Malthus

Ideas matter and have consequences are phrases heard in political discourse frequently. Policy requires that a prescription of action now be promulgated that produces desirable results soon afterwards. Policy analysis is serious stuff. Money is spent, coercive authority mobilized, all sorts of effects (some hidden or accidental) happen, and, maybe, we even know what we are trying to accomplish. The task environment, the field of action, poses complications and gaps in knowledge, so we use shorthands, theories and ideologies. All this is the field of policy analysis. An example of an early policy analyst, who used theory and convincing ideas, to influence public policy is Malthus, the first academic chair in the nascent field of political economy.

In the late eighteenth century, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus wrote a long essay about poverty and population, An Essay On the Principle of Population. He took issue with the optimism with that era's reformers, particularly his father, who saw education and publicly supported charity as the path to a good society. Rather, Malthus argued that unchecked population growth would inevitably exceed food supply, driving more and more people into destitution and undermine all efforts to improve the plight of the poor. Population, he reasoned, expands exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16, 32) while food, the limiting factor of population, grows arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10). The gap between the growth of food and mouths to feed creates a population crash. Ecologists would claim that the population has exceeded its carrying capacity. The end result, famine, remains inexorable, a kind of iron law--not responsive to policy remedies.

Alas, the well intentioned but wrong-headed prescriptions of reformers would founder on the lack of restraint among the working people. Malthus's grim theory gained wide influence: it dampened social reform, provided a tidy explanation of poverty, exposed the futility of doing anything about poverty, and promoted popular discussion about public policy. His theory provided a rational of benign neglect. People starved.

Others labeled the elaboration of Malthus's method of analysis the "dismal science." The label has been applied both to demography and economics, fields of study which were not formalized when Malthus wrote, but claim him as an pioneering, seminal thinker. In fact, Malthus was given the first academic post in the nascent field of Political Economy, a chair at Oxford University, funded by the British East India Company. His theories about populationism, citing unbridled as the cause of poverty, and what was later dubbed benign neglect

The field of public policy can now claim the label dismal science. Malthus's argument that public policy intervention produces few real solutions, wastes resources, and engenders disappointment prevails today. The common belief appears to be that much that the government does is either done badly or disingenuously. This doctrine comports with the conservative ideology, refuting the liberal prescription of active governmental intervention.

The crisis of confidence in the efficacy of public policy may become a defining characteristic of our age. Our public paralysis begets the standing policy of benign neglect, the triumph of laissez faire. The patient's symptoms worsen, the cure is not available. Public dissatisfation with the authors of national policy, the President and Congress, wilts to record lows.

Yet, no text in public policy entertains the premise that public policy is failing to address the needs of the American people. After all, a course in public policy attempts to explain how government works, not how it fails to work. However, the collective doubt looms so large that this theme will be woven into the fabric of this on-line textbook. Hopefully, if we can ascertain how public policy might work better.

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Malthus: The Dismal Science