Thomas Malthus was born in England in 1766 and would become one of the most important political and philosophical thinkers during the Industrial Revolution. He discussed many ideas about the economics of the industrial revolution and what they meant for the people of England, and he was very well respected. However, his most famous work, Essay on the Principle of Population, was concerning the rapid growth of population in Europe and its effects on the economy. In this essay, Malthus stated his belief that the population will always grow to a point at which the ability to sustain life will be strained, and the lower classes will suffer greatly because of this. He believed that population would always tend to grow faster than the food supply, and the checks to this growth were war, famine, and disease. His ideas would influence David Ricardo's famous iron law of wages, and his ideas would be prevalent throughout the industrial revolution. He is important to this time period as he was one of the main critics to the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and presented some of the large and daunting negatives about this expanding growth of population and new wage working system to the public eye. His thought that wages would always be just barely enough to survive on for the lower class were spot on, as many people in the lower classes of living would suffer through these years with only the bare necessities to live on.
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