How Economics Defeated The Malthusian Trap Summary

Break on Through to the Other Side: How Economics Defeated the Malthusian Trap

Evan Porcella

George Mason University

February 8, 2015

Economics can be a tricky subject to explain to the general public. People often view Economics as a broad scope of finance. While Economics does look at the financial industry quite a bit, it is not solely about stocks and bonds. As Merriam-Webster describes, Economics is “a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” The important aspect to gain from this definition is that Economics is a social science, which means the discipline studies human behavior. Economists study human behavior regarding the

There were times when society as a whole would be living slightly higher than subsistence level, but generally either war, famine, or disease would strike and society as a whole would fall back down to subsistence level. This was explained by Thomas Malthus in an essay he wrote in 1798 called An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus looked back through human history and found that in times of prosperity, populations were low causing incomes to be high, and in times of hardship populations were high and income levels were low. Malthus argued that the advances in technology that caused incomes to increase therefore did not affect the standard of living, but rather just increased population size. For example building the Roman aqueducts did not raise the standard of living for the Romans, it just allowed for a larger population to live at the previous standard of living. Malthus considered this phenomenon to be a trap because though increased incomes could support larger populations – paying for more food, shelter, clothing and so on – the increase in population would eventually lower wages. To defeat this trap, now known in Economics as the Malthusian trap, Malthus argued for population control in order to raise the standard of living. At the time, Malthus’ call for population control was the only foreseeable solution. However, the economists of the 19th century challenged Malthus’ solution and

Economists urged free trade so that all of society could benefit from technological advances. With the invention of the steam engine, trains were created as well as steam boats. These two inventions dramatically reduced the time it took to transport goods from one region to another and by extension the cost of transporting goods. Therefore by trading these goods, regions that did not produce a specific good could still purchase goods at a relatively cheap rate. Again reducing the cost of transportation caused real wages to rise because businessmen could sell their goods at a cheaper rate than before and still make a profit, thus strengthening currencies (Floud & Johnson, 2008, p