Thomas Malthus
Born on 13rd of February 1766
Died in Bath, Bath
Died on 23rd of December 1834
Though Malthus wrote various scholarly works, it is for just one of them that he is famed: Essay on the Principal of Population, published in 1798.
Born near Dorking on February 13 1766 into the gentry Thomas Malthus was educated initially at the Warrington Academy, a Dissenter institution, his father of liberal mind interested in the ideas of thinkers such as Rousseau. At Jesus College Cambridge he won numerous prizes, and became an accomplished mathematician, ninth wrangler in 1788, and elected a fellow in 1793.
Malthus became an Anglican clergyman, and was of generally conservative political mind, the only major economic thinker to back the Corn Laws.
The basis of his Principal of Population was mathematical: he writes: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio,” which has inevitable consequences. His views were influenced by his religious thought, seeing the disparity between population and subsistence to support it as in essence a lesson from god, and a spur to virtue and diligent work.
Appointed to the East India College at Haileybury in Hertfordshire in 1805 he was a popular professor of political economy, and after publication of the influential An Enquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent (1815) he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1818.
Malthus died in Bath on December 23 1834, his tomb housed in Bath Abbey.
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