Axel:

David Collard has argued that T. Robert Malthus' "fundamental rule" is that
"no children should be fathered unless the family itself can expect to
support them." The fundamental rule, however, will only work as an policy
framework for preventive population control, if "poor relief is zero."

In order to implement the fundamental rule, society has to construct
institutions (marriage, for example) which ensure that fathers support their
children (mothers can more easily be required to support children because,
as Malthus says, we can readily observe their connection to the children
they birth). We can connect this to a question David Levy asks about
Malthus: who bears the private cost of bearing and raising children?

Collard's fundamental rule suggests that Malthus argued the private cost of
children needed to be internalized in the family. If we treat that private
cost as a public responsibility (as you seem to suggest by calling children
"public goods"), the fundamental rule would be broken. Malthus feared that
this would ensure that prudential restraint would not function to maintain a
stable population/wage tradeoff, and society would incur "the black train of
distresses" arising from population increases.

The argument Malthus was responding to was made by William Godwin: that the
pursuit of freedom, equality, and communal benevolence required society to
take responsibility for raising children away from families (which in
Godwin's world would be dissolved anyway). You'll find Godwin's argument in
Political Justice (1793).


See David Collard, "Malthus, Population, and the Generational Bargain,"
History of Political Economy, 33:4 (2001), 697-716.; and David M. Levy,
"Some Normative Aspects of the Malthusian Controversy," History of Political
Economy, 10:2 (1978), 271-85.

Ross Emmett