The world’s population is now 7.4 billion people, placing ever greater demands on our natural resources. As we stand witness to a possible reversal of modernity’s positive trends, Malthus’s pessimism is worth full reconsideration. This Norton Critical Edition includes: · An introduction and explanatory annotations by Joyce E. Chaplin. · Malthus’s Essay in its first published version (1798) along with selections from the expanded version (1803), which he considered definitive, as well as his Appendix (1806). · An unusually rich selection of supporting materials thematically arranged to promote classroom discussion. Topics include “Influences on Malthus,” “Economics, Population, and Ethics after Malthus,” “Malthus and Global Challenges,” and “Malthusianism in Fiction.” · A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

The first major study of population size and its tremendous importance to the character and quality of society, this classic examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources.

Malthus has prepared in this work the general rules of political economy. He calls into question some of the reasonings of Ricardo and attempts to defend Adam Smith.

Malthus' life's work on human population and its dependency on food production and the environment was highly controversial on publication in 1798. He predicted what is known as the Malthusian catastrophe, in which humans would disregard the limits of natural resources and the world would be plagued by famine and disease. He significantly influenced the thinking of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and his theories continue to raise important questions today in the fields of social theory, economics and the environment. With an introduction by Robert Mayhew.

This book is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence. Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus's Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas.

A rich collection of current research in the growing field of social economics, covering such issues as culture, gender, ethics, and philanthropic behavior. The growing field of social economics explores how individual behavior is affected by group-level influences, extending the approach of mainstream economics to include broader social motivations and incentives. This book offers a rich and rigorous selection of current work in the field, focusing on some of the most active research areas. Topics covered include culture, gender, ethics, and philanthropic behavior. Social economics grows out of dissatisfaction with a purely individualistic model of human behavior. This book shows how mainstream economics is expanding its domain beyond market and price mechanisms to recognize a role for cultural and social factors. Some chapters, in the tradition of Gary Becker, attempt to extend the economics paradigm to explain other social phenomena; others, following George Akerlof's approach, incorporate sociological and psychological assumptions to explain economic behavior. Loosely organized by theme—Social Preferences; Culture, Values, and Norms; and Networks and Social Interactions”—the chapters address a range of subjects, including gender differences in political decisions, “moral repugnance” as a constraint on markets, charitable giving by the super-rich, value diversity within a country, and the influence of children on their parents' social networks. Contributors Mireia Borrell-Porta, Sjoerd Beugelsdijk, Joan Costa-Font, Elwyn Davies, Julio Jorge Elias, Marcel Fafchamps, Luigi Guiso, Odelia Heizler, Ayal Kimhi, Mariko J. Klasing, Martin Ljunge, Mario Macis, Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, Abigail Payne, Kelly Ragan, Jana Sadeh, Azusa Sato, Kimberley Scharf, Sarah Smith, Mirco Tonin, Michael Vlassopoulos, Evguenia Winschel, Philipp Zahn