Thomas Malthus

English cleric and political economist (1766–1834) whose An Essay on the Principle of Population framed scarcity as humanity's permanent condition.

Thomas Robert Malthus was an English clergyman and one of the founding figures of political economy. In his Essay on the Principle of Population (first published 1798), he argued that human population tends to grow faster than the food supply, so that misery, want, and competition for scarce resources are the natural and recurring checks on humankind. His name became shorthand for the doctrine that there will never be enough to go around.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: forebear. For R. Buckminster Fuller, Malthus was the paradigmatic scarcity theorist to be refuted. Fuller flatly held that "Malthus is wrong": where Malthus assumed a fixed, insufficient pie and permanent competition for survival, Fuller argued that design science, ephemeralization (doing ever more with ever less), and the intelligent use of technology had made it physically possible to support all of humanity at a high standard of living. Fuller's conviction that success, not failure, is now normal for humanity is stated as a direct reversal of the Malthusian premise — the same premise that, read differently, gave Charles Darwin his mechanism of competitive selection.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Charles Darwin (Charles Darwin) — drew directly on Malthus's population argument for natural selection

Sources

• Compiled from general knowledge and corpus mentions; no single work in this corpus anchors this figure.