6: Malthusianism in Wages

Walker considers Malthus's insistence that population increases at a geometrical ration (2-4-8-16) whereas production increases at an arithmetical one (2-4-6-8) - though his argument for this remains entirely flawed.

For population to increase geometrically, each couple must bear four children. While this is often seen in farming families, it is not the case for most townsfolk. In town, the most common arrangement is for each couple to have two children, which merely replace themselves. It's also observed that not all children survive to maturity and join the breeding stock, some are infertile, and some choose celibacy. This considered, couples who have more than two children provide spares to replace those lost to other families.

And for production to increase arithmetically, this would require fewer people to be engaged in acts of production. Each consumer is also a producer - so for the Malthusianism prophecy to hold true, the fourth generation of 16 persons must let half its workers lie idle in order to produce only 8 workers' worth of output. There is no plausible reason that this should be so.

In the century and a half between Malthus's theory and the date at which the present book was written, there has been much interest in population and productivity, and Malthus's math simply has not borne out.

(EN: And in the end, I'm not sure what any of this has to do with wages, nor does it seem to merit much consideration in that regard.)