Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798, [1] but the author was soon identified as Thomas Robert Malthus.The book warned of future difficulties, on an interpretation of the population increasing in geometric progression (so as to double every 25 years) [2] while food production increased in an arithmetic progression, which would leave a ...
Thomas Robert Malthus, after whom Malthusianism is named. Malthusianism is a theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline.
Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (/ ˈ m æ l θ ə s /; 13/14 February 1766 – 29 December 1834) [1] was an English economist, cleric, and scholar influential in the fields of political economy and demography.
Through Malthus, the essay is said to have influenced Charles Darwin. [3] [4] Conway Zirkle has noted that "Franklin is really the source of Darwin's inspiration, for he gave Malthus the clue to the theory of population we now call Malthusian, and Malthus... gave Darwin the clue which led to the discovery of natural selection." [11]
Using Malthus's idea of the struggle for existence, Darwin was able to develop his view of adaptation, which was highly influential in the formulation of the theory of natural selection. [2] In addition, Alfred Wallace independently used the concept of the struggle for existence to help come to the same theory of evolution. [3]
Malthus' idea suggests that the amount of goods supplied may be a result of the demand. [4] Furthermore, Malthus argues that the economy tends to move towards recessions because productivity often grows more quickly than demand. [4] Malthus suggests increasing government spending and private investment on luxuries to cure recessions. [7]
Malthus thought the Old Poor Law encouraged population growth. Ricardo argued that poor-rates reduced wages. Thomas Malthus thought any benevolence to the poor was self-defeating; the only check on the numbers of the poor was poverty. Furthermore, the Poor Law gave a right to relief only in the parish where the claimant had a right of ...
The model is named after Thomas Robert Malthus, who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), one of the earliest and most influential books on population. [1] Malthusian models have the following form: = where P 0 = P(0) is the initial population size,