In his article, “Population and Poverty in Classical Theory: Testing a Structural Model for India, Nigel Crook attempts to examine the classical assumption that poverty and population growth are directly related factors in terms of a countries development process. He attempts to focus his effort by choosing to examine the validity of two of the more famous theorists’, Marx and Malthus, ideas on the existence of a link between population growth and poverty. Crook summarizes the essential tenets of both men’s argument and then attempts to apply them to the empirical data from a forty-year period in Indian history.
Crook is able to break down the Malthusian argument into three essential hypotheses. The first assumption was that sustained population growth would ultimately lead to starvation, as food production will be unable to support the expanding population. Malthus also predicted that “improvident” poor would be encouraged to marry at a young age as real wages increased, thus creating an overabundance of labor and a subsequent fall in wages and increase in poverty. His third hypothesis, according to Crook, was that poverty at a macroeconomic level reflected household poverty as increasing fertility led to increasing rates of population growth.
Marx’s views contrast sharply with the Malthusian school of thought in that Marx believed that no link between population growth and poverty existed. Marx argued that poverty is a result of the unemployment and landlessness, not high fertility rates among the poor, that is a byproduct of the capitalist system. He argued that the capitalist class would strengthen its control of the means of the production and employ that control as a means of oppressing the lower classes, regardless of an increase or decrease in the size of the lower classes. He was in accordance with Malthus, in that both believed that poverty would lead to high birth rates.
According to Crook, empirical evidence from India does not support the Malthusian assertion that population growth will lead to starvation. The growth rate of both food production and GNP has kept up with and at times outpaced the growth of the population. Crook’s analysis of the data also disproves the notion that population growth will be higher in poverty-stricken areas, in fact there is some evidence that population growth is higher in areas of less poverty.
Crook continues on to construct an analytical model that uses both exogenous and endogenous factors in order to ascertain the validity of both the Marxist and the Malthusian arguments. The fact that increases in rice yields proved sufficient to prevent an increase in poverty, despite increases in population, serves to further disprove fundamental tenet of Malthusian thought. However, population density, a proxy measurement for landlessness, is weakly affected by rice yields. This fact weakens Marx’s argument that unemployment and the capitalist classes ability to control the means of production cause poverty.
Crook did discover that literacy rates, especially women’s literacy rate, are negatively related to both poverty and population growth. Through his analysis of individual regions of India, Crook was able to weaken the Malthusian argument that high birth rates among the poor lead to a cycle of poverty through an increase in malnutrition. A family whose children had not yet entered the labor force, classifying them as dependents, would be more susceptible to poverty, but not inexorably driven towards poverty.
In conclusion, Crook attempts to assess the existence of a link between poverty and population growth, and found the link weak at best. He examines the validity of both the Marxist and Malthusian schools of thought through the lens of empirical data from India.