Frederic Bastiat on Population and Economic Progress

Are there alternatives to operation of Malthusian positive check to keep race between growth of population and increase in of subsistence even? What are prospects that race could actuallv be won and material progress achieved? Few practitioners of dismal science in early phases of European capitalism gave more optimistic answers to these questions than did Claude-Fre'de'ric Bastiat (1801-50) in his posthumously published Harmonies economiques. Bastiat-described by Schumpeter as the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived' '-was an ardent advocate of laisserfaire and a believer in universal compatibility, indeed complementarity, of individual interests in a competitive society. Although neither original as a thinker nor innovator as an economic analyst, he was a sharp-eyed observer of contemporary economic and social trends. The excerpt presented here is concluding section in chapter Population'' that appeared as Chapter 16 in second edition of Harmonies. Having given a generally sympathetic presentation of Malthusian doctrines, in this section Bastiat turns to their vigorous criticism. In his attack on Malthus, Bastiat's emphasis on a social-historical interpretation of notion of subsistence is especially noteworthy. Bastiat sees human wants as expanding with civilization's progress in an ever increasing spiral. The means of existence are not a fixed quantity-they ''depend upon one's way of life, on public opinion, on habits.' Once a better material position is acquired, downward movement on social ladder is contemplated with repugnance and resisted through exercise of foresight and by resort to infallible of preventive limitation. While Bastiat plainly doubted effectiveness of preventive check in its Malthusian variant, he had no difficulty in envisaging effective working of preventive check informs other than practice of chastity. '' Glossing over means, he emphasizes motivational forces''towards self preservation and protection of one's family -as all-important. Since he could not envisage situations in which these forces would drive individuals toward behavior that would be socially less than benign, Bastiat's conclusions on relationship between population change and economic and social progress were uniformly sanguine. Many of trends he anticipated were indeed confirmed by subsequent developments in industrial societies. However, their general validity remains as controversial as it was 130 years ago

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