The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff · 30 May 2012
-century Americans hear the words “population debate,” most think of—but do not agree with—the limits-to-growth principles set forth by British pastor Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). In his Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798 but updated in a more widely read 1803 edition, Malthus concluded
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’ “republican” theory of democracy, sprung from the Enlightenment, valued an agrarian society with room to expand and fostered population anxieties among the elite well before Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. In the Early Republic, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party worried that population growth threatened
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to America’s great cities rather than seeing it disperse across the West. Thus Americans had engaged in substantial population debates long before the Rev. Thomas Malthus argued in An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798) that population growth doomed human societies by
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and making the onset of decay as remote as possible. A master variable, moreover, was assumed to be the pressure of population growth, well before Thomas Malthus produced his celebrated essay on that subject toward the close of the century.”38 Leading Americans began to suggest that Franklin and others had overoptimistically
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey · 15 Nov 2011 · 1,205pp · 308,891 words
local exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, precisely because it is not a closed system. Or again, an angry remark by another apparent scientist: “Thomas Malthus was always logical, just subject to delays for his worst-case scenarios. . . . It’s unclear if Simon understood [in 1971 at the first edition of
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger · 28 Jun 2020
of the universe.” Ibid. 39. Ibid., 41. 40. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 61. 41. Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population: The 1803 Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 417. 42. Robert J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and
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: And Our Planet’s Surprising Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 18. 50. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: The 1803 Edition, 265. 51. Thomas Malthus, letter to David Ricardo, 1817, in Thomas Robert Malthus: Critical Assessments, John Cunningham Wood, ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 262. 52. John and Richard Strachey, The
The Classical School
by Callum Williams · 19 May 2020 · 288pp · 89,781 words
. What did Adam Smith mean by the term “invisible hand”? Did Karl Marx predict the end of capitalism? Was John Stuart Mill a utilitarian? Did Thomas Malthus believe that famines were desirable? This book will talk about what the founders of economics actually thought. That involves debunking some popular myths. I will
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practically ignored Hume’s writing: why? Ricardo’s theories mean nothing, meanwhile, without knowing a bit about the Corn Laws. And your understanding of what Thomas Malthus argued will be far better once you know a bit about William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s sex life. Placing the political economists in their
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eight times as rich as the poorest, China. People were driven to explain what was going on. “[T]he wealth and poverty of nations”, wrote Thomas Malthus to David Ricardo in 1817, was “the grand object of all enquiries in Political Economy”. Most of the intellectual action took place in Britain and
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, too, since the production of luxuries tended to involve hiring more people than the production of run-of-the-mill commodities. These arguments presage what Thomas Malthus would argue a century or so later (see Chapter 11). Crucially, too, the mercantilists reckoned that trade surpluses would also help to increase spending. The
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worked. The question of the “optimum” size of a country’s population was a big theme from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Most notoriously, Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) worried about population outstripping food supply. As we will see in Chapter 11, Malthus reached that possibility from making a series of assumptions
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writings. To be fair, not everything he wrote was super-smart. He seems to share the simplistic notions of population growth that would later make Thomas Malthus a household name (see Chapter 11). His views on banks would also fall well outside the economics mainstream today. As would his views on value
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flour? Why is a Ferrari worth more than a Fiat? The question of what constituted value was hugely controversial: not only Smith but David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx and William Stanley Jevons all had different ideas. Economists today don’t really talk about value, but back then the debate sometimes got
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, insecurity, irrationality and religion, but there was no reason why that had to endure for ever. Condorcet’s optimistic view of the world so infuriated Thomas Malthus that he immediately set down to write his deeply pessimistic Essay of 1798 (which is discussed in Chapter 11). But what does Condorcet mean by
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of offences for which the punishment was death. He was famous for his delight in arguing with people. In 1823 Ricardo wrote a letter to Thomas Malthus, challenging him on some obscure point of theory, despite the fact that Ricardo was suffering blinding headaches from an abscess on the brain. “I have
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that the Bank was printing too many banknotes, which was the biggest factor behind the inflation). That, in turn, led to his first meeting with Thomas Malthus, who by that time was famous for his Essay (1798). The two quickly became friends. James Mill, John Stuart’s dad and a friend of
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referred to Marx as a “minor post-Ricardian”. Ricardo would no doubt have enjoyed intellectual battles with Marx as much as he had done with Thomas Malthus. We will learn more about Marx in Chapter 15. For now it is worth noting one thing. It is an oddity of history that someone
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did not think much of Jean-Baptiste Say. “M. Say came to me here from London at the request of Mr. Mill,” he wrote to Thomas Malthus in 1814. While he was an “agreeable man”, Ricardo noted that “in his book there are many points which I think are very far from
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country. It was also on this trip that Say met and failed to impress Ricardo. Whether he made a better impression on Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus, whom he also met, is not known. Quite how Say was so well connected is also hard to establish. It seems that many of the
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the development of commercial society will “improve” humankind. You will get a deeper understanding of Sismondi’s argument with the following example. He appeared, like Thomas Malthus, to worry that the working classes would have too many children and thus cause their living standards to fall. But unlike Malthus, who blamed the
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] Hume, that philosophers in his day have paid too much attention to the consequences of actions, and he wants to focus instead on their propriety.” Thomas Malthus was not a utilitarian either: “Malthus was of course religious, while the Utilitarians were agnostics who made the welfare of man the standard of right
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the operation of the Sinking Fund”. (The British government used the Sinking Fund to pay off debt.) In her autobiography Martineau recalls the amusement of Thomas Malthus “when I told him I was sick of his name before I was fifteen”. Malthus was not Martineau’s only famous friend. In her day
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London in the early 1830s. Eventually, says Michael Hill, “her intellectual circle came to include Charles Babbage, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens, Thomas Malthus, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin”. She was also exceptionally well-travelled. In 1837 Martineau published Society in America, a report from
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times from the bureaucrats who managed the system. The worry among government ministers was that an overly generous, easy-to-game system discouraged honest toil. Thomas Malthus had given some of the most compelling arguments against the old poor-law system, arguing that it did not really help the poor. In fact
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and gaping theoretical holes–which only he had spotted. He speaks of the “absurd contradiction[s]” he has discovered in John Stuart Mill’s oeuvre. Thomas Malthus, meanwhile, had produced “nothing more than a school-boyish, superficial plagiary”. As Marx saw it, he was put on Earth in order to produce what
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time.1 Could capitalism really be as harmonious as the classical political economists had asserted? In the same essay Engels offers a useful corrective to Thomas Malthus’s theory of population. Marxists have never been fans of Malthus, not only because Malthus believes the working classes are stupid but also because of
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and some poor. Simonde de Sismondi felt more comfortable deploying a compelling historical argument than he did an equation. The theories of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus were that bit more abstract, but did not contain complex algebra. It is a very different story today. Most economics papers have a few pages
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had around 100 billion tonnes of coal left. But the rate of extraction of that coal was rapidly growing. Borrowing some terminology and theory from Thomas Malthus, he feared for Britons’ prosperity once coal supplies ran out. Would the economy of the world’s richest nation turn to dust? The treatise On
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”. Specifically, Marxist economic analysis. Luxemburg’s writings bring together the works of many of the other people profiled in this book–she was obsessed with Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and, of course, Karl Marx. Luxemburg was not a particularly good writer. Like many Marxist theorists, her books are filled with impenetrable jargon
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184 (2004a): 33–68. Slack, Paul. “Measuring the National Wealth in Seventeenth‐Century England”. The Economic History Review 57, no. 4 (2004b): 607–635. Sowell, Thomas. “Malthus and the Utilitarians”. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne d’économique et de science politique 28, no. 2 (1962): 268–274. Sowell
The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee · 16 May 2016 · 824pp · 218,333 words
invisible hand to God. But the answer that came to him in October 1838, in a book by another cleric, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, had nothing to do with divinity. Thomas Malthus had been a curate at the Okewood Chapel in Surrey by daytime, but he was a closet economist by night. His true
The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World
by Paul Morland · 10 Jan 2019 · 405pp · 121,999 words
punctuated with unhappy setbacks. By around 1800 the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (essentially Britons and Americans) were escaping the constraints on population growth identified and defined by Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman, writer and thinker whose life spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and of whom much will be said later. Ironically
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century. Just as this revolution was getting under way, the ‘old regime’ from which it was breaking was at last being identified, by the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Malthus was a country parson from Surrey, a prosperous county in southern England, who identified what he believed was an iron law of history. In
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the early nineteenth century, and seemingly oblivious to the revolutionary changes occurring in the industrial heartland a few hundred miles to the north, the Reverend Thomas Malthus was describing a vanishing world. It was a world in which the capacity of land to support people rose only gradually, while growth in human
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& Paul, 1964 Baines, Dudley, and Woods, Robert, Population and Regional Development, Cambridge University Press, 2004 Bashford, Alison, and Chaplin, Joyce E., The New Worlds of Thomas Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population, Princeton University Press, 2016 Beinart, William, Twentieth-Century South Africa, Oxford University Press, 2001 Berghahn, V. R., Imperial Germany 1871
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey · 17 Jun 2019 · 626pp · 167,836 words
. In hindsight, and in the light of the gains brought by technology, it is astounding to think that economists of the early nineteenth century like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo did not believe that technology could improve the human lot. The technological virtuosity of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took some
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demand. Joseph Schumpeter believed that for a given technology to be adopted, some kind of need must exist.2 This was also the view of Thomas Malthus, who reckoned that “necessity has been with great truth called the mother of invention. Some of the noblest exertions of the human mind have been
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, America saw the share of income accruing to people at the top, fall. It may be telling that unlike economists of the Industrial Revolution (like Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx) who were all fond of apocalyptic economic predictions, economists living in the aftermath of the Second Industrial Revolution were largely
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the prospects of superintelligence or trying to predict the great inventions of the future, we looked at technologies on the horizon. In the words of Thomas Malthus, writing at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, “many discoveries have already taken place in the world that were totally unforeseen and unexpected.… But if
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did not lose ground to its rival nations in trade. And even though Malthusian forces in Britain had long disappeared, Malthusian logic was still thriving. Thomas Malthus’s contemporaries and the generation of political economists after him believed that population growth would always undo economic growth in per capita terms. One implication
Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann · 11 Apr 2016 · 695pp · 194,693 words
buy them—led to the realization of another previously un-imagined consequence: humanity would become the victim of its own success. The negative shadow of Thomas Malthus hovered over the shining hope of finance. 16 EFFICIENT MARKETS Nineteenth-century print of the Paris Bourse. The Enlightenment tradition of mathematical inquiry was stimulated
A Little History of Economics
by Niall Kishtainy · 15 Jan 2017 · 272pp · 83,798 words
the government Ricardo was taking a huge risk: if the British were defeated, he’d lose a lot of money. His friend and fellow economist, Thomas Malthus, who we’ll meet properly soon, had a small stake in the loan. Malthus panicked, and wrote to Ricardo to ask him to get rid
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decrease the surplus population.’ Earlier, we met a financial genius and one of the great British economists, David Ricardo and his good friend, the clergyman Thomas Malthus. Malthus (1766–1834) wasn’t as good at earning money as Ricardo but turned out to be very good at coming up with economic theories
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fail and the crops die. Or perhaps there were simply too many mouths to feed as a result of rapid population growth, the conclusion of Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century. Sen saw defects in the common explanations. Droughts happen in America from time to time, but no one ever starves there
What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky · 3 Mar 2020 · 290pp · 76,216 words
the twentieth century, and the gradual dissolution of the developmental perspective into the neoclassical Washington Consensus. Population If the economist is a tragedian, the Revd Thomas Malthus has a claim to be considered its tragedian in chief. Before Malthus there was the allure of a more prosperous future; after him gloom. For
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
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