Welfare of the individual and the group: Malthus and externalities.

OBERT MALTHUS is exemplary in presenting a basic pessimism in his assessment of the prospects of the labouring poor— a pessimism about the long-term growth possibilities of an essentially organic, agrarian economy that he shares with his fellow classical economists writing in the second half of the eighteenth, and the early nineteenth, centuries. 2 He is, of course, well known for identifying what he regarded as the principal obstacle to the enhancement of their well-being. In so doing he used an intriguing metaphor to identify the salient characteristics of that ever-present threat: