Malthusian Underconsumptionism as Mere Product of the Times
by Ryan Safner
[This paper was originally written for ECON 3462 - History of Economic Thought]
Reverend Thomas Malthus’ attempts to refute the universality of “Say’s Law of Markets” were largely driven by the rash conditions of war and post-war recession in the UK. Malthus’ underconsumptionist fears, and his more famous population thesis, both come during a coincidently chaotic time in European history – the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent post-war depression. A sound man of empirics like the good Reverend could find economic misery all across Europe in the early 1800s as a result of these conditions, and consequently would challenge Say’s Law in order to account for this. Malthus’ dismal theories were merely ‘a product of the times:’ in the bad times, during both the inflationary war and the deflationary recession, he contested the Classicals’ pristine assumptions of full employment. In the good times, by the 1820s when Europe had recovered, he simply lost interest in the debate and moved on. Both of Malthus’ unique theories – the “population principle” and the underconsumptionist call for an “unproductive class” can be explained by the empirical history of the chaotic era. The fears of a Malthusian catastrophe – that population would outstrip food production—may have largely been a result of barriers to international trade for wheat between the war-torn European powers. Following the war, amidst a depression, mass unemployment and “redundancy of capital” would prompt his calls for an “unproductive class” to sop up the excess production.
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