The Ration and the Ratio

by Thomas Robert Malthus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I am told that the comparison is now made on every side. Machines owned by a few, which can reckon, write, judge and direct, have begun to take the places of clerks and managers, and machines of a cruder sort the places of labourers. Those who are displaced will be kept, it is said, as the Roman populace was kept: with a ration of corn and a seat at the games. Some say this in alarm and some in hope. I have heard both, and I observe that neither party has yet asked the first question I would ask of any scheme for keeping a people. It is not whether they will be fed. It is how many of them there will be, what will keep their number equal to the ration, and where the ration itself is to come from.

I have spent my life asking that question and I have been abused for it in every decade since 1798. I shall ask it once more. The comparison with Rome deserves to be run through the numbers, and not merely admired as a figure of speech.

I. What Rome actually did

The comparison is usually made with a line of Juvenal, and it is worth reading the whole sentence, because the part that is not quoted carries the sense. The people, he says, have long since cast off their cares, since the day they ceased to sell their votes to anyone. Once they gave out commands, the rods of office, legions, everything; now they hold themselves in, and anxiously desire only two things, panem et circenses. The satirist does not say that bread and games made the people idle. He says that they had already lost their part in the government, and that the bread and games were what remained to them afterwards. The ration came at the end of a process. It was not the cause of it.

What was that process? I described it in the chapter of my Essay on the checks to population among the Romans, and I see no reason to alter the description. As the land of Italy was gathered into the hands of a few great proprietors, the citizens who had farmed it were successively deprived of the means of supporting themselves. In a modern state such men would have had one resource left, that of selling their labour to the rich. I wrote then, and I quote myself, that "from this resource they were completely cut off by the prodigious number of slaves, which, increasing by constant influx with the increasing luxury of Rome, filled up every employment both in agriculture and manufactures."

I ask the reader to notice the words every employment. Rome was a society in which owned labour had taken the place of free labour in the field and the workshop alike. The free citizen did not lack strength or skill. He lacked a buyer. The rich man who might have hired him already owned his labourers, and owned labourers do not have to be paid.

That is the true ground of the comparison, and it is a stronger one than the men who make it seem to know. The ancients had their owned intelligences too. The Greek secretary who kept a senator's accounts, the steward who managed his estate, the physician, the tutor, the copyist were very often slaves. When the comparison is made today, it should be made with them, and not merely with the gladiators.

What followed from it? A custom which I called strange and preposterous, "which, however, the strange and unnatural state of the city might perhaps require, that of distributing vast quantities of corn to the poorer citizens gratuitously." Gaius Gracchus made the corn cheap and Clodius made it free. By Julius Caesar's time the list of those who drew it had grown so long that, as Suetonius records, he cut it from three hundred and twenty thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand, and he provided that the places of those who died should be filled each year from men not on the list. "Two hundred thousand received this distribution in Augustus's time," I wrote, "and it is highly probable that a great part of them had little else to depend upon."

II. Running the ratios on the Roman ration

Here I must do what my critics have always found tedious, and reckon.

The ration was given to each adult male citizen on the list. I observed that "the quantity was not enough for a family, and too much for an individual." The consequence followed from the design. A ration sized for one man cannot support a man's children. It does not encourage early marriage, as our English Poor Laws do by giving relief in proportion to the size of the family. It keeps alive the men who already exist and makes no provision for any more. The Roman dole therefore did not do what my principle would lead us to fear from such a measure: it did not by itself multiply the poor of the city. Something else kept their numbers down. I pointed to it, from the manner in which Plutarch speaks of the exposure of children among the poor, and I concluded that many infants were destroyed even while the laws of Augustus offered privileges to fathers of three children. That was the check. It was a positive check, and it was a cruel one.

Nor was this all. Caesar's list was a fixed number, filled from outside only as deaths left vacancies. The state did not try to feed everyone who might come. It limited the number it would feed, and so the ration grew by fixed additions while the population pressing to share it would have grown, unchecked, by doublings. I do not commend Caesar's motives, which were political, but he understood the principle better than many of our parish overseers. A provision promised to all who come draws claimants faster than any granary can fill. Once he had decided to feed a crowd, he had also to decide how large a crowd, and to forbid it to grow.

Where did the corn come from? Not from Italy, or less and less so. I wrote that "the pernicious custom of importing great quantities of corn to distribute gratuitously among the people had given it a blow, which it never afterwards recovered", meaning Italian agriculture, and that the Roman authors complained that Italy, which had once exported corn, had become "dependent on all the provinces for its daily bread." The city's subsistence was drawn from Sicily, from Africa and from Egypt, by tribute. In plain terms, Rome fed its idle citizens on the produce of other men's land, taken by conquest.

So the Roman ration rested on three supports: a fixed list, a severe check on children, and a granary filled by force from abroad. Remove any one of them and the system fails. Those who say lightly that we shall keep our displaced clerks as Rome kept its plebs should say which of the three they mean to supply.

III. What the machine multiplies

Now I turn to the present case. I must speak of a world I did not live to see, and I shall try to keep to what I have been told and to what the principle requires.

The first thing to ask is whether the new machines alter either of my two ratios. Do they enlarge the power of population? Clearly not. Do they enlarge the power of the earth to produce subsistence? Here I must be careful, for every age believes it has escaped the limit, and every age is partly right for a while. I am told that machines are entering agriculture also, and I do not doubt that they will make the tillage of land already in use more exact and less costly. But a machine that reckons does not add an acre. It may improve the cultivation of a field, but it cannot extend the field. When acre has been added to acre until all fertile land is occupied, any further increase of food must come from the melioration of land already tilled, and that fund, from the nature of all soils, yields less with each addition. A clerk's machine, however clever, is not a new continent.

What, then, do the new machines multiply without limit? Here the comparison with Rome comes into its proper focus, and I believe the point has been missed. They multiply the games.

Consider the two halves of Juvenal's pair as an economist must. Bread is the produce of land. It increases, at best, in the arithmetical ratio, and every loaf must be grown, carried, ground and baked. The games are the produce of labour and contrivance. In Rome they were costly, because every chariot race needed horses, drivers and a circus, and every show of beasts needed beasts brought alive from Africa. They were limited as bread was limited, by the cost of their materials.

I am told that the new machines can now produce entertainment of every kind, stories, pictures, music, contests and conversation, at a cost which approaches nothing, and in a quantity that has no natural bound. If that is so, the two halves of the Roman pair have been separated in a way no Roman could have imagined. Spectacle has been released from the arithmetical ratio. It may now be multiplied as fast as people can watch it, while bread remains tied to the soil.

I call that a dangerous proportion. A people kept on unlimited games and limited bread is in a worse position than the Roman plebs, because its rulers can satisfy every want except the one that decides how many of it can live. The Roman crowd, given too little bread, rioted, and in this way the crowd itself acted as a check upon its masters' neglect. A crowd given abundant amusement may not notice the shortage of bread until the shortage has already done its work. I do not assert that this will happen. I say that the comparison, honestly pursued, points there, and that those who make it should consider the possibility.

IV. Who needs the ration?

There is a second point, and it comes from my own quarrel with Mr. Ricardo and M. Say, which I lost in my lifetime and do not consider settled.

They held that production creates its own demand, and that capital can always find employment if men will only save. I denied it. I argued that "the consumption and demand occasioned by the persons employed in productive labour can never alone furnish a motive to the accumulation and employment of capital." A manufacturer does not build a mill because he can make cloth. He builds it because he expects someone to buy the cloth at a price that repays him. That is what I called effectual demand. When labour-saving machinery is introduced and the produce of the country increases faster than the demand for it, labour is thrown out of employment and goods go unsold. I argued also that a country needed a body of consumers who do not produce material goods, the landlords, the professions, the servants of the state, whose spending keeps up the demand by which productive industry is rewarded. My contemporaries thought this a strange doctrine for the author of the Essay to hold, since in it I had been so severe on the idle poor. They did not see that the two arguments were the same argument viewed from opposite sides.

Apply it now. Suppose the owners of the new machines can produce everything that clerks, managers and labourers used to produce, at a fraction of the cost. To whom will they sell it? The displaced have no wages. The owners are few, and however luxurious they are, they cannot eat a nation's bread or wear a nation's cloth. The produce has been multiplied, and the purchasers have been dismissed. In that case a ration paid to the displaced is not only charity. It is the owners' market. Bread and games, or their money equivalent, would be paid to the multitude because the machines require buyers, quite apart from any compassion for the hungry.

This, I think, is the part of the Roman comparison that is most often inverted. It is said that the ration is what the masters give to keep the crowd quiet. In Rome that was partly true. In the economy now being built it may be more nearly true that the ration is what the masters must give to keep their own capital employed. The recipients of such a ration would be, in the strictest sense, the unproductive consumers whose necessity I was laughed at for asserting. Whether this gives them any power over those who pay them depends on whether they know it. Juvenal's plebs, who no longer had votes to sell, did not know it.

V. The wage as a school

I come now to the ground on which I stand most firmly, and on which I expect to be most disliked.

Throughout my writing on the Poor Laws I held one thing above every other: the labouring man's condition can be durably improved only if he can see the connection between his own conduct and his own condition. Wages, for all their hardness, taught that lesson. A man who considered marriage looked at what he earned and what a family would cost, and he deferred marriage or did not, as prudence advised him. This is the preventive check in its virtuous form, moral restraint. It is the only means of keeping population level with subsistence which is consistent with virtue and happiness. Every other check resolves itself into some form of vice or misery.

The English parish allowance weakened that lesson. It paid relief according to the number of children and so told the labourer that his family was the parish's concern rather than his own. Every man who is displaced, and who is told that the ration will see to him, receives the same message more completely. Where nothing he does affects what he receives, prudence has nothing left to teach him. I do not say that he will therefore multiply without thought. I say only that the school in which the labouring classes learned to connect their condition with their decisions will have been closed, and that nothing has yet been proposed to replace it.

In fairness I must record something I have been told and could not have foreseen. In the wealthiest nations of this age, the preventive check is now said to operate with a strength I never witnessed in any people. Marriages are late, families are small, and in some countries the numbers are expected to fall. I do not inquire here into the means, which I would not in every case call moral restraint, and the question of means is not a small one to me. But I accept the fact, and it means that the danger I have described is not that the displaced will overrun their ration within a generation. The danger is of another kind.

The danger is that when people no longer earn their own subsistence, every check on their numbers, every encouragement to marry, every inducement to have children or to forbear, passes into the hands of whoever controls the granary. Augustus, alarmed by the want of children among the orders that mattered to him, passed laws to reward marriage and penalise the unmarried. I recorded that thirty-four years after the law of Augustus respecting marriage was passed, the Roman knights demanded its repeal, and that its renewal under Trajan showed how little it had done. The emperor who fed the people tried also to manage how many of them there were, and he failed, as such management usually fails. A distribution which can be withdrawn can also be made conditional. Those who receive the ration of the new owners should ask, before they accept it, what conditions it may one day carry.

VI. Which check?

In 1803 I wrote a passage that I afterwards struck out, and which has been quoted against me ever since. A man born into a world already possessed, I said, "if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food." And then: "At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him."

I struck it out because the image was crueller than the argument required, and because it was read as contempt for the poor, which I never felt. But I ask the reader to look again at its middle clause: if the society do not want his labour. In 1803 that was an unusual case, the case of a bad harvest or a ruined trade. The comparison with Rome is now made so often because many fear that it will become the common case, and that a large part of mankind will soon be people whose labour no one wants. The question I once asked of a single unwanted man is being asked of whole classes. I should be dishonest if I pretended that my earlier answer can simply be repeated. It cannot. When a whole people is displaced by machinery that it did not choose and does not own, the fault is not in their imprudence. A rule designed to discipline the individual is no fair rule for that.

What my principle does still require is this. Some check always operates. The question for a society is never whether population and subsistence will be kept equal, because they will be, but which of the checks will keep them so. Rome's answer was a fixed list, exposed infants and a granary filled by conquest, which is to say the positive check managed from above. That is the answer the comparison invites, and it should be refused.

The other answer is the one I gave my own age and still give. Strengthen the prudential check by every means consistent with virtue: by education, by giving the labourer a stake that his own conduct can enlarge or lose, and by keeping the connection between what a man decides and what becomes of him and his children. In my time I argued for parochial schools and for savings banks, so that a working man might own something and learn foresight by owning it. If the work of the age is now to be done by owned machines, the displaced will learn foresight only if they own some part of those machines. A ration, however generous, will not teach it, and amusement, however plentiful, will not either.

I am called gloomy, and I have been called worse. But I have never said that misery is necessary. I have said that it follows when we refuse to look at the proportion between the mouths and the means. The comparison with Rome is useful only if it is pursued to that proportion. The machines will give an abundance of games. Bread will still come from the soil, at the old slow rate. Each reader may judge whether a people with endless entertainment and a fixed ration, receiving both at the pleasure of a few owners, is in the condition of free men. I know which check I should prefer to depend on.

The numbers have not changed. Only the claimants have.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Kalendās Novembrēs (29 October 2026), ā Thōmā Rōbertō Malthusiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Thomas Robert Malthus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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