Malthus warned that every gain in food would be swallowed by more mouths
In 1798 an English curate named Thomas Malthus argued that whenever harvests improve, populations grow until living standards sink back again. The grim idea, later called the Malthusian trap, rebutted Enlightenment dreams of a perfectible society, inspired Darwin and Wallace, and was undercut by the industrial boom he failed to foresee.
Malthus was born in February 1766 at a small mansion near Dorking in Surrey, the sixth of seven children; his mother's family had supplied apothecaries to several Georgian kings. He had a cleft lip and palate that affected his speech. At Jesus College, Cambridge, he won prizes in Latin, Greek and English declamation, graduated as Ninth Wrangler in mathematics, and was ordained in 1789.
His Essay on the Principle of Population began as a rebuttal to his own father's optimism and to thinkers such as William Godwin and Condorcet. Its claim was that population tends to rise geometrically while food supply rises only arithmetically, so growth is held down by moral restraint, vice or misery. As an Anglican, he saw the pressure as divinely imposed to teach virtue. Criticism prompted six revised editions before 1826, and he toured Germany, Scandinavia and Russia in 1799 to gather population figures.
His policy positions were contentious: he argued the Poor Laws drove up prices rather than helping the poor, and he backed tariffs on imported grain. From 1805 he held a professorship at the East India Company's college in Hertfordshire, where students nicknamed him Pop or Population. In the 1820s he sparred with David Ricardo over rent and whether an economy could suffer a general glut, though the two shared the same starting principles.
Critics point out that his model, drawn from England, ignored technology, changing family size and places where food could outpace people, as it did during the Industrial Revolution. Even so, his thinking framed debate on hunger and famine for close to two centuries, and readers included Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He died on 29 December 1834.
Source: Thomas Robert Malthus
