Overpopulation and the Impact on the Environment

 
 

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1.3. THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS AND HIS ESSAY ON POPULATION
One of the physiocrats was Thomas Robert Malthus, who was the first one to conduct the 
study on population and form a theory that will later in the years cause his followers to develop the 
policy of birth control. Malthus was born in 1766 to a wealthy family from a rural area of England, 
where he was homeschooled. In 1784 he began education at Cambridge University, and pursued 
both B.A. and M.A. degrees. He married at the age of 38 and had three children (Davis 103). For a 
brief time of his life, he served as a curate in the Church of England, while the rest he spent 
working at the college of the East India Company at Haileybury as a professor of political economy 
(Davis 103). 
In 1789, Malthus published his 
Essay on the Principle of Population
, where he argued that 
populations are likely to outgrow their food supplies. ''People, he argued, would reproduce until 
they starved. (...) the number of people would progress geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16, 32), but the food 
supply would only increase arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10)'' (Davis 104). The first critique was 
Charles Darwin, who was the only one to give a positive feedback. Darwin's theory on the survival 
of the fittest coincided with Malthus's explanation of the relationship between population growth 
and food supply. Animals and plants, Darwin argued, ''are kept in check not by limited births, but 
by food supply and predation. Each individual competes with others of the same and different 
species, which results in the survival of the fittest'' (Davis 105). 
But the ''fittest'' seemed to be the members of the upper-class, mostly rich landlords 
spending time hunting and making sure the law keeps their game safe from the peasants. Malthus 
contended that landlords should spend their money on servants because it would give them personal 
freedom. The lower class had no benefits, such as medical care, schooling and working in places 
other than the factories. Malthus was a member of the political party that advocated changes for the 

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lower-class, with an intention of decreasing the population, because the uneducated had too many 
babies.
Nevertheless, for some theorists, Malthus's view on population provided no reliable 
empirical basis. In 1844, Friedrich Engels questioned Malthus' evidence by stating, ''where has it 
been proved that the productivity of the land increases in arithmetical progression?'' (Davis 105) 
For Engels, cultivating land was the source of salvation for the occurring population growth, as 
only a third of a disposable land on the planet was cultivated. Some parts of land, like Mississippi 
Valley, were large enough '' to feed the entire population of Europe'' (Davis 105). Similar opinion 
had Karl Marx, the main opponent of Malthus, who underestimated the importance of Malthus’ 
work by addressing it as ''nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary'' (Davis 105). 
Malthus’ theory contradicted that of Marx, who advocated for communism. Under capitalism, 
poverty exists because capitalists don’t want to give the surplus product of labor back to masses 
that established work (Davis 105). ''But if Malthus were right, the workers would breed until they 
ate up the surplus, and none would be left'' (Davis 105). Today, it seems he was right.