Malthus was considered by many to be a pessimist.
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Thomas Malthus was educated at home by his father as a child and later attended Cambridge University. Malthus would eventually become a history and political economy professor at East India Company’s College in Haileybury, Hertfordshire (BBS, 2014.) While teaching Malthus wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” This essay would become well known and be his most referred to writing. He was one of the first political economy professors of the time and was a co-founder of the statistical Society of London in 1834 (BBS, 2014.) Malthus is now considered by many now to have been misunderstood at the time when he published his ideas of population. It was not until Keynesian economics that his theories became more popular and his ideas were looked at less negatively and more as a comparison of population growth and food production (BBS, 2014.) Malthu’s ideas of economics lead to others looking at economics in different ways and he was one of the first to focus mainly on population studies. One of the main counterarguments about his ideas were that he didn’t realize how much technology would help farming become more productive (BBS, 2014.)
Sources:
BBS. (2014). Thomas malthus. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/malthus_thomas.shtml