In the 1600s and 1700s in England, prominent writers such as Daniel Defoe argued that the wages of laborers should be kept low. If wages were too high, laborers would only work a few days a week and be idle the rest of the time.
“There is a general taint of slothfulness upon our poor,” wrote Defoe in 1704; “there’s nothing more frequent than for an Englishman to work until he has got his pocket full of money, and then to go and be idle, or perhaps drunk, till ‘t is all gone.”[1] And in 1771 Arthur Young wrote: “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.”[2]
This was part of the mercantilist mindset, said Edgar S. Furniss in 1920 in a book that I discussed earlier in a different context.
The prevailing view was that labor had what economists call a “backward-bending supply curve.” As wages went up—which normally would draw in more supply—a good portion of the work force worked less, not more. Apparently, they didn’t need more.
Why Early Industrial Workers Didn’t Work Much
But there was actually a good reason they might not need more. There wasn’t much to buy. They couldn’t go down to the local Best Buy for gadgets or go over to Starbucks for a cup of coffee. It wasn’t until coffee, tea, and gadgets became options that workers began voluntarily to work more. Continue reading “Why Work If You Can’t Buy Anything?”
I have been studying the poor laws of England. From 1601 to 1834 England was unique among European nations in that people in need could receive financial aid, paid for by taxes. Other countries relied almost entirely on charity.
But the cost of relief kept going up. As early as 1662, an act was passed limiting relief to the poor who were born or in the local parish or had lived there long enough to be “settled.” Those from elsewhere had to go home if they wanted relief—or even if the parish overseers suspected they might want relief in the future. The immobility of the poor made it hard to find jobs.
The poor (who became known as paupers) were increasingly viewed as idle and vicious. Over the years, prominent people from John Locke to Jeremy Bentham came up with fanciful schemes for correcting the bad behavior of the poor—educating them, working them, punishing them. Little change occurred, however.
Thomas Robert Malthus has had a very long run. Issuing his first essay on population in 1798, he has persuaded millions of people that the world is threatened by overpopulation.
“The effect of Malthusianism was immediate and dramatic,” writes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. “For half a century social attitudes and policies were decisively shaped by the new turn of thought.”[1] And the impact continues.
Until November I had never read Malthus’s essay.[2] To my surprise, it is a delightful essay—-clearly written, easy to read, a relatively short book. (Subsequent editions were more ponderous, I understand.)
Malthus is thoughtful and civil—deferential toward Adam Smith in spite of a disagreement and polite toward the two men whose arguments he demolished, William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. The essay is full of plain-spoken metaphors (using examples such as watches and telescopes)[3] and full of common sense.
The strange thing is this: Not only was his claim about population vs. food production wrong, as we now know from 120 years of experience, his argument for it was just armchair theorizing. Continue reading “The Marketing Genius of T. R. Malthus”
