Question

What were Parson (Thomas Robert) Malthus' economic perspectives?

Answer 1

English economist and demographer who is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. This thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism.

Thomas Malthus was an English economist and demographer best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without strict limits on reproduction.

Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply is linear. It derives from the political and economic thought of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, as laid out in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population.

The main point of his essay was that population multiplies geometrically and food arithmetically, therefore whenever the food supply increases, population will rapidly grow to eliminate the abundance. Eventually in the future, there would not be enough food for the whole of humanity to consume and people would starve.