Malthus & Bentham influenced the British Prime Minister not to fulfil a promise he had previously made to amend the Poor Law in order to encourage larger families (so as to gain a demographic advantage over France, with which England was at war.)
This was the first political fruit of Malthus's Essay on Population. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a bigger population did not mean a wealthier and stronger nation.
Pro-natalism does not increase national wealth unless the output of food and other necessities rises in equal measure. England's population was tiny relative to India. Yet it was conquering more and more of that vast subcontinent. Big famines were a feature of Indian life. They were a distant memory in England.
Malthus was appointed to teach History & Political Economy at Haileybury- the training college for youngsters between the age of 16 and 18 who had received a nomination for a job with the East India Company's Civil Service. (Parliament had separated the governance from the commercial function of the Company some two decades previously)
Malthus was paid 500 pounds a year. By contrast, Lord Macaulay, as member of the Governor's Council in India, was paid 10,000 pounds a year. Clearly, Malthus's role was small relative to the men who were actually in India. It was the latter who would provide the training and the specialist knowledge the cadets would need to advance in their career.
The Indian Civil Service- like that of England- was hierarchical. An officer in India had to suck up to his bosses and follow their instructions. He was expected to maintain the precedents set by his predecessors, only departing from them when his bosses signalled that he must do so. What he was taught as a teenager was irrelevant.
Speaking generally, the Government of the Raj was more generous with famine relief when there was no ongoing war. If the Viceroy- e.g. Lord Lytton (who had trained as a diplomat from age 18) was fighting a war (in his case, the second Afghan war) he would quote Malthus and say that there was no point offering famine relief. It was a law of nature that periodic famines curbed the growth of the native population. Under Lytton, the District Collector had to harden his heart or, if he defied orders, expect to get transferred to some shit-hole without any prospect for further promotion.
Malthus's employment as a lecturer at Haileybury led to his becoming a close friend of Ricardo. This was because his lack of any sort of empirical knowledge of Economics forced him to take a theoretical approach based on 'diminishing returns'. His successor, Richard Jones, was more empirical and optimistic. He laid emphasis on the gathering of reliable statistics and explained to his young students the very great variety and mutability of extant property regimes and methods of public finance. His essentially optimistic views are magnificently conveyed by Macaulay in his History of England which focusses on the growth in trade and industry alongside population growth and spreading affluence. It was obvious that rents could rise and profits could rise and real wages could rise simultaneously. True, there might always be an underclass living on subsistence wages. As the Good Lord said 'the poor ye shall always have with you.' Don't lose sleep over the matter.
Malthus died a little after the Great Reform Act. The balance of power was shifting towards the commercial middle class, away from aristocratic landowners. The Corn Laws still kept bread prices high- which meant higher rents but lower real wages- and this harmed the commercial and industrial interests. Malthus himself had made a case for high rents- the aristocrats spent freely thus keeping up 'effective demand'- but the ethos of Haileybury wasn't aristocratic. It was commercial. The Indian District Collector should try to increase the supply of food otherwise real wages would rise, rents would fall and some landlords would default under the 'Sunset law' (i.e. not be able to pay their tax on time). This would mean forced sales which might depress land prices and reduce the value of collateral sparking a credit crisis.
A District Collector who could not remit the full assessment would be in big trouble. The young cadets needed to understand this. The Collector was welcome to get the wealthy people of his District to contribute money to relieve dearth but he must not spend any of the revenue he collected on famine victims save with express authorization from his superiors.
The Collector did need to do what he could, using his influence to avoid famine. Otherwise there might be an exodus of labour and a vicious circle affecting rent extraction which would cause a structural revenue deficit. Sadly, in remote parts of the district, localized famines- where transport was difficult- were bound to occur periodically. The spread of the railways made it possible to dream, towards the end of the century, that the whole country could be covered by a Famine Code.
In a job-market paper titled-
Economic Ideas and Policy Implementation: Evidence from Malthusian Training in British Indian Bureaucracy
Eric Robertson writes
Public servants frequently fail to implement government policy as intended by principals.
If a District Collector failed to collect the Revenue due, his career would suffer. It is true that 'the man on the spot' had considerable leeway- but not when it came to his main job- viz. collecting money, not spending it.
Compassionate 'improving' Collectors, like A.O Hume, could raise funds locally for schools, public works, etc. provided they remitted the full assessment punctually. Sometimes, if the Collector had an influential patron on the Council, he could get approval for recurring expenditure on a specific project. But, if a new Governor came in and wasn't enthused, the thing would be axed. If the official protested, he would be side-lined and denied promotion and a 'gong'.
I investigate how exposure to economic ideas can alter implementation by government agents, focusing on the influence of Malthusian ideas on British bureaucrats in colonial India.
They were taught some shite at age 17 but, on arriving in India, were told to forget it. Had Malthus been to India? No! Fuck him. Also, guess how much he makes? 500 quid! You will be making 2000 quid in ten years- provided you keep your nose clean and remit every penny in the assessment.
In the Malthusian view, economic distress reduces population growth, raising incomes and ultimately resolving distress without any need for government intervention.
If Head Office sanctions famine relief or tax rebates, be as compassionate as you like. If they don't, harden your heart and say 'niggers breed like flies. Let them die like them. Such is God's will'.
Also, don't forget, the Speenhamland system is gone. The poor in England go into the Workhouse. You can scarcely treat heathens better than White Christians. Not that those who starved in Ireland were Christians. They were Catholics. The Pope is the Whore of Babylon.
Leveraging the death of Malthus in 1834 as a natural experiment,
That's illegitimate. It is obvious that Malthus's students would be older than those of his successor. They would have picked up habits of parsimony from a time when wars were more frequent and there was little cash to spare. A 'natural experiment' would compare people of the same age who were taught by Professors with opposite views.
I find that colonial officials who studied under Malthus at a bureaucrat training college
they learnt a bit of elementary Hindustani and acquired the elements of book-keeping etc. Their real training began in India.
implemented less generous fiscal policies in response to rainfall shortages, a proxy for local distress.
But they had been longer in the country and had more local influence. If they wanted there to be more provision of 'langars' etc., they knew whose arm to twist.
Across every common relief measure, Malthus trained officials provided between 0.10 and 0.25 SD less relief compared with peers trained by Richard Jones, a critic of Malthus.
Younger people were more likely to be Collectors in newly acquired Districts which were ryotwari or mahalwari. It was possible the assessment was too high. Some adjustments could be made. But if you acquired a reputation for being bad at collecting money you would be shunted off to some dead-end job in a malarial district.
Jones did not publish much. Those of his students who retained an interest in Economics read J.S Mill who went one up on Malthus by advocating family planning. Mill had been arrested in 1823 for distributing birth control pamphlets. Contraception was of interest to young men who were unlikely to marry heiresses. If you have too many children, you won't be able to provide for them. The family would sink in the social scale.
ICS men were aware that Indian prostitutes knew a thing or two about how to avoid pregnancy. It might be no bad thing if such knowledge gained greater currency among the natives.
The other big intellectual change which impacted Raj officials, was Darwin's theory- which drew on Malthus. Famine might be Nature's way of improving the race. In any case, as the Finns showed in the 1860s, for a nation to rise up economically and politically, it shouldn't waste too much money keeping losers alive.
The results offer new evidence concerning how economic ideas shape government policy through their influence on bureaucrats.
Sadly, bureaucrats- then or now- don't matter. Politicians do. Even if a lot of senior posts in India were sinecures for politicians who needed to repair their finances before returning to Parliament, power remained in their hands not that of the experienced 'old India hand'.
The plain fact is, nobody gave a shit about famines- even ones where White Irishmen died by the million. Wars mattered. Lose one and your head would roll.
Robertson's
main sample, ...is an unbalanced panel comprised of all district-years with data on rainfall and tax write-offs and whose collectors entered the civil service between 1805 (when Malthus was hired) and 1854 (when Jones retired). Nearly thirty percent of collectors in the panel studied under Malthus at Haileybury.
Jones had taught for 20 years after the death of Malthus. But his really wasn't a name to conjure with. One might say he promoted the empirical, experimental, approach of an Alan Octavian Hume. But this went hand in hand with a concern for gathering accurate statistics rather than relying on deductive logic to justify a policy choice. This suited the Civil Service mentality.
The study period begins in 1846
By which time Malthus was 12 years dead. The youngest of his students would have been 30. The oldest of Jones's students would have been 31. By all means compare such people. The trouble is, they would attain the rank of Collector only in the 1850's. The Mutiny, in 1857, changed everything. If the District had been loyal, a compassionate approach might be tolerated. Even then, the priority would be to repair the big hole military expenditure had made in the Government's finances.
due to the availability of data on rainfall and tax records; the panel ends in 1885,
About 30 years after the last Malthusian Collector held office.
the last year that I observe a Jonesian collector. This time period captures the transitional period as incumbent Malthusians are gradually promoted through the civil service and replaced by their more junior Jonesian counterparts.
No. The first Jonesian and last Malthusians would become Collectors in the Fifties. That's the only period when you can compare like to like. Otherwise, what you are picking up on is changed conditions in British India as wars decreased, transport improved and deficits fell.
The average collector is serving their twenty-third year in the civil service at the time
i.e. they are in their forties. England had greatly changed since such people were in their teens. It would be very strange if kids who recalled what they were taught by Malthus hadn't moved on to reading J.S Mill's Principles of Political Economy which came out in 1848. At the very least, they would read Macaulay.
that I observe them in the panel, largely due the fact that the position of collector is a more senior position in the civil service.
Some collectors, because of the District they were in or because of valour they had shown during the Mutiny, had a degree of discretion but many didn't have it and didn't want it. As for boring shite which you had to pretend to listen to when you were 17- it left no mark on you whatsoever.
Robertson does understand that you should compare people of roughly the same age taught by different professors. He says
introducing kernel weights in a second empirical approach, centered around cohorts which entered the college just before or after Malthus died. If the timing of the death of Malthus is random, then the assignment to training for cohorts entering within a narrow bandwidth of his death mimics a truly randomized assignment. Identification in this case relaxes the demand for balance of other policy determinants be balanced outright in favor of continuity across cohorts
The biggest determinant was precedent. You were safe enough if you did what was done by your predecessors. However if the Governor issued a new directive or statement, then you might be held personally responsible for implementing the new policy.
Malthus's essay did have a big political effect. But only actual politicians- powerful ones like Pitt- could make decisions reflecting Malthus's idea. Consider the 1832 Poor Law Royal Commission. Its members included Nassau Senior & Edwin Chadwick. But, had the Whigs split on some other issue, Tories might have strategically supported the Radicals to sink it.
Malthus's theory did not, by itself, shape policy in India. It merely helped justify parsimony. Lord Lytton pretty much quoted Malthus verbatim in explaining why he hadn't done much to help the starving. But, if pressed by some bleeding heart back in Blighty, he would have explained that eminent Indian loyalists had pleaded with him not to add to their financial burden. After all, they were having to pay for the second Afghan war. At that time, it seemed vital to check the Tzar. Defence was more important than economic ideology or compassion for starving Irishmen or Indians or other such 'lesser breeds without the law'.
At a later point, when the Indian middle-class began to resent having to pay higher taxes to finance famine relief, many Indians adopted an unspoken Malthusianism. I vividly recall the food shortages of 1974. Two years later the Government's forced sterilization campaign (men being vasectomized) reached its peak. Mrs. Gandhi, it turned out, was a naked Malthusian under her cloak of Cambridge bien pensant Socialism. Indeed, she had already said that the main cause of environmental degradation in India was the poor. They cut down forests. Also they crapped all over the place. Chee! Chee! The only thing to do was to chop their bollocks off.
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