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”
I have criticized economists for oversimplifying issues,[1] but I must say that sometimes they cut through the Gordian knot of difficult historical questions. That has just happened with an article by Joseph Connors, James D. Gwartney, and Hugo M. Montesinos.[2]
For decades, almost since Arnold Toynbee coined the term, there has been a debate over whether the Industrial Revolution increased or reduced the standard of living, especially for workers. Was the nineteenth century a period of “massive and continuous” progress, or were the Marxists right in saying that “capitalism both in its evolution and present form must be evil”?[3]
Connors et al. will have none of that debate because they have come up with a revolution that, by important measurements, has had even more impact than the Industrial Revolution. It is happening now around the world, affecting nearly everybody, not just those in England or Western Europe. Continue reading “Forget the Industrial Revolution”
As I have stated before, historians are often influenced by what’s going on around them when they write about the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, the newly-independent countries looked as though they might experience their own industrial revolutions. That led to an interest among historians in the early Industrial Revolution. [1]
Economists caught the enthusiasm, too. They viewed the great potential of these countries and expected an Industrial Revolution—what W. W. Rostow called these countires’ “take-off.” [2] But that period of enthusiasm was followed by disillusionment. It turned out that many countries failed to achieve the take-off that seemed right at their doorstep.
I suggest that the economists were looking at the wrong things.
More than 20 years ago in an article for the Journal of Private Enterprise [3] I wrote about economists’ views of development as reflected in Paul Samuelson’s famous textbook. (That’s the one you probably read in your first economics class if you are of a certain age.)
I looked at Samuelson’s treatment of international development in four editions of the textbook, 1951, 1961, 1964, 1985. In them he reveals both his own views and those of other leading development economists.
