Thomas Robert Malthus was the second son of eight children, the other six being girls, born according to several sites anywhere from February 13/14 or February 17 in the Year of Our Lord 1766 at the Rookery, near Dorking, Surrey, England to Utopian Socialist parents. His death too is disputed and is anywhere from Wikipedia’s December 23 or Britannica’s December 29, 1834 at St. Catherine, near Bath, Somerset. This article will concentrate on the nativity.
Thomas’s father Daniel was active in politics and corresponded with such luminaries as Voltaire, David Hume and Jean Jacques Rousseau who actually stayed with the family during his visit to the island-nation and played some part in son Thomas’s education. At 18, Thomas went to Cambridge where it was remarked that he had a strong stutter, but nonetheless did well in his studies.
In 1798, Malthus published anonymously a lengthy pamphlet criticizing the Utopians that life could and would definitely improve for humans on earth. The hastily written text, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, was later acknowledged by himself. This 50,000 essay, linked to from above, is freely available from Archive.org had as its basic premise that “population increases exponentially while food production increases at a constant rate.”
Within the essay, Malthus also described all the checks, such as infanticide, abortion, wars, plagues, and death from disease or starvation, part of “misery and vice,” that flowed from an unchecked population (Neptune in the Fifth) that according to his calculations would always outstrip resources (Saturn in the second)
The Malthus Chart
After a lot of study we have determined that Dr. Malthus was born on February 17, 1766 at 8:52 in Dorking, part of the Mole Valley district, an administrative and historic county of Surrey, in southeastern England, and southwest of London.This gives him the ascendant of 24 Aries with Uranus partile to it. This duo is vigintile Venus, an aspect of higher spiritual opportunity, in the twelfth house. That make sense as Malthus entered Jesus College, Cambridge, originally, where he was elected to a fellowship at the age of 27. He took religious orders at the age of 31 and held a curacy for a short period. Where the interest in economics turned up, we could not find, but that and not his religious work, is what he best known.
Elementally he has no water signs, making him rather unemotional, dry and philosophically cold. This man was no bleeding heart, but instead relied firmly on mathematics and statistics for his philosophy and economic theory. It has always made him a lightning rod in history.
This layout makes him a locomotive temperament type with a Grand Trine in earth: from Saturn in the second, to Neptune in the fifth ending at Pluto in the ninth. This is depicted in the chart above in green. The yellow circle the left of the green triangle shows Venus and Uranus’s conjunction to his ascendant.
Malthus’s Jupiter in Leo in the fifth, called by Marc Jones the circumstance of output, gets a rather ironic comment here. While it supports that he and his wife Harriet had a large family of five, and also his diverse interests, it the matter of Neptune there, but unaspected, that shows his awareness of what familial responsibilities entailed and probably why he discouraged large families for the poor — too great a monetary and material substance (Virgo) outlay of scarce resources — and Virgo is always cheap with whatever activity it ecompasses.
Neptune is also part of the trine, outlined above, but as part of the momentum of personal circumstances forced him to stay on the go and keep creating business opportunities. Obviously, Malthus felt that what he could ably do, not all men would or could do, hence his admonition against “unchecked” births. 1
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
Philosophically, Malthus in the Adam Smith camp of economic history with his lifelong friend with David Ricardo being just an academic footnote. Economist Peter Schumpeter remarks that his work was on statistical uneven ground because he married two independent variables and implying that Malthus used the wrong statistical test.
Alas the anova, probably the best suited for the problem, was not invented until 1921 by Ronald Fisher when Fisher also defined the concept of degrees of freedom that Malthus lists but not truly define in his “checks” against population growth theory.
But then Malthus’s locomotive is open on the Eastern or experiential side, suggesting that there was a wide gap in his knowledge. Whether or not he was wrong, and there are certainly flaws in the theory, largely because he did not live long enough, or anticipate, to see the Industrial Revolution.
Still, his theory of population versus resource resonates with many, at least on the personal level, even if it has failed on the macroeconomic. Indeed many studies have shown that throughout history family size falls in bad economic times and rises in good 2 and why economic booms lead to a general increase while dictatorial regimes (socialism and communism) both have smaller families and more instability within them. Those facts have helped the U. S. economy for the past 100 years. It is only with the onslaught of greater authoritarian control and taxes, both countered by intra-migration, that these numbers have fallen3.
Unintended Consequences
The greatest success that Thomas Malthus has gotten is with Charles Darwin and his “Origin of Species” who remarked that in animal populations there are indeed two insatiable appetites, one for sex and the other for food. Whether there is a corollary to the growing expanse of Americans waist sizes has never been tested.
Darwin in his magnum opus, born February 12, 1809, rejected the earlier ideas of transmutation but instead agreed with Malthus that evolutionary population is controlled by “vice and misery” and that once the surplus food is exhausted, the weakest will die off; hence the power grab for limited natural resources in the human arena of non-edible resources such as peace, energy and water, Malthus’s theories may still ring true.
Footnotes.
- Arguments against Malthus come from the Mises Institute in Auburn Alabama via Murray Rothbard’s book, Classical Economics volume II, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing c. 1995 by Murray Rothbard.
- Malthus and the Assault on Population by Murray N. Rothbard, The Mises Institute. Available online here.
- The Freeman, Ideas on Liberty essay The Birth Dearth by John Chamberlain, issue January 1988, volume 38 #1.
- Average family size at the time Malthus was born was two parents with seven children, thus making Malthus’s own 2+5 not as egregious as many would suggest.
- Fischer, David Hackett, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, Oxford University Press, c. 1996. Dr. Fischer extensively maps the correlation between economic prosperity and family size from the 1400s forward.
- According to the US Census bureau, Colonial America was roughly on par with England, where almost all immigrants hailed, on the average family size of 7 children with 2 parents.
- By the turn of the twentieth century America, that number continued to hold steady 7+2 but before the onset of WWII the size had shrunk in half with the US median family size was two parents and 4 children
- By 1960 that median had fallen in half again where the median size was 2+2 where it stayed until 1992 when it got fractional. It has continued to fall, albeit insignificant but stilli in a downward trend, to where it is now, with a little under 2 children. (From the US Census Dept at http://www.census.gov).
We constantly vet our posts for accuracy & typos. This one was revised on February 18 2019.
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