Malthusian Economics

Introduction
Malthusianism is the belief that population growth might be
exponential while other resource growth, such as that of the food
supply, is linear. This would eventually result in a decline in living
conditions that would lead to a mass extinction of the population. A
Malthusian catastrophe happens when population increase exceeds
agricultural output, leading to hunger or war, poverty, and
depopulation. The population will inevitably be forced to "adjust" back
to a lower, more manageable level as a result of such a calamity.
Malthusianism has been associated with a number of political and
social groups, but it nearly exclusively refers to population control
proponents.
History
The notion was put forth by Thomas Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of
Population in 1798. Although human populations tend to grow, he contended
that for a country to be happy, food production must also rise. "A country's
happiness depends less on its wealth or poverty, youth or age, or whether it is
sparsely or densely populated than it does on how quickly it is growing and how
closely the annual rise in food production approaches the annual increase in an
unrestrained population.
Philosophers of the 18th and early 19th centuries had the general belief that
humanity would keep progressing and lean toward utopianism. This idea was
refuted by Malthus, who said that some groups of the general population have
always been poor and miserable, which has actually slowed population growth.
Malthus wrote "An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent" (1815) and
"Principles of Political Economy" (1820), in which he contended that the amount
of farmland available was insufficient to support the expanding world population.
Malthus observed events in England in the early 1800s. Malthus made it clear that
while food output rises arithmetically, human population rises geometrically. This
paradigm would eventually prevent humanity from producing enough food to
feed themselves
Who Is Thomas Malthus?
The English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus, whose full name is
Thomas Robert Malthus, was born on February 13/14, 1766, in Rookery, near
Dorking, Surrey, and died on December 29, 1834, in St. Catherine, near Bath,
Somerset. He is best known for his theory that population growth will always have
a tendency to outpace the availability of food and that improvement of humanity
is impossible without strict restrictions on reproduction. Malthusianism is the
name given to this school of thought. Before being admitted to Jesus College,
Cambridge, in 1784, the young Malthus received the most of his education at
home. He received awards in Latin and Greek there and graduated in 1788 after
studying a wide range of disciplines. He received a master's in arts in 1791, was
chosen as a fellow of Jesus College in 1793, and began his ordination studies in
1797. Written in 1796, his unpublished pamphlet "The Crisis" advocated for the
establishment of workhouses for the poor and backed the recently enacted Poor
Laws. The ideas Malthus released two years later on poverty and population ran
slightly opposed to this one. Malthus joined the Political Economy Club in 1821
and was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1819. In 1824, he was chosen as
one of the ten royal associates of the Royal Society of Literature, together with
Ricardo and the Scottish economist James Mill. He was elected to the Royal
Academy of Berlin and the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in
1833. The Statistical Society of London was founded in 1834 with Malthus as one
of its cofounders.
The Problem of Population
Malthus's ideas on population growth were outlined in his 1798 essay An Essay on
the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with
Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers.
For the sake of conciseness, the text is frequently referred to as An Essay on the
Principle of Population. His rejection of the fundamentally optimistic views of
human progress that were prevalent at the time made Malthus's work
noteworthy, among other things. According to these views, human development
will continue unabatedly and eventually lead to a rich world for all. He warned of
a coming disaster brought on by population expansion. His suggested solutions to
the issue he anticipated would be regarded as anything from "unlikely to work" to
"overtly unethical" by modern standards.
Malthus felt concerned about population expansion as he observed the quickly
changing world around him. He observed that while the growth of resources and
human capacity to generate them was fundamentally arithmetic, population
growth was, or was shortly becoming, exponential. Many academics at the period
wondered how industrialization might affect the globe, but one of the most
significant responses came from Thomas Malthus.
What is The Malthusian Theory
By the end of the 18th century, population growth in England and other parts of
Europe surged as a result of rising agricultural productivity, industrial revolution-
related technological advancement, but more importantly, European expansion
abroad. Food and other resources that were in limited supply in their own
countries were being imported from other areas of the world by European
powers, who also exported some of their surplus population to the colonies. But
for many Europeans, the prospect of scarcity and famine persisted. In fact, in an
already impoverished environment, population expansion forced individuals to
the periphery of subsistence. Europe had fewer trees and less fauna than it did a
few centuries earlier. Little Ice Age climate conditions were unfavorable, and
people had pushed agriculture into unsuitable places, causing significant damage
of the terrain. Lack of hygiene education in urban areas resulted in widespread
sickness, which when combined with a lack of food led to a high mortality rate.
Despite all of these issues, birth rates continue to outpace death rates. The age of
reason, also known as the Enlightenment, was another development. Ideas
regarding social justice, alleviating poverty, and sanitary practices were created
by thinkers and scientists throughout Europe. In a nutshell, these individuals
supported progress or the enhancement of everyone's quality of life. Political
economist and Enlightenment thinker Thomas Malthus was concerned about the
population's growth. "An Essay on the Principle of Population," a book he wrote in
1798. Malthus argued in it that populations would keep growing until a tragedy,
such as a famine, war, or illness, halted or reversed that growth. A further
accomplishment of his is the creation of the Malthusian growth model, an
exponential formula for predicting population rise. He was looking for "natural
laws" that could explain why poverty continues to exist in the world, analogous to
the laws of gravity, in classic Enlightenment style. The population is growing faster
than the amount of food available to meet its needs, according to Malthus. Every
time there is a relative rise in food production over population growth, this
encourages population growth at a faster rate. Population growth will eventually
outpace agricultural production growth, causing a food shortage that will cause a
crash.
Malthus's ideas show an amicably expressed opposition to his father's beliefs as
well as the ideologies of the French Revolution and its proponents, including the
radical English philosopher William Godwin. Godwin, who is well-known for his
works like Political Justice (1793), assumed that humankind might be perfected
and anticipated a millennium in which intelligent people would live peacefully and
prosperously without the need for rules and organizations. Malthus was
essentially an empiricist and used the hard facts of his day as his point of
departure, unlike Godwin (or, earlier, Rousseau), who approached human
problems from a theoretical perspective. His response, which was formed in the
British economic tradition and is now classified as sociological,

Critical Elements of The Malthusian Theory of Population Growth

-Food Supply and Population : Malthus postulated that population growth

always follows a geometric pattern. It is a set of numbers in which each phrase
following the first is the outcome of multiplying the term before it by a constant
non-zero value. The common ratio is the name given to this non-zero quantity.
The sequence shown below serves as an illustration: The common ratio is
5,10,50,250,1250.
When it comes to food resources, the production rises in an arithmetic
progression, which is a list of numbers arranged so that the distance between
adjacent terms is always the same.
as in 3, 7, 11, 15, and 19... The standard deviation is 4.
Simply put, the availability of food grows more slowly than the population. This
indicates that there will eventually be a food scarcity. Therefore, a lack of food
indicates an over population wherever it occurs.
From this, he deduced that an exponential population expansion will cause a food
scarcity because a population's growth outpaces the availability of food.

-Preventive Inspections: The idea behind this inspection is to reduce the birth
rate in order to manage the population. Preventative measures result from the
ability to see the long-term effects, which anyone with a big family can do. The
family's standard of living will undoubtedly be lower if there are several children.
Anyone who wants to support a large family would need to put in much more
effort than he already puts in. The family members can be forced into poverty if
he is unable to provide for them. Man must therefore refrain from getting
married or raising a family unless he is certain in his ability to provide for them.

-Positive Checks: The premise of this check is that numerous events, like as
conflict, sickness, famine, etc., slow down population increase. Due to these
elements, the population would be lowered to a level that could be supported by
the amount of food that is currently available. Positive results would trigger a
Malthusian disaster, according to Malthus, forcing a population to revert to
subsistence level living. Here, it is important to keep in mind that when man fails
to control the excessive increase of the population by his or her own efforts,
nature steps in to provide such checks.

-Checks on Population: A state of disequilibrium occurs, in Prof. Malthus's

view, when population expansion exceeds the rate of growth of the food supply.
The reason for this is that the population is expanding at a faster rate than the
food supply. Many people will consequently go without even the bare necessities
of sustenance.
They won't have enough food to survive on, so they will perish. Civil wars,
starvation, famines, plagues, floods, and other natural calamities are all
experienced during their battle. These disasters were described by Malthus as
positive checks. On the other hand, there are man-made checks known as
preventive measures. However, the difference between these two types of
measures—natural or positive checks and preventive checks—is outlined below.

Malthusian Theory: Graph

A Malthusian theory graph is a useful tool for understanding the issues Malthus
predicted would face civilization. The graph's depiction of the population's
explosive expansion resembled what Malthus thought he was seeing in England
as it advanced toward industrialization. Industrialization did result in population
expansion, but not to the point of crisis that Malthus predicted would pose a
serious threat.

The Irish Potato Famine

A blight in the Irish potato crop was the initial cause of the Irish Potato Famine in
1845–1849. The blight caused the plant's leaves, roots, and tubers to seriously
deteriorate. The blight's impacts destroyed the crop and its subsequent harvest,
leading to widespread hunger. The blight's effects resulted in the deaths of one
million Irish people. Ireland's potato famine, which is now known as the Great
Famine, is regarded as the greatest famine in all of Europe.
A British economist predicted in 1798 that the world's population would outlive
food producing capacity. In other words, as the population grew, agriculture
would never be able to meet the rising demand. In response to Malthus's idea,
one approach to this issue was to reduce the population's constant growth. In
actuality, the 1840s in Great Britain were characterized by exactly the same way
of thinking.
The Great Famine, in the view of the educated British, proved Malthus's theories
to be accurate. Simply because the British felt that Irish decline was due to
overpopulation rather than a potato disease, no aid was given to the Irish. The
blight caused one million deaths. Yet a nation that was more than equipped to
reduce this mass murder chose to remain silent.
Any growth in the Irish population, according to Malthusian theory, would be the
result of their vicious and carnal character. This population boom would be
controlled by famine, and in Malthusian terms, this was just. The famine, which
would enforce control on their excessive breeding, was something that the Irish
deserved because they were hopelessly inferior and incurably loaded with vice. In
reality, the Malthusian hypothesis was applied to support British animosity
toward the Irish and to defend their refusal to offer assistance.
Advantages of the Malthusian theory
The Malthusian model enjoyed a lengthy period of success as a description of
population-income interactions, covering the majority of human history in much
of the world until the start of the industrial revolution.
First, the standard of living has a beneficial impact on population growth rates.
This effect can be attributed to either a biological effect of consumption on birth
and death rates or to potential parents' behavioral reactions to their financial
situation.
Early marriage, restraint, and simple living are preventive strategies that help to
balance population increase and food availability. These procedures not only limit
population increase but also have the potential to avert the disastrous results of
positive checks.
For numerous reasons, it is most likely to find Malthusian impacts in developing
nations. First, the poorest nations have seen the biggest population growth.
Between 1950 and 2050, the population of Africa is projected to increase by a
factor of 9.8. India's population is projected to increase by a factor of 5.5 between
1920 and 2020, the century with the fastest population growth worldwide. In
contrast, the population of Europe grew by a factor of 2.2 between the years
1800 and 1900 (approximately the century with the highest population growth).
Given the existing technology, if the baseline population in these areas
represented some degree of resource-population balance, then the more rapid
population expansion is more likely to produce a disequilibrium in this
relationship. Second, developing nations are least equipped to use trade to get
over resource shortages. Compared to rich countries, poor countries empirically
have substantially higher national income shares of natural resource rents.

Disadvantages of the Malthusian theory

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was much debate and criticism of
the Malthusian theory of population. Here are a some of the criticisms:
(1) The Theory's Mathematical Form is Incorrect:
The mathematical formulation of Malthus' theory, according to which the
population grows geometrically in 25 years and the food supply arithmetically,
has not been practically supported. Instead, the food supply has grown faster
than population expansion, which has not followed a geometrical development,
doubling the population in 25 years. This critique, however, is irrelevant because
in the first version of his Essay, Malthus utilized his mathematical formulation to
explain his theory and afterwards removed it.
(2) Did not anticipate the opening up of new areas:
Malthus had a limited outlook and was heavily influenced by the circumstances in
England. He was unable to predict the expansion of Australia, the United States,
and Argentina, where substantial farming of previously uncultivated territories
resulted in a rise in food output. Because of this, nations like England on the
continent of Europe have access to plenty of cheap food. This has been made
feasible by the quick advancements in transportation, a factor that Malthus
almost completely ignored. No nation today needs to worry about starvation and
misery if it cannot produce enough for its expanding people .
(3) Applied a Static Economic Law to a Period of Time:
. The Malthusian idea that there is an arithmetical progression in the amount of
food available is based on a constant economic law. the law of declining returns,
for example. The law of decreasing returns has been halted by an astonishing rise
in scientific knowledge and agricultural technologies that Malthus could not have
predicted. As a result, the food supply has grown far more quickly than in an
arithmetic progression. With the "green revolution," Malthus has been shown to
be incorrect not only in developed nations but even in underdeveloped nations
like India.
(4) Population not related to Food Supply but to Total Wealth:

The Malthusian theory is based on the shaky connection between population

growth and food availability. In actuality, the ideal relationship is between the
population and the nation's overall wealth. The optimum theory of population is
based on this. The claim is that a country may feed its citizens properly even if it
does not produce enough food for all of its citizens due to material wealth by
importing food in return for goods or money. The traditional illustration is of
Great Britain, which imports practically all of its food needs from countries like
Holland, Denmark, Belgium, and Argentina because it places a higher priority on
the development of money than on food items. Thus, it has been established that
the Malthusian idea is false in its core.
(5) Empirical Evidence proves this Theory Wrong:

Demographers have empirically demonstrated that per capita income levels have
an impact on population increase. Rapid gains in per capita income cut the
fertility rate and slow down population expansion. According to Dumont's "social
capillarity thesis," having more children to support parental wages is less
desirable as per capita income rises. When individuals are accustomed to a high
level of living, raising a big family becomes expensive. People typically refuse to
lower their level of living, which results in a stable population. In the cases of
Japan, France, and other western nations, this has actually occurred.
(6) Neglected the Manpower aspect in Population:
Malthus' failure to consider the labor component of population expansion was
one of his main flaws. He loathed population growth and was a pessimist. He
neglected the fact that "a baby comes to the world not only with a mouth and a
stomach, but also with a pair of hands," according to Cannan. This suggests that a
rise in population results in an increase in labor force, which may tend to increase
both industrial and agricultural productivity, making the nation affluent through a
fair distribution of wealth and income. "The problem of population is not simply
one of mere size but of effective production and equitable distribution," as
Seligman correctly noted, Consequently, the population growth could be
important.
Rewriting The Malthusian Theory
When I First came across the well renowned ‘Malthusian Theory’ of Economics, it
sounded pretty absurd that such a theory with such voluminous number of
assumptions would prevail in the modern world where assumptions are regarded
at a much lower level as compared to factual occurring. However, after a
thorough interpretation of the theory, I realized that it did have some aspects
that make it relevant and important in the world of economics.

With slight tweaks from here and there, the theory could be more effective and
more substantial. Malthus’s mind was influenced significantly by the conditions
that were prominent in England. He was unaware of the expansion in the
remaining parts of the world such as USA, Australia and Argentina. The
development of agricultural production methods resulted in a rise in food output,
contradictory to what he had predicted. This unexpected ‘green revolution’ had
resulted in greater access to cheaper foods.

The growing influence and impact of globalization and expansion of the world into
a global village through developments in communication and satellite technology
has facilitated the interconnection of countries despite their geographical
locations. Hence, no country would lack food as the global market made all
resources and food available to them.

In the modern world the influence and power of money has been increasing and
the items that we can purchase with wealth have significantly changed over the
years. The Malthusian theory is based on the relationship between population
and food availability; however, it would be more ideal to state this theory based
on the relationship between a nation’s wealth and population. As stated in the
previous paragraph, globalization has expanded the markets ,the claim is that a
country may feed its citizens properly even if it does not produce enough food for
all of its citizens due to material wealth by importing food in return for goods or
money.

Lastly an obvious fact overlooked by Malthus is the increase in manpower as

population increases. As population increase, the country focuses its resources to
the development of human resources resulting in greater man power. This
manpower can be used to produce larger amounts of food or even lead to
efficient use as well as production of resources. This would overall tackle the
problem of lack of food. Thus, the theory must reflect that the population of a
country can be used to its benefit with certain initiatives and measures, and it
must include the negative as well positive impacts of this variable.