Thomas Robert Malthus was born in 1766 in Dorking, England, just south of London. He was the second of eight children. His father had worked with Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hume. He was privately educated by his father and by tutors when he was a child. When he was eighteen, Malthus went to Cambridge, which is a Jesuit college. Malthus became a curate of England, in Albury while at college. He took up his parochial duties in 1796.
             In 1805, he was selected to be the professor of Political Economy at the college at Haileybury, which is a college developed for the education of civil servants of the East India Company. For pretty much the rest of his life he remained a professor at Haileybury, which made him the world's first academic economists.
             Malthus was also an author. He wrote an essay entitled Principle of Population, which outlined his views on population and how it affected the economy and general well-being of an area. His main theory was that overpopulation is man's greatest obstacle to human progress. He believed that population grows faster than food can to feed all the people being born. Actual population growth is kept in line with food supply growth by things like postponement of marriage, starvation both of which are characterized by "misery and vice". Actual (checked) population growth is kept in line with food supply growth by "positive checks" (starvation, disease and the like, elevating the death rate) and "preventive checks" (i.e. postponement of marriage, etc. that keep down the birthrate), both of which are characterized by "misery and vice".
             Malthus believed that people have a tendency to push population above the food supply and because of this tendency, it is pointless to try to help people in lower classes by giving them higher incomes and more food because they will keep having children and the incomes can't keep up with this. This tendency causes it to be impossible to ...