Malthus’s Theory of Population Growth

Abstract

There are striking statements about the explosive nature of potential population growth from Malthus’s predecessors — such as those by Cantillon and Smith which were quoted in previous chapters.¹ It was Malthus, however, who fully and systematically set out the complete classical theory of population growth together with its powerful social implications. He was much impressed by the evidence of extremely rapid population growth in the North American colonies, and in 1798 when he published his first Essay on Population he quoted examples of population in the various colonies doubling or more than doubling in twenty-five years. The evidence he relied on was first published in Boston in 1761 by Dr Edward Styles, President of Yale College, and it was republished in London by Richard Price in numerous publications from 1769 onwards, and Malthus saw it in one of these.² He appreciated its full implications and the first of his famous propositions was based on this evidence:

In the United States of America, where the means of subsistence have been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, and consequently the checks to early marriages fewer, than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population has been found to double itself in twenty-five years.

This ratio of increase, though short of the utmost power of population, yet as the result of actual experience, we will take as our rule; and say, that population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio. (Pop ednl 20–1)