Thomas Malthus was a thinker far ahead of his time. From a TLS review of two new books on him (Robert Mayhew’s Malthus: The life and legacies of an untimely prophet and Alan Macfarlane’s Thomas Malthus And The Making Of The Modern World):
Robert J. Mayhew’s speciality is historical geography and intellectual history; Alan Macfarlane is a social anthropologist and historian who has published widely on England, Nepal, Japan and China…
In his admirably rounded Malthus: The life and legacies of an untimely prophet Mayhew draws our attention to the actual writings of this pioneer of demography and political economy, and to his historical context, especially the revolutionary enthusiasm which Malthus was concerned to dampen. He questioned the belief that redistribution of resources to the poor would advance social progress: the poor would cancel it out by having more children…
Macfarlane concludes that Malthus has been vindicated as regards the potential of human communities to double their population in each generation – which is still the case in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and some Muslimmajority countries.
