Thomas Robert Malthus

Malthus was an economist, cleric, and scholar working in the fields of political economy and demography. In 1798 he published An Essay on the Principle of Population, observing that whenever food production improved, populations grew until the lower classes were pushed back into hardship, want, and greater susceptibility to war, famine, and disease. He called it inevitable: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." As an Anglican cleric, he saw the trap as divinely imposed to teach virtue. He opposed the Poor Laws, saying they caused inflation rather than helping the poor, and supported grain import taxes. His pessimism - that real progress toward a better society was precluded by biology - cut against the prevailing 18th-century belief in human perfectibility. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace read him; so did Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. His failure to foresee the Industrial Revolution became a standard critique, but his framework laid the theoretical foundation for nearly two centuries of debate on hunger and famine.