His Life
Thomas Robert Malthus was born in 1766, at Dorking, a place just south of London . He was the second son of eight children, six of whom were girls. As a boy, Robert was educated privately, partly by his father and partly by tutors. At the age of eighteen, in 1784, Malthus went up to Cambridge ( Jesus College ). In spite of a "marked impediment of speech," Malthus was to do well.

While at College, Malthus "took orders" thus becoming a curate of the Church of England. At about 1796, he took up parochial duties at Albury, Surrey , and lived with his father Daniel. At the age of 38, he married, an event which led him, in that year, 1804, to leave the safe haven of his "fellowship" at Cambridge . His marriage turned out to be a happy one; he had three children.

In 1805, he was appointed professor of Political Economy at the college at Haileybury, a college run by and for the general education of civil servants of the East India Company. He lived the balance of his life placidly existing as a scholar and teacher at Haileybury. His students called him "Pop." He was described in his obituary as a "tall and elegantly formed ... his appearance, no less than his conduct, was that of a perfect gentleman." "An amiable and benevolent man." Despite this eloquent description, Malthus was to suffer "much misrepresentation and abuse at the hands of both revolutionaries and conservatives

Major Contribution: The Principles of Population

Rationale and Core Principles

In 1830, when Thomas Malthus was still alive, the world's human population reached an estimated one billion. It took about a hundred years for the population to double to two billion. By the end of the 20th century, less than 70 years later, four billion more humans brought the total to more than 6 billion. In the early years of the 21st century, we are adding an estimated 73 million people every year. At this rate, a billion more people will be added in less than 14 years. Tragically, the larger our numbers, the harder it is to gain control over population increases while the devastating human impacts on our environment continue inexorably.

Since prehistoric times the institution of war has persisted in spite of its terrible danger and unbounded tragedy. Why have humans never solved the problems of poverty, inequality, and oppression? We are fortunate to have had Malthus to explain in simple terms the connection between population pressure and misery, which he defined as famine, poverty, disease and war. To promote his findings, to explore the lessons that may be derived from his core principles, and to provide a forum for discussion, the International Society of Malthus was launched in 1997, in time for the bi-centennial celebration of the publication of his 1798 classic, An Essay on the Principle of Population.

The Core Principles of Malthus:

• Food is necessary for human existence.
• Human population, if not checked, tends to grow faster than the power in the earth to produce subsistence.
• The effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
• Misery is the mechanism that balances human requirements and available resources.
• Nature's requirement that the imbalance between demand and supply be resolved forms the "strongest obstacle in the way of any very great improvement of society," and thus makes "the perfectibility of man and society" a theoretical and practical impossibility.
• The Principle of Population, i.e., the inevitability of misery due to the power of population to overwhelm resources, provides the mainspring behind the advance of human civilization by creating incentives for progress.

In relation to the Supply of Labour and Wages

The projected population increase was expected to lead to a glut in the supply of labor and hence a fall in the price paid to that labor. At the same time, the growing demand for food and other provisions would surely raise the cost of survival. Malthus postulated that population growth would come to a standstill due to the increased price of supporting a family. The population then remains stagnant until the excess laborers convert enough forest into farmland such that "the means of subsistence become in the same proportion of the populations as at the period from which we set out." In other words, humanity goes back to square one and the process repeats itself. The entire affair becomes a vicious circle where improved conditions lead to an increase in numbers which in turn nullifies any improvements that have been made. As a result, the income of workers inevitably falls to subsistence level. In the long run Malthus expected that forces such as war, pestilence, famine and plague would operate as checks on a swelling population.

In forming his dark forecast Malthus failed to take several factors into consideration. The industrial revolution transformed the very nature of Western society, so that his principles, which assume that agriculture forms the center of the economy, lost their validity by mid-nineteenth century. Focusing exclusively on the birth rates of economically thriving communities, he failed to consider that part of his projected "population explosion" would come from a reduction in death rates. This oversight throws Malthus's theories into disarray. An increase in the elderly population would not have significant repercussions in the labor market. Essentially, wages would not fall to the extent that Malthus originally predicted. In an era where children entered the work force at an early age, an increase in birth rates would have more profound implications than a decrease in deaths.

A more forgivable mistake by Malthus involves his failure to anticipate the growth of technology. The advancements made in agricultural science allowed farmers to make greater use of their lands. The development of effective contraception also made "restraint" a non-issue in terms of checking population growth. Because of these scientific breakthroughs the theories of Malthus have had little relevance in regards to Western society. Many underdeveloped nations, however, never adopted improved farming techniques or new methods of contraception. The results of this failure have mirrored Malthusian predictions to a startling degree. Overpopulation, famine, pestilence and war continue to ravage the third world. These events constitute an unhappy vindication of many of Malthusian doctrine