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The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus (February, 1766
– December 23, 1834), who is usually known
as Thomas Malthus, although he preferred to be
known as "Robert Malthus," was an England|English
demography|demographer and political
economy|political economist best known for his
pessimistic but highly influential views. 
Although it is popularly assumed that it was these
pessimistic views that gave economics the nickname
Dismal Science, the phrase was actually coined by
the historian Thomas Carlyle in reference to an
anti-slavery essay written by John Stuart Mill.

==Life==
Malthus was born to a prosperous family. His
father was a personal friend of the philosopher
and sceptic 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 language|Greek. 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; he and his wife had 3
children. In 1805 he became Britain's (and
possibly the world's) first professor in political
economy at the East India Company College at
Haileybury in Hertfordshire. Here, he developed a
theory of demand supply mismatches which he called
gluts. Considered ridiculous at the time, his
theory was later confirmed by the Great Depression
and works of John Maynard Keynes. 

Malthus was buried at Bath Abbey in England.

==Demographic theory==

Malthus's views were largely developed in reaction
to the optimistic views of his father and his
associates, notably Rousseau and William Godwin.
In An Essay on the Principle of Population,
published in 1798, Malthus predicted population
would outrun food supply, leading to a decrease in
food per person. This prediction was based on the
idea that population if unchecked increases at a
geometric series|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,
etc.) (See Malthusian catastrophe for more
information.) Only misery, moral restraint and
vice (which for Malthus included contraception)
could check excessive population growth. 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. Essentially what
this resulted in was the promotion of legislation
which degenerated the conditions of the poor in
England.

==The Influence of Malthus==
The influence of Malthus's theory of population
was very great. Previously, high fertility had
been considered an economic plus 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. Many 20th century economists,
such as Julian Simon, have criticised such
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 (especially the green
revolution). 

In the 1830s his writings strongly influenced Whig
reforms which overturned Tory paternalism and
brought in the Poor Law|Poor Law Amendment Act of
1834. Malthus's theory was also a key influence on
both of the co-founders of modern evolutionary
theory Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
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. Wallace considered it "the
most interesting coincidence" that both he and
Darwin were independently led to the theory of
evolution through reading Malthus. Ironically,
given Malthus's own opposition to contraception,
his work was also a strong influence on Francis
Place (1771–1854), whose Neo-Malthusian
movement was the first to advocate contraception.

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 Census being conducted
in 1801.

Malthus was, of course, wrong in thinking that
sexual abstinence could have a significant effect
on human population growth.  The condom, on the
other hand, and especially the birth control pill,
have prevented the Malthusian catastrophe
throughout much of the world.  In many nations
population has stabilized, technology has
increased the food supply, and even the poor
usually have enough to eat.  Those parts of the
world in which birth control is illegal,
unpopular, or considered immoral, however,
continue to suffer from growing populations and a
shrinking food supply.  

Malthus continues to have considerable influence
to this day, despite a large number of both
liberal and conservative thinkers who still assert
that overpopulation is not a problem.  Many
liberals think that blaming hunger on
overpopulation is a case of blaming the victim. 
Many conservatives think that overpopulation is
used as an excuse for contraception, which they
consider immoral.   One famous book about the
population explosion is Paul Ehrlich's The
Population Bomb. Erlich predicted, in the late
sixties, that hundreds of millions would die from
a coming overpopulation crisis in the seventies,
and that by 1980 life expectancy in the US would
be only 42 years.  Critics of the idea that
overpopulation is a problem often cite this book
as proof that predictions of a population
explosion are wrong.  And yet, the world
population continues to grow exponentially, and a
child dies of starvation every fifteen seconds.

==Critics of Malthus==
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 and the essayist William Hazlitt.  The
highpoint of opposition to Malthus's ideas in the
middle of the nineteenth century was the writings
of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who argued that
what Malthus saw as the problem of the pressure of
population on the means of production was, in
fact, 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.  For a review of the
historical development of Malthusian thinking and
its role in the evolution of capitalist society
through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth
century, see Eric  B. Ross's The Malthus Factor:
Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist
Development (1998).

==See also==
* Cornucopian - the opposite of the Malthusian
school of thought
* Malthusian Catastrophe
* Malthusianism
* Social Darwinism - a related idea
* Giovanni Botero - a sixteenth century thinker
whose work foreshadows Malthus' ideas on
population catastrophe

==External links==
*
http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop.html
An Essay on the Principle of Population,
1st edition, 1798.  Library of Economics and
Liberty.  Free online, full-text searchable. 
*
http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.ht
ml An Essay on the Principle of Population,
6th edition, 1826.  Library of Economics and
Liberty. Free online, full-text searchable. 
Malthus published a major revision to his first
edition--his second edition--in 1803.  His 6th
edition, published 1826, and revising his various
2nd-5th editions, became his widely-cited 6th and
final revision.

*Gutenberg|no=4239|name=An Essay on the Principle
of Population
*Gutenberg|no=4335|name=Grounds for an Opinion on
Restricting Foreign Corn
*Gutenberg|no=4336|name=Nature and Progress of
Rent
*Gutenberg|no=4334|name=Observations on the Corn
Laws

*
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/malthus.htm
Malthus profile and extensive links
*
http://www.economics.mcmaster.ca/ugcm/3ll3/malthus
/index.html Online copies of several of Malthus'
works
*
http://members.optusnet.com.au/exponentialist/inde
x.htm Exponentialist attempt to correct Malthus'
proposed universal law of nature
*
http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3
/malthus/malbib.htm Malthus bibliography
*
http://homepages.caverock.net.nz/~kh/bobperson.htm
l Malthus biography
* http://desip.igc.org/malthus The International
Society of Malthus