Adam Smith as Malthusian: “The Surplus Population”: Wednesday Focus for July 9, 2014

Note that when Adam Smith says “seems at first sight”, he is not signaling that he is about engaging in pointless contrarianism and about to reverse field and explain that a prosperous working class is an inconvenience rather than an advantage to society. It was an age of lower irony in which often things are as they seem: he is saying, rather, that you do not need to take more than a first glance for the answer to be “abundantly clear”:

Adam Smith: Smith: Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 8: “Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people…

…to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to the society? The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.

Poverty… seems even to be favourable to generation. A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children…. Luxury in the fair sex, while it enflames perhaps the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken and frequently to destroy altogether, the powers of generation. But poverty… is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children…. It is not uncommon… in the Highlands… for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive…. In civilized society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species… by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce. The liberal reward of labour, by enabling them to provide better for their children, and consequently to bring up a greater number, naturally tends to widen and extend those limits…. The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity.

It deserves to be remarked, perhaps, that it is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society. The stationary is dull; the declining melancholy…

Two things are worth noting here:

The first is that even as early as 1776 economics had already acquired the utilitarian bias toward an equal distribution of income: feeding, clothing, and lodging the working class “tolerably well” contributed much more to the flourishing and happiness of society then would devoting the same resources to further increasing the luxury of the rich. We are in the world of Jeremy Bentham, where any claim that we cannot make interpersonal comparisons of utility between rich and poor is dismissed with a laugh.

The second is that Adam Smith is, in the longest run and in the last analysis, a Malthusian: economies are headed for a stationary–or, worse, a declining–state, and that stationary state is not a good one: “the condition of the… great body of the people… is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state…” But there is no sense that we should not grab for the boom as long as we can, and as long as we are in the boom period, Adam Smith says, we should not complain about population growth:

The liberal reward of labour… is the effect of increasing wealth… [and] the cause of increasing population. To complain… is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity…