Economist, born near Dorking, Surrey. He studied at Cambridge, and was ordained in 1797. In 1798 he published anonymously his Essay on the Principle of Population, which argued that the population has a natural tendency to increase faster than the means of subsistence, and that efforts should be made to cut the birth rate, either by self-restraint or birth control - a view which later was widely misrepresented under the name Malthusianism . In 1805 he became professor of political economy in the East India College at Haileybury where he wrote Principles of Political Economy (1820) and other works.