• Classicals all largely agree with Smith, extend, refine, and correct Smith’s insights

• Forced by current political controversies in 19^th Britain to write about public policy in pamphlets

• Later, each major leader writes their own treatise on economic theory

  • Starting with Ricardo, we’re about to see a lot of Principles of Political Economy books over the next 2 centuries!

• Wrote on economics

• Notably, wrote a defense of usury ridiculing Adam Smith’s opposition to usury using Smith’s own logic against him

• English writer: novels & political philosophy

• Early Romantic period of English literature

• Married to feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who wrote Vindication of the Rights of Woman)

  • daughter: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein) who would marry Percy Bysshe Shelley

• As a political philosopher, one of the first utopian anarchists

• All of our vices & problems are not inherited, but shaped by environment, primarily government

• Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

  • anarchist critique of the State
  • positive vision of how an anarchist society would work
  • extremely popular (especially after French Revolution)

• Not advocating violent revolution or class conflict, but peaceful moral persuasion

• If institutions like the State, law, and property are abolished, human beings will live in harmony

• No crime, no conflict, perfect human health, human beings lose their passions and sexual desires

• We might even achieve immortality!

• Utopia in the tradition of Thomas More, etc.

• Second son of a wealthy landowner, Daniel Malthus

  • Under primogeniture, first son inherited family’s property
  • Thomas joined the clergy; trained in mathematics

• Daniel (father) was friends with Hume, Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet

  • Dabbled in utopian anarchism, tried to instill it in Thomas

• Thomas strongly disagreed with his father and his father’s friends (Godwin, etc.)

• Sits down to write (1798) An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvements of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, Mr Condorcet and Other Writers.

• This becomes the first edition of Malthus’ famous Essay on the Principle of Population

  • goes through several editions, first and second are most important (big changes)

“[T]he great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement; or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery, and after every effort remain still at an immeasurable distance from the wished-for goal...I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties in the way,”

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• Malthus makes two assumptions:

“That food is necessary to the existence of man...[and t]hat the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state”

• Recall Godwin argued that sexual passion will decay

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second."

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

“Necessity, that imperious all-pervading law of nature, restrains [all plants and animals] within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants, and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and pre- mature death. Among mankind, misery and vice.”

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• Malthus describes two types of “checks” on human fertility & population

1. “Preventative check”: anything that limits people from having children

2. “Positive check”: anything that reduces existing population

   • famine, disease, war

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• Refutes Godwin’s “beautiful system”: once governments are removed, population will still increase & outstrip food!

Quoting Godwin: “There is a principle in human society, by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence.”

Malthus: “This principle, which Mr. Godwin thus mentions as some mysterious and occult cause, and which he does not attempt to investigate, will be found to be the grinding law of necessity; misery, and the fear of misery.”

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• Most of human race doomed to live on margin of subsistence

• Privileged property (land) owners were above the margin in the long run

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• This was all in Malthus’ first (1798) edition of the Essay (published anonymously)

• His Essay very widely read, quickly attributed to him

• He then travels Europe, collects lots of data, and then republishes a second (1803) edition of the Essay, a whole different book

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• The population thesis was central to Classical Economics

  • overpopulation a constant threat
  • key part of their attitudes towards social reforms

• Bentham had already suggested deliberate family planning contraception

• John Stuart Mill interpretted Malthus not as pessimistic, but a “banner of hope”

• Further influence on Charles Darwin (reading Malthus convinced him of his theory of evolution)

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• Between Smith’s wages fund theory and Malthus’s population principle, the “iron law of wages”: wages will always tend towards subsistence level

• But Smith: with continual capital accumulation, wages can rise! Requires continual economic growth to avoid the stagnant steady state with subsistence wages

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• Major political controversy the poor laws to relieve poverty in Britain starting in 16^th century

• Long distinction between the “deserving’ (disabled) vs. “undeserving” (“lazy” vagabonds) poor

• Partially caused by social upheavals of the end of feudalism, enclosure movement

• Used to be church’s function, but English State began managing workhouses, etc.

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• Birth of the factory system & early days of industrial revolution

  • Massive movements from countryside to cities
  • Massive increase in urban poverty; no real wage increases for decades
  • Working poor in “dark satanic mills”
  • Poor had very high fertility rate

• Poor Laws passed to keep able-bodied poor working in factories or the military

  • at one point, a subsidy paid for each child had

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• Malthus opposed the Poor Laws

• Improving the least-well off ⟹ increasing fertility ⟹ further misery of checks

• Belief that the poor will not restrain their own fertility

• Tread carefully: an easy path to Social Darwinism & eugenics!

Malthus, Thomas, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population

• Key to his principle, which Malthus almost describes, is diminishing returns (in agriculture)

• Arguably descovered by Turgot, others

• Malthus & Ricardo would both later explicitly describe diminishing returns as key to their systems

• Two Malthusian implications

1. Population increases with living standards

   • suppose technology improves agricultural productivity
   • higher wages and incomes, people are wealthier and can support more children
   • hence, population grows

2. Living standards decline with population

   • A growing population with a fixed supply of land with diminishing returns implies living standards eventually decrease
   • population will die off and return to subsistence equilibrium

• In sum: living standards and population are inversely proportional!

• Think GDP per capita =GDPpopulation where population is increasing!

• "Malthusian" Trap: for most of human history, humans unable to escape poverty because of the following cycle:

Living standards improve →

→ population growth →

→ competition over scarce resources →

→ positive checks (war, famine, disease)

• Humanity stuck in a subsistence-level equilibrium for 1000s of years