Abstract
This chapter examines the views of the classical economists on the topic of scarcity and abundance. In particular, we examine the views of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, and the enduring impact such views had on the subsequent intellectual discourse. The chapter highlights the great intellectual transformation that occurred relative to the earlier Greek and Christian traditions.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to note that Charles Clark invokes one of several candidates for the identity of the invisible hand . See Samuels (2011) for an almost exhaustive list of such identities.
- 2.
Joyce Appleby, quoted by Xenos (1989, 28–29), presents a similar opinion:
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[T]he new scarcity is an abstraction – a hypothetical condition created when people’s desires outdistance actual goods. The real scarcity of a subsistence economy with population pressing upon its productive resources had now been replaced by the psychological scarcities of imagined wants heightened by a commerce rapidly extending in size and diversity of goods.
Xenos remarks by arguing that “only the ‘abstract’ condition of scarcity is ‘real.’”
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- 3.
“While the law of diminishing returns is an important part of population doctrine for Malthus , the law was to be overcome, at least in the developed countries, by technological progress” (Samuels and Henderson 1986, 14). While the empirical evidence of developed countries has refuted Malthus ’s conjecture, Samuels and Henderson believe that of developing countries to have confirmed it.
- 4.
According to LeMahieu (1979, 467–68), Malthus “felt compelled to include a theodicy in his polemic” as part of his broader attempt to follow the “new science” of his day, and to fit within the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment .
- 5.
According to Samuels and Henderson (1986, 10), Malthus believed that:
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[T]he population-pressure based problems of man evidence of neither divine impotence, lack of divine goodness or goodwill toward man, nor a state of human trial. These problems are rather the evidence of a creative process for man, a process which is a divine product and one acting through general laws. Its principal feature is the awakening of matter into mind, the improvement of the mind.
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- 6.
“God allowed moral and physical flaws in his Universe because ‘the constant effort to dispel this darkness, even it fail of success, invigorates and improves the mind’” (LeMahieu 1979, 470).
- 7.
“Malthus ’s blueprint for genuine social progress was founded upon an ethic which was radically individualistic, and yet wholly determined by a benevolent Deity” (LeMahieu 1979, 471).
- 8.
According to Mill :
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The doctrine that, to however distant a time incessant struggling may put off our doom, the progress of society must ‘end in shallows and in miseries,’ far from being, as many people still believe, a wicked invention of Mr. Malthus , was either expressly or tacitly affirmed by his most distinguished predecessors, and can only be successfully combated on his principles. Before attention had been directed to the principle of population as the active force in determining the remuneration of labor , the increase of mankind was virtually treated as a constant quantity; it was, at all events, assumed that in the natural and normal state of human affairs population must constantly increase, from which it followed that a constant increase of the means of support was essential to the physical comfort of the mass of mankind. The publication of Mr. Malthus ’ Essay is the era from which better views of this subject must be dated; and notwithstanding the acknowledged errors of his first edition, few writers have done more than himself, in the subsequent editions, to promote these juster and more hopeful anticipations (Quoted in Xenos 1989, 60).
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Reda, A. (2018). Abundance and Scarcity: Classical Economic Thought. In: Prophecy, Piety, and Profits. Palgrave Studies in Islamic Banking, Finance, and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56825-0_4
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