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Thomas Malthus, in full Thomas Robert Malthus, (born February 13/14, 1766, Rookery, near Dorking, Surrey, England—died December 29, 1834, St. Catherine, near Bath, Somerset), English economist and demographer who is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. This thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism.
Academic development
Malthus was born into a prosperous family. His father, a friend of the Scottish philosopher and skeptic David Hume, was deeply influenced by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book Émile (1762) may have been the source of the elder Malthus’s liberal ideas about educating his son. The young Malthus was educated largely at home until his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784. There he studied a wide range of subjects and took prizes in Latin and Greek, graduating in 1788. He earned his master of arts degree in 1791, was elected a fellow of Jesus College in 1793, and took holy orders in 1797. His unpublished pamphlet “The Crisis,” written in 1796, supported the newly proposed Poor Laws, which recommended establishing workhouses for the impoverished. This view ran somewhat counter to the views on poverty and population that Malthus published two years later.
Professional achievements
In 1804 Malthus married Harriet Eckersall, and in 1805 he became a professor of history and political economy at the East India Company’s college at Haileybury, Hertfordshire. It was the first time in Great Britain that the words political economy had been used to designate an academic office. Malthus lived quietly at Haileybury for the remainder of his life, except for a visit to Ireland in 1817 and a trip to the Continent in 1825. In 1811 he met and became close friends with the English economist David Ricardo.
In 1819 Malthus was elected a fellow of the Royal Society; in 1821 he joined the Political Economy Club, whose members included Ricardo and the Scottish economist James Mill; and in 1824 he was elected one of the 10 royal associates of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1833 he was elected to the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and to the Royal Academy of Berlin. Malthus was one of the cofounders, in 1834, of the Statistical Society of London.
