Thomas Malthus

Thomas Malthus was a British scholar who studied population and resources. He was born in 1766 in Surrey, England, and died in 1834. He is often described as an economist and a cleric. A cleric is a person who works in the church. Malthus lived during a time when cities were growing and populations were increasing.

Thomas Malthus studied at the University of Cambridge. He later became a teacher and writer. His most famous book is An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798. In this book, he wrote about how the number of people in a country can grow faster than the food supply. Food supply means the amount of food available to feed people.

Malthus explained that population can increase quickly when families have many children. He believed that food production usually grows more slowly. For example, land can only produce a certain amount of crops each year. When population grows faster than food supply, shortages can happen. A shortage means there is not enough of something.

He also wrote about events that can reduce population growth. These included famine, disease, and war. A famine is a long period with very little food. Malthus described these events in a factual way as part of population change. He believed these forces could limit how large a population becomes.

Thomas Malthus worked as a professor at the East India College. This was a school that trained people to work for the British government in India. He continued to revise and publish his ideas during his lifetime. Other thinkers read his work and discussed it widely in Britain and Europe.

Malthus spent much of his life writing, teaching, and studying statistics. Statistics are numbers used to describe patterns, such as population size. His writings became part of larger discussions about population, farming, and economic growth. He died in 1834 and was buried in England.