Status Updates From The Invention of Scarcity: ...

While Malthus reiterated the vulgar view of the laboring classes as indolent, Smith “never employed the notion of ‘indolence’ in connection with the laboring poor—this he reserved for depictions of the landed classes and the established clergy,” an irony written out of political economy.

Lapland visitors sometimes failed to calculate the value, in Lapp terms, of the animals and animal products that they encountered. (Characteristically unconcerned, Linnaeus went down on record as eating the last piece of reindeer cheese belonging to a “destitute old Sami woman.”)

His trademark principle repeated that once a people were well fed, they would reproduce more prolifically. A rhetorical use of the notion of humanity served to underscore the alliance Malthus attempted to forge with his readers, uniting them along an axis of elevation over an overpopulating peasantry.

Landscapes are historically accretional and cultures like cultivars fit into and contribute to this accretionary process. For this reason, some authors promote thinking about agricultural origins as evolutionary ‘niche construction.’

The considerable impact of Malthus on John Maynard Keynes, the architect of liberal spending in the public sector, deserves much more space than is possible here. That influence, Mayhew shrewdly pointed out, was best telegraphed by Keynes’s undergraduate students, who called their instructor “Jeremiah Malthus.”

Figures unknown today, such as John Rickman, largely responsible for the first census of Great Britain in 1801, commented on Malthus’s ignorance of numbers—“not likely to dogmatize less because he knows less”—with undisguised distaste.

Many elements of the first Essay have the quality of utterance that no one of a polite or educated temperament would have deigned to say in public.
Malthus as quintessential incel shitposter ((:

Even without historical knowledge of how the publication influenced the course of British social policy, any reading of the original Essay must come to terms with its deliberate punitive attitude toward the poor.

We might speculate that Malthus experienced nature as remorseless in a very personal sense. Reactions of contemporaries to Malthus’s speech and appearance make clear the salience of his disability.