ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Smith and Marx versus Malthus and the Beckerians on the Demographic Transition and the Industrial Revolution
Author: Lange Jérôme
In recent years, there has been a resurgence of the theme of the demographic transition in the economics literature, this theme being related to the question of the industrial revolution and economic development in developing countries. Two demo-economic relationships, and the articulation between the two, are involved in the theorisation of these macro-economic and macro-historic phenomena. The first of these is observed at the micro- or household-level. It is the interaction of wages (or income) with the determinants of population growth, i.e. fertility and mortality. The second demo-economic relationship in question concerns the macro- or society-wide level. The question here is the interaction of population growth and size with economic growth and income. In the theorisation of these two demo-economic relationships—which, together, quite comprehensively describe the interaction of population and the economy—some fundamental similarities appear between Smith and Marx, on one side, and Malthus and Becker on the other (an affiliation with Malthus was explicitly claimed by Becker in 1960). Two main points of divergence can be observed between the Malthusian and Beckerian and the Smithian and Marxian positions. The first is the predominant attention paid to fertility by the Malthusians, while Smith and Marx were more concerned with mortality (and morbidity). The second is the belief in decreasing returns to population, while in the Smithian framework (adopted by Marx) there are increasing returns to population size and concentration via the productivity-enhancing effects of the division of labour, entirely ignored by Malthus and the Malthusians. When the two points are combined, the Smithian and Marxian position offers a radically different way of theorising the interaction of population growth and economic development, which, it is held, is much more in line with historic and contemporary developments than the Malthusian theory that features so prominently in the economic literature to this day.
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