Thomas Malthus (1766–1834)

Who They Were

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was an English political economist and an ordained Anglican clergyman. From 1805 he was professor of history and political economy at the East India Company College at Haileybury -- a post generally described as the first academic chair in political economy in Britain. He worked within the classical framework inherited from Adam Smith, and was a friend, correspondent and intellectual sparring partner of David Ricardo. Rapid population growth and periodic scarcity in his era gave his ideas their urgency and their plausibility to contemporaries. Where Ricardo reasoned from tightly specified assumptions, Malthus argued from observation, demography and historical evidence -- a methodological difference that often led the two men to opposite conclusions from the same starting facts.

Key Contributions

Malthus is best known for An Essay on the Principle of Population, published anonymously in 1798, which argued that population tends to grow faster than the food supply, so living standards are repeatedly pushed back toward subsistence. This population principle was influential enough that Ricardo largely accepted it and built it into his own account of the natural wage. Malthus also worked on the theory of differential rent, publishing on it in 1815 at almost the same moment as Ricardo, Edward West and Robert Torrens, so priority there is genuinely shared. In trade policy he defended agricultural protection, arguing that dependence on foreign grain was a security risk and that landlord spending helped support demand -- an early concern with aggregate demand that later readers, including Keynes, would connect to his work.

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Classical economist and clergyman whose 1798 population essay argued that population outruns the food supply. Play the games that feature Thomas Malthus:

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