Search results for "Malthu"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Defense versus Opulence? An Appraisal of the Malthus-Ricardo 1815 Controversy on the Corn Laws
2015
This article proposes a rational reconstruction of the arguments of Malthus and Ricardo in their 1815 essays, Grounds of an Opinion and An Essay on Profits, whereby a policy of free corn trade was repudiated and endorsed, respectively. Malthus envisaged defense and (trade-induced) opulence as two mutually alternative options and, if required to make a choice, he had no hesitation in choosing the former. By contrast, Ricardo excluded any such trade-off, arguing that even in the case of war or poor domestic harvest, foreign agricultural countries would be seriously damaged if they opted for restrictions on their corn exports to Great Britain.
Anti-Malthus: Conflict and the Evolution of Societies
2013
The Malthusian theory of evolution disregards a pervasive fact about human societies: they expand through conflict. When this is taken account of the long-run favors not a large population at the level of subsistence, nor yet institutions that maximize welfare or per capita output, but rather institutions that generate large amount of free resources and direct these towards state power. Free resources are the output available to society after deducting the payments necessary for subsistence and for the incentives needed to induce production, and the other claims to production such as transfer payments and resources absorbed by elites. We develop the evolutionary underpinnings of this model,…
Is Food Self-Sufficiency Conducive to Long-Term Growth? An Assessment of Malthus (1803) on the International Corn Trade.
2017
In this article, we have reconstructed Malthus’s views on growth and international corn trade in the second edition of his An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803) and shown their theoretical consistency with Malthus’s food self-sufficiency policy proposal advanced in Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn ([1815] 1986b), the protectionist pamphlet that elicited Ricardo’s vehement reaction in “Essay on Profits.” Malthus’s (1803) main thesis was that the contemporary British unbalanced growth pattern was not viable. In order to avoid premature stagnation, he thought that Great Britain should both follow a pattern of balanced growth and pursue…
Essay on Profits
2015
The entry discusses the 1815 Essay on Profits by David Ricardo. In particular, it focuses on Ricardo's analysis of Malthus's protectionist arguments and on Ricardo's criticism of the latter.
Inverse Malthusianism and Recycling Economics: The Case of the Textile Industry
2020
The current use of natural resources in the textile industry leads us to introduce a new economic concept called inverse Malthusianism describing a context in which population grows linearly and resource consumption grows exponentially. Inverse Malthusianism implies an exponential increase in environmental impact that recycling may contribute to reduce. Our main goal is to extend the analysis of materials selection under the principle of equimarginality proposed by Jevons. As a first result, we show the particular circumstances under which policies excluding recycled supplies are never optimal. We also aim to overcome the difficulties of reducing environmental aspects to monetary units. To …
Malthusian checks in pre-industrial Sweden and Finland: a comparative analysis of the demographic regimes
2015
In this article, the existence of the Malthusian preventive and positive checks in pre-industrial Sweden and Finland are studied using demographic and economic data from circa 1750–1860. By applying time series analysis, we are able to identify strong preventive and positive checks for Sweden. The preventive check is considered to work both directly through births and indirectly through marriages. Although the Finnish data also indicate the existence of the preventive check, the positive check is only detected with differenced data. Our findings contradict the initial hypothesis that, due to poverty, Finland would display a higher sensitivity of mortality to living standards than Sweden. In…