Thomas Robert Malthus: The Prophet Of Population Pessimism

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 – 1834) is a known as the prophet of population pessimism because of his theory about the population growth. He was the first economists that referred phenomena of economic crises as gluts. Although he was born in the prosperous family, his father Daniel Malthus preferred to educate him at home. When Malthus excelled in the studies of mathematics and literature, he continued his degree in Master’s of Art at Jesus College in Cambridge in 1791. He began to write his argument into his first book, ‘An Essay on The Principle on Population’ when he showed a genuine interest to understand how the human can be related to the subsistence level as well as to demolish the ideas of Godwin and Condorcet whom favoured the working …show more content…
At some point, the population would outstrip food production that could be enough to feed everyone. Even though people could increase the food supply through made an improvement in agriculture by the open new plot of lands, the population still growing very rapidly. His first attention to the problem of population occurred when he was appointed as Curate to Okewood Chapel in Surrey in 1793. In this chapel, he saw illiterate poor children and women as they lived in mud huts and relied on their diet only by bread. Malthus noticed that unbalance between birth rate and death rate among his parishioners (Avery, …show more content…
The positive checks were famine, plague, war and misery. This could be a punishment for the people who did not practice the moral restraints. Most of the poor people would face misery because they were incapable of controlling the pregnancy as the fertility of the female was high at that time. Therefore they would think twice if they want to survive their life because for example, if one family have many children, their food supply would be limited for everyone and this would increase the hardship they have. The plague was one of the most virulent diseases that could reduce the population in the long run especially among the poor people because, at that time, most of the hospitals were located in the town. Therefore it were inaccessible to the poor people. However, if the positive checks also failed, famine would be the only choice to decrease the population because the food production grew slowly (Macfarlance, 2014). Moreover, a war would decrease the population drastically since women and children were left behind as well as old