Thomas Malthus, although he preferred to be
   known as "Robert Malthus", was an English demographer and political
   economist. He is best known for his pessimistic but highly influential
   views on population growth.

Life

   Thomas Robert Malthus was born to a prosperous family, his father
   Daniel being a personal friend of the philosopher David Hume and an
   acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The young Malthus was educated
   at home until his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1784. There
   he studied many subjects and took prizes in English declamation, Latin
   and Greek, but his principal subject was mathematics. He earned a
   masters degree in 1791 and was elected a fellow of Jesus College two
   years later. In 1797, he was ordained and became an Anglican country
   parson.

   Malthus married in 1804 and had three children with his wife. In 1805
   he became Britain's first professor in political economy at the East
   India Company College at Hertford Heath, near Hertford in
   Hertfordshire, now known as Haileybury. His students affectionately
   referred to him as "Pop", or "Population" Malthus. In 1818, he was
   selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

   Thomas Robert Malthus refused to have his portrait painted until 1833
   because of embarrassment over a hare lip. This was then corrected by
   surgery, and Malthus was then considered handsome. Malthus also had a
   cleft palate (inside his mouth) that affected his speech. These cleft
   related birth defects were relatively common in his family. Malthus was
   buried at Bath Abbey in England.

Principle of population

   Malthus's views were largely developed in reaction to the optimistic
   views of his father and his associates, notably Rousseau. Malthus's
   essay was also in response to the views of the Marquis de Condorcet. In
   An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798,
   Malthus made the famous prediction that population would outrun food
   supply, leading to a decrease in food per person. (Case & Fair, 1999:
   790). He even went so far as to specifically predict that this must
   occur by the middle of the 19th century, a prediction which failed for
   several reasons, including his use of static analysis, taking recent
   trends and projecting them indefinitely into the future, which often
   fails for complex systems.


   Thomas Malthus

     The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to
   produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or
    other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able
   ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of
   destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should
     they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics,
    pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their
    thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete,
   gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow
              levels the population with the food of the world.


   Thomas Malthus

   This Principle of Population was based on the idea that population if
   unchecked increases at a geometric rate (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128,
   etc.) whereas the food supply grows at an arithmetic rate (i.e. 1, 2,
   3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.).

   Only natural causes (eg. accidents and old age), misery (war,
   pestilence, and above all famine), moral restraint and vice (which for
   Malthus included infanticide, murder, contraception and homosexuality)
   could check excessive population growth. See Malthusian catastrophe for
   more information.

   Malthus favoured moral restraint (including late marriage and sexual
   abstinence) as a check on population growth. However, it is worth
   noting that Malthus proposed this only for the working and poor
   classes. Thus, the lower social classes took a great deal of
   responsibility for societal ills, according to his theory. In his work
   An Essay on the Principle of Population, he proposed the gradual
   abolition of poor laws. Essentially what this resulted in was the
   promotion of legislation which degenerated the conditions of the poor
   in England, lowering their population but effectively decreasing
   poverty.

   Malthus himself noted that many people misrepresented his theory and
   took pains to point out that he did not just predict future
   catastrophe. He argued "...this constantly subsisting cause of
   periodical misery has existed ever since we have had any histories of
   mankind, does exist at present, and will for ever continue to exist,
   unless some decided change takes place in the physical constitution of
   our nature."

   Thus, Malthus regarded his Principle of Population as an explanation of
   the past and the present situation of humanity as well as a prediction
   of our future.

   Additionally, many have argued that Malthus did not fully recognise the
   human capacity to increase our food supply. On this subject Malthus
   wrote "The main peculiarity which distinguishes man from other animals,
   is the means of his support, is the power which he possesses of very
   greatly increasing these means."

Malthus’s Evolutionary System

   Some claim that there is no specific prediction of Malthus regarding
   the future; that what some interpret as prediction was merely Malthus's
   illustration of the power of geometric (or exponential) population
   growth compared to the arithmetic growth of food production. Rather
   than a prediction of the future, the Essay is an evolutionary social
   theory. Eight major points regarding evolution are found in the 1798
   Essay:
     * Population level is severely limited by subsistence
     * When the means of subsistence increases, population increases
     * Population pressures stimulate increases in productivity
     * Increases in productivity stimulates further population growth
     * Since this productivity can never keep up with the potential of
       population growth for long, there must be strong checks on
       population to keep it in line with carrying capacity.
     * It is through individual cost/benefit decisions regarding sex,
       work, and children that population and production are expanded or
       contracted.
     * Checks will come into operation as population exceeds subsistence
       level.
     * The nature of these checks will have significant effect on the rest
       of the sociocultural system—Malthus points specifically to misery,
       vice, and poverty. (See Frank W. Elwell, 2001, A Commentary on
       Malthus' 1798 Essay on Population as Social Theory, The Edwin
       Mellon Press for an extended exposition.)

   It is this theory of Malthus—not some easily dismissed prediction—that
   has had huge influence on evolutionary theory in both biology (as
   acknowledged by Darwin and Wallace) and the social sciences (such as
   Spencer). Malthus's population theory has also profoundly affected the
   modern day ecological-evolutionary social theory of Gerhard Lenski and
   Marvin Harris. He can thus be regarded as an element of the canon of
   socioeconomic theory.

The influence of Malthus

   The influence of Malthus's theory of population was substantial.
   Michael H. Hart published a book called The 100: A Ranking of the Most
   Influential Persons in History in 1978 which placed Malthus at number
   80 in this worldwide ranking. Ironically, Malthus did not make the top
   100 Greatest Britons.

   At Haileybury, Malthus developed a theory of demand supply mismatches
   which he called gluts. Considered ridiculous at the time, his theory
   was a precursor to later theories about the Great Depression, and to
   the works of admirer and economist John Maynard Keynes.

   Previously, high fertility had been considered an economic advantage,
   since it increased the number of workers available to the economy.
   Malthus, however, looked at fertility from a new perspective and
   convinced most economists that even though high fertility might
   increase the gross output, it tended to reduce output per capita.
   Malthus has been widely admired by, and has influenced, a number of
   other notable economists such as David Ricardo (whom Malthus knew
   personally) and Alfred Marshall.

   A distinguished early convert was British Prime Minister, William Pitt
   The Younger. In the 1830s Malthus's writings strongly influenced Whig
   reforms which overturned Tory paternalism and brought in the Poor Law
   Amendment Act of 1834.

   Concerns about Malthus's theory also helped promote the idea of a
   national population Census in the UK. Government official John Rickman
   was instrumental in the first modern Census being conducted in 1801.

   Malthus was proud to include amongst the earliest converts to his
   population theory the leading creationist and natural theologian,
   Archdeacon William Paley whose Natural Theology was first published in
   1802. Both men regarded Malthus' Principle of Population as additional
   proof of the existence of a deity.

   Ironically, given Malthus's own opposition to contraception, his work
   was a strong influence on Francis Place ( 1771– 1854), whose
   Neo-Malthusian movement was the first to advocate contraception. Place
   published his Proofs on the Principle of Population in 1822.

   Malthus’s idea of man’s “Struggle for existence” had decisive influence
   on Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. Other scientists related
   this idea to plants and animals which helped to define a piece of the
   evolutionary puzzle. This struggle for existence of all creatures is
   the catalyst by which natural selection produces the “survival of the
   fittest”, a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer (Spiegel 282). Darwin, in
   his book The Origin of Species, called his theory an application of the
   doctrines of Malthus in an area without the complicating factor of
   human intelligence. Darwin, a life-long admirer of Malthus, referred to
   Malthus as "that great philosopher" (Letter to J.D. Hooker 5th June,
   1860) and wrote in his notebook that "Malthus on Man should be
   studied". Wallace called Malthus's essay "...the most important book I
   read..." and considered it "the most interesting coincidence" that both
   he and Darwin were independently led to the theory of evolution through
   reading Malthus.

   Thanks to Malthus, Darwin recognised the significance of intraspecies
   competition between populations of the same species (e.g. the lamb and
   the lamb), not just interspecies competition between species (e.g. the
   lion and the lamb). Malthusian population thinking also explained how
   an incipient species could become a full-blown species in a very short
   timeframe. The significance of Malthus's influence on Darwin was
   perhaps best highlighted by Robert M. Young (Darwin's Metaphor:
   Nature's Place in Victorian Culture, 1965), Professor of Psychotherapy
   and Psychoanalytic Studies at Sheffield University, England.

   Founder of UNESCO, evolutionist and Humanist, Julian Huxley wrote of
   "The Crowded World" in his Evolutionary Humanism (1964), calling for a
   World Population Policy. Huxley was openly critical of Communist and
   Roman Catholic attitudes to birth control , population control and
   overpopulation. Today world organisations such as the United Nations
   Population Fund acknowledge that the debate over how many people the
   Earth can support effectively started with Malthus. Julian's brother,
   Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, also seems to have been
   influenced by Malthusian theories on population. In Brave New World,
   the popular form of birth control is known as the Malthusian Belt. It
   is mentioned frequently by the females in the novel including the
   female protagonist Lenina Crowne.

   Karl Marx's social determinism has its roots in Malthus’s theory as
   well. Marx however rejected Darwin’s biological determinism and instead
   embraced social determinism (in other words one’s decisions are made as
   a direct reaction to one’s circumstances). He saw social ills as caused
   by unjust or faulty institutions and social arrangements in large part
   caused by capitalism.

   Malthus continues to have considerable influence to this day. One
   famous recent example of this is Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The
   Population Bomb. Ehrlich predicted, in the late 1960s, that hundreds of
   millions would die from a coming overpopulation crisis in the 1970s,
   and that by 1980 life expectancy in the United States would be only 42
   years. Other famous examples are the 1972 book The Limits to Growth
   from the self-styled Club of Rome, and the Global 2000 report to the
   then President of the United States of America. Science fiction author
   Isaac Asimov issued many appeals for population control reflecting the
   perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R.
   Ehrlich.

   More recently, a school of "neo-Malthusian" scholars has begun to link
   population and economics to a third variable, political change and
   political violence, and to show how the variables interact. In the
   early 1980s, James Goldstone linked population variables to the English
   Revolution and David Lempert devised a model of demographics,
   economics, and political change in the multi-ethnic country of
   Mauritius. Goldstone has since modeled other revolutions by looking at
   demographics and economics and Lempert has explained Stalin's purges
   and the Russian Revolution in terms of demographic factors that drive
   political economy. Ted Robert Gurr has also modeled political violence
   using similar variables in several comparative cases. These approaches
   compete with explanations of events as a result of political ideology
   and suggest that political ideology is really a creation that follows
   demographic forces.

   Malthus is widely regarded as the founder of modern demography. Malthus
   had proposed his Principle of Population as a universal natural law for
   all species, not just humans. Instead, today, his theory is widely
   regarded as only an approximate natural law of population dynamics for
   all species. This is because it can be proven that nothing can sustain
   exponential growth at a constant rate indefinitely.

   Nonetheless, Malthus continues to openly inspire and influence even
   futuristic visions, such as those of K Eric Drexler relating to space
   advocacy and molecular nanotechnology. As Drexler put it in Engines of
   Creation: "In a sense, opening space will burst our limits to growth,
   since we know of no end to the universe. Nevertheless, Malthus was
   essentially right."

   Malthus has also inspired retired physics professor, Albert Bartlett,
   to lecture over 1,500 times on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy",
   which promotes sustainable living and explains the mathematics of
   overpopulation.

   The Malthusian growth model now bears Malthus' name. The logistic
   function of Pierre Francois Verhulst results in the well known S-curve.
   Yet the logistic growth model favoured by so many critics of the
   Malthusian growth model was created by Verhulst in 1838 only after
   reading Malthus's essay.

   Malthus's arithmetic model of food supply is almost universally
   rejected as it can be clearly demonstrated that food supply has kept
   pace with population for the past two centuries (see below).

   Malthus's position as professor at the British East India Company
   training college, which he held until his death, gave his theories
   considerable influence over Britain's administration of India through
   most of the 19th century, continuing even under the Raj after the
   company's dissolution in 1858. The most significant result of this
   influence was that the official response to India's periodic famines,
   which had been occurring every decade or two for centuries, became one
   of not entirely benign neglect: the famines were regarded as necessary
   to keep the "excess" population in check. In some cases even private
   efforts to transport food into famine-stricken areas were forbidden.
   However, this "Malthusian" policy did not take account of the enormous
   economic damage done by such famines through loss of human capital,
   collapse of credit structures and financial institutions, and the
   destruction of physical capital (especially in the form of livestock),
   social infrastructure and commercial relationships. The presumably
   unintended consequence was that production often did not recover to
   pre-famine levels in the affected areas for a decade or more after each
   disaster, well after the lost population had been regained. Malthusian
   theory also influenced British policies in Ireland during the 1840s, in
   which relief measures during the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849) were
   neglected and mass starvation was seen as a natural and inevitable
   consequence of the island's supposed over-population.

   Although it is popularly assumed that Malthus's pessimistic views gave
   economics the nickname "the Dismal Science", the phrase was actually
   coined by the historian Thomas Carlyle in reference to laissez-faire
   economic theories in general.

Criticisms of Malthus

Contemporary

   William Godwin responded to Malthus's criticisms of his own arguments
   with On Population (1820).

   Other theoretical and political critiques of Malthus and Malthusian
   thinking emerged soon after the publication of the first Essay on
   Population, most notably in the work of the reformist industrialist
   Robert Owen , the essayist William Hazlitt ( Malthus And The Liberties
   Of The Poor, 1807) and economists John Stuart Mill and Nassau William
   Senior (Two Lectures on Population , 1829), and moralist William
   Cobbett. Also of note was True Law of Population (1845) by politician
   Thomas Doubleday, an adherent of Cobbett's views.

Marxist

   The highpoint of opposition to Malthus's ideas came in the middle of
   the nineteenth century with the writings of Karl Marx (Capital, 1867)
   and Friedrich Engels (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,
   1844), who argued that what Malthus saw as the problem of the pressure
   of population on the means of production was actually that of the
   pressure of the means of production on population. They thus viewed it
   in terms of their concept of the labor reserve army. In other words,
   the seeming excess of population that Malthus attributed to the
   seemingly innate disposition of the poor to reproduce beyond their
   means was actually a product of the very dynamic of capitalist economy.

   Engels called Malthus's hypothesis "...the crudest, most barbarous
   theory that ever existed, a system of despair which struck down all
   those beautiful phrases about love thy neighbour and world
   citizenship."

   After the Russian famine of 1921 and the Soviet-made 1932-1933 famine
   of Holodomor, which resulted from maldistribution rather than
   overpopulation, the official Soviet spokesman at the 1954 United
   Nations conference on population in Rome, T.V. Ryabushkin claimed
   "...In a socialist country...the problem of excessive population no
   longer arises...the Malthusian theory is completely wrong..."

Evolutionist

   Evolutionists John Maynard Smith and Ronald Fisher were both critical
   of Malthus's hypothesis, though it was Fisher who referred to the
   growth rate r (used in equations such as the logistic function) as the
   Malthusian parameter. Fisher referred to "...a relic of creationist
   philosophy..." in observing the fecundity of nature and deducing (as
   Darwin did) that this therefore drove natural selection. Smith doubted
   that famine was the great leveler that Malthus insisted it was.

Cornucopian

   Economists of the 19th century were well aware that improvements in the
   division and specialization of labor, increased capital investment, and
   other factors had rendered Malthus's warnings ever more implausible.
   Even in the absence of any improvement in technology or increase of
   capital equipment, an increased supply of labor may have a synergistic
   effect on productivity that overcomes the law of diminishing returns.
   As American land economist Henry George observed with characteristic
   piquancy in dismissing Malthus, "Both the jayhawk and the man eat
   chickens; but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more
   men, the more chickens." Many 20th century economists, such as Julian
   Lincoln Simon, have also criticised Malthus's conclusions. They note
   that despite the predictions of Malthus and the Neo- Malthusians,
   massive geometric population growth in the 20th century has not
   resulted in a Malthusian catastrophe, largely due to the influence of
   technological advances (see below) and the expansion of the market
   economy, division of labor, and stock of capital goods. Such arguments
   are echoed by skeptical environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg. Malthus is
   thus regarded by some such as British physicist John Maddox as little
   more than a failed prophet of doom.

Anthropological

   To date, the most sustained and trenchant critique of Malthusian
   doctrine and its influence on policy is from anthropologist Eric Ross.
   In The Malthus Factor: Population, Poverty, and Politics in Capitalist
   Development, Ross depicts Malthus's work as a pseudo-scientific
   rationalization of the social inequities produced by the Industrial
   Revolution, anti-immigration movements, the eugenics movement, the
   various international development movements.

Empirical

   Recent research and significant empirical evidence have showed some of
   Malthus's predictions to be unrealized. For example, the population has
   continued to grow, yet the prices of resources and foods relative to
   wages has decreased, indicating the supply of food (and resources) has
   grown relative to population size. This paradox can be easily resolved
   because Malthus made three assumptions which are further elucidated by
   history after his death.

   First, it is widely acknowledged that population growth is almost never
   exponential, but instead influenced by so many factors that no simple
   mathematical model can describe it. Demography since Malthus's time
   show that population growth rates flatten and then invert as a function
   of economic prosperity. Malthus lived in the time when England went
   through a geometric growth before birth rates in that country
   flattened.

   Second, the growth of food production has never been restricted to the
   rudimentary processes Malthus described. Twentieth-century researchers
   have provided documentation of the process of agricultural
   intensification (pioneered by economist Ester Boserup) by which
   production can be raised in response to population increases and market
   demands. Production has also been expanded by societal and
   technological advances in agriculture such as the Neolithic Revolution,
   British Agricultural Revolution, and the Green Revolution, food supply
   has outgrown population and is expected to continue doing so by the
   Food and Agriculture Organization. A review of the most recent edition
   of USDA Agricultural Statistics reveals that the yield of corn has
   grown from 113.5 to 160.5 bushels per acre between 1995 and 2004. This
   represents a 3.5% average annual compound rate of growth. Similar
   results are reported for wheat -- with growth rates varying by type of
   wheat. (Tables 1-3 and 1-36) However this growth has been based heavily
   on a finite resource, petrochemicals, and may yet prove unsustainable.
   This growth has also been based upon exhaustion of certain soil
   resources, such as creation of the barren central highland plateau of
   Madagascar, which by definition cannot be repeated. (Some debate exists
   on the extent to which Genetically Modified Crops will contribute to
   continued agricultural growth.) However, the market economy - defined
   as mutually beneficial exchange between decentralized actors - is
   responsible for increases in productivity, and is internally
   sustainable. Likewise, Malthus clearly underestimated the power of the
   human capacity to increase the means of human subsistence on Earth. For
   example, Malthus did not fully understand the additional leeway built
   into the agricultural system - diets composed of different kinds of
   foods can have a wide range of different land-use efficiencies.

   Third, Malthus assumed that technology would be held constants, even
   while population was growing at an exponential rate.

   And fourth, historical demography has shown that famines have never
   killed sufficient numbers of people to qualify as "Malthusian" checks
   on population. The demographers S. C. Watkins and J. Menken studied
   historical famines (Population and Development Review 1985), and found
   that even in the most severe cases, the population deficit created by
   famine is made up in just a few years. Thus, the populations of India,
   Ethiopia and the Sahel are far larger today than when these places
   suffered famines that were described as "Malthusian." Amartya Sen
   (Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation,
   Clarendon Press, 1981), has demonstrated that famines are not defined
   by food availability declines, but rather by the collapse in food
   entitlement, namely the ability of the poor to purchase sufficient
   food.

Epitaph

   Sacred to the memory of the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus, long known to
   the lettered world by his admirable writings on the social branches of
   political economy, particularly by his essay on population.

   One of the best men and truest philosophers of any age or country,
   raised by native dignity of mind above the misrepresentation of the
   ignorant and the neglect of the great, he lived a serene and happy life
   devoted to the pursuit and communication of truth.

   Supported by a calm but firm conviction of the usefulness of his
   labors.

   Content with the approbation of the wise and good.

   His writings will be a lasting monument of the extent and correctness
   of his understanding.

   The spotless integrity of his principles, the equity and candour of his
   nature, his sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of
   heart, his benevolence and his piety are still dearer recollections of
   his family and friends.

   Born Feb 14 1766 Died 29 Dec 1834.
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