THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS was born in Rookery, Surrey, England, in February 1766. He attended Cambridge University, earning a master's degree in 1791. In 1805 he became a professor of history and political economy at the East India Company's college in Haileybury, Hertfordshire, a position he held for the rest of his life.
Malthus is most famous for his Essay on the Principle of Population Control (1798), which argues that increases in population will eventually overcome the world's ability to feed itself, resulting in widespread starvation. He based this conclusion on the belief that populations grow at a geometric rate, whereas the food supply increases at an arithmetic one.
A pessimist who viewed the notion of human perfectibility as foolishness, Malthus saw famine, disease, and war as necessary checks on population growth. Later he believed that "moral restraint"
(delayed marriage and sexual abstinence prior to it) could also help curb the problem.
Malthus's works on economics include An Inquiry into Nature and the Progress of Rent (1815) and Principles of Political Economy (1820). Many ideas contained in these works anticipate the thinking of economist John Maynard Keynes, who lived a century later. Malthus's pessimistic assessment of life as a "struggle for existence" also influenced Charles Darwin's evolutionary mechanism of natural selection, or "survival of the fittest."
Thomas Malthus died at Haileybury on December 23, 1834.
