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Henk Plasmeijer's editiorial has a lot of interesting things to say about 
Malthus, and the context in which he wrote the Essay on Population. I 
only want to comment on one aspect of his introduction, in which he says: 
'Within twenty years the Principle of Population became an essential part 
of Ricardian economics.' 
 
But did it? Or rather, did Ricardo's theory derive from Malthus's? My 
first reaction was that Ricardo's treatment of population and wages is 
directly descended from Smith, and before that from Cantillon, Steuart, 
and so on. Could one argue that Ricardo would have been just the same if 
Malthus had never written on population? 
 
Ricardo was notoriously inconsistent about wages (hence disputes about 
the 'new view', etc.). Sometimes he echoed Adam Smith - higher wages in a 
growing economy, etc. - but elsewhere, and especially in the chapter on 
wages, he used a crude subsistence wage theory, with the concommitant 
crude surplus theory of distribution.  
 
Perhaps Henk would claim that Malthus is to be blamed for the cruder side 
of Ricardo's wage theory? I am not convinced. That tendency to 
oversimplify, to go for simple assumptions which produce strong results 
is the 'Ricardian vice', and it seems to me that Ricardo was quite 
capable of dumbing down Smith's more subtle insights without any help 
from Malthus. Look at the way he simplified Smith's much more complex 
treatment of agriculture (c.f. Brewer, Scottish Journal of Pol Econ, 
1995). 
 
What may well be true, and is perhaps what Henk intended, is that Ricardo 
was able to get away with a crude subsistence theory of wages because 
Malthus had shifted the terms of public debate. 
 
Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) 
 
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