Keynes said that economics had backed the wrong horse: âIf only Malthus, instead of Ricardo, had been the parent stem from which nineteenth-century economics proceeded, what a much wiser and richer place the world would be to-dayâ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 100â101). Malthus was practical and pragmatic. Ricardo was abstract and arid. Malthus had his ear to the ground. Ricardo had his head in the clouds. It should have been Malthus. Instead, it was Ricardoâs âmore fascinating intellectual construction which was victoriousâ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 87). Path dependence became dependent on the wrong path. The choices made in the interregnum following the death of Adam Smith âconstrained the subject to a full hundred years in an artificial grooveâ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 87). History had backed the wrong horse. Historyâs mistake had been âa disaster to the progress of economicsâ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 98).
It had been Ricardo. It should have been Malthus. Malthus was, Keynes proclaimed, âthe first of the Cambridge economistsâ (Keynes 1933 [1972]: 101). Pure theory should be applied to present-day problems. Value is determined subjectively by supply and demand. Saving diverges from investment in the absence of counter-cyclical public policy. Unstable velocity drives a coach and horses through the quantity theory of money. Free trade is only effective where it is multilateral and fair. Spendthrift welfare leads to indolence and procreation. Tight-fisted welfare deprives the destitute of essential food and shelter. It is all in Malthus.
Above all else, there is the sense of purpose. Malthus was a public-spirited utilitarian who declared that he looked to economics âto improve the condition and increase the happiness of the lower classes of societyâ (SE II 251). As we produce commodities, so we produce institutions. It is important to get the economic basis right. James Bonar thinks that Malthusâs economics was all a matter of doing good: âTo Malthus the discovery of truth was less important than the improvement of society. When an economical truth could not be made the means of improvement, he seems to have lost interest in itâ (Bonar 1885 [1924]: 213).
Malthus, never actually a Cambridge don, was the âfirst of the Cambridge economistsâ. Later Cambridge economists such as Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes and James Meade would be in agreement that their science was more than a game for graduates. It is not just in Cambridge but across the world that Malthusâs call for teleology and progress will inevitably exercise a strong appeal to the earnest and the socially minded. That sense of commitment and mission will in turn have a feedback effect on the kind of economics that they study and teach. Malthus said: âThe science of political economy bears a nearer resemblance to the science of morals and politics than to that of mathematicsâ (PR 2, 518). Malthusâs Principles and Ricardoâs Principles are not the same.
1.1 From Theology to Political Economy
Thomas Robert Malthus was born on 13 February 1766 and died on 29 December 1834. He is buried in Bath Abbey. He was the sixth child (of eight) and second son of Daniel Malthus, a country gentleman with a small estate near Albury, Surrey, and a strong interest in philosophy, botany and current affairs. He was a believer with William Godwin in human perfectibility and a friend of Hume and Rousseau. He corresponded with Voltaire. Daniel Malthus died in 1800, two years after the publication of his sonâs first Essay on Population.
T. R. Malthus was educated privately (occasionally in the spirit of Rousseauâs Emile) and then at the nonconformist Dissenting Academy in Warrington. He was influenced by the radical and anti-monarchist sympathies of his teacher, the Unitarian Minister Gilbert Wakefield, subsequently imprisoned for his seditious opinions in the white terror that followed 1789. Warrington, located in Lancashire, was in the thick of the British industrial revolution. It was a side of life that he would not have seen in rural Surrey.
From 1785 to 1788, Malthus was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge. His tutor was William Frend. Frend had been a pupil of William Paley, the Christian utilitarian, âecclesiastic Benthamiteâ (Petersen 1979: 52), Cambridge Fellow and Archdeacon of Carlisle. Malthusâs contemporary and lifelong friend was William Otter, later Bishop of Chichester. Otter recalls that Malthus was âactuated more by the love of excellence than by the desire of excellingâ (Otter 1836 [1964]: xxxiii). It was not just knowledge for knowledgeâs sake. Malthus told Otter that he was always âwishing to see the use and application of what I readâ (quoted in Otter 1836 [1964]: xxvii).
His principal subject was mathematics. It was an unexpected choice for an instinctual inductivist, soon complaining that the Cambridge course was âtoo much confined to speculationâ (quoted in Otter 1836 [1964]: xxvii). Malthus might have felt more at home with physics or history. According to his colleague William Empson, he âhad no notion of theory being any thing but science grounded upon and amenable to experienceâ (Empson 1837 [1963]: 240).
In a letter to his father, Malthus said that âI am rather remarked in college for talking of what actually exists in nature, or may be put to real practical useâ (quoted in Empson 1837 [1963]: 240). He was already under the influence of âthe grand and consistent theoryâ and âthe immortal mindâ (FE 126, 205) of Sir Isaac Newton, whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophyâthe Principiaâhe read in Latin in Cambridge. Only occasionally in his later work is there a glimpse of the pure mathematics he had learned.
Malthus obtained a first class honours degree in mathematics in 1788. He was the Ninth Wrangler, the ninth-ranked First, in his year. Later he was a non-resident fellow of Jesus College from 1793 to 1804. Also, in 1788, the final (sixth) volume of Edward Gibbonâs History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published. Malthus liked the historical approach and found Gibbonâs work âvery entertainingâ: âHis style is sometimes really sublimeâ (KG I 53). Three years earlier, in Malthusâs first year at Jesus, there had been Paleyâs Principles of Political and Moral Philosophy (1785), then called the Principles of Morality and Politics. Malthusâs Cambridge years were framed by these two great intellectual influences.
Despite his impaired speech due to a cleft palate, Malthus took holy orders in 1789 and became a curate at Okewood, in Surrey. It was, in his words, a âretired living in the countryâ (quoted in Bonar 1885 [1924]: 409), held under local patronage. Although the evidence is unclear, he may have resigned in 1805 when he joined the East India College. In 1824, he was given the title of perpetual curate at Okewood.
From 1803 until his death, he was (non-resident) rector at Walesby, Lincolnshire. A rector earned four times as much as a curate. As at Okewood, it was a rural attachment. Both in his writings and in his personal life, Malthus always had serious reservations about the towns. While he regarded the dark, satanic mills as an economic necessity, he was at one with romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Ruskin in deploring the ugliness and the crowding that were debasing the quality of life. A âretired livingâ was more to his taste. Life in the country (although he did not have access to a reference library) gave him the leisure to think and the tranquillity to study.
By the age of 30, the would-be curate was becoming convinced that the answers he sought were to found not just in the Bible but in Adam Smithâs Wealth of Nations . The new science of political economy had the key to the alleviation and elimination of poverty. Like Ricardo, Malthus learned his economics from the classics like the Physiocrats and Steuart, his contemporaries like Bailey, Say and Sismondi. At Okewood, he wrote a pamphlet in 1796 on The Crisis , a View of the Present Interesting State of Great Britain by a Friend to the Constitution. It was rejected for publication and is now only available in fragments cited by Empson and Otter. It would probably not have been well received in his Church.
The Crisis shows that he was already interested in population, about which he wrote: âI cannot agree with Archdeacon Paley, who says, that the quantity of happiness in any country is best measured by the number of people. Increasing population is the most certain possible sign of the happiness and prosperity of a state; but the actual population may be only a sign of the happiness that is pastâ (quoted in Empson 1837 [1963]: 244). Prosperous people have more children. Demand for labour does not keep pace with supply. Happiness past is misery present. That is the law of nature.
The Crisis proclaimed itself to be a defence of âtrue Whig principlesâ and the âmiddle classes of societyâ against the backward-looking Tories and the landed aristocracy: âIn the country gen...