Friday, September 14, 2012

Malthus Paragraph

                   
             Although a higher population provided more workers, families had to be aware of the amount of children they could support and the resources available to them. In Malthus's On the Principle of Population, he explained that if population was not checked it would out grow the resources on earth. Malthus suggested that people should only produce children that they could support. Malthus wrote that  "When the wages of labor are hardly sufficient to maintain two children; a man marries and has five or six. He of course finds himself miserably distressed.."(99). A large family that could not support them selves was not only bad for that family's moral but the entire population as well. Large families that relied on poor wages were most likely not to have good moral since the resources they required were not available to them. Due to their unhappiness they would blame the people around them for their greed and not themselves for producing children that they could not support. Large poor families were also bad for the population because their offspring would most likely be just as poor as their parents since they would have to work at a young age, skipping most of the education they needed to be truly successful. If an entire population consisted mostly of large poor families that would be bad because they would not be able to afford the resources available to them. People needed to take into consideration the amount of children they could actually support so that an healthy population could be maintained.

3 comments:

  1. Awesome use of a direct quote, it reflects the condition of the poor very well and supports your main points! Try to incorporate a little about population checks even though it isn't in your thesis, but you could always add it if you wanted.

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  2. Great job explaining the dynamic between the rich and the poor. Try portraying Malthus's ideas about the population checks.

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  3. Great job. The evidence and great analysis combine to form a great paragraph

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