17 February is the birthday of economist Thomas Robert Malthus (Surrey, England 1766).
In 1798, he published An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued that the human population of the earth was growing at a faster rate than the food supply, and that war, disease, and famine were necessary in order to prevent overpopulation.
Malthus is probably the most misunderstood and misrepresented economist of all time. The adjective “Malthusian” is used today to describe a pessimistic prediction of the demise of a humanity doomed to starvation via overpopulation.
When his hypothesis was first stated in his best-seller, the uproar it caused among non-economists overshadowed the instant respect it inspired among his fellow economists. So irrefutable and simple was his illustrative side-by-side comparison of an arithmetic and a geometric series—food increases more slowly than population—that it was often taken out of context and highlighted as his main observation.
Malthus’s actual conclusion: because humans have not all starved, economic choices must be at work, and it is the job of an economist to study those choices.
One of the things he recommended to help keep the population down was deferring marriage until middle age. Critics accused him of being cold-hearted and inhuman — but he actually had a passionate love affair as a young man, and when he was 38 he married a 28-year-old woman.
He wrote in his diary: “Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love […] that does not look back to the period, as the sunny spot of his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask […] which he would most wish to live over again.”
see also
Morgan Rose, “In Defense of Malthus,” at Econlib. September 16, 2002.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Teachers/defendmalthus.html
Morgan Rose, “What Malthus Missed, and Attacks on Individualists,” at Econlib, October 28, 2002.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Teachers/critiquemalthus.html