Malthus on norway

Abstract Malthus visited Norway in 1799 and his impression of the country's demographic experience was important in determining the character of the second edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population. He relied for the most part on non-statistical sources. This led him to exaggerate, e.g. the size of households, the number of unmarried farm servants and to miss important features, e.g. differences in marital age patterns, regional variations in fertility and nuptiality. The bias of his itinerary and of his main informants is also apparent. Statistical material not available to Malthus indicates that he was right to stress the late age at marriage in Norway but wrong to ignore the operation of the positive check. Mortality was frequently high in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Norway, much higher than Malthus ever realized. This destroys the symmetry, as well as the morality, of Malthus's exposition.     

Malthus on Godwin’s of population

A number of the issues raised by Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice recur in subdued form in Of Population. These are issues that Malthus himself considered only to interpret them differently. Most outstanding of the points of difference between the two were: (1) the augmentability of the food supply, which Malthus put far below Godwin’s estimate; (2) the rate of growth of population which Godwin believed to be negligible and Malthus to be potentially great; (3) man’s disposition to control his numbers when necessary, regarding which Godwin was much more optimistic than Malthus; (4) the interpretation each put upon the constraining role of institutions. The two men had more in common than is usually assumed.     

Malthus and the Philippines

Jose D. Drilon, Jr., president of Food Terminal, Inc., and a former undersecretary of the then Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources in the Philippines, attributes the widening gap between food supply and demand in developing countries to the high rate of population growth and to the inability of poor countries to produce more food. This situation, in which many countries are facing hunger, was predicted by Thomas Robert Malthus as early as the 16th century. The primary concern of Malthus was the problem of making the food supply keep pace with a constantly growing population. The question arises as to how reliable is Malthusian theory. According to Drilon, Malthus was correct in predicting that population would expand at a rate not previously imagined but that the other aspects of Malthusian theory might not hold true due to the intervention of human beings. For example, it is hoped that the imbalance between population growth and food production can be minimized in the future. In the Philippines there is good reason to be concerned about the validity of Malthusian theory. Although the country's growth rate has been reduced from 3.01% in 1970 to 2.6%, it is still quite high. However, the Philippines has actually been producing sufficient food to feed its population. To make the Philippines self-sufficient in rice, the government initiated the Masagana 99 program in May 1973. Technical and material resources from the public and private sectors were provided to aid rice producers. A nationwide information campaign was also launched to familiarize the farmers with the new methods of rice culture. Masagana 99 has been costly but effective. Since the launching of the program, rice production in the Philippines has been increasing at 7% a year. The government is now using the Masagana 99 formula to increase the production of other crops.     

Malthus,Boserup and population viability

The Malthus-Boserup explanatory framework is revisited from the point of view of viability theory. Instead of imposing a univocal relationship between population pressure and level of knowledge, the way technology will change is not determined, it is only constrained. This leads to regard any situation as associated to a set of reachable futures. When no possibility is left for systems to avoid extinction, systems are no longer viable. Hence, the control-phase space can be divided into regions corresponding to gradual danger or security. This point of view allows the introduction of ideas such as incentives to create or to use new knowledge, gives a role to the threatening power of Malthusian checks, and leaves space for a specific variety of behaviors. The Boserupian theme then appears indirectly, emerging from the constraints imposed by the inertia of technological change.     

Malthus and the social limits to growth

This paper seeks to demonstrate a tradition of argument that starts with Malthus' writings on population and on the environmental limits to growth, and continues in today's neo-conservative writings on ‘mobilized demand’ and the social limits to growth. The basic Malthusian theorem shows a concern with effective or mobilized demand. In this form, the theorem can readily accommodate changes that so-called neo-conservatives were to introduce in centuries that followed. Today the debate on the perfectibility of man, and the end-point of progress continues; only the terms of reference have changed. A key modification is the switch of concerns from physical to social limits. This switch is exemplified in Fred Hirsch's book, Social Limits to Growth, which introduces the useful concept of ‘positional goods’ to help account for the unsatisfiability of modern wants. The paper concludes with a quote from Keynes, which clearly establishes the line of development from Malthus to the neo-conservatives; and with a question, asked by one of Keynes's critics, that can be addressed to the entire tradition Malthus founded.     

制度与马尔萨斯的制度观——重读《人口原理》

制度创新的实践 ,新制度学派的繁荣 ,使制度问题成为当前的热点。从制度的视角解读《人口原理》 ,通过考察制度、经济发展和人口增长三者的内在关系阐述马尔萨斯的制度观 ,并采用理论分析和现实检验的方法探讨和评价制度及制度变迁在经济发展和人口增长等方面的作用 ,得出了制度是人口法则的克星等重要结论和启示     

China Commemorates T.R.Malthus

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马尔萨斯人口原理方法论特征

马尔萨斯的人口原理虽有反动的一面,但其中也不乏合理因素和科学成分。本文具体分析了马尔萨斯在人口原理中运用的四种方法,并对其特征进行了概括。     

再论马尔萨斯

文章从马尔萨斯<人口原理>的基本原理入手,运用数理方法证明"两个级数"推断的合理性,并对"两种抑制"进行了深入解读,认为人们对"两种抑制"存在某种程度上的误读.同时,对"人口决定论"、"鼓励战争论"、"反济贫论"等多年来的曲解与批判也展开讨论.文章认为对<人口原理>应进行系统研究,挖掘其合理成分,公允评价马尔萨斯.     

Hellenism and homoeroticism in Shelley and his circle

This paper discusses two leading English Romantic poets- Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron-and three of their friends, who lived close together in Italy during the first half of 1822. Despite the censorious efforts of family, friends and biographers, ample evidence survives to establish the importance of male love in their lives and works. They were ardent hellenists, whose reference point for male love was the homoerotic ethos of Ancient Greece.     

Corn and crisis: Malthus on the high price of provisions

In 1799 Malthus spent six months in Scandinavia. There he witnessed the extreme deprivation, misery, and mortality that were once the common accompaniments of a bad harvest. On his return to England he found that the topic of the day was the exceptionally high price of bread, which threatened both political turmoil and human suffering. In the event, suffering even among the very poor was far less than in Sweden, though the increase in the price of the chief bread grain was greater. Malthus was intrigued by this apparent paradox. In An investigation of the cause of the present high price of provisions, published in 1800, he resolved it using arguments similar to those developed recently by Amartya Sen in his exposition of the concept of “entitlements.” In spite of his principled opposition to the poor laws, Malthus conceded that their effectiveness in transfering purchasing power to those most in need was a major reason for the limited impact of the dearth.     

韩非和马尔萨斯人口思想之比较研究

韩非和马尔萨斯是中西方倡导人口过剩论的突出代表,他们的理论既有相通之处又各具特色.二者思想的异同,展示了不同民族所面临的相同或相近的经济问题,在某种程度上揭示了人口思想所产生的特定文化传统和时代精神.     

Of Population and False Hopes: Malthus and His Legacy

Population and Environment -     

Gregory King,Robert Malthus and the Origins of English Social Realism

In this article I compare King and Malthus in respect of their ability to penetrate what is here called social opacity, the resistance of all social structures to objective analysis by contemporaries, demographic and other forms of analysis. It accords to King the distinction to have been the first person ever to have recognized the issue, to have set out to penetrate social opacity as it was in his generation, and thus to have been the first to write out a systematic account of any social structure in what, in his age, could be called objective terms. His attitude is described as one of Gregorian realism. Malthus is equally distinguished by realism, but in a very different, much more theoretical mode, reminiscent of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His attitude is named Malthusian realism in contrast to Gregorian. It is insisted that both Gregorian and Malthusian realism are equally parts of the required equipment and outlook of all social scientists, demographers especially. On the way to the conclusion that David Glass, in whose honour the paper was delivered as a lecture, was a Gregorian, it is shown that the originator of the notion of deliberate, redistributive transfers from the propertied to the poor by means of the national taxation system was Tom Paine in Rights of Man (1790).     

Malthus in the Bedroom: Birth Spacing as Birth Control in Pre-Transition England

We use duration models on a well-known historical data set of more than 15,000 families and 60,000 births in England for the period 1540–1850 to show that the sampled families adjusted the timing of their births in accordance with the economic conditions as well as their stock of dependent children. The effects were larger among the lower socioeconomic ranks. Our findings on the existence of parity-dependent as well as parity-independent birth spacing in England are consistent with the growing evidence that marital birth control was present in pre-transitional populations.     

Malthus in state space: Macro economic-demographic relations in English history, 1540 to 1870

. The history of preindustrial Europe provides an opportunity to examine the causes and consequences of population change at a macro level. However, serious statistical problems arise from the endogeneity of all observed variables in a Malthusian system (fertility, mortality, population size, and real wages), and from unobserved influences such as shifts in the demand for labor and variations in health. These problems have undermined both informal inference from the data and more complex econometric investigations. This paper takes a new statistical approach, finding the maximum likelihood estimate of a state space representation of the Malthusian system by repeated application of Kalman filter methods, using annual data from England, 1540 to 1870. The new estimates confirm some findings of the earlier literature and contradict others. Some variables are estimated for the first time. Implications are discussed for the interpretation of English economic-demographic history. Received: 3 January 2000/Accepted: 22 January 2001