Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, 1766-1834.

Robert Malthus (he went by his middle name, [n]) was born in "the Rookery", a country estate in Dorking, Surrey (south of London).  He was the second son of Daniel Malthus, a country gentleman, an Enlightenment enthusiast of liberal views, who left a remarkable imprint on his son..  Daniel was an avid disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume (both of whom he knew personally), accordingly, Robert Malthus was initially educated according to Rousseauvian precepts by his father and a series of tutors (no fan of formal education, Daniel Malthus himself had studied at Oxford, but left without a degree "because of a contempt for the distinction"). The young  Malthus subsequently placed in the Warrington Academy, a Dissenter school run by the unitarian Gilbert Wakefield, before finally taking the conventional route and enrolling in Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784. Malthus achieved the rank of 9th Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos in 1788, and was ordained that same year as a minister of the Church of England in 1788.  He earned his M.A. in 1791.

Around 1793, Malthus became a curate of Okewood chapel, a few miles from his father's house in the sleepy town of Albury (in west Surrey).  Malthus was elected Fellow of Jesus College in June 1793 (not 1797 as sometimes stated), and consequently divided his time between Cambridge and Albury.  In his interminable intellectual debates with his father, Malthus wrote his first tract, The Crisis, a political critique of the Pitt administration, but at his father's advice, never published it.  In 1797, William Godwin's Enquirer came out, which opened another round of debates with his father over Godwin's "perfectibility of man" thesis.  A similar thesis had also been advanced by the Marquis de Condorcet's Esquisse in 1795, which was also discussed.  Malthus's decided to set his ideas down on paper.  He eventually published it as an anonymous pamphlet, with the title Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). 

In this famous work, Malthus posited his hypothesis that the natural (unchecked) rate of population growth always exceeds the growth of means of subsistence.  This implied that actual (checked) population growth is kept in line with food supply growth by "positive checks" (starvation, disease and the like, elevating the death rate) and "preventive checks" (i.e. postponement of marriage, that keeps down the birthrate).  Malthus's hypothesis implied that actual population always has a tendency to push above the food supply.  Because of this tendency, any attempt to ameliorate the condition of the lower classes by increasing their incomes or improving agricultural productivity would be fruitless, as the extra means of subsistence would be completely absorbed by an induced boost in population.  As long as this tendency remains, Malthus argued, the improvement and "perfectibility" of society will always be out of reach.  The future of mankind, Malthus pessimistically concluded, would always be marred by "misery and vice". 

Malthus's essay elicited a courteous answer from Godwin, and the two engaged in a brief correspondence, prompting Malthus to start contemplating a second edition with some new ideas and, no less importantly, empirical evidence to back his thesis.  In 1799,  Malthus went on a tour in Germany, Scandinavia and Russia, returning home around the time of his father's death in 1800.  He published his tract on the High Price of Provisions, announcing a new edition of the Essay was on the way.  In 1802, with hostilities suspended by the Peace of Amiens, Malthus did a quick tour of France and Switzerland. 

Malthus's second edition of the Essay finally appeared in June 1803, much revised and expanded. Malthus concentrated on bringing the empirical evidence gathered from his travels to bear.  He also introduced the possibility of "moral restraint" (voluntary abstinence which leads to neither misery nor vice) bringing the unchecked population growth rate down to a point where the tendency is gone.  In practical policy terms, this meant inculcating the lower classes with middle-class virtues, which he believed was to be primarily done by urging and preaching to the poor to change their improvident habits.  He also conjectured the enbourgeoisement of the proletariat could be furthered along with the introduction of universal suffrage, state-run education for the poor and, more controversially, the elimination of the Poor Laws and the establishment of an unfettered nation-wide labor market, so that the poor would fear falling and aspire to rise.  Malthus also tentatively suggested that once the poor had "a taste for the comforts and conveniences of life", then they would demand a higher standard of living for themselves before starting a family.  Thus, although seemingly contradictory, Malthus is already suggesting the kernel of the possibility of  a "demographic transition", i.e. that sufficiently high incomes may be enough by themselves to reduce fertility.

The Essay transformed Malthus into an intellectual celebrity.  He was reviled by many as a  prophet of doom, an enemy of the working class, a hard-hearted monster, the man who "defended smallpox, slavery and child-murder and denounced soup-kitchens, early marriage and parish allowances" (n),  etc.  The ridicule and invective rained down on Malthus by the pamphleteering classes was relentless, including some of the most prominent commentators of the day, such as William Hazlitt, William Cobbett, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (Malthus's critics derisively deployed the appellation "Parson Malthus", to stress Malthus's lowly rank at the bottom of the church hierarchy and remind that he never received preferment).  But a sufficient number of people accepted it and popularized it, and by the late 1810s, it is fair to say that Malthus's hypothesis was almost universally accepted and pressure for Poor Law reform placed at the political forefront .  Even his severest critics grudgingly acknowledged his Essay for what it was: the first serious economic study of the welfare of the lower classes..  Of all his critics on population, Malthus deigned only to reply in print (anonymously) to William Godwin in the 1821 Edinburgh Review.

In 1804, Malthus got married and thereby forfeited his fellowship at Cambridge.  In 1805, Malthus was appointed Professor of Modern History and Political Economy at the East India College in Haileybury, thereby becoming the England's first academic economist. 

Malthus got interested in monetary topics in 1800, when he published a pamphlet (much praised by Keynes), expounding an endogenous theory of money.  Contrary to the Quantity Theory, Malthus argued that rising prices are followed by increases in the quantity supplied of money.  Around 1810, Malthus came across a series of tracts by a stockbroker, David Ricardo, on the bullionist controversy.  He immediately wrote to Ricardo and the two men initiated a correspondence (and a friendship) that would last for over a decade.  The Malthus-Ricardo relationship was warm in all respects but one -- economics.  They found themselves on opposites sides of the fence on practically every economic question.  Except population.  Ricardo accepted the Malthusian population doctrine, and incorporated the Malthusian wage-fertility dynamics to pin down the "natural wage" in his 1817 treatise.  Despite attempts to displace it later with the Wages Fund theory, the "iron law of wages" would remain a part of the canonical long-run model of the Classical school.  

In 1814, Malthus launched himself into the Corn Laws debate then raging in parliament.  After a first pamphlet, Observations, outlining the pros and cons of the proposed protectionist laws, Malthus tentatively supported the free traders, arguing that as cultivation as British corn was increasingly expensive to raise, it was best if Britain relied at least in part on cheaper foreign sources for its food supply.  He changed his mind the next year, in his 1815 Grounds of an Opinion pamphlet, siding now with the protectionists.  Foreign laws, he noted, often prohibit or raise taxes on the export of corn in lean times, which meant that the British food supply was captive to foreign politics.  By encouraging domestic production, Malthus argued, the Corn Laws would guarantee British self-sufficiency in food.  

In his 1815 Inquiry, Malthus came up with the differential theory of rent.   Although it was simultaneously discovered by Torrens, West and Ricardo, Malthus's pamphlet was the first of the four to be published. Refuting older contentions that rent was a cost of production, Malthus argued that it was merely a deduction from the surplus.  Rent, Malthus argued, is enabled by three facts: (1) that agricultural production yields a surplus; (2) that the wage-fertility dynamics guarantee that the price of corn would remains steadily above its cost of production; (3) that fertile land is scarce.  Ricardo own 1815 essay was actually a response to Malthus.  Ricardo dismissed Malthus's arguments, arguing that Malthus's "third" cause -- that land differs in quality and is limited in quantity -- is sufficient to explain the phenomenon of rent.  He incorporated Malthus's theory of rent with his own theory of profits to provide the "Classical" statement of the theory of distribution.  He also dismissed Malthus's feeble attempts to defend parasitical landlords and the Corn Laws.

Malthus's own criticism of Ricardo's 1815 essay led them into a debate on the question of "value".  Malthus supported Smith's old "labor-commanded" theory of value, whereas Ricardo favored the "labor-embodied" version.  The outcome of the discussion was Ricardo's Principles in 1817, which set down the doctrine of the Classical School on value, distribution and production, incorporating at least two of Malthus's own contributions: the "natural wage" version of Malthus's population theory and an expanded version of Malthus's theory of rent.  

Malthus was never comfortable as a member of the Classical school.  Nowhere is this more evident than in Malthus's own treatise, Principles of Economics (1820), where he sets out where his views differ from the Classical Ricardians at several points.  For instance, Malthus introduced the idea of a demand schedule in the modern sense, i.e. as the conceptual relationship between prices and the quantity sought by buyers rather than the empirical relationship between prices and quantities sold.  He also paid much attention to the short-run stability of prices. 

Thirdly, and most famously, Malthus denied the validity of Say's Law and argued that there could be a "general glut" of goods. Malthus believed that economic crises were characterized by a general excess supply caused by insufficient consumption.  His defense of the Corn Laws rested partly on the need for landlord consumption to "make up" for shortfalls in demand and thus avert crisis.  See our more extensive discussion of the General Glut Controversy.

Malthus was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1819, and was one of the founding members of the Political Economy Club in 1821, although he found the atmosphere there was not always congenial to his views, with James Mill poking at theories of value and underconsumption and McCulloch poking at his population theory. Malthus wrote a pamphlet on the Measure of Value, in 1823, reiterating his labor-commanded theory, contributed two articles to the Royal Society of Literature and gave evidence before a parliamentary committee on emigration in 1827.

His population theory suffered a severe theoretical assault from Nassau William Senior in 1829, who insisted that aspirations of the working classes for higher standards of living for themselves could (and did) lead to voluntary curbing of birth rates.  This prompted a brief correspondence where Malthus, in which Malthus almost conceded. As Senior himself pointed out, the demographic transition was a possibility that Malthus himself had originally proposed, even if he de-emphasized its practical importance and ignored its policy implications.  Senior's views gained ground in the Political Economy Club, and soon moved to a proxy fight in the wider press in the early 1830s, between George Poulett Scrope (emboldened by Senior) and Malthusian loyalist Thomas Chalmers, with Michael Sadler in the middle, muddying the waters by slightly modifying the Malthusian hypothesis.

Under theoretical attack from Senior et al, the prospects for the continued acceptance of the Malthus's hypothesis seemed to rest on the hope that empirical evidence might bear it out. Gambling in that direction, Malthus took an interest in the fledgling field of statistics and empirical economics, which empiricsts William Whewell and Richard Jones were trying to promote at Cambridge.  At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Cambridge in 1832,  Malthus met the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, and urged him to take on the empirics and resolve the population debate.  At that same conference,  Whewell and Jones enlisted Malthus's support to persuade the BAAS to create "Section F" on statistics and political economy.   The same trio also helped found the Statistical Society of London (SSL) the next year (March, 1834). 

Malthus saw his main policy goal - the reform of the Poor Laws - finally accomplished by parliament in early 1834.  But he did not live long enough  to witness the empirical verdict on his theory.  Malthus died on December 23, 1834, while still in the process of editing a second edition of the Principles (which came out posthumously in 1836).  Quetelet, who had been intrigued enough to give Malthus's hypothesis a shot, published his inconclusive results in 1836 (although one of his students, Pierre-François Verhulst, looked into it more closely and came up with his famous "logistical curve").  But it was J.R. McCulloch's monumental 1837 compilation of data from the British census that put the empirical nail in the coffin of the Malthusian hypothesis.  McCulloch showed that birth rates had remained virtually unchanged, even declined a little in the late 1790s, that the explosion in population growth Malthus had attributed to rising birth rates was in fact due to steeply declining death rates.  The debate was not altogether over - the Malthusian hypothesis was resumed again a decade later, and would continue to be discussed again at least until the turn of the century, and intermittently in the 20th Century.  The Malthus hypothesis was finally integrated with the Senior hypothesis as two phases of a single model of "demographic transition".

Malthus's chair in Political Economy and Modern History at East India College in Haileybury was inherited by Richard Jones, who resigned from King's College London in 1835 to take up the new post.

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