The development of T.R. Malthus's institutionalist approach to the cure ofpoverty: From punishment of the poor to investment in their human capital

William Godwin had a dual influence on Thomas Robert Malthus. First, Malthu s wrote the premier (1798) edition of his Essay on the Principle of Populat ion to refute Godwin's thesis that institutional reforms could halt the gro wth of population and thereby pave the way toward universal affluence. Ther e were only two checks on population, said Malthus in 1798: vice and misery . Second, pursuant to his discovery of virtuous checks on population in Sca ndinavia, Malthus reread Godwin's principal works. He now accepted Godwin's dual proposition that population growth could be stopped, even reversed, b y the virtuous check of moral restraint and that this check could be made o perational through institutional realignment. In the second (1803) edition of his Essay, Malthus argued, therefore, that poverty could be replaced by prosperity through institutional changes in the form of the introduction of universal education and gradual abolition of the poor law.