Key Ideas
Eight ideas from Hunt & Lautzenheiser's chapter, from the population principle of 1798 to the theory of gluts of 1820.
Malthus's own illustration: population doubles every 25 years (1, 2, 4, 8…) while food rises by a fixed amount (1, 2, 3, 4…).
| Years | Population | Food | People per unit of food | Picture |
|---|
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometric progression and doubles every generation. Food from a limited territory can increase at best in an arithmetic progression, because each generation adds roughly the same amount as the last. Population will therefore always press against the means of subsistence.
"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical progression of such a nature as to double itself every twenty-five years."
Preventive checks lower the birth rate: sterility, sexual abstinence, birth control. Positive checks raise the death rate: famine, misery, plague, war, and finally starvation. If preventive checks fail, positive checks are inevitable.
The checks "are all resolvable into moral restraint, vice and misery."
Malthus defined moral restraint as "the restraint from marriage which is not followed by irregular gratifications." He believed only the virtuous practiced it. Birth control he condemned as a vice. In his theory, the difference between rich and poor came down to moral character, which Hunt criticizes sharply.
"Carelessness and want of frugality … [predominates] among the poor."
Because any rise in income would only bring more children and a return to subsistence, Malthus opposed redistribution and poor relief such as the Speenhamland system (1795). The Poor Laws, he said, increase population without increasing food, and they feed a part of society that is not "the most valuable part" at the expense of "more industrious and more worthy members."
Some must suffer: "the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank."
Unlike Smith, Malthus looked at the economy from the point of view of exchange, not production. Wages, profits, and rent were each payments for an equally necessary input owned by laborers, capitalists, and landlords, who had simply drawn different tickets "in the lottery of human life." Every exchange was mutually beneficial, a view of social harmony.
"I should define wealth to be material objects, necessary, useful, or agreeable to man…"
In 1815 Malthus explained rent by differences in soil fertility. As population grows, poorer land is farmed, food prices rise, and the best land earns a surplus: rent. He saw rent as a gift of nature and high rents as a sign of prosperity. He argued that "the interest of no other class" was so closely tied to the nation's wealth as the landowner's.
Rent is "the natural result of a most inestimable quality in the soil, which God has bestowed on Man."
In the Principles (1820) Malthus argued that markets do not always clear. Workers spend everything on subsistence, and capitalists save "much more rapidly" than capital can profitably grow. Effectual demand then falls short and a general glut, or depression, follows. Hunt calls this his most important and lasting contribution, and Keynes later revived it.
"Almost all merchants and manufacturers save, in prosperous times, much more rapidly than it would be possible for the national capital to increase, so as to keep up the value of the produce."
Malthus's cure for gluts was a class that consumes more than it produces: the landlords and their servants, or "personal services." Policies like the Corn Laws that raised rents would therefore help everyone. Ricardo mocked the idea: such consumers help profits only "in the same way as a fire would."
"There must therefore be a considerable class of persons who have both the will and power to consume more material wealth than they produce."
All quotations are from Malthus (and, in viii, Ricardo) as quoted in Hunt & Lautzenheiser, ch. 4.