Malthus

According to Macionis and Plummer, throughout much of human history, societies favoured
large families since human labour was the key to productivity. In addition to this, it was not until
the development of the rubber condoms 150 years ago that there was any hope of controlling
birth rates.

Birth-rates were always very high in preindustrial societies. In most of these societies, large
families were highly valued. Each new member was an economic asset in groups that had to hunt
or tend animals or wrest their living from the soil, and the high infant death rate encouraged
people to raise large numbers of children in the hope that some of them would survive into
adulthood.

MALTHUSIAN THEORY

In 1798, an English clergyman (and economist, Thomas Robert Malthus, published a book
entitled Essay on the Principles of Population, a work that aroused strong antagonism from his
contemporaries. Malthus lived in an age of great optimism, dominated by the idea of the
'perfectibility of man'. According to this notion, a new golden age of abundance and bliss would
be achieved in the future through the marvels of industrial technology. Malthus set out to shatter
this idea through a very simple argument, based on his observation that the European population
was growing rapidly at the time.

In his theory, Thomas Malthus set out to criticise certain ideas. The natural tendency of
population growth, Malthus pointed out, is to increase exponentially. But food supply depends
on a fixed amount of land, so increases in agricultural production can be made only in a simple,
additive fashion, by bringing in new land under cultivation. Population growth therefore tends to
outstrip the means of support available. At this point, certain factors intervened to keep
population within the limits set by food supply these factors being "war, pestilence, and famine".
Human beings, Malthus argued, were destined forever to press against the limits of the food
supply. Misery, hunger and poverty were the inevitable fate of the majority of the human species.
Unless human practise, what Malthus called "moral restraint", by which he meant accepting
strict limitations on the frequency of sexual intercourse, (Giddens). The use of contraceptives he
claimed was a vice.

This argument was not a popular one. Malthus became known as the "gloomy parson", and one
contemporaneous critic called his theory "that black and terrible demon that is always ready to
stifle the hopes of humanity" (quoted in Heilbroner, 1967). Malthus himself offered little hope.
The only suggestion he made were the abolition of poor relief and state support of poor children
in order to cut the growth rate of the lower classes and "moral restraint" on the part of the rest of
the population.

For a while Malthusianism was ignored, since population development of the western countries
followed quite a different pattern from that which Malthus anticipated. He did not foresee the
technical improvements that were later achieved in agriculture, making possible a vastly
increased yield from a fixed amount of land; nor did he foresee the decline in birth-rates that
took place in the industrialised nations in the 19th and 20th. Both Europe and the United States
grew in affluence and even in numbers, and it seemed for a while that Malthus had been wrong.

Since, however, an unprecedented population explosion has occurred in the poorer nations of the
world, and many have come to recognise that the affluence of the wealthier nations has largely
depended on their exploitation of the limited resources of the developing countries. The
underlying logic of Malthus's argument is difficult to refute: population cannot increase
indefinitely in a world that has finite resources. So as one writer calls it, we find ourselves in the
'Malthusian trap' once more.