An Essay on the Principle of Population, published anonymously in 1798 and hugely expanded in 1803 (1798)
Written against the optimism of William Godwin and Condorcet
General knowledge · Economics & society
Malthusianism
An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published anonymously in 1798
Economics — population, subsistence and the limits to growth
The doctrine that population, left unchecked, grows faster than the food supply, so that living standards are held down to subsistence by famine, disease and war unless people restrain their own numbers. Thomas Robert Malthus, an Anglican clergyman, published the argument anonymously in 1798 and expanded it greatly in later editions. The prediction failed spectacularly for the industrialised world: agricultural productivity rose faster than anyone expected, and birth rates fell as countries grew rich. But the model describes pre-industrial economies well, and its logic returns whenever a resource looks finite — in the population scares of the 1960s and 1970s, and in arguments about climate and soil today.
How to spot them
- ▸A clergyman writing anonymously in 1798, and expanding it hugely in 1803
- ▸Geometrical growth of people against arithmetical growth of food
- ▸Positive checks and preventive checks
- ▸Darwin and Wallace both said reading him gave them the mechanism of natural selection
Key facts
Population grows geometrically while subsistence grows only arithmetically
The central arithmetic, which Malthus offered as an illustration rather than a measurement
Famine, disease and war on one side; delayed marriage and moral restraint on the other
Positive checks and preventive checks — the two ways population is held to subsistence
Both Darwin and Wallace credited this 1798 essay with giving them the mechanism of natural selection (1838)
Darwin read it in October 1838; Wallace recalled it during a fever in the Moluccas in 1858
Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller predicting mass famine in the 1970s and 1980s (1968)
The Population Bomb, which opened by declaring the battle to feed humanity already lost
The Club of Rome's 1972 computer-modelled report on resource exhaustion (1972)
The Limits to Growth
A 1980 wager on the price of five metals, lost by the pessimist after ten years (1990)
The Simon–Ehrlich wager; Julian Simon won, all five metals having fallen in real price
Norman Borlaug's high-yielding wheat, which fed far more people than the arithmetic allowed (1970)
The Green Revolution; Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970
Key ideas
- The 'trap' is the model's real contribution: in a pre-industrial economy, any gain in productivity is absorbed by a larger population rather than a higher standard of living. Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms (2007) argues the pattern held for most of human history and broke only with industrialisation.
- Why it failed as a forecast: technological change — mechanisation, fertiliser from the Haber–Bosch process, plant breeding — outran population, and the demographic transition meant that as countries grew richer their birth rates fell rather than rose.
- What the modern debate turns on is not arithmetic but substitution: whether human ingenuity reliably finds a way round a binding constraint, which is what Julian Simon argued, or whether some constraints — a stable climate, groundwater, phosphate — are not substitutable.
Quick-fire facts
- •Thomas Robert Malthus lived from 1766 to 1834 and was ordained in the Church of England
- •The Essay was published anonymously in 1798; the much longer second edition of 1803 carried his name and added the preventive check of moral restraint
- •It was written against William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, both of whom expected indefinite human improvement
- •In 1805 he became professor of history and political economy at the East India Company College at Haileybury — reckoned the first academic post in political economy in Britain
- •He opposed the Poor Laws on the grounds that relief encouraged larger families
- •Charles Darwin read the Essay in October 1838 and Alfred Russel Wallace recalled it in 1858; both credited it with the idea of natural selection
- •'The dismal science' was coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1849, in an essay attacking economists for opposing slavery — though the phrase is usually attached to Malthusian gloom
- •Neo-Malthusian revivals include Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) and the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (1972)
- •Julian Simon won his 1980 wager with Ehrlich over the price of five metals over ten years
- •Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970
- •The United Nations projects world population peaking at around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s before declining
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Sources
- Thomas Robert Malthus — An Essay on the Principle of Population 1798; expanded second edition 1803
- Gregory Clark — A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World 2007; the modern statement of the Malthusian trap