Question

Examine the role of the population doctrine in classical economic theory.

Answer 1

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), a classical economist, in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) gave the first systematic theory of population and its effects on economic development. He offered the most chilling forecast of his time and also collected empirical evidence to support his thesis. Malthus argued that an ever increasing population would continually strain society's ability to provide for itself. He predicted that mankind would forever live in poverty.

The basic argument of his theory was that the food production grows in arithmetic progression while the humans produce themselves exponentially. So, after a point of time, human population would surpass the total food production and then humans would have no resources to survive on. Because of these gloomy predictions of population on economy, the economics was also called by many as "sad science". In Malthus's theory high population will keep an average person on bare minimum and as the the growth of population increased, these minimum resources will also come to an end due to higher population burden.

So Malthus advocated that population should be kept low to the level that resources can support. He emphasized on two types of population checks:

• Preventive checks: These include 'moral restrains' exercised through postponement in age of marriage, encouraging small families etc.
• Positive checks: These were natural check on population and included death due to wars, famine, diseases etc. These kept the balance in population growth.

Malthus rejected any charity or government participation to alleviate poverty because these merely allowed poor people to have more children, placing even more burden on society's already limited resources.

Malthus's theory was proved to be wrong as his predictions did not come true. His theory was criticised on the basis that it failed to factor in the role of technology (mechanised farm equipments, new crop varities), fall in fertility rates all over the world mainly due to better economic life. Hence food production growth was exceeding population growth, opposite to Malthus's predictions.

Other than Malthus's theory, other neo-classical growth model (like Solow's model) also observe that as population growth rate increases, capital and output need to grow at the same rate so that output per worker (and hence living standard) remains constant. If the capital and output do not grow at the same rate, high population growth can have detrimental effect on economic growth.