AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION
In the course of this enquiry I found that much more had been done than I had been aware of, when I first published the Essay. The poverty and misery arising from a too rapid increase of population had been distinctly seen, and the most violent remedies proposed, so long ago as the times of Plato and Aristotle. And of late years the subject has been treated in such a manner by some of the French Economists; occasionally by Montesquieu, and, among our own writers, by Dr. Franklin, Sir James Stewart, Mr. Arthur Young, and Mr. Townsend, as to create a natural surprise that it had not excited more of the public attention.
By far the biggest change was in how the 2nd to 6th editions of the essay were structured, and the most copious and detailed that Malthus presented, more than any previous such book on population. Essentially, for the first time, Malthus examined his own Principle of Population on a region-by-region basis of . The essay was organized in four books:
Few classics of economic thought could be considered great reads. Malthus’ friend, , is regarded as one of the best economic theorists ever, but his writings are interminable. This is what makes reading An Essay on the Principles of Population so surprising: it is beautifully written, overflowing with humanity, and a genuine page-turner.
An Essay on the Principle of Population - Wikipedia
Chapters 18 and 19 set out a to explain the in terms of . This views the world as "a mighty process for awakening matter" in which the Supreme Being acting "according to general laws" created "wants of the body" as "necessary to create exertion" which forms "the reasoning faculty". In this way, the principle of population would "tend rather to promote, than impede the general purpose of Providence."
…anonymously the first edition of 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. The work received wide notice. Briefly, crudely, yet strikingly, Malthus argued that infinite human hopes for social…
In 1798 Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population. It posed the conundrum of geometrical population growth’s outstripping arithmetic expansion in resources. Malthus, who was an Anglican clergyman, recommended late marriage and sexual abstinence as methods of birth control. A small group of early 19th-century freethinkers, including…
reading the economist Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population in September 1838. That was a seminal moment—even if Malthusian ideas had long permeated his Whig circle. Darwin was living through a workhouse revolution. Malthus had said that there would always be too many mouths to feed—population increases geometrically,…
An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford Worlds Classics)
Because of this unequal power between production and reproduction, "population must be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence.” While Malthus was not the first one to notice this, he was the first to inquire into the means by which this leveling of population is achieved.
An Essay on the Principle of Population - Econlib
principle—enunciated in Thomas Malthus’s “Essay on Population” (1798): according to Malthus, as the labour force increases, extra food to feed the extra mouths can be produced only by extending cultivation to less fertile soil or by applying capital and labour to land already under cultivation—with dwindling results because of…
Thomas Robert Malthuss Essay on the Principle of Population
In 1798 Malthus published 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. This hastily written pamphlet had as its principal object the refutation of the views of the utopians.…
An Essay on the Principle of Population by T. R. Malthus
Assuming 700 million people at the time of the Essay (an estimate widely reported in the literature, and a 25-year doubling time for unchecked population (what modern demographers call “fecundity”), today’s population would now be close to 48 billion.
An Essay on the Principle of Population, vol. 1 [1826, 6th ed.]
ends with a defense of the Principle of Population against the charge that it "impeaches the goodness of the Deity, and is inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the scriptures".
An Essay on the Principle of Population: The 1803 Edition on JSTOR
Chapters 1 and 2 outline Malthus' Principle of Population, and the unequal nature of food supply to population growth. The nature of population growth is today known as the . This aspect of Malthus' Principle of Population, together with his assertion that food supply was subject to a growth model, would remain unchanged in future editions of his essay. Note that Malthus actually used the terms and , respectively.