Malthus became hugely influential, and controversial, in economic, political, social and scientific thought.

* One school of thought is that Dickens based Scrooge's views on the poor on those of demographer and political economist Thomas Malthus.

He strongly influenced Paley and is thought to have had some influence on Malthus and his theories.

Malthusianism refers primarily to ideas derived from the political / economic thought of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, as laid out initially in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population, which describes how unchecked population growth is exponential ( 1 → 2 → 4 → 8 ) while the growth of the food supply was expected to be arithmetical ( 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 ).

In addition to Adam Smith's legacy, Say's law, Malthus theories of population and Ricardo's iron law of wages became central doctrines of classical economics.

Thomas Malthus wrote two books, An essay on the principle of population, published in 1798, and Principles of political economy, published in 1820.

In that book, Malthus claimed that population growth would outstrip food production, because population grew geometrically, while food production grew arithmetically.

However, classical liberals rejected Adam Smith's belief that the " invisible hand " would lead to general benefits and embraced Thomas Malthus ' view that population expansion would prevent any general benefit and David Ricardo's view of the inevitability of class conflict.

Using these modelling techniques, Malthus ' population principle of growth was later transformed into a model known as the logistic equation:

Notwithstanding the apocalyptic image conveyed by this particular paragraph, Malthus himself did not subscribe to the notion that mankind was fated for a " catastrophe " due to population overshooting resources.

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, the first edition published in 1798, Thomas Malthus ended with two chapters on natural theology and population.

He describes the struggle resulting from population growth: " It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.

The population and economic theorist Thomas Malthus argued that evil exists to spur human creativity and production.

Malthus has become widely known for his theories about population and its increase or decrease in response to various factors.

At the time, some believed this lack of growth outside Britain was due to the ‘ Malthusian trap ’ theory ; Thomas Malthus argued before the start of the Industrial Revolution that it was the tendency of a population to expand beyond the limits of resource sustainability, at which point a crisis ( such as famine, war, or epidemic ) would reduce the population to a sustainable size.

Contrary to Malthus ' predictions and in line with his thoughts on moral restraint, natural population growth in most developed countries has diminished to close to zero, without being held in check by famine or lack of resources, as people in developed nations have shown a tendency to have fewer children.

Even though the theories of Thomas Malthus would predict that famines reduce the size of the population commensurate with available food resources, in fact even the most severe famines have rarely dented population growth for more than a few years.

In addition, critics state that unlike Malthus, Ehrlich did not see any means of avoiding the disaster entirely ( although some mitigation was possible ), and proposed solutions that were much more radical than those discussed by Malthus, such as starving whole countries that refused to implement population control measures.

* 1798 — Thomas Malthus discussed human population growth and food production in An Essay on the Principle of Population.

Malthus on population, James Hutton and Lyell on geology, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, and above all, the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which put evolution into everyday discussion amongst literate folk.

Thomas Malthus believed a system of supporting the poor would lead to increased population growth rates because the Poor Laws encouraged early marriage.

Boserup argues, contra Malthus, that rather than population always overwhelming resources, that humans will invent a new agricultural technique or adopt an existing innovation that will boost yields and that is adapted to the new environmental conditions created by the degradation which has occurred already, even though they will pay for the increases in higher labor costs.

This follows from Malthus ' demographic theory, according to which population increases when wages are above the " subsistence wage " and falls when wages are below subsistence.

At the end of the 18th century, Thomas Malthus concluded that, if unchecked, populations would be subject to exponential growth.

This has caused Thomas Malthus and many others to postulate that this growth would continue until checked by widespread hunger and famine ( see Malthusian growth model ).

Jeremy Bentham argued for a disciplinary, punitive approach to social problems, whilst the writings of Thomas Malthus focused attention on overpopulation, and the growth of illegitimacy.

* David N. Weil, American economist known for his economics growth textbook and his reinterpretation of Malthus.

It is often stated that Carlyle gave economics the nickname " the dismal science " as a response to the late 18th century writings of The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who grimly predicted that starvation would result as projected population growth exceeded the rate of increase in the food supply.

Malthus ' claim, in " An Essay on the Principle of Population ", that population growth was the primary cause of subsistence level wages for laborers provoked Marx to develop an alternative theory of wage determination.

Whereas Malthus presented an ahistorical theory of population growth, Marx offered a theory of how a relative surplus population in capitalism tended to push wages to subsistence levels.

Starting with Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century, various commentators have projected some short-term population growth trend for years into the future, resulting in the prediction that there would be disastrous overpopulation within a generation or two.

Work in this area dates back to the 19th century, and even as far as 1798 when Thomas Malthus formulated the first principle of population dynamics, which later became known as the Malthusian growth model.

Doubts about the long run prospects for continuous growth in the industrial age are commonly described as beginning around the publishing of An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 by Thomas Robert Malthus.

As pointed out by Thomas Robert Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Albert Bartlett, and others, exponential growth in human population has the capacity to overwhelm any finite supply of resources, even the entire known universe, in a remarkably short time.

Jones is remarkable for his freedom from exaggeration and one-sided statement ; thus, whilst holding Malthus in esteem, he declines to accept the proposition that an increase of the means of subsistence is necessarily followed by an increase of population ; and he maintains that with the growth of population, in all well-governed and prosperous states, the command over food, instead of diminishing, increases.

Malthus was anxious that population growth would outstrip the capacity of the economy to sustain all the new people.

Malthus — a devout Christian — argued that revelation would " damp the soaring wings of intellect ", and thus never let " the difficulties and doubts of parts of the scripture " interfere with his work.

The political economist Thomas Malthus believed this to be a fair price, and that it would be dangerous for Britain to rely on imported corn because lower prices would reduce labourers ' wages, and manufacturers would lose out due to the decrease of purchasing power of landlords and farmers.

Malthus himself essentially claimed that British society would collapse under the weight of overpopulation by 1850, while during the 1960s the book The Population Bomb made similar dire predictions for the US by the 1980s.

B's ( i. e. Quinn's ) thinking here should not be confused with the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who made the prediction that population would outrun food supply.

That was manifestly not Marx's view ; already in his Grundrisse manuscript he had referred to a balance sheet cited by Malthus ; in Das Kapital he attempted to calculate the rate of surplus value according to data provided by Frederick Engels ; and towards the end of his life, as Leontief noted, he wrote that he wanted to study the " ups and downs " of economic activity mathematically ( but Samuel Moore convinced him that the data to do it did not exist yet ).