Malthusian Trap

Till the 18th century, the whole world was stuck in a trap, called the Mal-thusian trap, named after the English political economist Thomas Malthus, who described his theory in his work An Essay on the principle of popula-tion. The Malthusian trap is a condition in which standards of living won’t improve due to technology advances because improvements in technology will only increase population, which will reduce income per person. Many of the north-west European countries managed to escape this trap because they where characterized by a special economical and social pattern.

The Malthusian trap relies on the assumption that population increas-es with the growth of per capita income, not affecting the standards of liv-ing. Income per capita decreases with an increase of the population size, be-cause with a larger population, more people enjoy the same amount of wealth. In this way, the Malthusian trap leads to a stagnant demographic and economic growth, because any population increase would result in a de-crease of the standards of living and therefore to a decrease in the popula-tion. The way to escape this trap was by increasing the standards of living not through technological improvements (not effective in the long run) but by increasing the per capita income, through a reduction in the population growth.

Northwestern European countries could escape the Malthusian trap because they could decrease the fertility rate through a late age of marriage and a significant percentage of women not married at all, thanks to its par-ticular demographic pattern. Hungarian sociologist Hajnal drew the Hajnal line, which is a border that links Saint Petersburg, Russia and Trieste and that divides Europe in two different demographic regimes. The most im-portant features (of this pattern) involve composition of families and mar-riage: northwestern Europe is in fact characterized by a large percentage of women not married (10-25%, as pointed out by Alter and Clark) along with late average age of first marriage for women (24-26) while women mostly got married at an early age (16-19) in the Eastern Europe where there was more land per capita, according to the European Fertility Project (Coal and Watkins, 1986). The higher average age of the first marriage helped to de-crease the fertility rate because usually women did not bear children outside marriage, due to the influence of the Christian doctrine. Religion was both an incentive and a discouragement for having children. In fact, during the period of the Malthusian trap many people had more children that they wanted, because they either didn’t know how to control fertility or they didn’t see it as a socially and ethically acceptable action. Only the spread of the Enlightenment ideas during the 17th-18th century made finally birth con-trol within the marriage acceptable.

The different demographic pattern is not the only reason why the Eu-ropean countries could escape the Malthusian