Economists
Thomas Malthus
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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.
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Malthus is grouped with the classical school by convention, though his conclusions about population and long-run growth diverge sharply from the optimism of Smith and Ricardo.
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Ricardo and Malthus corresponded from 1817 onward in what historians call the Malthus-Ricardo debate, disagreeing over rent theory, the possibility of general economic gluts, and the Corn Laws, with Malthus favoring protection for British agriculture and Ricardo favoring free trade. A contemporary described the two as holding different shades of opinion rather than belonging to diverging camps.
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