Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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the “dismal science.”9
The fact that Malthus sought to explain was that, in all societies and all epochs including his own, “nine parts in ten of the whole race of mankind” were condemned to lives of abject poverty and grinding toil.10 When not actually starving, the typical inhabitant of the planet lived in chronic fear of death by hunger. There were prosperous years and lean ones, richer and poorer regions, yet the standard of life never departed for long from subsistence.
In attempting to answer the age-old question “Why?” the mild-mannered minister anticipated not only Darwin but Freud. Sex, he argued, was to blame. Whether from observing the wretched lives of his parishion-ers, the influence of natural scientists who were beginning to regard man as an animal, or the arrival of his seventh child, Malthus had concluded that the drive to reproduce trumped all other human instincts and abilities, including rationality, ingenuity, creativity, even religious belief.
From this single provocative premise, Malthus deduced the principle that human populations tended always and everywhere to grow faster than the food supply. His reasoning was deceptively simple: Picture a situation in which the supply of food is adequate to sustain a given population. That happy balance can’t last any more than could Adam and Eve’s tenure in paradise. Animal passion drives men and women to marry sooner and have bigger families. The food supply, meanwhile, is more or less fixed in all but the very long run. Result: the amount of grain and other staples that had just sufficed to keep everyone alive would no longer be enough. Inevitably, Malthus concluded, “the poor consequently must live much worse.”11
In any economy where businesses compete for customers and workers for jobs, an expanding population meant more households contending for the food supply, and more workers competing for jobs. Competition would drive down wages while simultaneously pushing food prices higher. The average standard of living—the amount of food and other necessities available for each person—would fall.
At some point, grain would become so expensive and labor so cheap that the dynamic would reverse itself. As living standards declined, men and women would once again be forced to postpone marriage and have fewer children. A shrinking population would mean falling food prices as fewer households competed for the available food. Wages would rise as fewer workers competed for jobs. Eventually, as the food supply and population moved back into balance, living standards would creep back to their old level. That is, unless Nature’s “great army of destruction”12—war, disease, and famine—intervened to hurry the process, as happened, for example, in the fourteenth century, when the Black Plague wiped out millions, leaving behind a smaller population relative to the output of food.
Tragically, the new balance would prove no more durable than the original one. “No sooner is the laboring class comfortable again,” Malthus wrote sadly, “than the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated.”13 Trying to raise the average standard of living is like Sisyphus trying to roll his rock to the top of the hill. The faster Sisyphus gets almost there, the sooner he triggers the reaction that sends the boulder tumbling down the slope again.
Attempts to flout the law of population were doomed. Workers who held out for above-market wages wouldn’t find jobs. Employers who paid their workers more than their competitors did would lose their customers as higher labor costs forced them to raise prices.
For Victorians, the most objectionable implication of Malthus’s law was that charity might actually increase the suffering it was intended to ease—a direct challenge to Christ’s injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”14 In fact, Malthus was extremely critical of the traditional English welfare system, which provided relief with few strings attached, for rewarding the idle at the expense of the industrious. Relief was proportional to family size, in effect encouraging early marriage and large families. Conservative and liberal taxpayers alike found Malthus’s argument so persuasive that Parliament passed, virtually without opposition, a new Poor Law in 1834 that effectively restricted public relief to those who agreed to become inmates of parish workhouses.
“Please, sir, I want some more.” As Oliver Twist discovers after making his famous plea, workhouses were essentially prisons where men and women were segregated, put to work at unpleasant tasks, and subjected to harsh discipline—all in return for a place to sleep and “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays.”15 The fare in most workhouses probably wasn’t as meager as the starvation diet Dickens described in his novel, but there is no doubt that these institutions topped the list of working-class grievances.16 Like most reform-minded middle-class liberals, Dickens considered the new Poor Law morally repulsive and politically suicidal and the theory on which it was based a relic of a barbaric past. He had recently returned from America with its “thousands of millions of acres of land yet unsettled and uncleared” and where the inhabitants were in “the custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times a-day,”17 and found the notion that abolishing the workhouse would cause the world to run out of food absurd.
Bent on striking a blow for the poor, Dickens began early in 1843 to write a tale about a rich miser’s change of heart, a tale that he liked to think of as a sledgehammer capable of “twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force” of a political pamphlet.18
A Christmas Carol, argues the economic historian James Henderson, is an attack on Malthus.19 The novel is bursting with delicious smells and tastes. Instead of a rocky, barren, overpopulated island where food is scarce, the England of Dickens’s story is a vast Fortnum & Mason where the shelves are overflowing, the bins are bottomless, and the barrels never run dry. The Ghost of Christmas Past appears to Scrooge perched on a “kind of throne,” with heaps of “turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.” “Radiant” grocers, poulterers, and fruit and vegetable dealers invite Londoners into their shops to inspect luscious “pageants” of food and drink.20
In an England characterized by New World abundance rather than Old World scarcity, the bony, barren, anorexic Ebenezer Scrooge is an anachronism. As Henderson observes, the businessman is “as oblivious to the new spirit of human sympathy as he is to the bounty with which he is surrounded.”21 He is a diehard supporter of the treadmill and workhouse literally and figuratively. “They cost enough,” he insists, “and those who are badly off must go there.” When the Ghost of Christmas Past objects that “many can’t go there; and many would rather die,” Scrooge says coldly, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Happily, Scrooge’s flinty nature turns out to be no more set in stone than the world’s food supply is fixed. When Scrooge learns that Tiny Tim is one of the “surplus” population, he recoils in horror at the implications of his old-fashioned Malthusian religion. “No, no,” he cries, begging the Spirit to spare the little boy. “What then?” the Spirit replies mockingly. “If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”22 Scrooge repents, resolves to give his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit, a raise, and sends him a prize turkey for Christmas. By accepting the more hopeful, less fatalistic view of Dickens’s generation in time to alter the course of future events, Scrooge refutes the grim Malthusian premise that “the blind and brutal past” is destined to keep repeating itself.
The Cratchits’ joyous Christmas dinner is Dickens’s direct riposte to Malthus, who uses a parable about “Nature’s mighty feast” to warn of the unintended consequences of well-meaning charity. A man with no means of support asks the guests to make room for him at the table. In the past, the diners would have turned him away. Beguiled by utopian French theories, they decide to ignore the fact that there is only enough food for the invited guests. They fail to foresee when they let the newcomer join them that more gatecrashers will arrive, the food will run out before everyone has been served, and the invited guests’ enjoyment of the meal will be “destroyed by the spectacle of misery