11
THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS (1766–1834)
Was he a pessimistic moron who hated the poor?
There are few more horrifying words in the English language than “Malthusian”. It brings to mind images of starving children and emaciated bodies, poverty, war. The adjective is named after someone who worried that too many children would be born, which would in turn lead to “overpopulation”. Thomas Robert Malthus is seen as a reprehensible figure: a hater of the poor and a dogmatic believer in laissez-faire economics. William Cobbett, a famous parliamentary reformer, blustered that “Malthus and his disciples” were a “stupid and conceited tribe” who “want to abolish the Poor Rates [and] to prevent the poor from marrying”. Donald Winch suggests the word “‘Malthusian’ was already in use during Malthus’s life as a term of abuse”. In the few portraits we have of him, he even looks evil. Harriet Martineau, whom we will meet in Chapter 14, commented on the “abuse lavished on” Malthus, and wondered “whether it ever kept you [Malthus] awake a minute”. “Never after the first fortnight,” was his reply.
There is a difference, however, between how Malthus is remembered and what he actually argued. He was not the best thinker covered in this book. But neither was he the miser he is made out to be. His views on population are more complex than commonly believed. And he inspired much of what John Maynard Keynes was later to write.
Malthus was born in 1766, pretty much exactly when the industrial revolution was getting going. In 1788 he graduated ninth in mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge. Then he faced a dilemma. He was from a rich, landed family but was a second son–and thus not entitled to any inheritance at all.1 So he needed to make some money. He had a cleft lip, and stammered awfully. Harriet Martineau called Malthus’s speech “hopelessly imperfect, from defect in the palate”. That ruled out being a lawyer, the army or the Navy. The only option, it seemed, was to enter the clergy. And so he did. Following university, he set up shop as a curate in a parish in Surrey. His intense religiosity was to inform much of what he wrote.
Malthus shot to fame in 1798 upon the publication of his Essay on the Principle of Population. The conventional story of that essay goes something like this. For centuries the received wisdom was that rapid population growth was a good thing (see the Chapter 2 on Sir William Petty). Malthus had his suspicions about such ideas. Then he came across the writings of “utopian” thinkers such as William Godwin and Condorcet. These two wrote books which, in effect, argued that the condition of the human race could get better and better. Life expectancy, for instance, might continue to rise indefinitely. Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, written during the Terror, was published in 1795, the year after Condorcet’s death. The Sketch, points out June Barraclough, a historian, “depicts nine stages through which humans have progressed from their origins in savagery, and a tenth stage still to come”, which would be “marked by a steady reduction of inequality among nations and within them, and by advances in human intellect, technological achievement, and morality”. Condorcet himself argued that progress “may follow a more or less rapid course but it never retrogresses”. Both Godwin and Condorcet blamed the widespread poverty and suffering that existed at the time on factors such as government policy. With the adoption of better policies, they argued, it was in theory possible to create the perfect society–large numbers of people living in plenty, safety and warmth.
In sum, this is what Malthus was reacting against. His incendiary essay of 1798 carries the subtitle, “with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers”. Godwin and Condorcet were optimists, while Malthus was a pessimist.
Malthus argues that humanity will forever be mired in poverty, buffeted every now and again by sickness, plague and war. To make his argument, he posits some simple rules. The supply of food, Malthus reckoned, could only increase arithmetically–that is, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on. But the population would increase geometrically–that is, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. People, by which he really means the lower orders, would quickly breed, unable to resist the urge to have sex. And so a mismatch between people and food would arise. A famine would result. The population would drop to a more sustainable level. Then, as the number of workers dropped, their wages would rise. As their standard of living rose, workers could not resist having more children. And the process would begin all over again. Contrary to what the optimists had argued, therefore, it was futile to hope that humanity could improve gradually over time. Instead humanity would be stuck in a vicious circle for all eternity.
That is, in a nutshell, the super-simple account of the utopian-versus-Malthusian controversy. Gail Bederman, a historian, has a snappy formulation of Malthus’s view of the world: “sexual desire”, she says, is “the motor of human history”. It is, however, a little more complicated than that.
A lack of faith
First, it is crucial to bear in mind the political context in which Malthus was writing. It had been about a decade since the French Revolution. Condorcet had taken a leading role in the upheaval, which he had hoped would spur his country towards perfection. Godwin hoped for something similar. His Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in 1793, was in effect an anarchist book, in the sense that it argued that outdated social rules (such as marriage) held people back, rather than helping them. Godwin appeared to be largely in support of the Revolution.
The British establishment was, quite naturally, worried that Britain was going to follow France into revolution. At the time the two countries were slugging it out in the French Revolutionary Wars. The Battle of the Nile took place in 1798; the Battle of Trafalgar was to take place in 1805. Donald Winch suggests, therefore, that in the late 18th century the British establishment was quite prepared to listen to arguments that contradicted those of revolutionaries such as Condorcet and Godwin. People wanted to be reassured that their radical theories were wrong.
This is where Malthus comes in. In critiquing optimist philosophy, he could have targeted his essay at any number of people. Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), a Scottish philosopher, had in 1767 said that “man” was “susceptible of improvement, and has in himself a principle of progression and a desire of perfection”. But Malthus wanted to make a name for himself. In fact he needed to. As a Cambridge fellow, his pay was pitiful. He got barely more as a curate. So of course he went after Condorcet and Godwin. He knew that the general public would sit up and take notice. Donald Winch is very clear. “As the person who first attacked the perfectibilism of Condorcet and Godwin, Malthus was later judged to have benefitted from the mood of anti-jacobinism in Britain.” Malthus himself alludes to his opportunism, noting that he wrote the 1798 version of his essay “on the spur of the occasion”.
But there was a further reason for Malthus to attack Godwin in particular. Godwin had recently written a biography of his deceased wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), detailing her sexual encounters with other men. As Bederman documents, free love came to be associated with the French Revolution. One can only imagine how viscerally Parson Malthus would have disliked the idea of an open relationship. He was disgusted by the notion that sexual freedom might lead to anything other than societal collapse–and wanted to prove that his hunch was right.
The nature of the disagreement between Malthus and Condorcet/Godwin is also more complex than is commonly assumed. Thomas Sowell points out that the utopians “recognised the truism that population could not exceed the means of subsistence”. Indeed it is a truism: obviously people cannot live if there is no food for them. Condorcet had explicitly noted that there would be instances in which the supply of food did not grow fast enough to support the people. So that is not the way in which they differed fundamentally from Malthus.
Instead the difference lies in their respective views of how humans behave. The utopians basically believed that humans were rational, forward-looking beings. People would recognise that if they were living on the margins of subsistence, having 30 children was probably not a very good idea. Malthus did not think people (especially the poor) were so rational. He reckoned that, given half a chance, they would breed like mad. (What a “libel on the human race”, Karl Marx commented.)
Swept from the soil
Malthus, then, had satisfied himself that the insatiable sexual desire of the working classes would consign them to “epidemics, war, infanticide, plague and famine”. Was there anything to be done about it? Utilitarians responded with a proposal that will seem obvious to most modern readers: provide birth control. On the Malthusian logic, limiting population growth among the working classes would guarantee them higher living standards. John Stuart Mill, who believed Malthus’s theory, was once arrested for helping poor people get access to birth control.
Malthus opposed birth control. If you went to him and said, “Look how much good birth control could do!” he would stare at you blankly. “The greater good” was not really a legitimate aim in his eyes. The only morally justifiable act was a virtuous one.2 Remember: he was a deeply religious man. The fact that population outstripped food supply was, according to Malthus, one of the “gracious designs of Providence”–a challenge set down by God to ordinary people. “Can you resist the temptation to have sex,” God in effect asks of men, “and by that virtuous act prevent the population from growing too fast?”3 According to Malthus, it is quite wrong to cheat God by using birth control. “If it were possible,” he argues, “for each married couple to limit by a wish the number of their children, there is certainly reason to fear that the indolence of the human race would be very greatly increased.”
Malthus, of course, accepted that some people would be unable to meet God’s challenge–to achieve self-restraint. Those people were little more than a “redundant population” (Malthus’s words). Their demise was not exactly to be celebrated but neither was it to be regretted. It just was.
So that’s Malthus’s theory. What was its impact? Some historians have suggested that this Malthusian logic informed British attitudes to the famines of the 19th century–most notoriously, the Irish famine of the 1840s, in which at least 1 million people died. The thinking went that you didn’t exactly want the Irish poor to die of starvation, but Ireland “needed” fewer people if it were to become rich. Nassau Senior (1790–1864), an Oxford economist, said of the famine that it “would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good”.4 Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish philosopher, said in 1839 that “[t]he time has come when the Irish population must either be improved a little or exterminated.” In a letter to David Ricardo, Malthus himself noted that “to give full effect to the natural resources of the country [meaning Ireland] a great part of the population should be swept from the soil”.
Malthus’s theories also had an impact closer to home. He scorned the “old” version of England’s “poor law”, a sort of welfare system that had existed since Elizabethan times, and encouraged the government to reform it. Already, there were concerns that the welfare system had got too expensive. “After 1795,” Gail Bederman argues, “demands for relief had skyrocketed due to poor harvests and concomitant food shortages.” Stories abounded of welfare scroungers who cheated the system.
Then Malthus came along and revealed that giving money to the poor was completely counter-productive. Under the system there existed a payment called “child allowances”–a per-child payment for families.5 Malthus argued that child allowances subsidised children. There was little reason for the working class “to put any sort of restraint upon their inclinations, or exercise any degree of prudence in the affairs of marriage, because the parish is bound to provide for all who are born”.
Malthus concluded that any positive effects of handing money to the poor–say, the reduction of hunger–would be only in the short term. “[T]he poor-laws tend in the most marked manner to make the supply of labour exceed the demand for it”, he said, with the effect “either to lower universally all wages, or… to throw great numbers of workmen out of employment, and thus constantly to increase the poverty and distress of the labouring classes of society.” The poor laws “may be said, therefore, to create the poor which they maintain”. There was only one sensible option: “the total abolition of the poor laws”.
By the early 19th century Malthus had slightly softened his recommendation to a “gradual abolition” of the poor laws.6 No matter. His ideas had galvanised the welfare reformers in the government. The “new” poor law came into force in 1834, the year that Malthus died. It outlawed the giving of “outdoor relief”–ie, payments of cash and kind. Instead people who needed assistance had to make do with a workhouse–again, a recommendation of Malthus.
Finally, Malthus’s demographic speculations made a big impact on other thinkers. Charles Darwin used Malthus to inform his famous theory of evolution by natural selection. “I happened to read for amusement Malthus’s Population,” he recalled, and “it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of a new species.” Darwin took the phrase “struggle for existence” from Malthus’s work.
Trust me
Malthus’s theories, then, have had an enormous impact. Whether they stand up to intellectual scrutiny is another matter. First things first. What led him to believe that the population tended to grow faster than food? After all, it is an empirical question, not a theoretical one. He looked at what was happening in America. The newish government had started to produce demographic statistics (the first census for the whole of the United States was in 1790). Malthus noticed that the American population had doubled from its level 25 years before. He also reckoned that America had pretty much no constraints on population growth because there was a lot of “free” land. Therefore, without any “checks”, as he put it, you would expect population growth to grow geometrically.
Fair enough. But who says that the supply of food can’t grow geometrically too? Here Malthus is vague. “It would be contrary to all our knowledge of the qualities of land.” Not terribly convincing. The notion that population grows faster than food therefore remains an assertion, not an empirical fact.
But let’s say population does grow faster than food. That leads to another problem: what you might call the “Wile E. Coyote” objection. In the cartoon, the character runs off a cliff, continues running on thin air, and only realises there is no ground beneath him when he looks down. That prompts him to plunge. Something similar is happening in Malthus’s theory. He warns of catastrophic population loss as there is nowhere near enough food to go around. But how did humanity get to that stage? Surely there would have been a series of mini-famines by now? It seems reasonable to expect that the available food supply would have constrained population growth. It’s as if the population has managed to grow by eating only air, and realises its predicament when it looks towards the ground.
Inconvenient data
With the benefit of hindsight we can test Malthus’s theory against the data. In 1798 Malthus noted that the population of “the Island”, meaning Britain, was “about seven millions”. By his calculations, by 1848 the population would have gone to “twenty-eight millions”. However, by that time “the means of subsistence [would be] only equal to the support of twenty-one millions”. The apparent implication was that a famine, “with one mighty blow”, would prompt the deaths of some 7 million people.
What actually happened? In 1801 Britain’s population was actually about 11 million. Fifty years on, in 1848, the population had grown to 20 million. This represents a much faster growth rate than had been seen in previous centuries. But there was no famine. The Malthusian theory was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Or was it? Some evidence, including from the historian George Boyer, suggests that under the “old” poor law system the working classes did respond to the payment of child allowances by having more children. Also, consider the context in which Malthus was writing. In the century to 1750 population growth had slowed almost to a standstill.7 In the 1760s the English population was only a little higher than it had been in the 1340s, on the eve of the Black Death. It was not completely unreasonable for someone writing around that time to believe that sustained, rapid population growth was not really possible.
The real fault of Malthus’s theory is that–like Ricardo–he failed to realise how powerful the industrial revolution would turn out to be. The exploitation of coal, in particular, meant that a lot more stuff could be produced, which supported a lot more people. As Tony Wrigley notes, Malthus’s poor understanding of agriculture was shared by many of the other classical economists, who underestimated the potential for massive improvements in productivity over the 19th century. Nonetheless, says Wrigley, “it is one of the most striking ironies of intellectual history that Malthus should have fashioned his analysis just at the time when it was about to cease to be applicable to the country in which he lived”.
No theory at all
One final point on Malthus’s theory of population. There is a bit of a difference between the Malthus that is remembered today and the Malthus as he would have liked us to remember him. Over the years following publication of his essay in 1798, Malthus revised it a number of times. And he started to adjust his theory.
In 1798 Malthus had believed that any temporary increase in living standards could lead to only one thing: an increase in the number of the working class, followed by return to subsistence living standards. But over time his theory slipped. He read more widely and looked at more data. He went on a fact-finding tour of Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 1799.
From the second edition of the essay (1803) onwards he placed more emphasis on the notion that the working classes were in fact capable of some moral restraint.8 He started to believe in the notion that with enough education the working classes would indeed learn what was best for them.9 He also spoke in Principles of Political Economy (1836) of the possibility of “improvements in the modes of subsistence”. He notes that a country “is always liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the increase of population” (emphasis added). People could, after all, get richer and richer–and increases in the population need not necessarily eat away all the gains. Malthus, in other words, was no longer a proper Malthusian.
John Stuart Mill complimented Malthus on this change. “Notwithstanding the acknowledged errors of his first edition [of the Population essay],” he wrote, “few writers have done more than himself… to promote these juster and more hopeful anticipations.” Hans Jensen, a historian, identifies Malthus’s “essentially new theory of population”.
Other commentators have been less kind. Rightly so. Malthus’s new pronouncements undermined everything he had said before. Sowell is surely right to say that Malthus “had completely repudiated his theory, not in the sense of adopting another theory, but in the sense of now having no theory at all”. Malthus basically says that population always grows faster than food supplies, except when it doesn’t. It is all rather muddled. Anyway, by that point intellectuals had largely lost interest in his theories–his later writings on population made nowhere near as much impact as his first, fateful Essay.10
Save something from the wreckage
Malthus’s confused population theory was not his sole contribution to economic thought, however. Malthus helped Ricardo towards his theory of rent, which was to be one of the most important assertions of 19th-century political economy (see Chapter 9). Malthus meanwhile distinguished himself from his best friend through his work on “general gluts”–or, in plain English, depressions. He is much less known for this work, but it was quite revolutionary.
Many of the economists in this book wondered about what might cause recessions and depressions. Simonde de Sismondi, for instance, worried about the spending habits of the rich, and how this could deny employment to the working classes (see Chapter 12). Bernard Mandeville worried that if people were put off from consuming luxuries, either because of public disapprobation or because of legal changes, the economy would suffer from higher unemployment. Jean-Baptiste Say, by contrast, appeared to deny that capitalism could suffer from depressions, at least in the long term. David Ricardo appeared to believe that recessions were caused by people’s sheer irrationality, or outrageous bad luck.
What did Malthus believe? He became particularly interested in the question of unemployment in Britain following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Thousands of soldiers had returned from the frontline and many of them could not find enough work. The unemployment rate rose to twice its pre-war level. From 1815 to 1817 average wages fell by more than 10% in real terms, as employers realised that with lots of people looking for work, they could get away with paying less. In August 1819, workers demonstrated in Manchester. The government sent in armed forces and 10–20 people were killed, in what came to be known as the “Peterloo massacre”. Peterloo happened a short while before the publication of Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy.
Malthus did not formulate his theory of depressions especially clearly. In 1963 Thomas Sowell wrote a long paper that explained Malthus’s supposed position in torturous detail. But one can understand Malthus in roughly the following way. He disagreed with Say, arguing that his theories were “utterly unfounded”. He disagreed with Ricardo, who had also come up with a complex theory explaining why depressions were not possible. Malthus did not have Ricardo’s gift for abstract theorising–if you can call it a “gift”–but it was obvious to him that the economy was not self-correcting. He just looked out the window. According to Keynes, Malthus explained the “formidable” weakness of the economy as a problem of “the insufficiency of effective demand”. In other words, relative to what the economy was able to supply, people lacked the means to buy it.
Malthus was not totally clear about what sent the economy on the wrong path either. I don’t think it really matters. But he described the unhappy route that it would follow: once there was a temporary fall in demand in the economy, businesses would end up discouraged. Worried about the future, they would scale back on production. Perhaps they might lay off some staff. The laid-off workers could not spend as much as they once did. That cut into the revenues of other businesses. And so on. In that way, says Malthus, “a marked depression of wealth and population” could exist “permanently”.
By the way, it is with the help of this logic that Malthus was in favour of the Corn Laws (which, you will recall, his good friend David Ricardo was virulently against). Malthus accepted Ricardo’s argument that the abolition of the Corn Laws would result in higher profits for capitalists and lower rents for landlords. But to him that was a bad thing. He believed that the landed gentry tended to spend what money they had, whereas capitalists tended to save it. That was bad news for the working classes, who depended on spending to put them in a job.
The first Keynesian?
It is no wonder that Keynes liked Malthus’s theories. For one thing, Keynes’s style of economic reasoning was similar to Malthus’s. In Principles of Political Economy Malthus does not want to get bogged down in logically watertight theorising about the economy, in the manner of Ricardo. He relies more heavily on powerful intuitions about how the world works. Keynes followed a similar style of reasoning. What’s more, the notion of inadequate demand is a central part of Keynesian economics. Keynes used that idea to develop his best-known policy recommendation: during a recession, the government should boost spending in order to make up for the shortfall.
In 1934 the economics department at Cambridge University organised a commemoration to mark two centuries since Malthus’s birth. At Jesus College, where Malthus had been a fellow, a dinner was held. At the dinner Keynes talked of how Malthus “found the explanation in what he called the insufficiency of effective demand”. In a time of recession, Keynes said, Malthus calls for “free expenditure, public works and a policy of expansionism”. And, no doubt bigging himself up ever so slightly, Keynes remarked that a “hundred years were to pass before there would be anyone to read with even a shadow of sympathy and understanding his powerful and unanswerable attacks on the great Ricardo”.
How, then, should we think of Malthus’s legacy? It is a tricky one to summarise. His initial views on population were totally wrong. And his attempts to modify them later in his life got bogged down in theoretical and empirical confusion. On the plus side, he pioneered a style of economic reasoning which, while less watertight than the style employed by people like Ricardo, is just that bit more realistic. He ended up being influential for the right reasons, as well as the wrong ones.