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Treatise by Thomas Malthus

The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798, but the author was soon identified as Thomas Robert Malthus. The book warned of future difficulties, on an interpretation of the population increasing in geometric progression (so as to double every 25 years) while food production increased in an arithmetic progression, which would leave a difference resulting in the want of food and famine, unless birth rates decreased. His final version, the 6th edition, was published in 1826. In 1830, 32 years after the first edition, Malthus published a condensed version entitled A Summary View on the Principle of Population, which included responses to criticisms of the larger work.

As a Christian and a clergyman, Malthus addressed the question of how an omnipotent and caring God could permit suffering. In the First Edition of his Essay (1798) Malthus reasoned that the constant threat of poverty and starvation served to teach the virtues of hard work and virtuous behaviour. "Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state," he wrote, adding further, "Evil exists in the world not to create despair, but activity." Similarly, Malthus believed that "the infinite variety of nature is admirably adapted to further the high purpose of the creation and to produce the greatest possible quantity of good." Nevertheless, although the threat of poverty could be understood to be a prod to motivate human industry, it was not God's will that man should suffer. Malthus wrote that mankind itself was solely to blame for human suffering: I believe that it is the intention of the Creator that the earth should be replenished; but certainly with a healthy, virtuous and happy population, not an unhealthy, vicious and miserable one. And if, in endeavouring to obey the command to increase and multiply, we people it only with beings of this latter description and suffer accordingly, we have no right to impeach the justice of the command, but our irrational mode of executing it.

1798: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future improvement of society with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers Anonymously published. 1803: Second and much enlarged edition: An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness; with an enquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions. Authorship acknowledged. 1806, 1807, 1817 and 1826: editions 3–6, with relatively minor changes from the second edition. 1823: Malthus contributed the article on Population to the supplement of the Encyclopædia Britannica. 1830: Malthus had a long extract from the 1823 article reprinted as A summary view of the Principle of Population.

A Summary View on the Principle of Population was published in 1830. The author was identified as Rev. T. R. Malthus, A. M., F. R. S. Malthus wrote A Summary View for those who did not have the leisure to read the full essay and, as he put it, "to correct some of the misrepresentations which have gone abroad respecting two or three of the most important points of the Essay". A Summary View ends with a defense of the Principle of Population against the charge that it "impeaches the goodness of the Deity, and is inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the scriptures". Malthus died in 1834 leaving this as his final word on the Principle of Population.

Malthus became subject to extreme personal criticism. People who knew nothing about his private life criticised him both for having no children and for having too many. In 1819, Shelley, berating Malthus as a priest, called him "a eunuch and a tyrant". Marx repeated the idea, adding that Malthus had taken the vow of celibacy, and called him "superficial", "a professional plagiarist", "the agent of the landed aristocracy", "a paid advocate" and "the principal enemy of the people". In the 20th century an editor of the Everyman edition of Malthus claimed that Malthus had practised population control by begetting eleven girls. In fact, Malthus fathered two daughters and one son. Garrett Hardin provides an overview of such personal comments. According to Peterson, William Pitt the Younger (in office: 1783–1801 and 1804–1806), on reading the work of Malthus, withdrew a Bill he had introduced that called for the extension of Poor Relief. Concerns about Malthus's theory helped promote the idea of a national population census in the UK. Government official John Rickman became instrumental in the carrying out of the first modern British census in 1801, under Pitt's administration. In the 1830s Malthus's writings strongly influenced Whig reforms which overturned Tory paternalism and brought in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Malthus convinced most economists that even while high fertility might increase the gross output, it tended to reduce output per capita. David Ricardo and Alfred Marshall admired Malthus, and so came under his influence. Early converts to his population theory included William Paley. Despite Malthus's opposition to contraception, his work exercised a strong influence on Francis Place (1771–1854), whose neo Malthusian movement became the first to advocate contraception. Place published his Illustrations and Proofs of the Principles of Population in 1822.

In Ireland, where (writing to Ricardo in 1817) Malthus proposed that "to give full effect to the natural resources of the country a great part of the population should be swept from the soil", an early "refutation" of the Essay on Population was offered by George Ensor. In his Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations (1818), he professed "astonishment" at Malthus's "general indemnity" of the rich and powerful: Mr Malthus considers that attributing in any way the distress of the poor to the higher classes of society is a vulgar error [ ] and that it depends on the conduct of the poor themselves. Does slavery depend on the slaves themselves? [ ] Does it depend on the Irish peasantry that the proprietors are absentees? or, on the Catholics of Ireland that they pay tithes to the protestant clergy? Does it depend on the poor of England that they pay for salt a tax thirty times the original cost of the article? Seizing upon Malthus's proposition that "manufacturing is at once the consequence of a better distribution of property and the cause of further improvement", Ensor was later to press the argument that poverty is sustained, not by a reckless propensity to breed, but by government's indulgence of the heedless concentration of private wealth. A similar broadside was published in 1821 by Whitely Stokes. His Observations on the population and resources of Ireland found fault in Malthus's calculations and juxtapositions, and insisting upon the advantages mankind derives from "improved industry, improved conveyance, improvements in morals, government and religion", argued that Ireland's difficulty lay not in her "numbers", but in her indifferent government. William Godwin criticized Malthus's criticisms of his own arguments in his book Of Population (1820). Other theoretical and political critiques of Malthus and Malthusian thinking emerged soon after the publication of the first Essay on Population, most notably in the work of Robert Owen, of the essayist William Hazlitt (1807) and of the economist Nassau William Senior, and moralist William Cobbett. True Law of Population (1845) was by politician Thomas Doubleday, an adherent of Cobbett's views. John Stuart Mill strongly defended the ideas of Malthus in his 1848 work, Principles of Political Economy (Book II, Chapters 11–13). Mill considered the criticisms of Malthus made thus far to have been superficial. The American economist Henry Charles Carey rejected Malthus's argument in his magnum opus of 1858–59, The Principles of Social Science. Carey maintained that the only situation in which the means of subsistence will determine population growth is one in which a given society is not introducing new technologies or not adopting forward thinking governmental policy, and that population regulated itself in every well governed society, but its pressure on subsistence characterized the lower stages of civilization. Another American, Daniel Raymond stated in his Thoughts on Political Economy (1820) “Although his theory is founded upon the principles of nature, and although it is impossible to discover any flaw in his reasoning, yet the mind instinctively revolts at the conclusions to which he conducts it, and we are disposed to reject the theory, even though we could give no good reason.” This rejection of conclusions, coincides with Malthus's own observation that “America had not reached the stage where the difficulties in increasing production were great enough appreciably to check population”. In France, ideas concerning overpopulation had been prevalent some time before Malthus published his Essay, “Pre Malthusian French writers had developed an unorganized set of observations more in accord with fact and probability than Malthus’ well integrated doctrine”. By 1798 two broad bodies of thought had already begun to form in the country, those who like Malthus, saw a danger in overpopulation and the stressing of productive limits, and the “pro populationists” who argued that population growth would lead to productivity growth, and thus should be encouraged.

Another strand of opposition to Malthus's ideas started in the middle of the 19th century with the writings of Friedrich Engels (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 1844) and Karl Marx (Capital, 1867). Engels and Marx argued that what Malthus saw as the problem of the pressure of population on the means of production actually represented the pressure of the means of production on population. They thus viewed it in terms of their concept of the reserve army of labour. In other words, the seeming excess of population that Malthus attributed to the seemingly innate disposition of the poor to reproduce beyond their means actually emerged as a product of the very dynamic of capitalist economy. Engels called Malthus's hypothesis "the crudest, most barbarous theory that ever existed, a system of despair which struck down all those beautiful phrases about love thy neighbour and world citizenship". Engels also predicted
calling it a "reactionary doctrine" and "an attempt on the part of bourgeois ideologists to exonerate capitalism and to prove the inevitability of privation and misery for the working class under any social system". In addition, many Russian philosophers could not easily apply Malthus' population theory to Russian society in the 1840s. In England, where Malthus lived, population was rapidly increasing but suitable agricultural land was limited. Russia, on the other hand, had extensive land with agricultural potential yet a relatively sparse population. It is possible that this discrepancy between Russian and English realities contributed to the rejection of Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population by key Russian thinkers. Another difference which contributed to the confusion and ultimately the rejection of Malthus's argument in Russia was its cultural basis in English capitalism. Economist Julian Lincoln Simon has criticised Malthus's conclusions. He notes that despite the predictions of Malthus and of the neo Malthusians, massive geometric population growth in the 20th century did not result in a Malthusian catastrophe. Many factors have been identified as having contributed: general improvements in farming methods (industrial agriculture), mechanization of work (tractors), the introduction of high yield varieties of wheat and other plants (Green Revolution), the use of pesticides to control crop pests. Each played a role. The enviro sceptic Bjørn Lomborg presented data to argue the case that the environment had actually improved, and that calories produced per day per capita globally went up 23% between 1960 and 2000, despite the doubling of the world population in that period. From the opposite angle, Romanian American economist Nicholas Georgescu Roegen, a progenitor in economics and a paradigm founder of ecological economics, has argued that Malthus was too optimistic, as he failed to recognize any upper limit to the growth of population—only, the geometric increase in human numbers is occasionally slowed down (checked) by the arithmetic increase in agricultural produce, according to Malthus' simple growth model; but some upper limit to population is bound to exist, as the total amount of agricultural land—actual as well as potential—on Earth is finite, Georgescu Roegen points out.

Writers who have presented ideas that have paralleled various of those of Malthus include: Paul R. Ehrlich who has written several books predicting famine as a result of population increase: The Population Bomb (1968); Population, resources, environment: issues in human ecology (1970, with Anne Ehrlich); The end of affluence (1974, with Anne Ehrlich); The population explosion (1990, with Anne Ehrlich). In the late 1960s Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions would die from a coming overpopulation crisis in the 1970s. Other examples of work that has been accused of "Malthusianism" include the 1972 book The Limits to Growth (published by the Club of Rome) and the Global 2000 report to the then President of the United States Jimmy Carter. Isaac Asimov also produced many essays on topics related to overpopulation. Ecological economist Herman Daly has recognized the influence of Malthus on his own work on steady state economics. Goldstone has since modeled other revolutions by looking at demographics and economics and Lempert has explained Stalin's purges and the Russian Revolution of 1917 in terms of demographic factors that drive political economy. Ted Robert Gurr has also modeled political violence, such as in the Palestinian territories and in Rwanda/Congo (two of the world's regions of most rapidly growing population) using similar variables in several comparative cases. These approaches suggest that political ideology follows demographic forces. Physics professor, Albert Allen Bartlett, has lectured over 1,500 times on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy", promoting sustainable living and explaining the mathematics of overpopulation. Malthus is directly referenced by science fiction author K. Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation (1986): "In a sense, opening space will burst our limits to growth, since we know of no end to the universe. Nevertheless, Malthus was essentially right." The Malthusian growth model now bears Malthus's name. The logistic function of Pierre François Verhulst (1804–1849) results in the S curve. Verhulst developed the logistic growth model favored by so many critics of the Malthusian growth model in 1838 only after reading Malthus's essay.