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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.
Malthus also notes that the checks on the human population are more complicated than those on animals and plants. [25] Malthus explains, for example, that a human check on population growth is the conscious decision not to reproduce because of financial burden. [25] Malthus then explains that the main check on population growth is food.
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 ...
Pity the philosopher. Underpaid and underappreciated, professional thinkers are doomed to a terrible dilemma: in the best case, their ideas are likely to be ignored. In the worst case, they will ...
Its main thinkers are held to be Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and John Stuart Mill. These economists produced a theory of market economies as largely self-regulating systems, governed by natural laws of production and exchange (famously captured by Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand).