The Reverend Thomas Malthus on population and education

Yet another post by occasional guest contributor on topics of theology and history, Alfred Russel Wallace.

The western world played a central role in developing today’s modern political and philosophical scholarship from the 17th through 19th centuries. Many of these influential thinkers were ordained as priests. One of them was the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834).

The youngest son of eight children, Malthus grew up in comfortable circumstances, and was educated at the Presbyterian Warrington Academy before attending Jesus College, Cambridge. He received his MA in 1791, and became an Anglican country curate near Guilford in Surrey in 1797. He married his cousin Harriet in 1804, and in 1805 became Professor of History and Political Economy at the East India Company College. He had three children.

Malthus was an early advocate of assessing the value of labor, and took issue with other economists such as Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Hume (1711-1776) in viewing the true and only generation of wealth as the production of food. He believed that a country’s population was limited by the amount of food available, especially for the poor.

Malthus also theorized that food production could at best increase only linearly, while populations could increase exponentially without constraint. His book published on this topic was initially anonymous, but he was acknowledged in a major revision and four subsequent editions. The last edition, in 1828, bore title that was typically, like many written its time, exhaustively descriptive: “An Essay on the Principle of Population; or a view of its past and present effects on human happiness; with an inquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions.”

Many at the time, including Karl Marx, disagreed and expected technology to come to the rescue. Today, the success of Norman Borlaug’s (1914-2009) wonderful wheat and the ‘Green Revolution’ has temporarily blunted Malthus’ arguments. The critics have been correct. So far.

But as Malthus predicted, populations in many countries have increased to match the food supply, and the specter of perennial starvation and other Malthusian consequences is always near at hand.

Some see Malthus’ views as heartless, but he believed that “Evil exists in the world not to create despair, but activity” and spent much time and effort in proposing ways to mitigate the potentially appalling consequences of the truth of his observations. He believed that delaying marriage would keep populations in check, and felt strongly that education was a far better investment for society than charity, saying, “It is surely a great national disgrace that the education of the lower classes of people… should be left merely to a few Sunday schools…”

Both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were strongly influenced by Malthus’ recognition of the “constant struggle for existence” caused by a shortage of food supplies. They independently generalized it to all living things, and came to recognize that subtle random differences in individuals could lead to their improved survival, and thus eventually to new species. So in a very real sense the Church, in the form of the Rev. Malthus, helped lay the foundation for the discovery of the principle of Natural Selection that underlies all biology.