Our co-Director, Professor Timothy Swanson, portrays the economics of Malthusianism in his article. He describes it as a set of assumptions concerning the way in which population, technology and re- source constraints interact. In its earliest form, it made assumptions concerning technology and resource constraints that implied that they were static and fixed, so that the aggregate production function was concave and static, as implied by the existence of a requisite and fixed factor of production ( Clark 2008 ; Sharp et al., 2012 ). By way of contrast, the assumption concerning population was that it was dynamic, and positively related to any growth in consumption. In this way, the Iron Law of Malthus, as laid out in Thomas Malthus’ famous “Essay on the Principle of Population” published in 1798, was derived from the application of these simple population dynamics to the static nature of the production system –any production surplus that was available for consumption would be dissipated on fertility increases, moving society inexorably toward the economic steady-state. 

To read the full article, please follow this link.