Thomas Robert Malthus was born in 1766 southwest of London in Surrey. Malthus had an enormous impact on scholars of biology, human populations and economics. He entered Jesus College at Cambridge in 1784 and graduated four years later at which time he was ordained in the Church of England. He served for a brief time as a curate in a parish not far from where he was born. He later became a Fellow of Jesus College and also a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1805 he became a professor of history and political economy at the East India Company's college at Haileybury in Hertfordshire.

He is remembered not because of the holy orders that he took. Rather, his essays on population brought recognition to him worldwide. He was not optimistic with regard to the lot of working humans at the time. He believed that the means of subsistence would always...