Paley and Malthus: The First of the Cambridge Development Economists

We begin with the observation that notions of human perfectibility are today immediately associated as the impetus for the work of Malthus, who Keynes famously regarded as ‘the first of the Cambridge economists’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 78). This was not idle praise. Malthus made some of the earliest major contributions to the subject of development economics in terms of both his ideas and methodology, and also to many other areas of economics. Malthus’s influence was vast; he was a long-time personal friend of Ricardo. Their respect for each other’s work was mutual, although they did not always agree with each other. The work for which Malthus is most famous is not considered rigorous in its methodology and argument by today’s standards of data availability, but it indicates some of the earliest high-quality scholarship in development economics and provided many real-world applications to issues in the field. Perhaps more importantly, his work in political economy was the impetus for contemporary theories in fields related to long-term economic sustainability, including demography and statistics, poverty, welfare, agriculture, macroeconomic policy, environmental economics, and evolutionary biology.

Keynesian historiography of economic thought ties together Malthus and William Paley in that each could claim to have been the first Cambridge economist—at least ‘in a sense’ (ibid.: 79, fn. 2). The intellectual climate in Cambridge around the late eighteenth century favoured theological and philosophical ideas, which formed the basis of an emerging subject, political economy. Waterman (1996) remarks upon the rather limited early involvement of the Cambridge tradition in this emerging field. He reports little evidence from Cambridge University and college library records that there was any substantial interest in political economy (including Smith’s Wealth of Nations 1776) until Malthus’s Essay (1798) brought the subject into the spotlight with his provocative message asserting the ominous imperfectability of mankind. In examining their respective influences on the development economics discourse, however, it is useful to consider Malthus and his predecessor Paley side by side. On the one hand, this is because they were amongst the first to speak of and popularise economic ideas in economic language in Cambridge and in Britain generally.^[1] On the other hand and most significantly, they personally influenced one another a great deal. As such they might rather be considered the first of the Cambridge development economists.

Malthus’s earliest influences were significant and entrenched in the Church of England, utilitarianism, and liberal thought and pacifism. He arrived as a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, in Michaelmas Term 1784, at a time when ‘the University was just stirring from a long sleep, and Jesus, which had been among the sleepiest, was becoming a centre of intellectual ferment. Malthus probably owes as much to the intellectual company he kept during his years at Jesus as to the influence and sympathy of his father’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 79). Indeed, Daniel Malthus, whose own family hailed from Cambridgeshire, took a great deal of interest in the education of his precocious son, and tutored him himself along with Richard Graves^[2] and Gilbert Wakefield.^[3] Moreover, as mentioned above, Daniel Malthus, who was a gentleman of means, was a personal friend of both Hume and (when he was in England) Rousseau. Moving within the same circles, it may be presumed that there was some spillover of ideas and academic influence on the younger Malthus. While at Jesus, Malthus praised his new environment of scholarship and intellectual curiosity, noting in a letter home: ‘I think it seems rather the fashion to read’ (Malthus quoted in ibid.: 78). His peers included the likes of natural historian E.D. Clarke, while Coleridge arrived some years later. The work of Paley had a vast influence over Malthus due to the still-prevailing tutorial systems at Cambridge, which promote a culture of intellectual dis- cipleship. Malthus’s Tutor was the social reformer, William Frend, who had been taught by Paley himself. Moreover, as Keynes observes in his Essays on Biography (Keynes 1933 [1972]), Paley’s The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy was published in 1785, Malthus’s first year at Cambridge and is likely therefore to have been a significant intellectual stimulus for him.

Morality, in the sense of responsibility and duty in society, is a common theme running through the work of both Paley and Malthus^[4]—a theme which continues in the work of contemporary development economists including Amartya Sen, Thomas Piketty, and Ha-Joon Chang. Paley’s Principles can be interpreted as a treatise on the moral obligations and rights of the liberal individual to civil government, the constitution, the administration of justice, and the establishment of the Church of England. In Paley’s work, this aspect of principled social cohesion is tied to the concept of human betterment and progress. Its chapters refer to now-familiar themes in development economics and international relations—‘Population and Provision’ and ‘War and Military Establishment’, for example (Paley 1825). Waterman (1996) considers Paley’s influential work to have been ‘the origin of this characteristically “Cambridge” way of looking at economic reality, so sharply distinguished from “classical” thinking of either the nineteenth or the twentieth century’ (ibid.: 674). The ‘immortal’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 79, fn. 2) tome itself is primarily an undergraduate textbook in moral science, which reflects the content of approximately one-third of the core curriculum taught at Cambridge during the eighteenth century. It was designed to pass the intellectual baton of studying human betterment, drawing students such as Malthus into an emerging and complex subject and defining political economy from the perspective of moral philosophy. Paley’s work was to complement biblical and classical readings, and intended to ‘form the minds and the moral sensibilities of clergymen, magistrates and legislators’ (Waterman 1996: 674), the then- accepted institutions of human progress.

Malthus took an early interest in the relationship of demography with the problems of political economy. His first essay, The Crisis, A View of the Recent Interesting State of Great Britain by a Friend to the Constitution (1796), written when he was 30 years of age, indicates this interest which in turn could be traced back to Paley’s ‘Population and Provision’ ideas. Extracts from this unpublished work reproduced in Keynes’s Essays on Biography (Keynes 1933 [1972]) show Malthus comparing his thoughts with Paley.^[5] In 1798, Malthus published his magnum opus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). In this text on the relationship between supply of subsistence and demand, Malthus argued that the demand for food increased at a geometric rate to meet the needs of an increasing population while the supply of food was only able to grow at an arithmetic rate. The Essay was a responsive work, not only to Malthus’s indirect intellectual influences in Cambridge and at home, but also directly to Godwin’s^[6] doctrine of human perfectibility, which described a future age of perfect equality and human happiness. In conversation the latter was frequently defended by Daniel Malthus, which prompted Malthus’s intellectual attack (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 84). Malthus’s Essay, in the ‘sheer immodesty of [its]...propositions’ (Winch 1987: 3), hypothesised against perfectibility: improving living standards and society is limited by certain laws of nature whereby population—when unchecked by misery and vice (and in later editions of the Essay by moral restraint)—tends to equal or surpass existing means of subsistence. With such a pessimistic conclusion, this bestseller gave rise to huge controversy and enjoyed a certain notoriety, illuminating problems in political economy for the general public.

Malthus has several claims to being the first of the Cambridge development economists. He was a consummate scholar. He collected first-hand data on various aspects of population, gathered on his journeys to Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia—wherever British citizens were allowed to go before the Napoleonic Wars. Malthus was an empirical statistician, ‘fascinated not with the inevitability of human demise but why humans do not die off in the face of such overwhelming odds’ (EconLib 2008). His Essay was an instant success, strongly criticised by non-economists upon its first publication. However, so irrefutable and simple was his illustrative side-by-side comparison of the arithmetic and geometric series model that most people were immediately silenced by the quantitative comparison. Malthus’s demographic data was so compelling that it was easy to lose sight of his main conclusion, which was that since the human race has not starved to death, economic choices must be at work and it is the duty of an economist to analyse these choices and search for optimality in these choices. Malthus examined a whole range of other issues in his textbook Principles of Political Economy in 1820. It was the first text to describe a demand schedule as distinct from a supply schedule, an innovation in which ‘political philosophy gives way to political economy’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 84). Although his knowledge of industry was not so developed, Malthus provided the first systematic explanation of a whole range of economic and political phenomena.

In the history of development economics, Malthus’s contributions exceed those of a mere demographer. He used population theory to question the views of Godwin, Condorcet and the like—who collectively supported a general Romantic post-Enlightenment movement of a utopian egalitarianism that would happen under natural law. Malthus’s empiricism succeeded in popularising the subject with his controversial bashing of these early theoretical, deductive, and idealistic conceptions of human progress. Paley was himself converted to Malthus’s side despite having previously argued that population decay was a sociopolitical evil, while even politicians, including Pitt, took a deferential interest in Malthus alongside Bentham. Indeed, early nineteenth- century ideas that were centred on individual welfare provided favourable conditions for the Malthusian message, which, like Smith and Ricardo, began from a utilitarian position. For instance, a Malthusian preoccupation can be detected in ideas associated with a developing and expanding society—the self-defeating impact of welfare laws on available housing, the fate of the independent labourer given government intervention in labour markets, and the propensity for upward pressure on the population due to adverse incen- tivisation. Yet within utilitarian thinking, Malthus’s Essay promoted universal optimality rather than perfection, which became an underlying supposition of development economics.

• [1] Though having highlighted problems in political economy as a key area of intellectual debate, it wasSmith who solidified this interest and garnered attention throughout Britain.
• [2] The author of The Spiritual Quixote, a satirical work on Methodists.
• [3] A heretical clergyman and a Fellow at Jesus College, Wakefield was famously arrested in 1799 for‘expressing a wish that French revolutionaries would invade and conquer England’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]:78).
• [4] Who incidentally were both ordained ministers.
• [5] ‘On the subject of population [Malthus wrote] I cannot agree with Archdeacon Paley, who says, that thequantity of happiness in any country is best measured by the number of people. Increasing population isthe most certain possible sign of the happiness and prosperity of a state; but the actual population mayonly be a sign of the happiness that is past’ (Malthus quoted in Keynes 1933 [1972]: 83).
• [6] Also born and raised in Cambridgeshire.