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Thomas Malthus
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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.
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Thomas Malthus was one of the most important English economic theorists of the early nineteenth century. He is best known for his influential work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published anonymously in 1798, but reissued in six editions by 1826. Malthus further developed the laissez-faire (French for "let things alone") views of economist Adam Smith (1723-1790), who promoted the capitalist principles of self-interest and free competition in the marketplace. Malthus's book proved valuable for Charles Darwin (1809-1882) as he began to formulate his concept of natural selection through the struggle for existence. Though Malthus's population principle has been largely discredited, fears of overpopulation periodically stir new interest in his ideas.
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Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) has a hallowed place in the history of biology, despite the fact that he and his contemporaries thought of him not as a biologist but as a political economist. Malthus grew up during a time of revolutions and new philosophies about human nature. He chose a conservative path, taking holy orders in 1797, and began to write essays attacking the notion that humans and society could be improved without limits.
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During the late 1700s, Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus each entered their predictions on the future of the world’s economies into the history books. In his writings in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith theorized that national economies could be continuously improved by means of the division of labor, efficient production of goods, and international trade. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus predicted that the sustainable production of food in relation to population was vital to the mere existence of national economies in order to ensure an able labor force. Smith believed that the success or failure of a nation to progress toward development was dependent upon the quantity of labor and money invested in the production of manufactured goods. Malthus calculated that labor and funds would better serve a country if invested in agricultural enterprises aimed at feeding its own people.
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Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), a minister and an economist, published thisessay in 1798, which challenged theEnlightenment's indomitable belief in the perfectibility of humankind. Theessay raised much controvers y in the earlynineteenth century. It not only resigned some social groups to theinevitability of poverty, but ... encouraged themto abandon traditional charity. The custom of indiscriminately aiding allindigent people with satisfactory relief,argued Malthusians, only exacerbated the problem. The following passage onfood supply and population increaselaid the foundation for his bleak argument.From An Essay on the Principle of Population, Th omas Malthus, John Murray,1826.
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Thomas Malthus was born in 1776 to a wealthy family in England. Malthus was educated at home until in 1784 he was accepted to Jesus College, Cambridge. As Malthus developed his philosophy through his education, his beliefs were formed after the earlier writings of William Godwin and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Malthus developed a strong opinion on population versus means of subsistence and expressed that opinion in his most famous work, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). His philosophy was immensely popular on its introduction, and became accepted as an orthodox utilitarian tradition. Some ... were offended by Malthus's belief that there would never be a perfect society or golden age.
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Thomas Malthus