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Thomas Robert Malthus
(1766—1834) political economist
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(1766–1834)
English economist and clergyman. He was a pioneer of the science of political economy and is known for his theory, as expressed in Essay on Population (1798), that the rate of increase of the population tends to be out of proportion to the increase of its means of subsistence; controls on population (by sexual abstinence or birth control) are therefore necessary to prevent catastrophe.