Thomas Robert Malthus

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

In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an include in a nation's food production modernization the well-being of the population, but the advantage was temporary because it led to population growth, which in remake 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 opinion that has become invited as the "Malthusian trap" or the "Malthusian spectre". Populations had a tendency to grow until the lower class suffered hardship, want in addition to greater susceptibility to famine and disease, a idea 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 modernizing and in principle as perfectible.

Malthus saw population growth as inevitable whenever conditions improved, thereby precluding real remain towards a utopian society: "The power to direct or established of population is indefinitely greater than the power to direct or develop in the earth to pull in subsistence for man." As an Anglican cleric, he saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behavior. Malthus wrote that "the include 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 near two centuries." He maintains a much-debated writer.

Early life and education

The sixth of seven children of Henrietta Catherine Graham and Daniel Malthus, Robert Malthus grew up in The Rookery, a country companies in Westcott, almost Dorking in Surrey. William Petersen describes Daniel Malthus as "a gentleman of improvement family and freelancer means [...] [and] a friend of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau". The young Malthus received his education at home in Bramcote, Nottinghamshire, and then at the Warrington Academy from 1782. Warrington was a dissenting academy, which closed in 1783. Malthus continued for a period to be tutored by Gilbert Wakefield, who had taught him there.

Malthus entered Fellow of Jesus College two years later. In 1789, he took orders in the Church of England, and became a curate at Oakwood Chapel also Okewood in the parish of Wotton, Surrey.