What Would Thomas Malthus Think of Today’s Antinatalism and Pronatalism?

In Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical novel Melincourt (1817), a parody of Thomas Malthus named Mr. Fax encounters a young farmhand and dairymaid about to be married and decides to approach them on behalf of “general reason” in order “to ascertain if they had a clear notion of the evils that awaited them in consequence of the rash step they were about to take.” He tries and fails to impress upon them a sense of the irresponsibility of marrying young, pointing out that once married they could have as many as six children in the next six years. The giddy and affectionate couple is unfazed as the increasingly frustrated Mr. Fax tries to explain to them the difficulty of supporting so many children on their expected income and the very real possibility that they shall end up having to rely on parish support. They come away from his tendentious discourse every bit as excited to be married as they were before. And Robin Ruddyface, the jovial bridegroom, still has no idea who “General Reason” is.

If Malthus was easily parodied and often misunderstood in his own time, not much has changed in the centuries that have passed since he wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). A video on YouTube with half a million views claims that he “recommended killing off the have-nots of society, lest the haves starve to death” (He never recommended any such thing), and the author of the introduction to an early-twenty-first-century edition of the Essay felt the need to explain that Malthus did not advocate for eugenics (He lived half a century too early to have encountered the idea of eugenics).

The prevalence of such misconceptions can easily obscure the fact that Malthus was an impressive and influential thinker. His population principle became a part of mainstream political economy and remained so long after his death. The broad, philosophical framework in which he discussed economic questions inspired both the historicist critique of classical economics in the nineteenth century and the explicitly Christian variant of political economy advanced by writers like Thomas Chalmers. Charles Darwin acknowledged the influence of Malthus’s population principle in helping him discover and understand natural selection, and John Maynard Keynes famously lamented the fact that nineteenth century economists had not followed Malthus’s lead on the issue of overproduction and general gluts. While Malthus was a controversial figure, his contributions to economic thought were nonetheless substantial. 

In fact, the present moment is a particularly good time to revisit Malthus. Nationally syndicated newspapers are running headlines asking whether it is ethical to have children, and nearly half of US adults say they are unlikely to do so. Some have gone a step further than simply not having children and joined groups like VHEMT and Stop Having Kids who try to convince other people not to have children. All of this is occurring simultaneously with widely reported concerns about the negative consequences of excessively low birth rates in a myriad of countries and the growth of the Pronatalist movement, a movement endorsed by high-profile political figures like Elon Musk and J. D. Vance. The website Pronatalist.org warns that “Demographic collapse is well underway” and suggests that “If existing social structures can’t motivate people to have kids we will have to build new ones.” It is amusing to try to picture Mr. Fax’s reaction to this statement. But a more interesting question to contemplate is, what would the real Thomas Malthus think about the current discourse on population?

Asking what a historical figure would think about a present day debate is always a little bit daunting, but what we know about Malthus can give us some basis for speculation. He was an Anglican clergyman, though he had been educated at a dissenting academy. He got married relatively late in life and fathered several children. In his writings he comes across as reasonable, open-minded, and charitable toward his ideological opponents. Several aspects of his intellectual character will be apparent to anyone who reads the Essay: he was a staunch empiricist who never liked to stray from what could be confirmed by observation and experience, he did not view moral philosophy and political economy as separate and independent subjects, and he generally preferred to think about problems in practical rather than theoretical terms.

The late eighteenth century was a moment rife with utopian speculation and it was such speculation that motivated Malthus to write what would become one of the most famous works in the history of political economy. The Essay was in large part a response to the philosopher William Godwin’s speculations about the future of humankind. Godwin advocated for the abolition of government and the equalization of property, arguing that unjust institutions were the only thing preventing men from becoming wise, benevolent, rational, healthy and prosperous. Malthus was unconvinced.

Because population has a natural tendency to increase faster than food supply, he argued, population growth will either be prevented from nearing the point beyond which it can be sustained or reach its limit and be checked by poverty and starvation. Catastrophic events like plagues and natural disasters can prevent population growth from reaching this natural limit, as can decisions made by individuals to avoid or delay marriage. But none of these scenarios were ideal in his view. Generally, according to Malthus, the population will grow during more prosperous times until it presses against its upper limit. This pressure will lead to less prosperous times, which will continue until the population is forced back down. This cycle, the inevitable result of population pressure and the finiteness of resources, makes the perfectibility of human society an idle dream. 

I suspect that nothing would make Malthus happier than seeing the large population that the planet currently supports and the relatively high standard of living that so many hundreds of millions of people enjoy. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his claim that “nothing would give [him] greater pleasure than to see” the obstacles to human perfectibility “completely removed,” and the extent to which so many barriers to human flourishing have been overcome would almost certainly impress him.

At the same time, as a skeptic regarding human perfectibility, he would be unsurprised to see that war, poverty, injustice and crime have not been altogether eradicated from society. He understood that while institutions can and should be reformed for the better, no reforms can change the fact that we live in a world with finite resources and are morally imperfect creatures.

But when it comes to how we should think about population issues moving forward, it seems likely that Malthus, as an empiricist, would be impressed by the evidence presented for demographic collapse concerns. He would take seriously the fact that extremely low birth rates are already a significant problem in countries like South Korea, Italy and Greece, a problem expected to have severe economic consequences.

However, he would probably be skeptical of some of the proposed means of addressing the issue. He was particularly critical of attempts to increase population through monetary incentives for having children. As far as he was concerned, the only true way to boost population growth is to “Increase the demand for agricultural labour by promoting cultivation and with it consequently increase the produce of the country, and ameliorate the condition of the labourer.” He even went as far as to denounce any alternative method as “vicious, cruel, and tyrannical.”

This argument is not quite so dated as it might seem. Of course the percentage of people who earn their living by agricultural labor is a lot lower now than it was when Malthus was writing, but the broader principle here still seems applicable; the availability of steady employment and of the resources necessary to sustain life are important factors in people’s decisions whether to have children. Today the looming threat of AI-driven job loss, rather than the lack of ready farmland, is widely expected to become the most formidable obstacle to employment, and those concerned about the continued availability of scarce resources are thinking about more than just agricultural produce. Regardless of what one thinks about these issues or the best way to address them, it is not difficult to see why the effectiveness of cash incentives has been mixed. As Malthus recognized, any plan to address low birth rates that does not speak to the broader concerns of would-be parents is unlikely to be successful.

If he would understand pronatalist concerns about low birth rates, he would also appreciate that many antinatalists are coming from a good place. Like the antinatalists, Malthus recognized that in some cases the act of bringing an additional person into the world can be a harmful one. That was why he considered preventative checks to population growth preferable to positive checks; it was far better in his eyes for people to put off marriage and have fewer children than for population growth to be checked by starvation instead. As someone who took the laws of nature and the limitations of the planet seriously, he would also understand the environmental concerns deterring many from having children.

But even if he would grant some of their premises, he certainly would not endorse their conclusions. While he preferred preventative checks to positive checks, a marriage delayed on account of the financial inability to support children was still, as far as he was concerned, “a species of misery.” He was even sympathetic to men like Robin Ruddyface who got married earlier than advisable; “it would be hard indeed,” he says of such cases, “if the gratification of so delightful a passion as virtuous love did not, sometimes, more than counterbalance all its attendant evils.” His willingness to view delayed marriages as a necessary evil should not obscure the fact that he held love and marriage in very high esteem. And his assumption was that most married couples would have children.

Malthus did not believe that people would ever be perfectly rational and virtuous, or that any country on earth would ever be a utopia. But he believed that people living in this world could be happy and that progress was possible. In fact, the Essay is quite preoccupied with the question of how the greatest amount of human happiness could be attained. He was the furthest thing from a defeatist, and it can safely be assumed that he would reject the defeatism inherent in the philosophy that no human should ever be brought into existence. 

As an anti-utopian text, Malthus’s Essay helps us to understand how we benefit from living in an imperfect world. Malthus’s understanding of population problems was never at odds with his belief in God’s benevolence. As harsh as the population principle was, he believed that it had ultimately been productive of much good because of the “powerful stimulus” it provided to the human species. The population problems of the future could be viewed in a similar light. If it is the case, as many fear, that the global population is set to begin declining within the next thirty or forty years, then confronting this very formidable problem will test our ingenuity and bring out the best in us in ways we cannot yet fully anticipate. Or so we may believe if we are good Malthusians.

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