Thomas Malthus: biography of this political economy researcher

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an English demographer and economist renowned for a theory named after him: Malthusianism. Broadly speaking, it suggests that population growth inevitably leads to decrease in food supply, which is why it proposes a control of reproduction and birth rate.

Then we will see a biography of Thomas Malthus, as well as some of his main contributions to economic and demographic thought.

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Thomas Malthus: Biography of an Important Economist

Thomas Malthus was born on February 13, 1766, in South London. He was the sixth of seven siblings, all children of Henrietta and Daniel Malthus. It was an important family of intellectuals, who even were close friends of philosophers like David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With the passage of time Malthus created a close relationship with another great economist of the time, David Ricardo.

From a young age, Thomas Malthus was able to access Jesus College in Cambridge. There he himself took courses in declamation, Latin and Greek, although his main subject of study was mathematics. By the year 1791, Malthus had graduated as a specialist in these areas, for which he was appointed a member of the same college two years later. In 1979

he ordained and became an Anglican pastor.

Years later, in 1804, he started a family with Harriet Eckersall, with whom he had three children, and whose upbringing was strongly influenced by Rousseau's liberal ideas about education.

Like other members of his family, Thomas Malthus had a cleft palate that affected his speech, as well as a cleft lip. For this reason he had refused to take a personal portrait, which was typical at the time. It was until 1833, after having undergone surgery, when he decided to carry it out.

Thomas Robert Malthus died December 29, 1834 in Rookery, although and the remains of him are in Bath Abbey in England.

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Academic activity and memberships

Malthus served as professor of history and political economy at Haileybury College in Hertfordshire. In fact, this was the first time that the term 'political economy' had been used in the academic context of Great Britain in reference to a subject.

In 1819 Malthus was elected a member of the Royal Society, and in 1821 joined the Political Economy Club. Other members of the same society were David Ricardo and James Mill. Almost a decade later, in 1833, Malthus was elected a member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, as well as a member of the Royal Academy in Berlin. Finally, in 1834, Malthus was one of the founders of the Statistical Society of London

Malthusianism

In the year 1798, Malthus published a first edition of the text "An essay on the principles of population and how they affect the future development of society." Since he published it, this work had a wide impact. In a forceful way, Malthus argued that social development was doomed to failure due to rapid population growth. In turn, population growth would increase more and more rapidly if strict control was not exercised.

Thus, the problem posed by Malthus is that this population growth did not occur in tandem with the increase in livelihoods.

While population growth had a "geometric rhythm", livelihoods increased in a purely "arithmetic" progression. The population would always tend to grow beyond the limits of subsistence, which would ultimately translate into poverty, war, disease, and death. For Malthus, one of the remedies would be, for example, self-control and contraception.

Some criticism

His work is recognized as a pessimistic vision, since presented poverty as one of the inevitable phenomena for the human species. Likewise, his work has been criticized for having started in an abstract and analytical language. In fact, it has been claimed not to have carried out rigorous statistical analysis, despite the fact that this research method was in full growth in Europe and Great Britain.

For some critics, even though Malthus had used empirical evidence in developing his theory, the theory itself tended to be less concise in these tests, and stronger in the development itself theoretical.

Either way, Malthusianism was quickly incorporated into major economic theories and it represented an important break with excessive economic optimism, while offering a justification for the theory of wages based on the minimum cost of subsistence and discredited the more traditional forms of charity.

Outstanding works

Some of the most representative works of Thomas Malthus's work are An Essay on the Principle of Population, from 1933; An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions, from 1800; Y Principles of Political Economy in two volumes from 2008. Works such as Definitions in Political Economy, from 1827 and Importation of Foreign Corn 1996.

Bibliographic references:

• Thomas Robert Malthus (2014). New World Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 1, 2018. Available in http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Thomas_Robert_Malthus.
• Thomas Robert Malthus (2018). Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved October 1, 2018. Available in https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Malthus.