- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks; New edition edition (12 Aug 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0192837478
- ISBN-13: 978-0192837479
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 12.7 x 1.3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,165,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
An Essay on the Principle of Population
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Product Description
Product Description
Malthus's Essay looks at the perennial tendency of humans to outstrip their resources: reproduction always exceeds food production. Today Malthus remains a byword for concern about man's demographic and ecological prospects.
About the Author
He is also the author of many articles on Malthus, the Poor Law, and the Welfare State. He is currently researching a book on Malthus and poverty.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
THE following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr Godwin's Essay,on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
THE following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr Godwin's Essay,on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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7 reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
The most important essay.
12 July 2000
Format:Paperback
This small and often overlooked essay by Thomas Malthus is probably one of the most important essays ever written.
Way back in 1798 Malthus wrote this essay to expose how human population is still being kept in check by mother nature. Famine, plague and war pop up whenever a population gets too high.
The essay has been overlooked mostly because of the stance Malthus takes in this book towards the poor. He suggests that when you give money to people who don't work, you help them have children. This increases the population without increasing production of food. Also, by increasing the standard of living of these people, you then qualify more people to receive without working, exacerbating the situation. Malthus clearly supports workhouses to welfare in this essay.
This essay had influenced two notable people. First is Charles Dickens. In 'A Christmas Carol' you read how Scrooge said, "that if the poor would not go into workhouses, they might as well die and decrease the surplus population". This was aimed straight at Malthus. The second person he influenced with this essay is Darwin. While reading Malthus, Darwin realized that population pressure was that "natural selector" that made evolution possible.
If you want to read a piece of history, read this essay. If you then want to get a more modern and thorough take on the subject read Marvin Harris's "Cannibals and Kings".
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Was Malthus Right?
21 May 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population has been the subject of much debate. 19th Century economists accepted The Population Principle as fact. 20th century economists have arrived at such a strong consensus against the Population Principle, that the subject is considered as closed. The main reason for this consensus is failure to realize Malthus' dire predictions. Declines in birth rates among prosperous nations indicate that Malthus was wrong.
An Essay on the Principle of Population is important today for several reasons. First, it is an important part of history. Second, population issues still loom large. Also, historian Ross Emmett has reinterpreted Malthus in a way that fits better with world experience. My own reading of An Essay on the Principle of Population fits with Emmett's reinterpretation of Malthus.
Malthus reasoned through one of the biggest issues. This is a classic of political economy, worthy of careful consideration. Don't listed to those who say Malthus has been proven wrong. Read this book and judge its merits yourself.
An Essay on the Principle of Population is important today for several reasons. First, it is an important part of history. Second, population issues still loom large. Also, historian Ross Emmett has reinterpreted Malthus in a way that fits better with world experience. My own reading of An Essay on the Principle of Population fits with Emmett's reinterpretation of Malthus.
Malthus reasoned through one of the biggest issues. This is a classic of political economy, worthy of careful consideration. Don't listed to those who say Malthus has been proven wrong. Read this book and judge its merits yourself.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Scary.
29 Sep 2005
Format:Paperback
That Thomas Robert Malthus was a cleric might startle some readers, who could look on his pessimism as something that is more typical of a man of hard, God-less science. Malthus was clearly, once one examines deep within the heart of his treatise on overpopulation, a theist, and a hard-hearted "God Disposes" sort of one at that. Underneath everything, we can sense Malthus' view being, "ultimately what does this brief, cluttered, hopeless world matter next to eternal life in Heaven?" Malthus' statements about the human race breeding past its ability to feed itself, have merit, but he failed to take into account the capacity of science to be humanity's deliverer. Revolutions in agriculture, medicine, social health, as well as many other fields, not excluding simple advances in birth control, have to an extent nullified the ABSOLUTE nature of Thomas Malthus' ideas, and instead, alas, made them true primarily in the 21st century for the Third World alone. Malthus was a man both in and ahead of his time--in it because he had but to open his eyes and see starvation and orphaned children, poverty and overcrowding in the slums, and ahead of his time in that he looked forward and forecast a dire warning to the world of a time when the horrors of this state might over-sweep civilization and strangle it to death with numbers alone. Malthus was a cruel man on one hand, advocating the selective starvation of a segment of society. He totally opposed any form of welfare, charity or aid to those who could not contribute to their own upkeep. Those types, he argued, decayed human society and lead it closer to the nightmare state he detailed in his work. He cited wars, plagues, famines, as servants of humanity, in that they thinned the ranks and tried to keep us from reproducing ourselves into extinction. Malthus' fearful prognostications might yet see its consummation one day and some may say that in various parts of the world we are already seeing it, but I take the stance that if our species has one great gift, it is its intellect, and that intellect might-if we are motivated by conditions made intolerable--yet serve to deliver us from even our self-created scenarios of mad destruction.
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