Search results for "Thomas Robert Malthus"
showing 2 items of 2 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.
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…