Malthus

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

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Dinesh ^club

. . . Ultimately, for Malthus, civilization was aspirational: the “civilized man hopes to enjoy, the savage expects only to suffer.” Educating people out of the expectation of degradation was Malthus’s version of improvement, but for him this would both signal and require their movement out of a low stage of civilization. Stadial theory here met the political economy of poor relief, both in the context of colonial and humanitarian improvement. The single advantage of savage life, he decided, was the grater degree of leisure for the lowest, compared to the “incessant toil” of the lower classes of society in agricultural economies, in England for example. But he thought this South Sea advantage was entirely offset by the great tyranny of many of the island chiefs and lords.

In ranging over so many different societies in preparation for his long edition, Malthus was constantly looking in voyagers’ accounts and within existing histories for evidence of what happened to the “least fortunate.” But he found his sources insufficient in this respect, repeatedly critiquing existing “histories of mankind” the tradition in which he was himself writing. Quite simply, he wrote, the lower classes were far too often ignored; “the misfortune of all history” he called it, meaning the misfortune of all history-writing. “The histories of mankind that we possess, are histories only of the higher classes. We have but few accounts that can be depended upon of the manners and customs of that part of mankind, where there retrograde and progressive movements [that is, the oscillation of population] chiefly take place.” And elsewhere, he regretted that the histories of princes and leaders neglected to examine the motives of “willing followers.” It is no wonder that Malthus was at least as much ethnographer as he was historian. But this was also consistent with his efforts to analytically privilege the aggregate over the single unit, population over the individual. His argument for the abolition of the Poor Law, for example, he regretted as difficult for individual families, but ultimately better economic policy for the whole. Private and public interest were not necessarily the same. ~ Page 164

2 years ago. Edited 17 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

There is a reason to suspect, as Malthus has remarked, that the reproductive power is actually less in barbarous, than in civilized races. We know nothing positively on this head, for with savages no census has been taken; but from the concurrent testimony of missionaries, and of other who have long resided with such people, it appears that their families are usually small, and large ones rare. This may be partly account for, as it is believed, by the women suckling their infants during a long time; but it is highly probable that savages, who often suffer much hardship, and who do not obtain so much nutritious food as civilized men, would be actually less profile. . . . Page 45 ~ Charles Darwin

2 years ago. Edited 17 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . . By 1820 the USA had 10 million people and the numbers kept growing thanks boto to new arrivals -- still largely from the British Isles -- and a high birth rate. American women in those days were giving birth to seven children. The population was mostly of British origin and its demography was an essential part of its dynamism and ability to brush aside rival French and Spanish colonists as well as Native Americans. Malthus had been well aware of conditions in the United States and specifically the opportunities for population to double in a generation where a fresh supply of agriculture land was unlimited. American founding father Thomas Jefferson had been aware of Malthus and commended his work. ~ Page 65 Excerpt "The Human Tide" - Paul Moreland

2 years ago. Edited 17 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

Until quite recently it was taken for granted by historians that famines were simply natural checks on the population. That is to say, when the size of the population outstrips the capacity of the land to support it, then famine follows inevitably. . . . . In his book ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) Malthus argued that famine, disease and war are ‘ positive checks’ on the expansion of population, which it would be foolish to fight. As the population increases geometrically, he argued, so it outruns the possible food supply, which can only increase arithmetically: famine is a positive and natural check which re-established the balance. Human suffering, while regrettable, is thus inevitable and natural -- and, indeed, for Malthus the clergyman, part of God’s scheme of things. Malthus was initially writing not a technical treatise on population but a political tract. His targets were on the one hand those English supporters of the French Revolution who believed society could be bettered in the long term. The ‘principle of population’ was Malthus’s answer to show that it could not. The revolutionaries were therefore misguided. Malthus’s other trget was the then-current Poor Law Legislation, whichhe claimed supported the poor during dearths and famines and allowed them to breed, thus subverting the natural ‘positive check’ that famines and epidemic diseases were intended to provide. For Malthus the Poor Laws were, in this sense, unnatural, and against God’s order of things.. . . . Page 202/203

17 months ago. Edited 17 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . the theory of human exceptionalism, which was added to science by Thomas Malthus. “Population when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in arithmetical ratio”. Absolutely o known species population behaves in this way – except ours, if we take the word of the late-eighteenth-century Angelican country curator. (I find it curious that Darwin’s theory has been controverted since its final appearance in print but Malthus’s has gone virtually unchallenged for two centuries) ~ Page 12 (Chapter: Daniel Quinn)

4 months ago. Edited 4 months ago.

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