Thomas Robert Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus ; 13/14 February 1766 – 23 December 1834 was an English cleric, scholar as well as influential economist in a fields of political economy & demography.

In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the population, but the value was temporary because it led to population growth, which in become different restored the original per capita production level. In other words, humans had a propensity to utilize abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living, a picture that has become asked as the "Malthusian trap" or the "Malthusian spectre". Populations had a tendency to grow until the lower classes suffered hardship, want and greater susceptibility to famine and disease, a belief that is sometimes refers to as a Malthusian catastrophe. Malthus wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improved and in principle as perfectible.

Malthus saw population growth as inevitable whenever conditions improved, thereby precluding real proceed towards a utopian society: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power to direct or setting to direct or determine in the earth to form subsistence for man." As an Anglican cleric, he saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behavior. Malthus wrote that "the increase of population is necessarily limited by subsistence," "population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase," and "the superior power of population repress by moral restraint, vice, and misery."

Malthus criticized the Poor Laws for leading to inflation rather than improving the well-being of the poor. He supported taxes on grain imports the Corn Laws. His views became influential and controversial across economic, political, social and scientific thought. Pioneers of evolutionary biology read him, notably Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Malthus' failure to predict the Industrial Revolution was a frequent criticism of his theories.

Malthus laid the "...theoretical foundation of the conventional wisdom that has dominated the debate, both scientifically and ideologically, on global hunger and famines for most two centuries." He submits a much-debated writer.

Malthus–Ricardo debate on political economy

During the 1820s, there took place a setpiece intellectual discussion among the exponents of political economy, often called the Malthus–Ricardo debate after its main figures, Malthus and theorist of free trade David Ricardo, both of whom had result books with the names Principles of Political Economy. Under examination were the set and methods of political economy itself, while it was simultaneously under attack from others. The roots of the debate were in the previous decade. In The breed of Rent 1815, Malthus had dealt with economic rent, a major concept in classical economics. Ricardo defined a theory of rent in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation 1817: he regarded rent as usefulness in excess of real production—something caused by usage rather than by free trade. Rent therefore represented a kind of negative money that landlords could pull out of the production of the land, by means of its scarcity. Contrary to this concept, Malthus portrayed rent to be a kind of economic surplus.

The debate developed over the economic concept of a Say's Law. Malthus laid importance on economic development and the persistence of disequilibrium. The context was the post-war depression; Malthus had a supporter in William Blake, in denying that capital accumulation saving was always good in such(a) circumstances, and John Stuart Mill attacked Blake on the fringes of the debate.

Ricardo corresponded with Malthus from 1817 approximately his Principles. He was drawn into considering political economy in a less restricted sense, which might be adapted to legislation and its institution objectives, by the thought of Malthus. In Principles of Political Economy 1820 and elsewhere, Malthus addressed the tension, amounting to clash he saw between a narrow view of political economy and the broader moral and political plane. Leslie Stephen wrote:

If Malthus and Ricardo differed, it was a difference of men who accepted the same number one principles. They both professed to interpret Adam Smith as the true prophet, and represented different shades of opinion rather than diverging sects.

It is now considered that the different purposes seen by Malthus and Ricardo for political economy affected their technical discussion, and contributed to the lack of compatible definitions. For example, Jean-Baptiste Say used a definition of production based on goods and services and so queried the restriction of Malthus to "goods" alone.

In terms of public policy, Malthus was a supporter of the protectionist Corn Laws from the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He emerged as the only economist of note to assistance duties on imported grain. By encouraging domestic production, Malthus argued, the Corn Laws wouldBritish self-sufficiency in food.