Biography thomas robert malthus economic contribution

Thomas Robert Malthus

British political economist (–)

"Malthus" redirects here. For the demon Halphas, sometimes called Malthus, see Halphas.

Thomas Robert MalthusFRS (; 13/14 February – 29 December ) was an English economist, cleric, and scholar influential in the fields of political economy and demography.

In his book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the population, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level. In other words, humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living, a view and stance that has become known as the "Malthusian trap" or the "Malthusian spectre". Populations had a tendency to grow until the lower class suffered hardship, want and greater susceptibility to war, famine, and disease, a pessimistic view that is sometimes referred to as a Malthusian catastrophe. Malthus wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible.

Malthus considered population growth as inevitable whenever conditions improved, thereby precluding real progress towards a utopian society: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." As an Anglican cleric, he saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behavior.Malthus wrote that "the increase of population is necessarily limited by subsistence", "population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase", and "the superior power of population repress by moral restraint, vice, and misery."

Malthus criticised the Poor Laws for leading to inflation rather than improving the well-being of the poor. He support

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    Malthus was interested in everything about populations. He accumulated figures on births, deaths, age of marriage and childbearing, and economic factors contributing to longevity. His main contribution was to highlight the relationship between food supply and population. Humans do not overpopulate to the point of starvation, he contended, only because people change their behavior in the face of economic incentives.

    Noting that while food production tends to increase arithmetically, population tends to increase naturally at a (faster) geometric rate, Malthus argued that it is no surprise that people thus choose to reduce (or “check”) population growth. People can increase food production, Malthus thought, only by slow, difficult methods such as reclaiming unused land or intensive farming; but they can check population growth more effectively by marrying late, using contraceptives, emigrating, or, in more extreme circumstances, resorting to reduced health care, tolerating vicious social diseases or impoverished living conditions, warfare, or even infanticide. Malthus was fascinated not with the inevitability of human demise, but with why humans do not die off in the face of such overwhelming odds. As an economist, he studied responses to incentives.

    Malthus is arguably the most misunderstood and misrepresented economist of all time. The adjective “Malthusian” is used today to describe a pessimistic prediction of the lock-step demise of a humanity doomed to starvation via overpopulation. When his hypothesis was first stated in his best-selling An Essay on the Principle of Population (), the uproar it caused among noneconomists overshadowed the instant respect it inspired among his fellow economists. So irrefutable and simple was his illustrative side-by-side comparison of an arithmetic and a geometric series—food increases more slowly than population—that it was often taken out of context and highlighted as his main observation. The obser

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    • Thomas Robert Malthus

    Thomas Robert Malthus () was the founder of population studies and one of the greatest English economists of the 19th century.

    Robert Malthus profoundly influenced legislation governing the state’s approach to poverty and unemployment and was the first professor of economics at any English higher education institution. 

    Early life

    The son of a country gentleman, Malthus was educated privately at home and by tutors, except for the year he spent at the Dissenting Academy at Warrington. The last of the tutors was Gilbert Wakefield, a former Fellow of Jesus and the finest classical scholar to emerge from the College before the 20th century.

    At Jesus College

    It was on Wakefield’s recommendation that Robert Malthus came to the College. His Tutor at Jesus was William Frend, another radical, who was soon to declare himself a Unitarian. Having been a precocious and mischievous teenager, at Cambridge Malthus became a serious student.

    He began his career at Jesus College as a pensioner (an ordinary fee-paying student) in He graduated in with a first class degree in Mathematics, and was a Fellow from until his marriage in  

    As with most of his contemporaries, graduation was followed by ordination and his appointment as curate of a chapel in his home parish in Surrey. He lived there with his family and visited Cambridge only occasionally, even after his election to a fellowship; he never held a teaching post in the College.

    Essay on the Principle of Population

    Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society anonymously in when he was The inspiration appears to have been his own reading and the animated discussions that he had with his father, his father’s friends and, perhaps, his sisters. On the title page of the copy he gave his father one of them added the words “especially addressed to young clergymen”.

    In the following year he

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    • Thomas Malthus ( - )

    Thomas Malthus, c  ©English economist Malthus is best known for his hugely influential theories on population growth.

    Thomas Robert Malthus was born near Guildford, Surrey in February His father was prosperous but unconventional and educated his son at home. Malthus went on to Cambridge University, earning a master's degree in In , he was made a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. In , Malthus became professor of history and political economy (the first holder of such an academic office) at the East India Company's college in Haileybury, Hertfordshire, where he remained until his death.

    In , Malthus was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and two years later he became a member of the Political Economy Club, whose members included David Ricardo and James Mill. In , he was elected as one of the 10 royal associates of the Royal Society of Literature. Malthus was also one of the co-founders of the Statistical Society of London in

    Malthus' most well known work 'An Essay on the Principle of Population' was published in , although he was the author of many pamphlets and other longer tracts including 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent' () and 'Principles of Political Economy' (). The main tenets of his argument were radically opposed to current thinking at the time. He argued that increases in population would eventually diminish the ability of the world to feed itself and based this conclusion on the thesis that populations expand in such a way as to overtake the development of sufficient land for crops. Associated with Darwin, whose theory of natural selection was influenced by Malthus' analysis of population growth, Malthus was often misinterpreted, but his views became popular again in the 20th century with the advent of Keynesian economics.

    Malthus died on 23 December