Thomas Malthus, portrait by John Linnell, from Wikimedia Commons.

The First Supply-Side Economist

Remembering Thomas Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus was a British political economist, active in the early 19th century. Although his work was groundbreaking at the time, it has been forgotten by many, despite the significant influence of his ideas throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. By understanding the principles articulated by Malthus, and how they influence modern economics, politics, and public policy, we expose an arc of intellectual development and the relatedness of a set of political and economic theories that continue to impact society today.

In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus articulated a basic pattern in political economics. Malthus started with two basic assertions about human society. In his own words:

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.[1]

With these assertions he supports his big idea, that in a world of bounded resources and unbounded demand, resources should be allocated to favor those who can do the most for society in terms of economic impact. He asserts the inevitability of poverty when resources are limited, concluding that charitable support for the poor is wasteful. He further argues:

It is the hope of bettering our condition, and the fear of want, rather than want itself, that is the best stimulus to industry;[2]

While his theory may seem intuitive and appealing as “common sense,” it is also incorrect in practice. It incorporates simplifying assumptions that commonly fail to hold. These limitations were not well recognized during the lifetime of Malthus, and did not diminish the impact of his theory. Malthus published five more editions of his book, some with substantial revisions. His theories influenced policy and scholarship well beyond his lifetime, continuing to this day.

One flawed assumption of Malthus relates to the productivity of agricultural land. Malthus was keenly aware of the limited availability of land on the British Isles, accentuated by the tribulations of British, Irish and Scottish lords who were naturally incentivized to manage their estates to increase profitability, indifferent to consequences for the resident peasant populations. While the physical dimensions of a territory like Ireland clearly limits agricultural acreage, Malthus conveniently ignored the Agricultural Revolution that, starting around 1700, produced “the greatest move forward in agriculture since neolithic times.”[3] Malthus may not have recognized the improvements in agricultural practice to increase per-acre yields, but that hardly stopped farmers from adopting new crops, crop rotation, irrigation, fertilizers, optimized hybrids, and the development of mechanized agriculture, techniques that have continued to increase agricultural yields to this day. Grain output increased 43% during the 18th century and even more in the 19th century.[4] Although Malthus was recognized as an expert in scientific data analysis, he failed to apply rigorous empirical analysis to his own population theory.

The second flawed assumption made by Malthus relates to human fertility and procreation. Malthus assumed that humans, like rabbits, would procreate without restraint until famine and disease imposed natural limits on their population. To support his assertion, Malthus observed that in America, where natural resources were effectively unconstrained, families were large, and population had doubled in a matter of 25 years.[5] In making this assumption, Malthus ignored the variable fertility observeable in society around him, as individuals managed their families and futures based on their own means and interests. While his weak assumptions may seem obvious for modern readers, they were commonly ignored by Malthus and his peers. Some cite the immature state of science in the 19th century, but others like Stephen Jay Gould argue that all scientific research is conditioned by popular beliefs, with the course of scientific progress more complex than the shortest path from ignorance to enlightened scientific truth.[6]

The intentions of Malthus can be hard to discern when stated as abstract principles. In the 2nd edition of his essay, Malthus clarified his beliefs, advocating policies to proactively shape mortality rates among the poor. Malthus wrote:

[W]e should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns, we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases, and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.[7]

Malthus and his peers applied his theory with noted effect during his lifetime, realizing policies in Britain that denied public assistance to the poor, and that limited availability of vaccines for preventable diseases such as Rubella, a leading cause of mental retardation in the era.[8] While advocating policies to increase mortality, Malthus opposed contraception, which he found immoral.[9, 10]

Slavery was prominent issue in the politics of the era. Malthus was opposed both to chattel slavery and to the application of his theories by its proponents. He documents his perspective in a three page footnote at the end of the Appendix to the third edition of his Principle of Population, arguing that while his work had been applied in support of the slave trade, “the just conclusion” from his work would be “exactly the contrary.”[11] Dennis Hodgson of Fairfield University documents how Malthusian scholarship was applied to argue both for and against the slave trade, both in the United States and in Great Britain.[12]

Despite his opposition to slavery, it would be incorrect to conclude that Malthus embraced racial equality. His acknowledgement of race and his pejorative view of certain groups is evident in his description of the indigenous people of Tierre del Fuego.

The wretched inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego have been placed by the general consent of voyagers at the bottom of the scale of human beings.[13]

Curiously, the most biased statements in his Essay are often made by referencing the observations of others. Malthus cites “​​Cook’s First Voy. vol ii, pg 59” for the above passage. As the description continues, he reacts to the record of Cook’s second voyage:

… we cannot be at a loss to conceive the checks to population among a race of savages, whose very appearance indicates them to be half starved, and who, shivering with cold, and covered with filth and vermin, live in one of the most inhospitable climates in the world, without having sagacity enough to provide themselves with such conveniences as might mitigate its severities, and render life in some measure more comfortable.

The pattern of selective inclusion of peggiorative references indicates an endorsement of Cook’s perspective. The racism of Malthus is more personal and direct in his commentary on the Irish peasantry, of whom he wrote plainly: “The quiet and peaceable habits of the instructed Scotch peasant, compared to the turbulent disposition of the ignorant Irishman, ought not to be without effect on every impartial reasoner.”[14] In his 1817 correspondence to colleague David Ricardo he was explicit and prescient, writing of the Irish “a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.”[15]

Evidence suggests that Malthusian principles were applied with a fatal outcome in the Irish Potato Famine. To be clear, Malthus died in 1834, and the Potato Famine didn’t begin until the late 1840s, but his student Sir Charles Trevelyan was responsible for administrative oversight of aid to the poor. Trevelyan restricted food aid to the Irish at the peak of the famine,[16] while of the Scottish he wrote in 1846 that “the people must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve.”[17] Both Scotland and Ireland saw significant emigration during the period, but mortality was minimal in Scotland, while over a million Irish died.[18] Historians note that there was never an actual food shortage. At the peak of the famine Ireland produced enough food to support twice the population of Ireland and Great Britain. The famine was due not to a shortage of food but to a skewed distribution of wealth that left Irish peasants with no means to compete economically.[17]

Thomas Malthus was England’s first professor of political economics, with an appointment at the East India Company College, an institution founded in 1806 to train individuals for service as administrators for the East India Company, governing vast British interests in east Asia. The debate on the abolition of slavery was of central importance to the politics of his time. Malthus provided clear, rational, secular arguments but with the authority of a cleric, as if to sanction a distancing from religious authority. His influence on groundbreaking secular scholarship throughout the 19th and 20th century is well documented. Charles Darwin described in his autobiography his early encounter with the work of Malthus:

In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work.[19]

Herbert Spencer. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Hence, Darwin recognizes Malthus as early inspiration for the development of his theory of the origin of species. Darwin applied the basic premise of Malthus, competition for limited resources, on an evolutionary time scale, seeking an explanation for the diversity and specialization of plant and animal species observed in our world. He published The Origin of Species in 1859, to be followed by his thoughts on the human species until 1871 with The Descent of Man. But Darwin was not the only scholar thinking in Malthusian terms. Herbert Spencer, in his 1864 work Principles of Biology, acknowledged Darwin’s influence on his thinking:

This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called “natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” [20]

Many associate the phrase “survival of the fittest” with Darwin but in fact it was introduced by Spencer. Whereas Darwin’s analysis concerned the development of plant and animal species, Spencer’s “Social Darwinism” extends this Malthusian notion of resource conflict to class competition within human society. Spencer’s view engenders a laissez-faire approach to economic policy, where the rich accumulate wealth without limits, while the poor are duly entitled to suffering and starvation. This conservative view was challenged in the period by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who acknowledged the same class struggle but recognized the possibility of a very different outcome. Marx is recognized as rejecting Malthusian principles of population. Wiltgen documents how Marx acknowledged that the principles might apply in certain primitive species of plants, but they ignore and contradict the history of human civilization.[21] Foster captures Marx’s perspective with the quote: “what characterises Malthus is the fundamental meanness of his outlook.”[22]

Ayn Rand in 1943. Photo credited to “Talbot”, Public Domain

Darwin’s theories continue to be respected today as competent science, despite an occasional challenge from religious absolutists. Social Darwinism was also considered competent scholarship through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, but fell into disfavor due to conflict with the modern perspective on human rights that became dominant after World War II, and to its relevance to the pre-War Fascist and Nazi movements. While Social Darwinism has been discredited, its basic Malthusian character is recognizable in subsequent philosophical and political movements. Objectivism is a system of beliefs invented by author Ayn Rand. Rand described Objectivism as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”. It echoes the principles of Malthus by advocating for a society where the strongest are empowered to act without sacrifice or compromise, and with no particular obligation to support society beyond selfish exercise of their own talents. Objectivism prescribes that the pursuit of happiness is the highest moral purpose in life, with compromise on this principle leading to lesser outcomes. It teaches that government and society must preserve perfect individual liberty, and that a society that compromises this ideal by limiting an individual’s liberty or their access to resources is deficient and immoral. Rand explored Objectivism through her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, novella Anthem, and non-fiction works including Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Objectivism aligns with many elements of American conservative and libertarian political movements, lending them a sort of academic credibility that they might otherwise lack.

Sir Francis Galton. Portrait by Charles Wellington Furse, 1903. Public Domain.

If Social Darwinism is Malthusian economics applied to biology, then Eugenics is Malthusian economics applied to genetics. Eugenics is the discredited notion of maintaining the quality of the human gene pool through policy and practice that deliberately preference the participation of specific individuals and groups. Eugenics was championed in the 19th century by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin. He named the field in 1883, and was a prominent leader and promoter of its theories through the Galton Eugenics Laboratory, founded in 1904 and joining University College London in 1907. Such open endorsement of Eugenics may be shocking for contemporary leaders, but it was uncontrovertial in the early 20th century. In The Legacy of Malthus, historian Allan Chase documents the broad support of the movement.[23] The First International Congress on Eugenics in 1912 enjoyed participation and support by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admirality; Charles W. Elliot, president-emeritus of Harvard University; and David Starr-Jordan, president of Stanford University, announcing among its goals the “Prevention of the propogation of the unfit by segregation and sterilization.” In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld the right of states to implement forced sterilization of individuals deemed unfit to procreate.[24] Sterilization policy was applied based on such criteria as blindness, deafness, promiscuity, and in some cases poverty attributed to the imagined genetic condition of “pauperism”. Sterilization was also practiced upon determination of “feeblemindedness,” typically based on testing methodologies now understood to be deeply flawed.[6] The actual scope of sterilization programs is unclear. While NPR reported that “as many as 70000 Americans were forcibly sterilized,” Chase estimates the rate as “at least 200000 Americans per year”.

Eugenics was broadly condemned following World War II, reflecting in part its use in Nazi Germany to rationalize genocide. Scholar Ken McCormick recognizes Malthus in Hitler’s preoccupation with the impact of limited land on population, while also explaining that “Hitler never gave credit to anyone else for his ideas” so it is difficult to establish their proper origin.[25] Eugenics was a frequent defense during the Nuremberg trials, with defendants citing the similarities between the German and American application of Eugenics.[26] Galton was unambiguous in articulating the connection between Malthus and Eugenics. The first issue of The Annals of Eugenics, published in 1925, features a portrait of Thomas Malthus, with the caption “Strewer of the Seed which reached its Harvest in the Ideas of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton.”[27] The Annals of Eugenics was renamed The Annals of Human Genetics in 1954 and continues as a respected outlet for relevant scholarship.

Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States. Source: WhiteHouse.gov

While slavery, Social Darwinism and Eugenics have fallen into disfavor, other popular applications of Malthusian economics build new followings. Objectivists and other proponents of Rand thrive in American Libertarian and conservative political movements. Ronald Reagan’s supply side economics echos the Malthusian notions of limited resources and preferential resource allocation to a minority who manifest economic success, while the name gives it a new lustre and a clean ideological separation from the logic of Fascism. Le Grand Replacement of Renaud Camus demonstrates the international relevance of Malthusian economics and of nationalist contempt for immigrants. The resonance of these popular influencers demonstrates the timelessness and international appeal of the Malthusian notions they echo. Without denying their original contributions, it seems proper as a question of scholarship to acknowledge Malthus for articulating the original pattern. At the same time we recognize his intellectual contributions, it also seems wrong to shackle him with all the evils of Eugenics and other subsequent discriminatory social theories. In his life, Malthus appears deliberate in conducting himself with the strict ethical and moral standards of a cleric. While this may be difficult for modern readers to square with his bigotry against the Irish, it’s wrong to assume that Malthus would have immediately embraced all of the worst ideas that his economic theories have inspired. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t, but we will never know.

Self Portrait By Renaud Camus. Source: Flickr.

This brief summary of the influence of Malthus seems incomplete without acknowledging his influence on popular fiction. From 1843, Charles Dickens’ character of Ebenezer Scrooge is commonly recognized as a reference to Malthus. Dickens wrote the following dialog to capture Scrooge’s view of the poor:

“If they would rather die,’’ said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

This logic of limited resources and inevitable poverty clearly echoes Malthus. Writing for Forbes, Jerry Bowyer documents how this Malthusian notion is invoked throughout the story to provoke Scrooge into recognizing the lack of humanity of his views and his life.[28] In 1932, Thomas Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World uses “Malthusian belt” to denote the accessory worn by women to ensure ready availability of contraceptives. More recently, the 2001 Tony winning musical Urinetown includes “Hail Malthus” in its closing lines as the entire population of the town dies due to a lack of water.

In Anticipations, a collection of future predictions, H.G. Wells summarized the influence of Thomas Malthus as follows:

Malthus is one of those cardinal figures in intellectual history who state definitely for all time, things apparent enough after their formulation, but never effectively conceded before [. . .] Probably no more shattering book than the Essay on Population has ever been, or ever will be, written’[29]

Some individuals live their lives in a way that towers above the rest of us, extraordinary in their influence. Thomas Malthus was such an individual. Certain individuals are later forgotten, some because they became irrelevant, others because their relevance was inconvenient to the authors of history. The history of Malthus is important. It’s worth remembering, recognizing his influence on subsequent theories and movements, and the conflicts and challenges to which they contributed.

References

1. Malthus, Thomas Robert, 1766–1834. An Essay On the Principle of Population: Or, A View of Its Past And Present Effects On Human Happiness. With an Inquiry Into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal Or Mitigation of the Evils Which it Occasions. 3d ed. London: J. Johnson, 1806, vol 1, page 8.
2. Malthus 1806, vol 2, page 287.
3. Chase, Allan. The legacy of Malthus : the social costs of the new scientific racism. New York, Knopf, 1976. page 72, citing John W. Osborne who recognized the Agricultural Revolution as “the greatest move forward in agricultural production since neolithic times”.
4. Chase 1976, page 72, citing Osborne.
5. Malthus 1806, vol 1, page 6.
6. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, W.W. Norton, 2006. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Mismeasure_of_Man_Revised_and_Expand/RTjfmxTpsVsC
7. Malthus 1806, vol 2, page 359. See also 2nd ed, pg 517–518.
8. Chase 1976, page 27.
9. Binion, Rudolph (1999). “”More Men than Corn”: Malthus versus the Enlightenment, 1798". Eighteenth-Century Studies. 32 (4): 564–569. ISSN 0013–2586.
10. Chase 1976, page 81.
11. Malthus 1806, vol 2 page 556.
12. Hodgson, Dennis. 2009. Malthus’ Essay on Population and the American Debate Over Slavery. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51(4):162–163.
13. Malthus 1806, vol 1, page 30.
14. Malthus 1806 vol 2, pg 419–420.
15. Mokyr, Joel (1980). “Malthusian Models and Irish History”. The Journal of Economic History. 40 (1): 159–166. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2120439
16. Michael O’Flynn, “Food Crises and the Ghost of Malthus”. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, Vol. 3, №1 (October 2009) Pp. 33–41.
17. Bourke, Austin, “Apologia for a dead civil servant”. The Irish Times, 6 May 1977.
18. Dorney, John, “The Great Irish Famine 1845–1851 — A Brief Overview.” The Irish Story, 18 October 2016. https://www.theirishstory.com/2016/10/18/the-great-irish-famine-1845-1851-a-brief-overview/
19. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882, and Francis Darwin. Autobiography of Charles Darwin: With Two Appendices, Comprising a Chapter of Reminiscences And a Statement of Charles Darwin’s Religious Views. London [Eng.]: Watts, 1929. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822007776990
20. Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Biology. United Kingdom, Williams and Norgate, 1864, pg 444–445.
21. Wiltgen, Richard J. “Marx’s and Engels’s Conception of Malthus: The Heritage of a Critique.” Organization & Environment, vol. 11, no. 4, 1998, pp. 451–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26161690. Accessed 8 July 2023.
22. Foster, John Bellamy, “Malthus’ Essay on Population at age 200”. The Monthly Review, vol. 50, no. 7, 1 December 1998, https://monthlyreview.org/1998/12/01/malthus-essay-on-population-at-age-200/
23. Chase 1976, page 19.
24. “The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced Sterilizations”. Fresh Air, National Public Radio, 7 March 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/07/469478098/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations
25. Ken McCormick, 2006. “Madmen in Authority: Adolf Hitler and the Malthusian Population Thesis,” Journal of Economic Insight, Missouri Valley Economic Association, vol. 32(2), pages 1–8.
26. Bashford, Alison; Levine, Philippa (3 August 2010). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford University Press. p. 327. ISBN 978–0199706532.
27. “Annals of Eugenics Portrait Series, No 1”. Annals of Eugenics: A Journal for the Scientific Study of Racial Problems. Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, University of London. 1 (1). 1925.
28. Bowyer, Jerry. “Malthus and Scrooge: How Charles Dickens Put Holly Branch Through The Heart Of The Worst Economics Ever”, Forbes, December 2012.
29. H.G. Wells, Anticipations, Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought. LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, ld. 1902. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19229/19229-h/19229-h.htm

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