Thomas Robert Malthus

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Robert Malthus was born on the 13th or the 14th of February 1766 at The Rookery, a small elegant mansion near Dorking in Surrey. He arrived into a family already woven into the fabric of English intellectual life, and he would leave it permanently altered. His central idea was simple enough to state in a sentence, and devastating enough to haunt every subsequent debate about hunger, poverty, and the limits of human progress. Population, he argued, always grows faster than the food supply. The consequences, he believed, were not a policy failure. They were a law of nature. What drove him to that conclusion? What were the personal and intellectual forces that shaped one of history's most contested theories? And why does a clergyman-turned-economist, buried in Bath Abbey in 1834, keep appearing in blockbuster films, nineteenth-century novels, and arguments about global hunger today?

• 2. A Clergyman's Roots

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  Daniel Malthus, Thomas's father, was by the account of economists William Petersen and John Maynard Keynes a gentleman of good family and independent means, and a personal friend of both David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The household Thomas grew up in was shaped by that reforming, optimistic spirit. Daniel believed society was improvable, even perfectible. His son would spend his career arguing the opposite. Thomas was the sixth of seven children. His mother Henrietta was the daughter of Daniel Graham, apothecary to kings George II and George III, and her own face appeared in William Hogarth's painting The Graham Children, completed in 1742. The Malthus family sold The Rookery in 1768 and moved to a less extensive establishment at Albury, not far from Guildford.

  Thomas had a cleft lip and palate that affected his speech from birth, a condition that had appeared in earlier generations of the family. His social theorist friend Harriet Martineau, who was herself hard of hearing, wrote that because of his sonorous voice he was the only person she could hear clearly without her ear trumpet. Martineau's detail inverts what might be assumed: the man whose words marked millions was almost disqualified from speaking them aloud.

  At the Warrington Academy from 1782, Malthus was taught by Gilbert Wakefield at a dissenting institution that closed the following year. He continued studying under Wakefield at the latter's home in Bramcote, Nottinghamshire before entering Jesus College, Cambridge in 1784, where he took prizes in English declamation, Latin, and Greek, and graduated Ninth Wrangler in mathematics. He took Anglican orders in 1789 and became a curate at Oakwood Chapel in the Surrey parish of Wotton, the position he held when his most famous book took shape.

• 3. The Essay and Its Argument

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  An Essay on the Principle of Population appeared in 1798, published anonymously, and it was written in direct reaction to the optimism of Daniel Malthus and his associates, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Malthus also aimed the book as a specific response to writings by William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, who had died just four years earlier in 1794. The argument can be stated briefly: food production grows arithmetically; population grows exponentially. The gap between them means that any improvement in the food supply produces a temporary rise in wellbeing, followed by population growth that consumes the surplus and returns people to their prior condition.

  In the Essay, Malthus identified two categories of check on population. Positive checks raise the death rate: hunger, disease, and war. Preventive checks lower the birth rate: birth control, later marriage, and celibacy. He wrote that a population in times of resource abundance could double in 25 years. He also described what happens when it does: the growing number of laborers drives up the cost of food, real wages fall, and the difficulties of raising a family eventually reduce the rate of growth. He concluded that preventive checks, particularly later marriages, were the means by which a higher standard of living might be maintained.

  The first edition contained a theory of mind that Malthus later suppressed. It proposed that innate bodily desires and impulses gave rise to the mental apparatus, a materialist view that drew accusations of atheism. He removed this section from all subsequent editions. The Essay went through six revisions before 1826, each one incorporating new data, responses to critics, and shifts in Malthus's own thinking. The 1803 second edition acknowledged his authorship for the first time.

• 4. Professor, Traveller, Debater

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  In 1799, Malthus toured Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia with his college friend William Otter, traveling part of the way with Edward Daniel Clarke and John Marten Cripps. He used the journey to collect population data. During the Peace of Amiens in 1802 he traveled to France and Switzerland in a party that included his relation Harriet, who would become his wife. He married Harriet Eckersall on the 13th of March 1804; she was eleven years his junior, the eldest daughter of his first cousins John and Catherine Eckersall. She would outlive him by thirty years.

  In 1805, Malthus became Professor of History and Political Economy at the East India Company College in Hertfordshire, the first such academic appointment in Britain. His students called him "Pop", "Population", or "web-toe" Malthus. In 1818 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. When a political maneuver threatened to close the college in 1817, Malthus wrote a pamphlet defending it; the East India Company reprieved the institution that same year.

  The central intellectual contest of his mature career was the Malthus-Ricardo debate of the 1820s, a sustained argument with the free-trade theorist David Ricardo. Both men had written books titled Principles of Political Economy. The disagreement turned on economic rent: Ricardo defined it as value in excess of real production, a drag created by ownership. Malthus argued instead that rent was a form of economic surplus. They also diverged on Say's law, which states that there can be no general glut of goods; Malthus denied this, arguing that demand-supply mismatches were real and persistent. Leslie Stephen later wrote that their differences amounted to different shades of opinion from men who shared the same first principles, both claiming Adam Smith as their authority. Ricardo himself, after corresponding with Malthus from 1817, came to consider political economy in a broader sense adapted to legislation, partly under Malthus's influence.

• 5. Controversy and Legacy

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  Malthus stood as the only economist of note to publicly support the Corn Laws after the Napoleonic Wars. Parliament passed those laws in 1815, banning the import of foreign corn until domestic corn reached 80 shillings per quarter. The resulting rise in food prices caused serious rioting in London and contributed to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819. Malthus had actually written a tentative pamphlet supporting free trade in grain in 1814, the year before the laws passed, arguing that cheaper foreign sources should supplement increasingly expensive British corn. His later defence of the laws on grounds of food self-sufficiency placed him against the dominant direction of economic opinion.

  His 1827 book Definitions in Political Economy presented 60 numbered paragraphs of terms and definitions, making Malthus the first economist to explicitly organize and publish a coherent glossary of defined terms for his field. The editor of The Scotsman, John Ramsay McCulloch, reviewed it on the front page of the newspaper in March 1827 with a response described by observers as largely personal derogation. McCulloch implied Malthus wanted to dictate terms to other economists; critics noted his review addressed neither the rules of chapter one nor the definitions of chapter ten. Despite having supporters including Thomas Chalmers, Richard Jones, and William Whewell of Cambridge, Malthus's reputation as an economist declined through the last years of his life.

  Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both read Malthus. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison read him. John Maynard Keynes, who later extended Malthus's theory of demand-supply mismatches into a full economic system, became one of his admirers. Malthus contributed the article on Population to the Encyclopaedia Britannica supplement in 1823. He died suddenly of heart disease on the 29th of December 1834 at his father-in-law's house and was buried in Bath Abbey. His epitaph there calls him "one of the best men and truest philosophers of any age or country", raised above misrepresentation by "native dignity of mind."

• 6. Malthus in Culture

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  Ebenezer Scrooge's line in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, refusing charity to the poor with the remark that if they would rather die "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population", is a direct echo of Malthusian logic. Dickens wove similar concerns through Oliver Twist and Hard Times, and he grouped Malthus with Jeremy Bentham as figures he regarded as unjust and inhumane.

  In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the reproductive controls of the World State are literalized in the Malthusian belt worn by women, containing the regulation supply of contraceptives. The musical Urinetown, written by Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann, stages a society where drought has made water scarce and citizens pay a fee to urinate; the revolution that wins the day ends with the cast dying because water conservation collapses, and the penultimate line is "Hail Malthus!". In the 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War, the villain Thanos executes a universe-spanning genocide driven by a concern about population outpacing resources, a scenario critics and commentators read as directly Malthusian.

  Malthus's youngest daughter Lucille died unmarried in 1825 at age 17, years before her father. His son Henry became vicar of Effingham, Surrey in 1835 and of Donnington, Sussex in 1837, marrying Sofia Otter, daughter of Bishop William Otter, the same man who had toured Europe with Malthus in 1799 and later wrote the Memoir of Malthus included in the posthumous second edition of the Principles of Political Economy in 1836.