Lecture 3- malthus Flashcards
Optimisitc and utopian views:
William Godwin and Marquis de Condorcet both believed that the perfect society could be created
Godwin (1793): enquiry concerning political justice, and its influence on general virtue and happiness
- a political philosopher with an anarchist agenda, advocating a society without government
inspired by the industrial revolution
- Shared Condorcet’s belief in the victory of human reason under the conditions of liberty. But Godwin lacked Condorcet’s vision of continuing technological progress.
- Instead, Godwin saw the solution to the economic problem in the abolition of unnecessary consumption in a classless society of the future, free from the snobbism of conspicuous consumption and with a better distribution and more rational utilization of the already existing potentialities for production, of which
Godwin had exceedingly optimistic ideas
The success of Godwin’s book was re- sounding but short-lived, for the more pessimistic outlook, already heralded in some French writings, came to the fore with Malthus’s epoch-making attack on both Condorcet and Godwin, An Essay on Population, published in 1798
Optimisitc and utopian views:
William Godwin and Marquis de Condorcet both believed that the perfect society could be created
Condorcet (1784) Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind
- argued for a technical fix, based on human ingenuity.
- Condorcet was a child of the eighteenth century, continuing the tradition of the French philosophers of enlightenment with their unflinching trust in man's improvement through knowledge and education - A second point to note is that the acknowledgment that growth cannot possibly continue indefinitely (a rather obvious point for the mathematician Condorcet) was linked in his mind with the new and bold idea that the number of births might be consciously limited so that the size of population, or its rate of growth, could be held down to the desired level. It was well into the nineteenth century before other voices were heard in support of a conscious regulation of the growth of population. Condorcet's book was published in 1794-95, shortly after the author's tragic death. - One year earlier, William Godwin had published his chef d'oeuvre, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
How did Malthus (essay on the principle of population) attack Godwin and condorcet?
- The fire was opened by Godwin and Condorcet. Their books appeared independently of each other around the year 1794. Malthus’s first and most important contribution to the theory of population came in 1798, and it was formed as a direct protest against the two bright pictures of future progress sketched by Godwin and Condorcet.
Malthus’s view was as pessimistic as those of Godwin and Condorcet were optimistic
- First, the assertion about the constancy of the “passion between the sexes” (a polemical allusion to Godwin) is significant only as long as it is assumed, with Malthus, that birth control in marriage must be considered a vice.
- Secondly, the statement that population and food production increase in geometrical and arithmetical ratio, respectively, is arbitrary and unsupported by historical evidence.
Who was Malthus?
• Malthus (1766–1834) was a mathematician and a Church of England clergyman • Considered as one of the “Founding Fathers” of the classical economics of self‐ regulating mechanisms (alongside Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill
Who was John stuart mill?
Mill, though heavily influenced by the Malthusian tradition, had something new to say in two areas that were to occupy a central place in sub- sequent debate on population issues.
- First, Mill had a program for population policy, namely, birth control by means of those preventive techniques that had been envisioned by Condorcet half a century earlier and condemned by Malthus as unnatural and vicious. On this point, Mill was a pioneer. - The second difference between Mill and his immediate predecessors was related to the prospect of a stationary future society. While other classical economists had viewed this with foreboding, Mills attitude was more detached. 'what is wrong with a stationary economy'? - n around 1850 as nearly acceptable, as is clearly implied by his text. Of course, Mill's standpoint was subject to the preconditions of a radical redistribution of income and a socialist organization of production. But at that time economic statistics were in their infancy, and Stuart Mill may have vastly over- estimated the improvement in the material conditions of the workers that could be achieved solely by a change in income distribution, without any growth in total output per capita. At any rate, even as late as 1850-60, Mill had no conception of technological progress as a built-in tendency in the economic system
Who was saint simon.
French Socialist- Saint Simon
- Industrialism and modern science as the instruments of progress for human society - There is a direct line from Saint-Simon to Karl Marx. Even as an adolescent, at school and in his home, Marx had some contact with a local Rhineland group of Saint-Simonist propagandists, and it is reasonable to assume that this made a lasting impression on him. In any case, one important difference between the Marxist model of development and the classical model was that Marx saw technological innovation as a continuing, though unsteady, process built into the capitalist system of competition. - It is clear without further explanation that this Marxist view of the future of human society is incompatible with Malthus's doctrine, the essential message of which is that poverty is a "natural" and irremovable condition of human life. In his own time, Marx had every reason to reject the Malthusian attempt to explain poverty and unemployment as results of overpopulation. But his highly emotional polemic against Malthus contains passages that are misleading if mechanically repeated today, when population in large parts of the world is growing at annual rates of 2.5-3 percent, far more rapidly than Marx could have envisaged in discussing problems of overpopulation and population policy
what did malthus argue?
Argued that population increases geometrically
and food supply only arithmetically (linearly)
• Then eventually the number of people will
become too great for the available resources
• This is true no matter how small the initial
population, or how many the initial resources
Hence, the perfect society was
impossible to create
• Pressure of population on
resources would inevitably
produce stresses and strains
leading to:
war, famine, disease,
misery and vice
Summarise the Malthusian model?
Two facts taken to be self‐evident (axioms):
1. Constant ‘passion between the sexes’
2. People need to eat in order to live
• Because of Axiom 1, population would
increase geometrically
• This means a constant ratio between the
sizes of successive generations
• This is a mathematical regularity which
we can demonstrate
What factors determine population?
- Fertility: average number of births per woman
- Proportions of births which are daughters
- Mortality of females up to the ages 50
Describe scenario A
- Consider a remote island with 100 males
and 100 females
o Suppose each male is partner to one female
o Suppose each female has 4 children: 2 boys
and 2 girls
o The average number of children per woman is
known by demographers as Total Fertility Rate
o Ignore mortality
o Assume zero migration
How does the population grow in scenarion A?
see phone
How does the population grow in scenario B?
see phone
Describe scenario E?
Introduce mortality
• Suppose half of those born die before reaching
childbearing age
• This is very high mortality, but not beyond
human experience in the past
Describe scenarion F?
Dramatic impact of mortality – in Scenario E
population even declines rather than grows
• Even if only 1 in 5 of those born die before
childbearing age (a situation similar to 19th
century England) we have:
What is the result if all the scenarios are compared?
All the scenarios are compatible with geometric growth (or decline- which is just negative growth).
