Thomas Malthus was a British economist who startled early 19th century society with his pessimistic prediction that population growth would exceed food supply. Mankind would sink into deep misery. He was one of Adam Smith's famous students. Adam Smith tried to find the factors producing welfare. Thomas Malthus on the other hand focused on the interdependence between poverty and population growth. In his famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus expressed his view that famine and poverty were natural outcomes of population growth and food supply.