Thomas malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus (ˈtʰɒməs ˈɹʷɒbət ˈmælθəs) (13 February 1766 in Surrey – 29 December 1834 in Bath) was an Anglican clergyman and British scholar with great influence on economics politics and demographics.

A member of the Royal Society since 1819, he popularized the theory of economic rent and is famous for the anonymous publication in 1798 of the book An Essay on the Principle of Population (An Essay on the Principle of Population).

He is considered one of the first demographers. Before Malthus were Johann Peter Süssmilch (1707-1767), whom Pele mentions in his book, and John Graunt (1620-1674).

Biography

Born in Surrey on February 13, 1766, his main study was the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which he stated that population tends to grow in geometric progression, while food only increases in arithmetic progression, so the population is always limited by the means of subsistence. Malthus was educated according to the pedagogical principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of whom his father was a close friend. He completed his studies at Jesus College, Cambridge. After graduating in philosophy and theology, he was ordained as an Anglican clergyman and headed Albury parish for a time.

In 1793 he was appointed a member of the management team of Jesus College, a post he had to resign in 1804 when he got married. Around the same time, the East India Company founded Haileybury, a new university institution designed to train officials who would later serve England overseas; there Malthus served as professor of economics from 1805 until his death in 1834.

Contexts

In the theoretical thought that appears in the first anonymous edition of Essay on the principle of population, it must be located in at least four coordinates in which Malthus was:

• Representative of the classical economy, friend of David Ricardo with whom he polluted, influenced by Jean Charles Léonard of Sismondi.
• Refutation of the Enlightenment and its idea of progress, rejection of the idea of perfectibility of man, put into question, for Malthus himself, for the madness of the French Revolution and therefore refutation of the optimism of thinkers of the centuryXVIII like William Godwin (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice), Nicolas de Condorcet (L'esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès d l'esprit humain) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed in the future evolution of reason, of science, of technique and of the unlimited capacity of improvement of society, composed of good and free men united under a social contract.
• Divine imposition of virtue that hinders any change of human nature, and that Malthus observed in the danger of the growth of the population opposed to endless progress towards a utopian society by the productive limitations of the earth. For Malthus: "The power of the population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to guarantee the livelihood of man".
• England at the end of the 18th century which presented a grim picture: great demographic growth (Gregory King gives a figure of 5 million in 1700 and 9.2 million in 1801) caused, among other reasons, by the industrial revolution; together with problems in food production, motivated by the fences of the open fields; the rise of prices and the existence of the laws of the English poor which, for Malthus and others, promoted irresponsible procreation.

Essay on the principle of population

Essay on the principle of population, 1826

There were six editions of his Essay on the principle of population, the first in 1798 as anonymous, the second, already with his name in 1803, and the last in 1826. The first edition was purely theoretical, it did not document many of the postulates. The latest edition is more documented and argued, although, on occasions, it does not justify his propositions with data either.

Editions Testing on the principle of the population and related

• 1798: 1.a edition (anonymous), An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future improvement of society with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers. I test on the principle of the population, as it affects the future improvement of society with comments on Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and other writers.
• 1803: 2.a more extensive edition (250.000 words, signature Malthus): An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness; with an enquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions. Testing on the principle of the population; or a view of the past and present of its effects on human happiness; with an investigation into our perspectives regarding the future elimination or mitigation of the evils that causes it.
• 1806, 1807, 1817 and 1826: 3.a to 6.a edition; with not very important changes on the 2.a edition.
• 1823: Article Population (Population) in the British Encyclopedia.
• 1830: Malthus makes a long extract on the article of 1823 (Population) and print it as A summary view of the Principle of Population. A summary of the principle of the population.

Problem statement

In Chapter I of the First Book, on the obstacles that have been placed to the increase of the population, Malthus points out that:

But in man the effects of this obstacle (natural limits of space and food) are very complicated; guided by the same instinct, it stops the voice of reason that inspires him the fear of seeing his children with needs that he cannot satisfy. If you yield to this righteous fear is often by virtue. If, on the contrary, the population grows more than the means of subsistence.

And further on it indicates the progression of the population (geometrically) and that of food (arithmetically).

When it does not prevent any obstacle, the population doubles every twenty-five years, growing from period to period, in a geometric progression.
The means of subsistence, in the most favourable circumstances, are not increased but in arithmetic progression.

To show that the population has the capacity to double every 25 years, use the example of population growth in the United States over the last century XVIII, where thanks to early marriages and abundant food resources, there are no restrictions on the natural force of population expansion.

After wars or epidemics, with very high mortality in a given region, the population that survives finds itself with a relative abundance of food resources. The growth capacity of the surviving population under favorable conditions causes the original population to recover in a short period of time.^{[citation required]}

Obstacles to population growth

For Malthus there were some obstacles or brakes (checks) to population growth that he classified in two ways, as privative and destructive obstacles (according to voluntariness) and as restriction or moral repugnance, vices and miseries or sufferings.

Private barriers, are those who are volunteers

• Moral restriction: abstinence of marriage, chastity, delay of marriage to accumulate resources.
• Vicios: debauchery, practices contrary to nature, rape of marital bed, criminal unions, irregular unions.

Destructive obstaclesThey're not volunteers.

• Miseria: Malsan occupations, hard work, poverty, bad food, unhealthyness, diseases, epidemics, hunger, pest.
• Disgrace: wars, natural disasters, political conflicts.

Fundamental Propositions

Malthus condenses the basic content of his book into three fundamental propositions:

1.- The population is necessarily limited by means of subsistence.
2.- The population grows invariably whenever livelihoods grow, unless it is prevented by powerful and manifest obstacles.
3.- The higher force of population growth cannot be stopped without producing misery.

Malthusianism

The name of Malthusianism or Malthusianism is given to the demographic, economic and sociopolitical theory, developed by Malthus during the industrial revolution, according to which the growth capacity of the population responds to a geometric progression, while the rate of increase of the resources for its survival can only do so in arithmetic progression. According to this hypothesis, if repressive obstacles do not intervene (wars, plagues, famines, etc.), the birth of new beings keeps the population within the limit allowed by the means of subsistence, in hunger and poverty.

Influence of Malthusianism

Malthus was highly influential in economic, political, social, and scientific thought. Malthus remains a writer of great importance and controversy.

He influenced, through the novelist Harriet Martineau, evolutionary biologists, particularly Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, for whom Malthusianism was a kind of intellectual springboard to the idea of natural selection and the theory of evolution.

Malthus's theory is a recurring theme in the social sciences. For example, John Maynard Keynes, in his book The Economic Consequences of Peace, opens the polemic with a Malthusian image of Europe's political economy as unstable because of Malthusian demographic pressure on food supplies. food. Paul R. Ehrlich, in his Malthusian book Population Bomb, has played an important role in the environmental movement of the 1960s and helped provide a rationale for for the research and development of contraceptive methods.

Many models of growth and resource depletion have a Malthusian inspiration:

• The energy consumption rate will surpass the ability to find and produce better and new sources of energy so there will be a crisis that could join a food supply crisis if the population continues to grow.
• The Club of Rome and its report The limits of growth.
• Organizations like Optimum Population Trust.

Criticism of Malthus

Criticism of Marx

Karl Marx, in a note in Capital, exposes one of the first critiques of the Malthusian theory. Marx regards Malthus's demographic theory as a superficial plagiarism from authors as diverse as Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and others. Marx defends, against Malthus, that progress in science and technology will allow the exponential growth of resources.

Inequality and poverty

Malthus understood that the poor multiplied, prey to the instinct of reproduction, even in conditions of misery, among other things due to their irresponsibility, fostered, Malthus understood, by the English poor laws that for Malthus meant a release from the restriction moral and finally an unnecessary burden for the State in the form of aid to parents and children that involved unnecessary costs. That is why a new Poor Law of 1834 (the year Malthus died) was made, inspired by his theories, which was much worse: it centralized public assistance and the unemployed and unable to support themselves were & #34;collected" like any stray animal in an institution called a workhouse or "work house", which separated four blocks of homeless people: the elderly and the disabled; children; men without disabilities and women without disabilities. Apart from the problem of child labor, it eventually became a punishment and a sign of discrimination and social shame. However, novels and articles by Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others, rose up against this law and these institutions. and Friedrich Engels' criticisms of Malthusian pauperism and the 1834 Poor Law in his The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

Malthus established an important relationship between population and wealth (food and other goods necessary for life) but maintained that basic idea as an inexorable constituent of an unequal society, where privileged rich people did not need an excessive population if it could cause them expenses in tax form. In this sense, Malthus provided a good conscience to the ruling classes -the unpredictability of the poor and their situation is the sole responsibility of themselves- and strengthened the existing social order.

One of Malthus's most famous quotes is the following:

A man who is born in an already occupied world, if his parents cannot feed him and if society does not need his work, he has no right to claim even the smallest portion of food (in fact, that man is leftover). In the great banquet of Nature you have not been reserved any cover. Nature commands him to leave and does not take long to fulfill his threat.

In another version:

The man who is born in an already occupied world has no right to claim any part of food and is more in the world. In the great banquet of nature there is not covered for him. Nature requires him to leave, and it will not take long to execute such an order itself.

However, he advocates reducing economic inequality between social classes as much as possible. Throughout the essay on population, he cries out on numerous occasions for economic measures aimed at increasing agricultural production as the only means of increasing the "wealth of nations", which he himself considers inseparable from an increase in the happiness of the population and specifically in the improvement of the situation of the most disadvantaged classes.

Malthus ultimately defends that, although it is inevitable that a part of society lives in misery, economic inequalities are reduced through the growth of the middle classes. To simplify his position in this regard, he uses the metaphor of a lumber merchant who wants to exploit the wood of an oak, where he represents society:

The most valuable parts of an oak [...] are neither the roots nor the branches, and yet these are indispensable for the existence of the trunk that is in the center and is the desired part. The wooden negotiator will never intend [...] an oak without roots or branches, but if he found some form of cultivation that would allow him to increase [...] the trunk and decrease [...] roots and branches, he would have reason to strive to generalize his application. In the same way, even if we cannot purport to exclude the wealth and poverty of society, if we found a form of government that would reduce the number of people in the extreme zones and increase that of the middle zone, we would certainly have the obligation to adopt it.

Accurate forecasts subject to interpretation

Thomas Malthus stated in 1798 in his Essay on the Principles of Population that despite remarkable progress in agricultural technology and food production, population growth would neutralize this progress and a an important part of humanity would always remain in misery and hunger. Contraceptive methods and birth control have limited population growth in developed countries, so that food production has exceeded the necessary level. However, a large part of the world population has remained in conditions of poverty and even hunger, and even in developed countries, hunger has not been totally eradicated in the marginal social classes.

Malthusian Economics

Malthus defended the long-term stability of the economy over the short term. He criticized the English poor laws, supported –contrary to the positions of classical economics and in closed circles– the protectionist Corn Laws, which introduced a system of taxes on British wheat imports, since He thought that these measures would encourage domestic production, thus promoting long-term profits.

Malthus' theory of population has contributed to Economics being also known as the dark science, a name given to it by Thomas Carlyle.

Malthus also made important contributions to the theory of value and its measurement, as well as to the theory of crises and underconsumption.

One of the ideas that worried Malthus was what he called “general stagnation”; keeping the distance in time, both in the past and today, many companies produce goods that he called "essential", such as food, and "non-essential", such as luxury items, desired by people. There are many companies that have gone bankrupt for producing large quantities of goods, which later people do not buy, either because they are not interested in them, because they are not motivating, because they do not know about them or because other more innovative ones appear and many times cheaper.

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Original English

• 1798 - An Essay on the Principle of Population (Testing on the principle of the population)

• 1798: 1.a anonymous edition, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future improvement of society with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers.
• 1803: 2.a more extensive edition (250 000 words) with Malthus signature: An essay on the Principle of Population; or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness; with an enquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions.
• 1806, 1807, 1817 and 1826: 3.a to 6.a edition; with not very important changes on the 2.a edition.

• 1800 - Anonymous edition, An Investigation of the cause of the Present High Price of Provisions and General Wealth of the Country.
• 1815 - An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent and the Principles by which it is Regulated.
• 1815 - The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting th Importation of Foreign Corn, intended as an Appendix to Observations on the Corn Laws.
• 1820 - Principles of Political Economy considered with a View to their Practical Application.
• 1823 - The Measure of Value stated and illustrated with an Application of it to the alterations in the Value of the English Currency since 1790.
• 1823 - Population, article for British Encyclopedia.
• 1827 - Definitions in Political Economy; Preceded by an Inquiry into the Rules Which Ought to Guide Political Economists in the Definition and Use of Their Terms, with Remarks on the Deviation from These Rules in Their Writings.
• 1830 - A Summary View of the Principle of Population, long extract on the article of 1823 (Population)

Spanish translation

• 1846 - Testing on the principle of the populationThomas Robert Malthus, Madrid, 1846. (Complete view and download on Google Books)
• 1966 - First rehearsal on population (translation of Patricio de Azcárate Diz), Editorial Alliance, 2000, ISBN 84-206-3984-2. With John Maynard Keynes prologue Robert Malthus: Cambridge's first economist (The First of the Cambridge Economists 1933, published in Essays in Biography, 1933.