Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834)

Samuel Hollander

Introduction

Thomas Robert Malthus was born on 14 February 1766, near Dorking, Surrey. He entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784, graduating with high distinction in mathematics in 1788. William Paley, whose The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy figured large in the curriculum, had been Tutor at Christ’s College of William Frend (mathematician, controversial reformer, and harsh critic of the Pitt ministry), Malthus’s own Tutor. William Otter, Malthus’s biographer, was a fellow undergraduate. Malthus was ordained minister of the Church of England after graduation, and in 1793 was appointed curate of Okewood, Surrey, officiating there for several years; he was instituted rector of Walesby, Lincolnshire, in 1803, but paid a curate to officiate. A Fellowship at Jesus College in 1793, which provided a small income without obligation, was conditional upon his remaining single. He forfeited the Fellowship in 1804 upon marriage to Harriet Eckersall. The following year, Malthus was appointed Professor of Modern History and Political Economy in the newly founded East India College, the earliest chair of Political Economy in England. He was a founding member of the Political Economy Club and of the Royal Statistical Society. He died on 29 December 1834.

S. Hollander (*)

University Professor Emeritus in Economics, University of Toronto, Canada e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_11

In his chapter on Malthus in Essays in Biography, John Maynard Keynes focused famously on a perceived sharp divide between Malthus and Ricardo, as revealed by their correspondence: ‘In economic discussions Ricardo was the abstract and a priori [sic] theorist, Malthus the inductive and intuitive investigator who hated to stray too far from what he could test by reference to the facts and his own intuitions’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 95). Again, Ricardo

is investigating the theory of the distribution of the product in conditions of equilibrium and Malthus is concerned with what determines the volume of output day by day in the real world. Malthus is dealing with the monetary economy in which we happen to live; Ricardo with the abstraction of a neutral money economy (ibid.: 97; italics in original).

Indeed, ‘[w]hen one has painfully escaped from the intellectual domination of these pseudo-arithmetical doctrines [the Quantity and Purchasing Power Parity Theories], one is able, perhaps for the first time for a hundred years, to comprehend the real significance of the vaguer intuitions of Malthus’ (ibid.: 88). Keynes gave particularly high marks to Malthus’s early pamphlet An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions (1800) as indicative of ‘a certain line of approach in handling practical economic problems.. .more likely to lead to right conclusions than the alternative approach of Ricardo’ (ibid.: 87). As for the Essay on Population, purely a priori procedure had governed the first edition, whereas in later versions ‘political philosophy gives way to political economy, general principles are overlaid by the inductive verifications of a pioneer in sociological history’ (ibid.: 84-85). Marshall had similarly contrasted the first edition, where Malthus ‘gave his argument without any detailed statement of facts’ with the second, where ‘he based himself on so wide and careful a statement of facts as to claim a place among the founders of historical economics’ (Marshall 1890 [1920]: 179, fn. 1).

Keynes’s first section in 1933 designates Malthus as ‘the first of the Cambridge economists’. It is unlikely that by this remark he intended a belief that before Malthus there had been at Cambridge no one who could fairly be designated an ‘economist’, since he surmised regarding Paley: ‘Perhaps, in a sense, he was the first of the Cambridge economists’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 79, fn. 2; italics in original. On this matter, see Waterman 1996 and this volume). But there is a more specific signification of the term sometimes encountered—that referring to the anti-Ricardian ‘Cambridge inductivists’ represented in economics by Richard Jones (Gonville and

Caius College). For Jones excluded Malthus from his indictment (Jones 1831: vi), and William Whewell (Trinity College), who took the campaign into the enemy’s own territory (Whewell 1829), focused entirely on Ricardo. Keynes may have had this connection in mind when he talks of Malthus’s ‘vaguer intuitions’, ‘inductivist verifications’, and ‘a certain line of approach in handling practical economic problems’ preferable to Ricardo’s ‘alternative approach’. But, as will be made clear in our discussion, to place Malthus at the head of an anti-Ricardo ‘inductivist’ line would be wholly unjustified. For he refused to join Jones in his campaign (see Malthus to Whewell, 28 February 1831, Additional Manuscripts c, Trinity College Library, Cambridge University: Add. Ms. c. 53²). Moreover, as early as 1803, he protested against those who declaimed against ‘theory and theorists...prid[ing] themselves upon the distinction of being practical’, but failing to distinguish ‘partial experience which.is no foundation whatever for a just theory’, from ‘general experience, on which alone a just theory can be founded’ (Malthus 1803: 582-583).

That the 1803 essay engages in ‘inductivist verification’—illustrating from the historical and contemporary record in all parts of the world the different forms taken by ‘checks’ to population growth—may justify Malthus’s high status as a pioneer historical economist, but in no way does this detract from his contribution to deductive theory, the dimension that will primarily engage us in this chapter. Now Keynes, in fact, himself observed in his 1933 biography that Malthus learned as an undergraduate ‘the a priori methods of Cambridge—whether Paley, the Mathematical Tripos, or the Unitarians’ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 86; see also Keynes 1935 [1972]: 107 on Paley and a priori method). Moreover, a Cambridge Centenary allocution in 1935 dilutes the notion of a sharp Ricardo- Malthus methodological divide by representing Malthus as ‘a great pioneer of the application of a frame of formal thinking to the complex confusion of the world of daily events’, who sought ‘to penetrate these events.by a mixture of intuitive selection and formal principle and thus to interpret the problem and propose the remedy’ (ibid.; italics added). We have been recently reminded of ‘Malthus’s quest for a middle way between opposed doctrines, his search for the golden mean, his desire for a balance between abstract theory and experience [which] derived from the intellectual legacy of the eighteenth-century Anglican via media whose stronghold was Cambridge’ (Cremaschi 2014: 11)—although it is unlikely that this is what Keynes intended by his designation of Malthus as ‘the first of the Cambridge economists’.

Whatever methodological debt Malthus may have owed to Cambridge—a priori procedure or a ‘balanced’ perspective or both—my main concern will be to establish his bona fides as a leading theorist. I proceed by reference first to his land-based growth model—I use the term ‘model’ advisedly—yielding the canonical classical inverse wage-profit relation and downward paths of the wage and profit rates until the stationary state; and to his representation of the profit rate as a physical ratio of corn surplus to corn input, transposed to the industrial sector via variation in the terms of trade between food and manufactures, a representation famously ascribed by Piero Sraffa to the early Ricardo. The use to which the primary growth model is put in application will be a major concern, with particular reference to the charge that Malthus maintained the inevitability of low living standards. The historiographical implications of our reading will also engage us.

Secondly, I shall take up Malthus’s perception of an aggregate-demand problem, independent of the scarce land constraint, both in the secular and short-term contexts—strikingly unorthodox in the former case. Here arises the question of a Malthus-Keynes nexus. Malthus was certainly preoccupied by ‘the facts’ of the real world, as Keynes insisted. He did not, however, abandon theoretical endeavour because of his dissatisfaction on factual grounds with the orthodox model, but sought rather to devise an alternative better able to account for the facts, believing—prematurely it turns out—that his theory of sustainable growth satisfied the requirement. The same may be said of his analysis of the post-1814 depression. The precise character of Malthus’s ‘inductive’ procedures in support of the theoretical models in both these cases will be briefly addressed.

A third general theoretical issue is Malthus’s ‘Physiocratic’ perspective on the source of surplus in agriculture—a central feature of his work, albeit inconsistent with canonical growth doctrine. I shall demonstrate the late abandonment of this and related theoretical elements, in response to major empirical transformations of the day, and also of the case for agricultural protectionism based upon them.

Drawing upon the foregoing discussions, I attend finally to Malthus’s methodology of applied economics, characterized by great caution in addressing policy issues. Here, factual circumstance relating to time and place is of the essence. So too is the problem of ‘proportions’ or defining optima in addressing policy, an issue raising a further possible dimension to the Cambridge connection considering its centrality in Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy (see Cremaschi 2014: 29). Our coverage seeks to capture the main characteristics of Malthus’s contribution to economics, both theoretical and applied.