Thomas Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus was a British cleric and scholar best known for An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798. He argued that population tends to grow geometrically while the food supply that sustains it can grow only arithmetically, so that population is checked, sooner or later, by famine, disease, or war unless growth is restrained. Malthus is conventionally grouped with the classical economists, though his pessimism about long run growth set him apart from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, with whom he carried on a long and detailed correspondence about rent, gluts, and trade policy.