nach oben

2018 | Buch

Kapitel lesen Erstes Kapitel lesen

Thomas Robert Malthus

verfasst von: Prof. David Reisman

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Great Thinkers in Economics Series

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Einloggen, um Zugang zu erhalten

Über dieses Buch

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was a leading figure in the British classical school of economics, best-known for extending the insights of Adam Smith at a time of revolutionary improvements in agriculture and industry. This book explores the way in which he accounted for the tendency to overpopulation, the exhaustion of arable land and the deficiency of effective demand.

Malthus relied on historical and empirical evidence in the spirit of Bacon and Hume, but also backed up his data with a priori hypotheses that link him to his contemporary, David Ricardo. Malthus was strongly in favour of free trade, the minimal State, the gold standard and the abolition of poverty relief. Always a pragmatist, however, he was just as much in favour of public education, contra-cyclical public works and a safety net of tariffs and bounties to encourage national self-sufficiency with regard to food. He was both an economist and a clergyman and saw the two roles as interconnected. Malthus believed that a benevolent Deity had created vice and misery in order to shake human beings out of their natural indolence that would otherwise have condemned them to still greater distress.

This title provides a clear and comprehensive examination of Malthus’s economic and social thought. It will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Introduction

Abstract

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was a leading figure in the classical school of economics that extended the insights of Adam Smith. Malthus made major contributions to the theory of overpopulation and its checks, diminishing returns to land, trade policy, monetary policy and the deficiency of aggregate demand. This chapter sets his work in the context of his life and the British economy in the industrial and agrarian revolutions. It discusses the impact of Cambridge in the 1780s, Malthus’s ordination in the Church, his professorship at the East India College, Haileybury, his participation in the Political Economy Club and the British Association, his friendly rivalry with Ricardo. It also discusses the reaction to his work of contemporaries like Coleridge and Godwin.

David Reisman

Chapter 2. Induction and Deduction

Abstract

Economics in the time of Malthus was torn between the abstract, symbolic and mathematical approach of Descartes and Ricardo and the facts-based empiricism of Bacon, Petty and Hume. Malthus said he wanted to rely principally on historical evidence but that theory was indispensable in order to interpret the record. His mixed methodology enabled him to back up his data with a priori conjectures and promising hypotheses. His investigations were always hampered by the lack of statistics and by the difficulty of testing hypotheses like those involving consensus, utility or popular unrest which are by their nature imprecise. The chapter shows that near-contemporaries like Wallace, Howlett, Price and Paley had encountered the same difficulties.

David Reisman

Chapter 3. The Law of Population

Abstract

Malthus is best known for his Essay on Population. The first edition was published in 1798 and the last (the sixth) in 1826. Malthus’s theory is built around the contention that the population increases in a geometrical ratio but the supply of subsistence only in an arithmetical ratio. The mismatch results in positive checks like famine and disease if the disaster is not first allayed by preventive checks such as later marriage. The chapter explores Malthus’s view that moral restraint could, because of economic growth and social upgrading, keep the headcount in line with the increasing capacity of the land to provide food. It also explains Malthus’s cautious support for emigration as a stopgap in the period before the outflow was corrected by natural increase.

David Reisman

Chapter 4. Public Policy

Abstract

Malthus like all classical liberals looked in the first instance to self-stabilising mechanisms and the free market to solve the economic problems of supply and demand. The State should ensure a stable framework of law and order to prevent the reappearance of Hobbes’s state of war. Bad governments in the past had been predatory and insensitive, open to the special pleading of interest groups that seek to redistribute the national wealth when they ought to increase it. The inference is a constitution reflecting the damage-containing rule of minimax. In spite of that Malthus called for pragmatic intervention in forms such as the Corn Laws to exclude cheap imports and the legalisation of trades unions. Education for citizenship was also important to inculcate in the masses a resistance to demagogues and revolutionaries.

David Reisman

Chapter 5. The Poor Laws

Abstract

The Poor Laws since 1601 had provided parish relief to paupers. Malthus, believing that hand-outs encouraged earlier marriage and larger families, recommended that all welfare save for grants to the irremediably destitute should be abolished. He denied that there was a right to welfare or that welfare formed part of the social contract. While benevolence was a moral absolute, it was expanding the population, putting pressure on limited food and creating the misery it was intended to contain. The hidden curriculum was that the abolition of income-maintenance would teach the values of self-reliance, prudence, assiduity and moral restraint which would confer economic as well as social benefits.

David Reisman

Chapter 6. Balanced Growth

Abstract

Malthus (who regarded the service sector as non-productive) explored the interaction between agriculture and industry. He saw farming as essential not just for national self-sufficiency in food but because it created a home market for manufactures and released manpower for the towns. The emphasis he places on agrarian activity, especially in his early years, recalls the Physiocrats like Quesnay in France, Spence in England, who traced all value-added back to the land. The primary sector should continue to generate at least half of the national product. An artificially high price of grain might be justified if the outcome were a flourishing agricultural sector.

David Reisman

Chapter 7. Tariffs and Bounties

Abstract

Malthus was concerned that the cultivation of less-fertile land together with the improved exploitation of existing plots might lead to diminishing returns in agriculture and a rising price of food as the population grew. For some time, and it could be for ‘several centuries’, the increasing productivity on the land could exceed the growing demand. In the long run, however, high farming would be no match for the population multiplier. Domestic agriculture should be defended by the State through the Corn Laws and an export bounty. In all his published work Malthus, unlike his fellow liberals, contended that free trade in grain would be incompatible with balanced growth. There is some evidence from the last years of his life that he was becoming increasingly favourable to free trade in grain and not just in manufactures.

David Reisman

Chapter 8. The Circular Flow

Abstract

The great majority of economists in Malthus’s time denied the possibility of aggregate over-supply or involuntary unemployment. Ricardo and James Mill believed in Say’s Law. Even saving was said to be spending, and a deficiency of total demand was an exception. Malthus, anticipating Keynes, argued that the savers are putting a brake on economic growth that can only become worse as income in the process of secular stagnation is transferred away from the natural spenders. In his second great book, the Principles of Political Economy of 1820, Malthus addressed the threat of excessive withdrawals from the circular flow. Although his definition of the national product is different from that of more modern statisticians like Stone, he continued the practice begun by Quesnay of treating the macroeconomy as a whole that is different from the sum of the households and the firms.

David Reisman

Chapter 9. Circular Flow and Social Class

Abstract

Malthus, like most economists from Smith to Marx, grouped economic actors by their factor of production. The workers, unskilled and oversupplied, receive relatively low pay that does not permit of parsimony. Even their money wages must be informally uprated with grain prices so as to keep their real wage high enough for them to be adequately nourished and able to work. Economic growth would improve the standard of life of the working class but in the short-run labour will remain a spending interest. The middle class is, however, a saving class with a high propensity to bequeath uninvested capital to their children who in that way will inherit their achieved status. Sharing some insights with Lauderdale and a small number of heterodox thinkers, Malthus believed that thrift could go too far. The landowners might be able to fill the gap, both because they are not abstemious and because they tend to spend on services which do not form part of the national wealth.

David Reisman

Chapter 10. Society and State

Abstract

Proportion is essential in political economy. There has to be a good balance between spending and saving if the perils of overheating on the one hand, stagnation on the other are to be avoided. There must also be an appropriate balance in the ownership of landed property. Some redistribution is needed but it must occur gradually, so as not to destabilise the social and political order. The laws of primogeniture and entailing, illiberal as they are, must be preserved. Social conventions should also conform to the rule of balance. Consumption should not be so great as to starve investment of loanable funds but it should not be so niggardly as to drive satiated agents into indolence and unchanging replication. There had in addition to be balance in the role of the State. If total demand is deficient, the State should contribute unproductive consumption through counter-cyclical public works financed even in a recession by higher taxes and a national debt which in itself is favourable to full employment.

David Reisman

Chapter 11. Foreign Trade

Abstract

Adam Smith said that the exchange between nations would rationally be governed by absolute advantage, Ricardo by comparative advantage. Malthus was on the side of Smith. Malthus rejected mercantilism in favour of free trade that maximised the sum of consumer satisfactions. He said that a lower price is only one of the gains from trade. There was also the exploitation of a unique advantage and the faster growth that resulted from diversification and catch-up. Beggar-thy-neighbour policies could, however, negate the global benefits if countries were attempting to dump their exports without also creating a demand for their trading partners’ products. Malthus believed that foreign trade could go too far. The home market must remain the principal source of demand.

David Reisman

Chapter 12. Money

Abstract

The suspension of specie payments in 1797 initiated a debate between bullionists like Ricardo who believed that irresponsible money creation had led to inflation and anti-bullionists like Bosanquet who felt that prudent lending backed up by ‘real bills’ as good collateral would ensure that the money supply even in the absence of gold and silver would not be in excess. Malthus, who never wrote a dedicated tract on money, leaves no doubt that he is a bullionist, convinced that the supply of money was causing the price of goods to go up. He was critical of the bankers and what he saw as their vested interest to make interest-bearing loans. He felt that a return to specie would end competitive devaluation by establishing a world economy linked up by fixed exchange rates and price adjustment. Inflation is always bad. It does, however, create finance for industry through the redistribution of purchasing power known as forced saving.

David Reisman

Chapter 13. God’s Design

Abstract

Malthus was an ordained clergyman. Explicitly, in the much criticised and rapidly deleted Chapters 18 and 19 of the 1798 Essay, less explicitly throughout the whole of his life, he sought to reconcile the will of the Creator with the vice and misery which result from the population mechanism and the marginal soils that God had created. Malthus preferred to induce the divine purpose from the natural world than to rely on revelation which lacks confirmation. He concludes that the Deity created evil because he wished to shake indolent creatures out of their torpor. Happiness is the result. Malthus owed some of his most promising insights to Hutcheson and Paley, both of them utilitarians but also ministers of religion. Malthus deviates so significantly from Biblical Christianity that the reader wonders if he might secretly have been an Enlightenment deist and not a Christian at all.

David Reisman

Chapter 14. Malthus’s Legacy: A System of Ideas

Abstract

It is easy to treat Malthus’s disparate writings on population, productivity, distribution, effective demand, forced saving, money and God as isolated and free-standing contributions that do not add up to a whole. It is true that he never wrote an ambitious summing-up analogous to Smith’s Wealth of Nations. This chapter suggests, however, a different interpretation. The conclusion is reached that the separate elements are all parts of a single project in which human life becomes, through economics, an earthly paradise and not a veil of tears.

David Reisman

Backmatter

Titel: Thomas Robert Malthus
verfasst von: Prof. David Reisman
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-01956-3
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01955-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01956-3