Thomas Malthus: Biography Of This Political Economy Researcher
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an English demographer and economist recognized for a theory that bears his name: Malthusianism. Broadly speaking, he suggests that population growth inevitably leads to a decrease in the food supply, which is why he proposes reproduction and birth control.
Next we will see a biography of Thomas Malthus as well as some of his main contributions to economic and demographic thought.
Thomas Malthus: biography of an important economist
Thomas Malthus was born on February 13, 1766 in south London. He was the sixth of seven children, all children of Henrietta and Daniel Malthus. It was an important family of intellectuals, who even They were close friends of philosophers such as David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau As time went by, Malthus created a close relationship with another great economist of the time, David Ricardo.
From a young age, Thomas Malthus was able to access Jesus College in Cambridge. There he himself took courses in declamation, Latin and Greek, although his main subject of study was mathematics. By 1791, Malthus had graduated as a specialist in these areas, so he was named a member of the same college two years later. In 1979 He was ordained and became an Anglican minister
Years later, in 1804, he started a family with Harriet Eckersall, with whom he had three children, and whose education was strongly influenced by Rousseau’s liberal ideas about education.
Like other members of his family, Thomas Malthus had a cleft palate that affected his speech, as well as a cleft lip. For this reason he had refused to make a personal portrait, which was typical at the time. It was not until 1833, after having undergone surgery, that he decided to carry it out.
Thomas Robert Malthus died 29 December 1834 at Rookery although his remains are found in Bath Abbey in England.
Academic activity and memberships
Malthus served as a professor of history and political economy at Haileybury College in Hertfordshire. In fact, this was the first time that the term “political economy” was used in the academic context of Great Britain in reference to a subject.
In 1819 Malthus was elected a member of the Royal Society, and in 1821 joined the Political Economy Club Other members of the same society were David Ricardo and James Mill. Almost a decade later, in 1833, Malthus was elected a member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, as well as a member of the Royal Academy of Berlin. Finally, in 1834, Malthus was one of the founders of the Statistical Society of London.
Malthusianism
In 1798, Malthus published a first edition of the text “An Essay on the Principles of Population and How They Affect the Future Development of Society.” Since he published it, this work had a wide impact. Conclusively, Malthus argued that social development was doomed to failure due to accelerated population growth. At the same time, population growth would increase more and more rapidly if strict control was not exercised
Thus, the problem raised by Malthus is that this population growth did not occur at the same time as the increase in the means of subsistence.
While population increase had a “geometric rhythm,” the means of subsistence increased in a solely “arithmetic” progression. The population would tend to always grow beyond the limits of subsistence, which would ultimately translate into poverty, wars, disease and death. For Malthus, one of the remedies would be, for example, self-control and contraception.
His work is recognized as a pessimistic vision, since presented poverty as one of the inevitable phenomena for the human species. Likewise, his work has been criticized for having begun in an abstract and analytical language. In fact, he has been accused of not having carried out rigorous statistical analysis, despite the fact that this research method was in full growth in Europe and Great Britain.
For some critics, although Malthus had used empirical evidence in the development of his theory, the theory itself tended to be less concise in such evidence, and stronger in the theoretical development itself.
In any case, Malthusianism was quickly incorporated into the main economic theories and it represented an important break with excessive economic optimism, while offering a justification for the theory of wages based on the minimum cost of subsistence and discrediting more traditional forms of charity.
Outstanding works
Some of the most representative works of Thomas Malthus’ work are An Essay on the Principle of Population1933; An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions, 1800; and Principles of Political Economy in two volumes from 2008. Works such as Definitions in Political Economy from 1827 and Importation of Foreign Corn of 1996.
