Jim Menegay  wrote:

> john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> > John Edser  wrote:
> > > Where Malthus could only see death and destruction
> > 
> > This is also false. Malthus thought that economic selection would
> > generate fitter individuals (in the pre-Fisherian sense of
"fit").
> > 
> > > Darwin saw natural selection. 
> 
> John (Wilkins, that is),
> 
> Your claim about Malthus is new and interesting to me.  As an economics
> student, I was taught that Malthus had argued that the wage rate could
> never rise significantly above the subsistence level (a grim conclusion,
> to be sure, but not exactly the "death and destruction" that Edser
> paints). I have never heard that he had suggested any tendency toward
> increased "pre-Fisherian fitness" in the population.
> 
> Could you expand on this, and perhaps provide references?  Also, what do
> you mean by "economic selection" as the causal agent in all
this? What did
> "fit" mean, pre-Fisher?  For that matter, what did it mean,
pre-Spencer?

Malthusian economics is not quite the same as Malthus' arguments on
population growth and the Poor Laws. He has been pilloried and parodied
by many (mostly by Marx, Engels and their followers). What he said was
roughly this:

There are two actual, and one possible, checks on population growth. The
actual ones are the "preventive" checks and the
"positive" checks. 

Preventive checks include raising a family with foresight, saving money
and resources to educate and set them up. This tends to reduce the
birthrate.

Positive checks include disease, war, famine, and the like.

The possible check is a moral one: restraint (from sex of course, this
*is* the early 19thC).

He says (Ch 5) that "all checks to population may be resolved into
misery of vice" and notes that "The sons and daughters of peasants will
not be found such rosy cherubs in real life as they are described to be
in romances. It cannot fail to be remarked by those who live much in the
country that the sons of labourers are very apt to be stunted in their
growth, and are a long while arriving at maturity", and this he ascribes
to poor food, a "want of either proper or of sufficient nourishment".

It follows that if one takes preventive and moral restraint into account
when raising a family, they will be better off and fitter. The Poor Laws
"tend to depress the general condition of the poor in ... two ways.
Their first obvious tendency is to increase population without
increasing the food for its support. ... Secondly, the quantity of
provisions consumed in workhouses upon a part of the society that cannot
in general be considered as the most valuable part diminishes the shares
that would otherwise belong to more industrious and more worthy
members..." [p97 in the Penguin edition]

To put it in modern terms, the poor relief laws will increase the
population beyond the carrying capacity of the environment, and secondly
will cause a Tragedy of the Commons.
> 
> [moderator's note: This may seem a bit off-topic, and I suppose perhaps it
> is. I don't care; I think it's interesting, and any discussion about
> historical perceptions of "fitness" is, in my view, relevant to our
> charter. John, (and any others who would like to weigh in): carry on. -
> JAH]
> 
> 
> As it turns out, Malthus's argument regarding the wage rate was correct,
> but irrelevant, due to an escape mechanism that Malthus noted but did not
> take seriously:  "vice".  Also, he underestimated the degree to which
> capital could be substituted for land as a factor of production.  Capital,
> like population, can increase geometrically, for a few more centuries,
> anyways.

Flew notes that Malthus implies what economist Kenneth Boulding called
the Dismal Theorem - that actively pursuing vice will tend to apply a
positive check on the population, and the Utterly Dismal Theorem, that
increasing the subsistence will inevitably increase misery and vice.

These things have obvious evolutionary analogues. It is no coincidence
that Darwin's ideas are similarly economic to Adam Smith's. He read a
lot of Smith and of Ricardo, one of Smith's followers.
-- 
John Wilkins
john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au   http://www.wilkins.id.au
"Men mark it when they hit, but do not mark it when they miss" 
                                               - Francis Bacon
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