Malthus

American  

[mal-thuhs] / ˈmæl θəs /

noun

1. Thomas Robert, 1766–1834, English economist and clergyman.

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Malthus British  

/ ˈmælθəs /

noun

1. Thomas Robert. 1766–1834, English economist. He propounded his population theory in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

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Example Sentences

Still, comparing Ehrlich to Malthus is something of an insult to the latter.

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 17, 2026

Ehrlich was often labeled a neo-Malthusian, a reference to the 18th-century British political economist Thomas Malthus, best known for “An Essay on the Principle of Population.”

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 17, 2026

Neo-Malthusian refers to the concepts of economist Thomas Malthus, who argued against human overpopulation in the 18th century; social Darwinism is a misapplication of biologist Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to validate conservative social hierarchies.

From Salon • Dec. 2, 2024

It was named for Thomas Malthus, who had advocated limiting births in the late eighteenth century in order to prevent the human population from growing beyond the capacity of the land to support it.

From Textbooks • Dec. 14, 2022

In 1798, writing under a pseudonym, Malthus had published an incendiary paper—An Essay on the Principle of Population—in which he had argued that the human population was in constant struggle with its limited resource pool.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee