Thomas Robert Malthus

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Thomas Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus (born February 13 , according to other sources on February 14 or 17, 1766 in Wotton near Dorking , in the English county of Surrey , † December 29, 1834 in Bath ) was a British economist who was among the representatives of the classical economics is counted.

Malthus was the holder of the first chair in political economy in England, which had been established in 1805 at the College of the East India Company in Hertford, England .

Live and act

Essay on the principle of population , 1826

Thomas Malthus, born in Surrey, a county south of London, British economist and social philosopher, was an Anglican pastor from 1797 and professor of history and political economy at Haileybury College from 1806. Malthus was best known for his population theory, which he developed in two works in 1798 (An Essay on the Principle of Population) and 1820 (Principles of Economics) . There were five editions of his works. However, from the second edition onwards, they only differ in details. He is considered a pessimist within classical economics. The considerations contained in the essay on the so-called Malthusian “ population law ” stimulated both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to transfer these ideas to the coexistence of species in nature and thus to the development of the theory of evolution .

The population theory

In his essay on the Principle of Population (1798) , Malthus emphasized overpopulation as a problem of an evolving economy and society in a criticism of William Godwin's optimistic view of the perfection of human society and its fundamental problem-solving capacities . Malthus presents it as an apparent fateful necessity that the human race should blindly obey the law of unlimited multiplication, while the means of subsistence that keep it alive do not increase in the same proportions with it. This fact seemed to him so well established that he did not hesitate to formulate it as a mathematical axiom . He claimed that people increased in geometric progression and food increased in arithmetic progression. In the numerical example: If a couple has four children and these four children per couple, the population grows accordingly; but an increase in food production does not follow in the same proportion. Improved irrigation increases productivity by around 20%. However, this increase does not generate any further growth. According to Malthus, a point in time will come when the supplies would no longer be sufficient for the earth's population, if those corrective measures did not repeatedly intervene, such as illness, misery and death, in order to restore the balance. Malthus expressed his scientific and moral judgment of the unfortunate in a text passage that he deleted in later editions, but which was considered to be indicative of the spirit of his teaching:

“A person, he said, who is born in an already occupied world when his family does not have the means to support him or when society does not need his work , this person has no right at all to any part of food to ask, and he really is too much on earth. At the great feast of nature there is absolutely no place setting for him. Nature orders him to resign, and she does not fail to carry out this order herself. "

Proudhon has always preoccupied this picture of the table, which is not set for everyone, since he had to regard it as an inhumane challenge to any hope for the creation of social equality; but he has not succeeded in refuting it with any rigor.

Godwin responded to this teaching in 1820 with Of Population: An Inquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind . In it, like other critics after him, he pointed out that productivity is constantly improving through technical progress and that Malthus' hypotheses can at best be empirically illustrated in certain individual cases, but by no means systematically proven.

Friedrich Engels argued that the main objection was that “overpopulation” was not a technical problem, but a socio-economic problem that primarily resulted from the relationship to effective demand and productively deployed capital. For under capitalism the means of subsistence are only produced and distributed in relation to the solvent market demand, and if the population is surplus, then this is measured exclusively in relation to the employment mediated by the labor market. This line of argument was later developed by Karl Marx into his theory of the “ reserve army ”. Karl Marx called the book by Malthus a "sensational pamphlet". The writer Charles Dickens was critical of Malthus' ethical approach and used Malthus and his views on the poor and overpopulation as a model for the character of the hard-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol .

Malthus' problem definition was groundbreaking as such. Nevertheless, his cognitive achievement remains questionable, mainly because he had completely inadequately clarified his own theoretical frame of reference. He came to barely comprehensible arguments because he mixed up axiomatic with empirical claims and value judgments . In the theoretical frame of reference for explaining population growth, Malthus differentiates between the drive to increase the population, which he sees quite unspecifically in the biologically predetermined human sexual drive; the barriers to population growth are divided into preventive and positive, both of which affect fertility . At the same time, however, this twofold subdivision is counteracted by a threefold classification , which he calls “moral restraint”, “vice” and “misery”. The only apparent reason for this new classification, inconsistent with the old one, is evidently that Malthus is at the same time seeking moral reasoning.

Nevertheless, the scientific discussion keeps coming back to his draft of a population theory, since it was the first time - after the publication of Johann Peter Süßmilch The Divine Order in the Changes of the Human Gender from Birth, Death and Reproduction from the year 1741 - had addressed the fundamental, as yet unsolved questions in the context of global limits to growth (see Economic Growth and Club of Rome ), sustained population growth and the earth's limited carrying capacity .

The fact that it was not the scientifically more durable book by Süßmilch but that by Malthus that had so much influence is attributed to the fact that Malthus argued more plausibly and served the prejudices of the (English) upper class against the lower class.

"Principles of Political Economy"

In his second major work, Principles of Political Economy (1820), Malthus examines value , basic rent , labor and wages in order to find out the factors that affect a people's prosperity. Before Malthus, it was generally assumed that the greater the population, the greater the economic efficiency of a country. From the Malthusian population theory it emerges, however, that population growth is stronger than economic growth and that the country is thus impoverished and impoverished. Malthus contradicts the statements of his friend and scientific rival David Ricardo and writes in line with Adam Smith's economic analyzes . This economic analysis of the population theory by Malthus is also interpreted as a population trap. The biologist Charles Darwin was very much influenced by Malthus. He adopted many aspects of his theory for the development of his theory of evolution . His correspondence with Jean-Baptiste Say also became famous .

Based on the assumption that is still valid today that raising the general level of education will lead to a decline in the birth rate, Malthus recommended an education offensive for the lower classes. Malthus argued in his “essay” that work resulting from luxury would be of no use to the poor if it did not give them power and independence.

Actions by the Royal Commission are often attributed to Malthus's influence. The workhouse test was tightened , a test that became part of a new law on the poor from 1834: anyone who had to take public support had to go to the workhouse and work hard there. Support was only found for those who proved unable to work. It was also stated that the lowest wage for free labor (known as independent labor ) should be the upper limit for assistance. This principle was known as the less-eligible principle. However, the provisions and the deterrent effect of the workhouses did not serve to strengthen the poor through property and independence, as demanded by Malthus, but to enforce wage labor and the dumping of wages .

reception

Malthus's works are in the context of the Enclosure Movement , following the impoverishment of the farmers and in a relativity of arms legislation to understand ( "poor laws"). His criticism was directed in particular against the Speenhamland legislation , which would have caused the pauperism then increasing . Malthus' influence from “his” overpopulation paradigm then led to the “new” poor legislation in 1834 , in which the (Elizabethian) poor relief received massive cuts.

Malthus' works follow the tradition of Joseph Townsend (1786: A Dissertation on the Poor Laws by a Well-Wisher to Mankind ).

See also

Works in German translation

literature

(chronologically)

Web links

Wikisource: Thomas Malthus  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Thomas Malthus  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Brockhaus. The encyclopedia in 24 volumes. Study edition. 20th edition. FA Brockhaus, Leipzig, 2001. Volume 14, p. 127.
  2. Heinz. D. Kurz (Ed.): Classics of Economic Thought. Volume 1: From Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall. C. H. Beck, Munich 2008, p. 91.
  3. Adolph Blanqui : History of the political economy in Europe. Second volume. Verlag Detlev Auvermann KG, Glashütten im Taunus 1971. Unchanged reprint of the Karlsruhe 1841 edition: History of political economy in Europe, from antiquity to the present day, together with a critical bibliography of the main works on political economy , by Adolph Blanqui (the parents ), Member of the Institute of France (Academy of Moral and Political Sciences), professor of industrial economics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers , director of the Special School of Commerce in Paris. Translated from the French, annotated, augmented with an excerpt from Count G. Pecchio's History of Political Economy in Italy , and with a partly supplementing, partly correcting epilogue accompanied by Dr. FJ Buß, ord. public Professor of constitutional and international law and political science at the University of Freiburg. Second volume, printed and published by Ch. Th. Groos, Karlsruhe 1841, pp. 105f.
  4. ^ Yves Charbit: Proudhon et le piège malthusien. In: Cahiers internationaux de sociologie , 2004/1, nº 116, ISBN 2-13-054416-9 , pp. 5-33.
  5. Friedrich Engels: Outlines for a Critique of National Economy, p. 43. Digital Library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 529 (cf. MEW Vol. 1, pp. 519-520).
  6. Gisela Grupe, Kerrin Christiansen, Inge Schröder, Ursula Wittwer-Ofen: Anthropologie. An introductory textbook. Springer-Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3-540-21159-4 , p. 217 with additional information
  7. Archived copy ( memento of the original from March 24, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.faculty.rsu.edu
  8. ^ Kingsley Davis: Malthus and the Theory of Population. In: Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Morris Rosenberg (Eds.): The Language of Social Research. A Reader in the Methodology of Social Research. The Free Press, New York / Collier-Macmillan, London 1955, pp. 540 ff.
  9. Gisela Grupe, Kerrin Christiansen, Inge Schröder, Ursula Wittwer-Ofen: Anthropologie. An introductory textbook. Springer-Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3-540-21159-4 , p. 217 with additional information
  10. "The labor created by luxuries, though useful in distributing the produce of a country without vitiating the proprietor by power, or debasing the laborer by dependence, has not, indeed, the same beneficial effects on the state of the poor." (TR Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1798 (first edition), ISBN 0-19-283747-8 , last paragraph in chapter 14)
  11. Bianca Többe Gonçalves: Population and Development. Münster 2000, p. 10: "Malthus' main point of criticism of the ideas of the French Revolution was his skepticism towards a social redistribution of wealth."
  12. Eric B. Ross: The Malthus Factor. Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development, 2000.
  13. Ulrike Ferdinand: The Malthusian heritage. Strands of development of population theory in the 19th century and its influence on the radical women's movement in Germany. Münster 1999, p. 29: "In practice it [Malthus' essay] was an attack on the English poor legislation."
  14. ^ Eberhard Eichenhofer: History of the welfare state in Europe. From the “social question” to globalization. Munich 2007, p. 39.
  15. ^ “Smith, Bentham, Malthus and Ricardo all demanded its [old poor laws] abolition. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, drafted by the Political Economists, sharply cut payments to the poor. "
    (University of California, Davis, Department of Economics, Gregory Clark, Marianne Page [2008]: Welfare Reform, 1834 [PDF; 331 kB], pp. 1 ff).
  16. Cf. Matthias Bohlender: Social (in) security. In: Security and Risk. On dealing with danger in the 21st century. Bielefeld 2010, p. 114.