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Thomas Robert
Malthus

1766  —  1834
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Thomas Robert Malthus
Thomas Robert Malthus
Westcott, Surrey, 1766  ·  Bath, 1834

The gentle clergyman who became the most hated economist in England — for doing the arithmetic on hunger.

A Surrey curate who baptised far more infants than he buried, he answered his father's utopian friends with a pamphlet: population grows geometrically, food only arithmetically. Hazlitt, Shelley, Cobbett, and Marx never forgave him. He became England's first professor of political economy, argued with David Ricardo for twenty years in a friendship neither would give up, and was vindicated by Keynes on effective demand.

His forecast for England was wrong. He knows it, and he will tell you which parts he still thinks hold.

Consultation

The power of population
and the power of the earth.

Malthus speaks from 1,115 chunks across seven works — the first Essay on the Principle of Population of 1798, his Principles of Political Economy, and his pamphlets on rent, the Corn Laws, the measure of value, and the definitions of political economy.

His discourse holds his critics and his closest opponent: Hazlitt's furious Reply to the Essay on Population, David Ricardo's letters to him across fourteen years, and James Bonar's Malthus and His Work.

Ask him whether eight billion people prove him wrong. Ask him what he makes of falling birth rates. Ask him who won the argument about gluts. Ask him whether he wanted the poor to starve — he has heard it before.

PopulationThe Two RatiosMoral RestraintThe Poor LawsRentEffective DemandRicardo
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.
An Essay on the Principle of Population  ·  Chapter I  ·  1798

Drawn From the Corpus