An Essay on the Principle of Population

by Thomas Robert Malthus

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Genres: Economics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Classics, Science, Sociology

150 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1798

About the author

The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus FRS was an English cleric and scholar, influential in the fields of political economy and demography. Malthus himself used only his middle name Robert.

His An Essay on the Principle of Population observed that sooner or later population will be checked by famine and disease, leading to what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible. He thought that the dangers of population growth precluded progress towards a utopian society: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man". As an Anglican cleric, Malthus saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behaviour. Malthus wrote:

That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,
That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and,
That the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.

Malthus placed the longer-term stability of the economy above short-term expediency. He criticized the Poor Laws, and (alone among important contemporary economists) supported the Corn Laws, which introduced a system of taxes on British imports of wheat. 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. He remains a much-debated writer.

Reviews

[Sean Barrs · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are too many people in the world, and it gets more and more crowded every day.

Malthus understood this in 1798 and his main concern was with food, of us running out of it as we created more and more mouths to feed with no real checks in place on an exploding population growth. This can only be mitigated through two ways. The first is us actively trying to control birth rates. And the second is when nature strikes back and starts to kill us off because we have stripped the earth of all resources and face famine. We control the amount of people in the world, or we start to die off. It is that simple.

Malthus speaks through a logical lens. There are no feelings here, only cold hard facts. And as much as I hate his pessimism, and as much as he was despised by his own literary generation for his lack of sentimentality, I know that almost everything he argues here is fundamentally correct. We will face this dilemma in the future. Malthus limits his ideas to food but if he were alive today, he would consider energy consumption and fossil fuels: he would consider his ideas and arguments in much greater scope. And I think it is important to say that he was a product of his time. He had a limited knowledge of the world, and he did not consider the future or possible advancements in agriculture (and by extension renewable recourses.) The dilemma has, in effect, been postponed but it is still very real.

Malthus recognised that vegetable farming, as opposed to animal farming, was far more sustainable. Growing beef was wasteful and uneconomical because of the amount of land it requires, so a vegetable diet would mean more food for everyone. Agriculture reforms like this could delay the problems because more food is available but this, in effect, would create another set of problems. Indeed, because of this the population would grow and grow and grow because more sustenance was available. And the world would be back to where it started. Reform only delays the inevitable and here we get to the crux of his principle of population: it is unavoidable. No matter what we do, one day we will run out of resources and land. There will be too many people on the earth, and we will start to die as a species unless we change.

The philosophical implications of Malthus’ ideas extend far beyond the limitations of his own writing and era. And what I am trying to suggest here is that Malthusian principle has implications in modern environmentalism and deep ecology. He has, indeed, given me much to think about.

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[Roy Lotz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not sure what exactly I expected from this little book. Certainly, I expected to see Malthus’s oft cited argument concerning the rate of food production vs. that of population increase (but I wondered if an entire book, however brief, could be filled on that topic). I just as certainly did not expect to meet such a charming writer and incisive thinker.

But why has this book stood the test of time? Doubtless, Malthus was wrong about every specific prediction he ventured to make. He did not foresee the widespread use of contraceptives, nor the dazzling improvements in farming technology that would appear in the years to come. I wonder what Malthus would say if you told him that, in the future, less than 2% of the population of the United States would be farmers, and that the population of the world would exceed 7 billion. Probably nothing, he would just laugh at you.

So, he’s no Nostradamus. But then why has Malthus been brought up in every class on the environment that I have ever taken? This must be because, although Malthus was gloriously (and thankfully) wrong in the specifics, the general problem that he elucidates here is an important one that somehow eluded the attention of every major thinker before him. As the human species continues to multiply at an ever-increasing rate, the ghost of Malthus will continue to haunt us.

I have heard it said that Malthus was an enemy of the poor—a lassez-faire capitalist that didn’t want welfare states to impinge on the free market. Yes, he was opposed to the Poor Laws in England; but not because he cared little for the well-being of the poor. Malthus genuinely, and for good reason, believed that simply giving money to the poor without increasing the food supply wasn’t likely to make their conditions any better.

In point of fact, the central concern of this book is to improve the lot of the greatest possible number of people. True, for reasons he lays forth, Malthus is not very optimistic about this prospect. The tension he identifies between food supplies and population increase lead him to conclude that some poverty and suffering is inevitable, and that a perfect utopia is an idle dream. But don’t mistake this realistic view of things for gloating about the destitution of the masses. Surely, if he thought that suffering could be entirely extirpated, he would throw all his weight behind that solution.

Population explosion will likely be the major issue of our time. If the world is to be improved, it does no good to play around with utopian dreams where the streets are paved with gold and everyone eats candy without gaining weight or getting cavities. The solution will require a hard-headed, realistic analysis of the problem, our identifying what we can reasonably expect to work based on what has worked in the past, and our working with what is currently possible given the political situation. And when we look back at how much has already been done, we can thank Malthus for giving us a head start.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Humans tend to increase faster than they can create food, so at a certain point they will be unable to support themselves. There are two ways to control this: decrease birth rate (preventive checks) or increase death rate (positive checks); if the first one doesn't happen, the second inevitably will.

That general idea is so obvious that it seems hard to believe someone would have to come up with it, and Malthus is just the guy who laid it out most clearly. People have known that since the dawn of time. But he's also been consistently misinterpreted and vilified since day one by people who, for example, think he's advocating policies to kill off poor people. That's sortof the same as using Darwin to justify eugenics; there's a logical leap in the middle that makes no sense.

There's a third way, first pointed out by Engels (the other dude who wrote The Communist Manifesto). It seems possible, he said, through science, to increase the amount of food we can produce in order to keep up with our population. That's what's happened so far: the "Green Revolution" of the 20th century greatly increased farm yield, preventing a calamitous population collapse in the nick of time.

Unfortunately, we now suspect that rather than preventing a calamitous collapse, the Green Revolution may just have forestalled a catastrophic one; the new farming techniques are destroying our soil. The world is becoming exhausted. (See Charles Mann's cover story in National Geographic, September 2008 for more.) We need a new silver bullet. Or else birth control. Either way.

Genetically modified crops could be that bullet; just like the Green Revolution, they offer to greatly increase farm yield, bringing along a number of dire-sounding, poorly understood side effects. (See the "Potato" section of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire for a thoroughly pessimistic take on that.)

My own take is that the human urge for expansion and invention will always be much greater than our capacity for sober reflection; to ask us to slow down would be like asking a 13-year-old to quit masturbating. You might explain that it'll only result in decreased sensitivity and a shortage of socks, but he is going to keep at it with endless industry and innovation. In the end, this either will or won't work out. We'll either be able to innovate fast enough to barely stay ahead of our own unforeseen consequences, or something else will happen. He'll either get a girlfriend or die of autoerotic asphyxiation in his parents' basement. (I'm not flogging this metaphor too much, am I?) But it's human nature: show us a piece of land, and we will put stuff on it; give us an idea, and we will pursue it. We damn the torpedoes. We Frankensteins will always have our monsters.

ETA: Cecily directs me to a couple of poems that say pretty much what I've said but much better and they rhyme. I've pasted them in a comment.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this was not quite what I expected. The topic broadens into the public policy consequences of his theory and the metaphysical purposes of misery. Moreover, the writing is excellent; who expects Malthus to have a sense of humor? I also didn’t expect the feminism, and the extension of the analysis from the how to the why of the misery produced by the imbalance in population and agriculture. As a clergyman, Malthus understandably felt it incumbent on him to justify to man the ways of a God who would create such a law of nature. So he sets out to prove that misery is essential to the development of man’s mind and heart. Interesting topics because I am participating in a library-based reading group that is spending the summer on Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The Essay takes on Godwin’s argument for the perfectibility of man/woman and his/her society, with Malthus bent on showing the folly of Godwin’s optimistic views. (It is also important to remember that this was an era of the belief that a larger population would produce a wealthier state.) Malthus, with geometrical population growth and arithmetic food increase, argues that the result of a surplus starving population would be reached almost immediately, not in the distant future.

As a technical aside, I thought Malthus would muster more statistical support for the propositions that population expands geometrically at the rate he assumes, and that agricultural production expands at the rate he assumes. In fact, I t think that both of his rates are shakier than he asserts, although the general contrast of geometrical and arithmetical progressions were probably correct for his time (ie, before widespread contraception and the Green Revolution; still a huge problem but not quite as fundamentally destined to a mismatch, until you throw medical advances in).

First off, the population issue. Malthus asserts that population grows quickly right after an event that creates a food surplus. He looks at the ratio of births to deaths in Europe before and after crises such as plagues; fewer people, same land, more food per person, less worry about feeding your children, earlier marriage, more births per death. He doesn’t examine the fact that the death rate would have been surpressed after plagues because the plague woud have carried off the most vulnerable. So the ratios are suspect.

Similarly, his assertion that a population will double in no more than twenty five years when there is no food constraint, based on data from America, undervalues the contribution of immigration to population growth here and especially the age distribution of immigrants—most would have been of an age to start or increase their families. For example, I looked up the ages of the ages of indentured servants shipping out of England over a period of years, and almost none were older than thirty. Presumably since people heading for a life of hewing farmsteads out of the wilderness knew how much physical work was involved, the old and infirm would have stayed behind. Skewed age distribution, higher birth rate than in a normal population, although according to a few websites early marriage was indeed common.

The food production question is especially interesting, and highlights the consequences of the lack of comprehensive economic statistics in his time. Malthus was, like the Physiocrats, a believer in the proposition that the only measure of a country’s wealth was agricultural production. Cities and manufacturing led to unhealthy living and vice. Anything other than land-based production was a luxury that didn’t add to the real (food) wealth that could improve the lot of the poorer laboring classes. He offers that food production might increase by the current level every twenty-five years with Herculean effort: food for 7 million today, for 14 million in twenty-five years, for 21 million in fifty years, versus the potentially geometric increase in population. He briefly discusses of the enclosures and intensive interest in scientific farming on the part of landowners, but he argues that much of the increased capacity was used up in converting grain fields to pastures. (In fact, one of his most interesting propositions is that redistribution of land would lead to increased production because it would reverse the grain-to-pasture process.) But there isn’t really much in the way of agricultural statistics to back up his specific ‘increase by present production every twenty-five years’ hypothesis.

He also argued against the Poor Laws, as tending toward a counter-productive outcome. He argues that if the poor can be sure of publicly-provided food for their children if things go wrong, they won’t delay marriage and procreation. This earned him lasting opprobrium from many intellectuals and artists, although politicians and economists took his reasoning seriously. The contraception solution to the consequences of early marriage was, in his opinion, anathema.

Further, Malthus repeatedly argues that women take the brunt of the misery from this unbalanced law of nature. And at one point he says, far be it from me to argue that women are not men’s intellectual equal, although their lives do not lead them as frequently to be strongly interested in such questions.

The middle of the book is the long argument with Godwin, saying that we are not headed to heaven on earth because man’s basic nature is not going to change. You cannot assert that people will start behaving contrary to ways we have always seen them behave: a fantasy that they will refrain sufficiently from sex to keep the population down, for example. We can only look at the evidence. But then, because he feels he has to justify the ways of God to man, he has boxed himself in a corner; he needs to resort to Revelation to explain why misery exists and is necessary. He can find no factual or reasonable explanation. To be fair, he acknowledges the problem right up front. But he grabs the usual casuistic argument that the ways of God are too subtle for human minds, so when we reach an impasse in our reasoned argument, we must resign to incomprehensible wisdom. I sensed that Malthus is himself frustrated by this resignation, necessitated by his own discovery of the natural law of population, despite his best efforts to argue that the mind needs adversity to develop, as does the heart. He also makes the surprising assertion that he doesn’t believe in eternal damnation; souls who don’t merit Heaven are simply obliterated at death.

Thus I find Malthus was not inherently a callous, pessimistic man, but one who reasoned his way into a dismal position and tried to recommend policies that would do the least damage.

[Em · Rating 1 out of 5]

Malthus is a rational man, a brilliant man, but a man without a real sense of humanity. His justifications of his theory were taking humans as mere objects translated into numbers, looking on the macro side, and not even dealing with the intimate details of people, family, and community in his theory. Sort of Darwin-istic only he's taking it a step further to say hey yeah the fittest will survive and those that are unfit won't--and we should not aid them in any way. So in a way, his implication takes it to more than a theory, and it becomes a really really dark proposition. Didn't like it.

[Neil Collins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book because it has been recommended as one of the influences for the modern capitalist system. Adam smith is regarded as the founding father of our current economic system and the ideas of Malthus which are presented in this book serve as a solidifying justification to further support the capitalist class system.

As much as I detest the inhumane and completely debunked conclusions of this book, I did give it 2 stars, rather than one. This is because i do think the book is important as a way of peering deeply into the severely flawed mechanics and ideology which supports our modern system. A very good example of a bad example, so to speak.

The basic idea of the book is that if humans all had their basic needs met, then they would reproduce exponentially, covering the Earth and destroying the habitat. Therefore the majority, the poor and working classes must always live in poverty, starvation and disease, in order to keep their numbers in check. Almost any attempt to create a more equal society, to lift the lower classes up out of poverty or feed them, runs against nature and would be harmful to the whole, to the survival and fitness of the "race". He goes on further to explain how the higher classes are exempt from this rule because of their "christianly" well-breeding and self restraint. In short, he justifies a world where the few live in luxury, ease and plenty while the masses of humanity toil for them, largely starving and dying off to keep population in check.

All the while he claims that these views are actually the findings of reason and science. To support his claims of scientific evidence, he uses a long list of outdated assumptions, truncated examples, biased hypothetical scenarios and religious rhetoric. One particularly absurd claim I can remember is when he said such and such is true "because, as science has proven, the Earth is 5,000 or 6,000 years old." Hmmm... I wonder what scientific text he researched in order to come up with that figure. Any guesses?

Anyway, I think this book is very important, not only as an amusing peek into the past when people believed absurd notions for lack of more accurate data. It is important because such a dangerous amount of people still believe the basic idea today, in spite of the vast information, research and data which has long since disproved his ideas. Not only have the ideas been thoroughly disproved from many angles, but we actually are actually still living in a system which was founded on and supports these beliefs.

First of all, is his main premise, that if humans have enough of the basic necessities of life and are not controlled by poverty and starvation, then they will multiply at an exponential rate, causing overpopulation. It has been shown that this is actually the opposite of what has been later observed in our world. Women in poor countries tend to have less children as they are able to receive proper nutrition, clean drinking water, education, etc... Women also have less children when basic medical treatment is available. It has been shown that in situations where there is a high infant mortality rate, there is also an even higher birth rate.

I won't pick apart every one of Malthus' numerous incorrect assumptions here but I will say that I think the mistake ultimately lies with his incorrect beliefs as to what "human nature" is. This is very common and seems to be a root issue especially then, and even now. although now luckily science seems to be shedding light slowly on the issue. Unfortunately, belief systems are slow to adjust to new information and there is a dangerous 'culture-lag'.

Human nature has long been thought of as an force that comes from within the person and cannot be changed, only managed. It was assumed that human nature is selfish, greedy, aggressive and competitive... and cannot be any other way. In ancient times, this view was supported by religions (especially Malthus' own obviously Christian bias). Later, psychology took the same view, except in its own language with people like Frued, and finally came the study genetics which further seemed as if "human nature" comes from within, deciding how we will be and behave.

It turns out that very little of behavior is programmed by the actual genes. The genes merely give options for traits that can be expressed. It is eventually the social environment that decides which traits do become expressed. Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University is one of many biologists who show that human behavior is very adaptable, not fixed. It is influenced by the environment, not from within.

This completely changes the conversation as to what a healthy society should be, because the conclusions of people like Malthus, Adam Smith and capitalism in general rely on the belief that humans are only self-interested, selfish and competitive. It has been said that capitalism, with its inequality, competition and scarcity-based mechanisms is the ideal system to harness and work with this selfishness that is human nature. In fact, selfish and competitive traits are a response to a highly competitive, scarcity based social system, not the reverse. The realization coming from these findings is that this is not the only way society could be organized. In a more equal, collaborative and abundant society, we would see our flexible "human nature" expressing traits which are suited to such an environment. Traits such as collaboration, intelligence, empathy and creativity would be the parts of "human nature" which would be expressed, rather than competitiveness and aggression, as are necessary in today's system.

Because of the view of human nature which was upheld when Malthus wrote An Essay on The Principal of Population, he saw the human (and especially the masses of the poor) as children which must be controlled by poverty and starvation rather than helped to escape such poverty. This view was convenient for him to have, since he was part of the educated leisure and business class which lives from the labor of the poor. It would be extremely inconvenient for him to realize or even glimpse the fact that those in his class are rich simply BECAUSE there are desperate masses who have nothing and are willing to submit (if you can call it willing) to labor. It is just as inconvenient and unlikely that the capitalist economists of today will have these realizations. Luckily, scientific inquiry and social progress march on.

[Otto Lehto · Rating 4 out of 5]

The basic argument of the book is dead. To borrow Monty Python, "'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This argument is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-ARGUMENT!!"

So, the argument is dead and buried. But it is still pretty fantastic. It has plenty of redeeming merits that salvage it from oblivion. Malthus was a brilliant thinker and an eloquent writer. Let me just give five reasons to keep on reading the dismal essay: 1) Malthus's scientific methodology is rigorous. He was one of the first economists to present a clear hypothesis, formalize it using clear mathematics, and defend it empirically. Let me also encourage the reader to admire the scintillating prose and rhetoric of the author. 2) Malthus was one of the first to clearly articulate the commonplace economic fact that "people respond to incentives." He showed that social policy should improve existing incentives and avoid bad incentives. 3) He showed that basic human motivations - like self-love and the procreative instinct - are hard to change. He showed that our bodies and minds are subject to certain constants, or statics, that are resistant to change. He thereby provided a necessary corrective to Utopian social engineers like Godwin and Condorcet who believed that human beings and societies are endlessly malleable. And even if Godwin and Condorcet are proven right in the long run (which might well turn out to be the case), Malthus was right in the short to medium run. 4) On a more theoretical level, Malthus thereby forced social reformers to think hard about the TIME, INERTIA, and EFFORT needed to ameliorate the human condition. Before reaching for Utopian human perfection, Malthus showed that the science of economics is the science of gradual amelioration through incentives. 5) Malthus's theory inspired Darwin's theory of natural selection. What a marvelous thing! Such a powerful theory!

Sure, Malthus was pessimistic, cranky, and wrong. Dead wrong. But his prose is still worth resurrecting for the hundreds of little droplets of wisdom that it secretly, silently shelters.

[Bill Bowyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intelligent man taught me to think of Malthus by drawing a line graph, with population on the x-axis and food supply on the y-axis. Draw a straight line from the top left corner to the bottom right and plot a point midway down the line. Once you pass that point going down, things start to get interesting.

I see that a good number of reviews on here are negative, and I imagine they're that way because the reader stopped once Malthus went into the English Poor Laws. Like any good theorist his writing can drift into misunderstood subjects and it's hard to figure out what the hell he's talking about when he does, but with Malthus you just have to keep reading. I have that problem with Aristotle but it's the same concept: a contemporary mind cannot think in two dimensions.

The gist of what you need to take from Malthus are the checks to population and the importance of food and water in the natural order of civilized human life. With over 7 billion people on this planet, those issues are starting to become quite important.

-bb

[Mirjam]

Look, the thing is that he's not *wrong* (although he was wrong about a whole lot of things, such as the advent of technological advances and the widespread use of contraceptives) per se; its just that the basic thesis of his work (which is fine) has been so corrupted by people's taking it to reinforce their eugenics-based opinions that the original is kind of moot. It's basically what happened to Communism, or the Free Market: obviously the idea sounds fine in principle, because even Hitler didn't start off by outright advocating for genocide! No, you have to work up to that sort of thing. Foreplay, or whatever.

A lot of people were reintroduced to the concept of Malthusian economics via... Thanos, as much as it pains me to say. (And no, for the record, randomly killing off half the population -- including all non-human living things -- is not the solution, nor does Malthus himself advocate for it. Thanos is a dick.) Oh well. The power of pop culture, I guess. The issue then is that most people won't bother to dig any deeper into it. There's a great book called Wolf Island by Celia Godkin that was basically baby's first introduction to Social Darwinism (which is a bullshit excuse for eugenics, FYI) for me. It's about an ecosystem and how balance is important. Here's part of the summary blurb thing:

[...] based on an actual event, [this] is a moving chronicle of what happens when the highest link in a food chain is removed. The resultant population growth, food shortage, and starvation affect every member of the chain.

A family of wolves leave their island environment. Although, at first, their absence is unnoticed, nature's delicately balanced ecosystem comes undone over a period of months, and the mice, rabbits, squirrels, and even owls fight for survival. Finally, the accidental return of the wolf family to their home restores the island habitat to health.

So, yeah. The wolves leave the island, and the prey animals' birthrate skyrockets. There's a population boom. Then there isn't enough food to feed everyone, and the deer and mice and whatever all start dying in droves. And not just the old and the sick that the wolves would pick off -- everyone. It's a mess. But then the wolves come back, and gorge themselves on the economic nightmare, and everything is back to normal. Based on a true story!

Obviously, the problem here is that we human beings like to think that we're above that. Or at least we pretend to be, until it comes down to something we're passionate about -- how many times has someone said "I'm against the death penalty, but"? A fuckton, that's how many. It's impossible to care about every single person in the world; our brains aren't calibrated for that level of empathy. Also, it's not healthy. There's some innocent orphan kid dying of starvation right now that you personally don't know about, or care about, because that's how humans work. Does that mean that poor kid's life isn't worth anything? Of course it doesn't. That kid is worth just as much as any other human being. It's just bad luck and prejudice.

The issue is who gets to determine who dies. Practically speaking, overpopulation is not actually a problem at the moment -- there's more than enough resources, renewable or otherwise, to support the nearly eight billion humans who populate the planet. There's plenty of space, water, food, what-have-you; it's more an issue of distribution than anything else. And of course the question of who gets to live.

Because it's never as simple as the Wolf Island situation. If we were to kill off -- let's say everyone over the age of 60. Anyone with a physical disability that doesn't allow them to work, because productivity is important. Infertile people, because they don't contribute to the survival of the population. Anyone with genetic conditions that are considered detrimental. Babies born with birth defects. Everyone with mental conditions. Homosexuals, because they won't reproduce. Anyone who opposes this concept. Are you starting to see the problem? This is eugenics, and eugenics = bad.

Historically speaking, the kind of thing Malthus talks about has been wielded as a weapon against "undesirables." Whomever is undesirable has generally been determined by the dominant class. That's why you get things like femicide under China's One Child Policy, or political prisoners exiled to Stalin's Gulags. Or forced sterilization of disabled adults in the United States. Or -- well, I'm German, okay? You get the idea. There's nothing new under the sun.

Also, I do strongly believe that the value of a human life is not up to humans to be determined. I also believe that death is a necessary factor of life, and an individual being -- human or otherwise -- is not individually all that special or important. I'm against the death penalty, and I've no problem with the concept of a meat industry. I don't think these opinions are contradictory, but then again, I'm only one person. How it's decided what's valuable is context-dependent. The peacock with the biggest, gaudiest tail feathers gets all the ladies, but then when a predator species moves in and starts hunting the flashy fellows, suddenly the chicks want a more demure boyfriend. That's one of the ways evolution happens. We're removing our wisdom teeth faster than our bodies can evolve not to need them. We have vestigial tails that form in the womb because our genomes are still hardwired like monkeys. Stephen Hawking was widely recognized as one of the most brilliant minds in history, but he would've been eaten by the returning wolves were he a mouse. All of which is to say, I don't actually think Malthus is right. For better or for worse, our brains have developed beyond Malthusian population culling.

Maybe if we were octopi. But those tend to live only for a couple of years anyway. So nature takes care of it on its own.

[Dorotea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another reading for my Economic History class

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malthus published several editions of this essay. I read his first edition, published in 1798. His later editions addressed various concerns about what he had put forward.

Malthus' general argument is well known. Population increases geometrically; the means to support population increases arithmetically. (1) This leads to a situation where population exceeds the means for existence, which then checks population growth via misery (disease, starvation) or vice (wars; those with means survive, those without die). Malthus presents these dynamics as "laws of nature." Though he acknowledges technological or behavioral changes that slow down these dynamics, the end result is the always same: population overtakes the means to support a population increase.

The Malthus thesis has been debated extensively by contemporary and historical commentators. The explosion of population growth in the last century confirms the Malthus thesis on geometric expansion. The debate is whether we are now dealing with the "misery and vice" components that Malthus highlighted as the natural consequence of situations where sheer numbers of people overrun the capacity for subsistence (scarcity of food and water; competition for territory). (2)

Malthus strikingly framed his argument in a much broader context. He argued that Pitt's poor laws were fundamentally flawed in a double sense because they allowed the poor to propagate beyond their means of subsistence and because they drew resources from the well-off, which were the very resources that promoted the welfare of the country. This argument flows directly from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." Smith argued that the selfish impulses of free-market capitalism, operating as an invisible hand, benefited society as a whole. Responding to criticism about the absence of "benevolence," Malthus believed that Smith's system was best suited to address misfortune and to keep population numbers and subsistence balanced.

All of this, Malthus thinks, was a reflection of God's plan for the world. Malthus, coming from a clergyman's background, was a progressive in the sense that he saw life moving, evolving, from low to high, with the latter defined as "mind" in control of matter. This helps to explain his preoccupation with how those from the lower class fit into his population theories. These individuals represented a degraded condition. They were moved by passions and, especially, sexual passion. More generally, they were void of mental sophistication. They frequented bars, engaged in various debaucheries, and spent their money. When they ran out of money, they abandoned their family and left them to the care of the state. But, through the invisible hand principle, Malthus' system had the virtue of regulating (i.e., eliminating) these lower types and, thereby, leaving those with more obvious mental superiority to advance, ipso facto, God's plan for Mind in the world. (3)

In a sense, Malthus philosophical schema could be seen as a modernized version of the Platonic vision for the immanence of God in the world. But whereas Plato left the material world behind (as but a shadow on the cave wall), Malthus anchored his argument in Smith's "invisible hand" and material reality. Malthus argues from nature to God, not the other way around. (4) In fact, nature -- and the laws of population and subsistence - is used by Malthus in this book to argue against the idealism of two contemporary theorists, Condorcet and Godwin who, he says, believed in "the indefinite prolongation of human life, as a very curious instance of the longing of the soul after immortality." (5) Later, he takes on Godwin's idealism in another sense. Godwin, Malthus says, lodged all evil in society and its institutions, thereby highlighting the role of human-created problems over the "laws of nature." (6) Godwin argued that the unlimited perfectibility of man was limited by "bad institutions" that corrupted the best tendencies of humankind. Malthus was clear, though, that human passions, especially within those of the lower classes, were such that perfectibility was, and always would be, an illusion because his natural law relating to population-subsistence have been and always would be, life's prevailing dynamic unless, or until, humankind was purged, through natural selection, of these misery-inducing passions.

(1) Population increases "1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, &c." And subsistence increases "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, &c."

(2) Another consequence that Malthus does not mention is whether quality of life is compromised by a crowded world.

(3) "It is to the established administration of property, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-love, that we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, all the finer and more delicate emotions of the soul, for every thing, indeed, that distinguishes the civilized from the savage state...." Later, the "survival of the fittest" argument was picked up heavily by Darwin, especially in connection with what he regarded as the superior white race who, via colonialism, controlled non-white peoples.

(4) "In all our feeble attempts...to 'find out the Almighty to perfection,' it seems absolutely necessary that we should reason from nature up to nature's God, and not presume to reason from God to nature."

(5) The rest of the quote reads as follows: "Both these gentlemen have rejected the light of revelation which absolutely promises eternal life in another state. They have also rejected the light of natural religion, which, to the ablest intellects in all ages, has indicated the future existence of the soul. Yet so congenial is the idea of immortality to the mind of man that they cannot consent entirely to throw it out of their systems. After all their fastidious scepticisms concerning the only probable mode of immortality, they introduce a species of immortality of their own, not only completely contradictory to every law of philosophical probability...."

(6) "The great bent of Mr. Godwin's work on political justice...is to show that the greater part of the vices and weaknesses of men proceed from the injustice of their political and social institutions; and that if these were removed, and the understandings of men more enlightened, there would be little or no temptation in the world to evil. As it has been clearly proved, however (at least as I think), that this is entirely a false conception, and that, independent of any political or social institutions whatever, the greater part of mankind, from the fixed and unalterable laws of nature, must ever be subject to the evil temptations arising from want, besides other passions."

[Andrés Astudillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviamente, son 5 estrellas solamente por ese axioma que dice que "la población crece geométricamente, mientras que los recursos lo hacen aritméticamente", de ahí el resto de capítulos son ensayos sobre la moral humana. La sobrepoblación no son conjeturas, ni teorías, es un hecho. Ingresen a la página https://www.worldometers.info/world-p..., y es ESPELUZNANTE que cada segundo nace una persona nueva. A medida que escribo esta reseña, la población ha aumentado en más de centenas. Al momento, somos cerca de 7,7 mil millones de personas... recuerdo que empezamos el año con 700 millones menos. Cada vez que te quejes del tráfico, de que no hay empleo, del costo de la comida, de violaciones en televisión, de los índices de delincuencia y de que cada vez es más dificil conseguir trabajo, acuerdate de Malthus. Él fue un hombre en transición, vivió en el siglo en el que el conocimiento científico estaba naciendo. Es tan profunda esta aseveración, que le dieron su nombre a un escenario tétrico del futuro, lo cual llamamos "Distopia malthusiana".
Como trabajo en consultoría ambiental, propongo este caso sumamente puntual para las Islas Galápagos. "La expansión demográfica, en áreas consideradas como reservas naturales de la humanidad, pueden generar deterioros en el ecosistema, debido a 1) la expansión de terreno para uso antropogénico, 2) el consecuente aumento de la demanda de servicios básicos (redes eléctricas, uso de combustibles, gas, agua potable, entre otros) y finalmente, 3) la generación de desechos sólidos domiciliarios e industriales. Las Islas Galápagos tienen 25.244 habitantes, un 9,5% más que la población de hace cinco años cuando llegó a 23.046 personas (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, 2016). En el año de 1990, la población total de Galápagos era de 9.785 habitantes, de los cuales 5.536 eran hombres y 4.249 correspondían a mujeres (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, 2019). Considerando estos valores, se ha determinado que la población ha casi quintuplicado su demografía, con el 456% de crecimiento en los últimos 29 años." Yo he ido a Galápagos, y los extranjeros que van allá se dan cuenta de que hay algo en el ambiente que no se siente bien; ya se está empezando a observar que cada vez que viajan, hay más humanos y lujos en infraestructura de lo que había antes. Me apena muchísimo porque ya el relleno sanitario ya se llenó, y ahora van a gestionar la creación de uno nuevo. Bajo esta premisa, en 100 años tendremos las mismas "Islas encantadas" pero rellenas de basura. No hay turismo sostenible.
Revisen cualquier fuente estadística, y ninguna miente.
Es tan claro el problema, que hasta nos hacen películas y series que tocan este tema, ni siquiera de manera sutil e indirecta: recuerden a Thanos en Infinity War diciendo que la población sufrió un declive por su exponencial crecimiento; o la serie en Netflix de 3%, en donde la población ya fue devastada y únicamente el 3% es apto para tener una vida con recursos; en The Matrix cuando el agente Smith dice textualmente que somos un virus que al acabar con los recursos de un sitio nos vamos a otro a hacer lo mismo. Lo vemos en todo lado, pero nadie quiere hacer el sacrificio. Esto lo sabía Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Jacob Bronowski, lo sabe Desmond Morris y lo plasma en su libro "El mono desnudo". Las nuevas generaciones deben de dejar de compartir memes y empezar a pensar de manera crítica: deben tener un solo hijo o ninguno. Cada día salen nuevas publicaciones tanto de la ONU como de la OMS indicando que la Tierra ya no tendrá agua para el año 2050; otros materiales de divulgación científica dicen que los humanos nos extinguiremos para el nuevo siglo.
Siembre habrá gente que se oponga, y dirán que somos unos desalmados, o que la vida es una bendición y que por fervor religioso debemos de procrear; eso es FALAZ y FALSO, además de egoísta y escaso de crítica. Es cierto que el enamoramiento fue un producto evolutivo para garantizar que la especie no se extinga, pero, hay que examinar a nuestro alrededor: el ser humano ha sido responsable de la extinción de más de un millón de especies tanto de Flora y de Fauna; cada dia vemos noticias de las desgracias que ocurren a la naturaleza, sin embargo, no se trata de ser un misántropo, se trata de quitarnos esa corona antropocéntrica que creemos tener.

[Aleksandar Janjic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Друго поглавље ове књиге ми је упало као реадинг ассигнмент за неки курс који пратим на Курсери, али мој добри стари ОЦД ме је приморао да прочитам комплетан есеј. Наравно, проценат оног што сам разумио је мизеран и креће се у једноцифреној зони. Углавном, то друго поглавље описује како се количина хране повећава линеарно, а број људи експоненцијално, тако да ће у скорије вријеме да дође до опште апокалипсе и глади и смака свијета и ратова и Побјешњелог Макса и спашавај се ко може! Међутим, пошто је овај есеј написан прије скоро 250 година, може се констатовати да се ове црне прогнозе нису баш обистиниле. Један од разлога јесте да са повећањем стандарда и квалитета живота људи напрасно губе жељу да се размножавају (умјесто да буде обрнуто!), а за то су првенствено криве жене које би да се школују и сл., а ти док се школујеш и направиш каријеру и све то углавном имаш времена да одгојиш цирка нула дјеце или тако нешто. Мислим има и других фактора, али ја сам запамтио овај јер сам мушки шовиниста.

У осталим поглављима Малтус се свађа око нечега с неким другим људима и морам признати да ми пажња није баш била на врхунском нивоу, тако да ми је и његова и њихова аргументација напросто прошишала кроз уши. Онда посљедња два поглавља праве нагли заокрет у смјеру неких вјерских тема и то ми је заправо и најзанимљивији дио књиге (иако суштински није баш скроз неодвојив дио цјелине). Између осталог, Малтус износи нека занимљива размишљања о чувеном проблему Зла У Свијету, паралелном развоју душе и тијела и разним другим стварима и мени се то некако свидјело. Неки ранији дијелови ми се нису свидјели јер, ако сам добро разумио, он тврди да колко год пара дате тим сиромасима, њихово стање се неће нимало поправити јер ће све да спискају у биртији или тако нешто.

Шта ви заправо оћете од мене, да ривјуирам књигу која се бави друштвеним наукама? Е па извињавам се, али нисам компетентан за то. Узмите сами па прочитајте. Мислим стварно.

[Sidharth Vardhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is that old riddle that goes like this - suppose germs in a glass are doubling every minute and the glass will be full of germs after one hour. When was the glass half full?

The answer is 59 minutes. The thing is after 59 minutes, germs would be like - look how much space we are left with, we still have a hour to spare. This fallacy arises out of our tenrency to think in terms of arithemetic proportion, whereas population grows in a geometric proportion.

Some reviewers argue that all Malthus' predictions have turned out to be wrong. The thing is he didn't predicted anything. There are no dystopian warnings in the essay relating to some kind of future. On the contrary, he argues that his law - that population outgrows existing or possible food production and will then be checked back by misery and vice, has always shown itself, even in past.

He couldn't forsee inventions of contraceptives and effect of technology - true, but can you blame him for tha? There are also factors like more working women, a desire to maintain a high alstandard of living and so on. For him to talk about them at that point of time would be like me telling you today that we need not worry about global warming as we can always colonalise Mars. That may not be impossible but something we shall be stupid to bank upon. Malthus is taking into account only factors that can counted upon.

Anyways we probably got those contraceptives a little too late. Population has exploded enough, even if it was to stop growing today, there is no way we could provide a decent standard of living to existing numbers. Yes, there may be food enough but now considerations have changed. Now it is a question of habitable land. Don't look at little forests that are left, that would be stealing from wildlife.

[Sotiris Makrygiannis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Free audiobook from librivox.org , didnt pay much attention :) looks like a manual for population control. Or at least the means that population grows, one must be stupid to believe that can grow idefently. So every 25 years the population doubles IF the land can support such population or then it declines to the level that land can support. In essence proves that there is a corelation between the land that can be cultivated to the amount of people that can live in this planet. Are we pushing to the limit? I think so.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a complete ass.

[Keen Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

“The labouring poor…seem always to live from hand to mouth…and they seldom think of the future.”

Malthus like so many other philosophers has the unfortunate status of often being misunderstood and appropriated by cynical, opportunist politicians and leaders who wish to use their interpretation of his work to justify their toxic agendas. This book has remained so influential for so long that it even gave rise to its own adjective, noun and theory in Malthusian, a term still beloved of certain philosophers, economists and other academics, often at the cost of its validity or relevance.

At the heart of this Malthus does seem to genuinely have an interest in allowing the desperately poor to enjoy better quality lives, but I can also see the many ways it can be interpreted or distorted to seem otherwise. He does acknowledge the great inequities which exist within the society of the 1790s, saying at one point, “It must be considered as an evil, and every institution that promotes it is essentially bad and impolitic.”

So it’s good to actually get to the source of the man and the text which has generated so much passion, debate and division for over two centuries across the world, and although his numbers were off and many of his predictions wrong and prone to over-simplification, there’s still some value in this more than 200 years later.

[Matty-Swytla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, the theory and explanations are sound and not nearly as monstrous as some people have made it out to be - there's no call to mass genocide or something equally monstrous, just an observation that people can't just multiply and not expect natural resources to run out at some point. All pretty reasonable and self-explanatory. The author merely suggest that people who can't afford to support a family don't start one until they have the means, and that people with money shouldn't underpay their workers; again very sensible advice.

He is against giving money to the poor; he would rather people give them work or land to cultivate, so they can support themselves and not be dependent on the government or charity. He does support helping people who find themselves in need, but he abhors long-term poverty and any form of the dole. Considering the masses reliant on government money these days in the west, I'd say he was ahead of his time. He also realised that marrying young tended to result in more children and more poverty among the lower classes - he was for postponing marriage anyway, but knew that passion can't always be controlled even by the most rational men, so he understood that it was one of the lesser evils. Rather people get married than turn to prostitution or out-of-wedlock sex. I guess his positions as a minister comes in play here, but he's far more liberal than I expected regarding these things.

So his message is not the reason for the average rating, but his writing style certainly doesn't endear him to his readers. I found some parts of the long essay rather painfully dry and even repetitive, with over-long sentences and complicated punctuation. Or just maybe I shouldn't have tried to read his text before going to bed - it demands your full attention.

[Sookie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This essay may not be completely relevant with changes made in the fields of agriculture, reproduction sciences and wealth accumulation. It however finds relevancy in equating population, food control and moral high ground that man has to take. The simplistic premise is extended to all the classes, many developed and developing countries. Malthus takes into account the industrial revolution that is afoot in Europe, expansion of the empire and the unprecedented diseases that crop up every now and then which disrupts population.

Malthus' essay is poignant, slow and is executed with a degree of attachment.

[J.P. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Complete trash. Dude was literally just making things up 220 years ago, and people apparently still think he’s worth listening to for some reason.

“It’s actually bad to help poor people, here’s some reasoning that *sounds* logical but has no basis in reality; we also should not question the system which caused ‘poor people’ to exist in the first place.” (paraphrased) - Okay douchebag.

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've reviewed this in conjunction with Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Cengiz Aytun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herkesin hakkında konuştuğu ama kitabını okumadığı ya da okumaya fırsat bulamadığı kişi. Ben de hakkındaki dedikoduları bir yana bırakıp kendisi ne diyormuş diye merak edip okudum. Nüfus ve besin artışındaki matematiksel orantısızlığı bilimsel olarak değil de bir önkabul olanak sunuyor. Ancak yine de haksız olduğunu söyleyemem. Fosil yakıtların kullanımı ve yoğun tarım yöntemlerinin kullanılması öngörülerini bir süreliğine boşa çıkardı. Fosil yakıtların sınırlı miktarı ise sürekli olarak Malthus’un görüşlerini yeniden gündeme taşıyor. Günümüz bilimselliği ile yazılmamış olsa da önemli konulara değinen bir eser olduğu için okunması gerekir diye düşünüyorum.

[Nico Battersby · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's funny to see such an obviously intelligent man write so beautifully, make so many wonderful points and yet miss the mark completely - less funny is that his ideas were put into practice by governments in the form of social Darwinism and eugenics...

[LaPommequirougit · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://lapommequirougit.com/2020/11/...

Je remercie les Éditions Kurokawa pour l’envoi de cette lecture. Comme vous le savez, je suis de près, la collection Kurosavoir depuis ses débuts. J’adorais lire de la philosophie ou même des textes complexes, lorsque j’étais adolescente et je trouve ça très intéressant de les expliquer aux travers de mangas.

Ici, nous abordons le point de vue du principe de population d’après Thomas Robert Malthus. Pour ce faire, ce dernier nous prend les rats comme exemple, pour qu’on comprenne mieux son principe. Je pense que c’est pour cela que le mangaka à fait le choix de dessiner des rats à l’aspect humain.

Le sujet est vraiment intéressant et comme toujours avec les Kurosavoir, le fait de nous les expliquer à travers des images aide grandement à la compréhension des divers sujets abordés.

Seul petit bémol pour ma part, j’ai trouvé la manière d’expliquer ce tome-là un peu plus compliqué et donc plus difficile à comprendre pour un jeune public que les autres.

En bref, ce manga reste vraiment intéressant si le sujet vous intéresse et permet vraiment d’aider à nous initier à des univers que l’on n’aurait pas découverts autrement !

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like Malthus wrote this for an assignment because it was so incredibly overdone. He repeats everything at least twice and goes slightly off-topic towards the end. He makes decent points, but he really had no way to know what the future would bring in the way of advances in agriculture and industry, which made it more of a time capsule than a relevant essay.

[Jayde · Rating 3 out of 5]

an…innovative approach

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This famous work essentially espoused the idea that there was an upper limit to the degree to which the earth could sustain human population, one that Malthus felt was, even in his life around 1800, substantially already at the brink of being reached. That's the popular understanding of it, at least, that I'd always gleaned. And to some extent, the book is about that sort of thing, but to me it seemed really the musings of a consumant pessimist.

The basic theory/idea that starts off and informs everything else in the work is one in which Malthus claims that population increases at a faster than the ability of humans to find ways to supply food for that population. If we were to graph the two items, one could imagine the food supply increasing as a constant rate—a straight line going slowly upward; meanwhile, the population line would go up at an accelerating rate—a line like the right half of a parabola. This is because, essentially, people love sex. We just can't help ourselves. So whether there's food or not, we're going to keep making more people. (The issue, of course, is that when the two lines meet, that parabola will come to an end: population wouldn't keep going up; rather, a lot of folks will die of hunger. In a sense, overpopulation takes care of itself. Malthus never really addresses this.)

Beyond that, Malthus argues against various other writers who espouse various rosy ideas about humanity. We won't ever put off our reproductive desire or our wish to have more. We will continue toward greed and avarice. Society is ever headed toward a bad end. If and when things do improve (temporarily), that will just encourage more population and more desire. That is, even as we increase our resources, it's inevitable that our desires and our population will always outstrip capacity. Efforts to alleviate suffering of less fortunate only further the problem by encouraging more population among the less fortunate and thus more suffering. Is there a solution? Malthus doesn't really propose much that's workable. The essay seemed more a head exercise and set of opinions than anything substantiated in statistical anaysis.

[Tobi ﾄﾋﾞ · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is the BANE of modern human existence. if someone were to ask me “where did everything go wrong?”, i would point to this book. this work has been used to justify SO MANY horrible mass deaths and killings by imperialism since it was written (especially by the British imperialists). it is almost completely ignorant to the role capitalism plays into the theory, and is overall scary with the amount of impact it has on everyone’s lives today and people don’t even know it. i can’t believe i’d never heard of this book until i was in university, yet it seems like i’ve heard references and reminisce to it everywhere for my whole life: “Humans are a 'plague on Earth” says Sir David Attenborough, (January 2013) again, (this quote alone is) ignorant to the capitalism humans now have to obey to (or else suffer) (imo). we don’t actually have to be like this. we don’t have to be treating the planet like this, but the truth is that most people actually can’t make enough of a difference to significantly improve anything, and probably the only reason it is like this is because it’s cheaper to allow bad things to happen.

there’s plenty of food to go around. there always has been. have you seen how much food waste is thrown away because it’s too ugly, hasn’t sold, or because people bought too much of and threw away the leftovers? population increase does not- hasn’t yet, and has no reason ever to- arise with food shortages. especially not in the long term. there is plenty of land and farmers. there has never been an insufficiency of food. there has only ever been insufficient distribution of food, and people who can not afford food or gain access to land, as capitalism would rather these people starve than receive free food. you know, because giving someone something for free because their life depends on it isn’t financially beneficial. even in the worst of famines of all time has this been the case.

yet imperialists and capitalists justify starvation and all these horrible global humanitarian and environmental disasters on overpopulation, which is actually the one thing in this situation which is actually naturally occurring and has happened the longest.

it’s like all this is, is “don’t blame capitalism, or imperialism, or anything like that!!! it’s just a human thing that every single human is responsible and guilty for!!! you are a horrible person for existing even though there’s almost absolutely nothing you can do to stop these bad things happening!!!”

[CDDC · Rating 2 out of 5]

Creo que leí con demasiadas expectativas este libro. Pensé que realmente el autor haría un análisis brillante sobre el problema de la sobrepoblación humana.

Lo cierto es que tiene sus puntos interesantes, pero el enfoque está orientado principalmente a cuáles elementos considera el autor serían los causantes de que las personas proliferen o disminuyan en un lugar específico (por ejemplo el acceso a la alimentación por medio de superficies cultivables adecuadas, o también a partir de los medios laborales que permitan el poder satisfacer las necesidades básicas de una familia).

Sin embargo, no hay una crítica ni una tesis que analice los perjuicios ecológicos para el hábitat y para todos aquellos que en ellos se desarrollan (el mismo animal humano, otros animales e incluso otras especies de seres vivos).

Tampoco encontré mucho sentido a las divagaciones del autor acerca de la potencial inmortalidad del hombre, o la relevancia de Dios para el análisis de este ensayo.

A pesar de esto, valoro la idea de intentar pensar el tema de la población humana, aunque sea desde un enfoque tan básico.

[Bogdan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This essay was not what i was expecting and i say this positively.
Malthus is empirical and wouldn't assume the "agricultural revolution" that happened after because he put into perspective what happened beforehand. Even though he admits that can happen things that he cannot predict.
The biggest criticism to this essay is that he says that the population multiplies and food adds. Valid, but he always says aswell the population will always grow and overgrow the means of substinence.
A must read in my opinion.