Question

5. Malthus was famous for his population theory. Explain the logics and politics of the two theories, and provide your own theoretical and empirical critique.

Answer 1

The view of the Malthusian people had a profound and immediate effect on British social policy. It was believed that fertility itself added to the nation's wealth; Evil laws perhaps encouraged large families with their mustaches. If “they never existed,” writes Malthus, “even if there were just a few more miserable conditions, the happiness of the common people would be even greater.” These laws limit the movement of workers, he said, and encourage inequality and should be abolished. The main culprit would be to consider establishing workplaces - not "comfortable shelters" but places where "money has to be hard" and "great stress… to get relief."

Malthus held that a continuous increase in per capita income would not be possible.
His idea was that, even if technology could improve and increase labor productivity, people would still have more children as soon as they got better. This population growth will continue until living standards fall below the standard of living, halting population growth. Malthus' violent circle was widely accepted as inevitable.
There is evidence that the colonial rulers of Victoria thought that starvation was a natural response to overgrowth. Mike Davis says their attitudes led to the inevitable and unprecedented genocide, which he called 'cultural genocide'.

Malthus did not give a optimistic view of economic progress - at least in terms of ordinary farmers or workers. Even if people succeed in developing technologies, in time most will earn enough money for their jobs or their farms to survive, never to return.

But in the time of Malthus' life there was something big happening around him, changes that would allow Britain to quickly escape the vicious circle of human growth and financial stagnation he described. The change that came from Britain from the Malthusian trap, and which would do the same in many countries in the next hundred years, became known as the Industrial Revolution. which allows the same product to be produced with less work.

The important social and scientific ideas associated with Malthus are:

- the prevention of human oppression in human societies,
Shortage as a key principle of economic analysis,
- "Automatic order" and the futility of political change,
-Bad rules and "social dependence,"
- the idea of ​​inactivity, as well
-the struggle for existence.

*POPULATION: "STATISTICS" "AND TEST"

Malthus admitted that the "human goal" was not new. That human beings reproduce like “rats in a cage” (Cantillon [1755] 2001, p. 37) when they are not prevented by a lack of resources is easily taken for granted by all 18th-century social scientists. Malthus' new alliance, which was occasionally introduced by his predecessors and explicitly known as James Anderson in 1777, was an analysis of the effects of globalization. When natural resources are limited, large numbers of people make human stress inevitable. Sensible people can respond and often respond with a variety of contraceptive checks: methods of contraception from "moral restraint" (delayed marriage without "abnormal self-satisfaction," which is a preferred solution for Malthus) in contraception, as recommended by "neo-Malthusians" as young John Stuart Mill3 (1806-18 ), but Malthus himself dismissed it as a non-Christian, and a rebellion against moral law. If any or all of these failures, the real income of others should be greatly reduced in order for the good check to work: Population will suffer from hunger, malnutrition and disease, high infant mortality, and reduced adult life expectancy.

* "REAL COMMANDMENT" AND A PERIOD OF POLITICAL CHANGE

Malthus' view of human societies as powerful parallel systems is in line with the ideology of FA Hayek's "automatic order" by Scottish Enlightenment researchers, especially David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith, each of whom Malthus had learned very well to care for. Things get this way they are not because everyone intended and planned the current situation; rather, the present situation is the unintended consequence of countless independent, self-centered decisions in the past. It is stable in the sense that those who are now in a position to change love the things they are, and have strong incentives to restore balance when severely disturbed.

This concept is scientifically important, because Burke's and Godwin's arguments are equally flawed. By posting the instability of the current situation they leave an unexplained and unclear how society becomes what it is. Malthus' stable stability model is not only central to all of the following economic analyzes: It is an integral part of all modern attempts to define social events as a result of rational choices about people.

*POOR RULES AND "HEALTHY FAITHFULNESS"

Malthus criticized the then Elizabethan Poor Laws, which were active in England, for the first time, because they often “increased the population without adding food to its support” (1803, p. 358); and second, because any transfer of the poor “reduces the share that would otherwise be for members who are more active, and more qualified” of the working class (1803, p. 358). “The most deserving” are those who “have the spirit of independence,” and “bad laws have been firmly established to eradicate this spirit” by reducing costs for “careless, insecure,” and weakening the motive for postponing marriage and childbearing (1803, p. 359). Because "impoverished poverty should be treated as a disgrace," evil laws, by removing that stigma, "create the poor to provide for them" (1803, pp. 359, 358). What is now called “social dependence” was clearly recognized by the Malthus not as a loose morality among lower orders but as their rational response to a set of corrupt incentives.

* GENERAL EMPLOYMENT VISION

Like his eighteenth-century predecessors, Malthus saw economic activity driven by "active demand." His Principles of Political Economy (1820), written in part to criticize Ricardo's view of value, tried in chapter 7 to define post-1815 stress as a "general glut" in the stock market. The increase in capital cuts diverts spending from “non-productive” to “productive” workers, thus increasing the supply of goods while reducing demand. Therefore, unless landlords and other “wealthy” add to “unnecessary expenses” (personal services, luxury, etc.) Similarly, overpaying will lower prices and profits, “temporarily suspend production,” and outsourcing employees

Ricardo, James Mill (1773-1886), Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), and many others may fear the possibility of "universal gluts" on the grounds that the products produced should be counted as cash for those who own them, so "Selling" to create the desired results.

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), however, was a lifelong fanatic of Malthus, calling him “Cambridge's first economist,” and included Piero Sraffa (1898–1983) in his recovery and publication of Ricardo-Malthus. While in the early 1930s Keynes began to formulate a very different view of the demand for integration needed for employment and employment was inspired, if not directly influenced, by Malthus' conscientious but flawed efforts to do justice to the whole economic reality; and he avoided "the complete abolition of Malthus' system and the complete Ricardo's rule ... a catastrophe in the economic system"

* “THE BODY OF LIFE”

In October 1838, shortly after returning from a trip to the Beagle, Charles Darwin “studied the entertainment of the Malthus, and was well prepared to celebrate the struggle for existence ... it struck me that under these circumstances good differences could be avoided and undesirable ones to be destroyed [mentioned in Chapter 3 of Essay, the phrase “fight for life”). It was here that I finally got the idea of ​​how I was going to work ".

Modern biology is “Malthusian” in two different ways by analysis. In a short period of time in which all genes could be taken into account, natural science - studying the general equality of species that exists in a defined area - focuses on the parallel analysis of Malthus' human equality to define what JS Mill calls “the natural order of nature. ”In the course of genetic mutations and evolution, evolutionary theory focuses on Scotland's enlightenment of the" history of speculation "in the midst of Malthus' anti-Godwin disease.

Shortages in human affairs are by no means acceptable. From the very beginning, Malthus 'work has provoked intense controversy, from technical opposition and sometimes to the speculation of his opposition to other angry economists who have angered Romantics, Marxists, Christian Socialists and social activists, some of whom seem to have read Malthus' writings.