DIARY ENTRY:  I’ve had to think about economics since I rode my bike this morning and the lecture I listened to covered Malthus and Ricardo.

Thomas Malthus is remembered for his pronouncement that the food supply grows arithmetically while the human population grows geometrically.  He was, along with David Ricardo – his friend as well as fellow late 18th century economist – a reader of Adam Smith and a modernizer of Smith’s observations and conclusions.  It is interesting to note that THE WEALTH OF NATIONS is even today the foundation for economic theorizing.  We have just brought the terminology up to date where we can understand it. “Supply and Demand” are the terms for what Smith and his commentators, Malthus and Ricardo talked about.

It is interesting that Malthus and Ricardo were termed “utopians”.  “Political Economy” was what concerned them and how to create a better society through an understanding of the principles of what came to be known as the “economy”.  These writers, and especially Malthus and Ricardo were involved with not only writing about economics termed as “the dismal science”, but as friends who met and talked about it endlessly. They wanted to correctly define the forces at work in the natural world.

These two very different men whose education could only be contrasted (Ricardo did not have the benefit of much schooling) discussed the role of children and decisions about having them.  If population increases because of the need to have sex could be regulated, then there would be a different attitude toward how prices rise in scarcity and lower in times of plenty. Malthus was a minister and believed that birth control was immoral.  He struggled with the idea that perhaps people could be educated to produce fewer children, probably by just saying no.  However, population growth seriously interfered with the three constants of any economy.  These were land (and landlords), production (factories and tools) and workers (whose needs could be determined to keep them just above starvation). Historically, people are least valuable and troublesome.

Some ideas are longer lasting than others. A lasting idea is that owners of land and producers of products only create wealth. Workers who produced the wealth from the land and in the factories but had none themselves, led to notions of Marx and Engels that a war between classes was inevitable. The idea of justifiable revolution was not just against monarchs and aristocracy, but against exploitation of workers who could not compete against the owners of tools in the workplace and whose working conditions were inhuman in the service to profits for the capitalists.

Today we have the educated in wealthy countries who advocate “zero population growth” for the poor in other countries.  This is just a continuation of the Malthusian proposition. Economics make for strange conclusions about humans and their destiny.