English economist who believed that progress towards a better society was impossible, because human population would always increase faster than the methods of supporting them could be developed. He published his views anonymously in Essay on Population (1798). His work inspired both Charles Darwin and Wallace.
The English political economist and demographer Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (13 February 1766 – 23 December 1834) analyzed population growth and noted the potential for populations to increase rapidly, often faster than the food supply available to them. Commentators may refer to such a runaway scenario, as outlined in Malthus’s treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population, as a “Malthusian catastrophe”.
Modern commentators generally refer to him as Thomas Malthus, but during his lifetime he went by his middle name, Robert.
Biography
Thomas Robert Malthus, the second son of eight children (six of them girls) born to Daniel and Henrietta Malthus near Guildford, Surrey, came into a prosperous family, with his father a personal friend of the philosopher David Hume and an acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The young Malthus received his education at home in Bramcote, Nottinghamshire and at the Dissenting Academy, Warrington until his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1784. There he studied many subjects and took prizes in English declamation, Latin and Greek, but he majored in mathematics. He earned a masters degree in 1791 and won election as a fellow of Jesus College two years later. In 1797, he took orders and became an Anglican country parson at Albury Church, near Guildford in Surrey.
Malthus married his cousin, Harriet, on April 12, 1804, and had three children: Henry, Emily and Lucy. In 1805 he became Britain’s first professor in political economy at the East India Company College (now known as Haileybury) in Hertfordshire. His students affectionately referred to him as “Pop” or “Population” Malthus. In 1818 Malthus became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
