W ORKERS AND O WNERS IN THE F ACTORY S YSTEM ( PART 2) Unit 5 Day 4.

WORKERS AND OWNERS IN THE FACTORY SYSTEM (PART 2)

Unit 5 Day 4

The “Dismal Science”

Alongside the material and social changes of the Industrial Revolution came the development of new fields of intellectual pursuit. In particular the development of industry, which demanded new and more precise ways of counting and quantitative analysis (statistics), for the first time encouraged the broad application of quantitative methods to practical problems – especially in the fields of economics, sociology, and demography.

At the forefront of this trend was the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1776-1834), a British economist and demographer who applied quantitative analysis to problems of population and food supplies. His insight that populations grow geometrically (exponentially) while food production only increase arithmetically (linearly) resulted in a rather bleak picture.

Rev. Thomas R. Malthus

The “Dismal Science”

Malthus observed that the amount of food that was produced did grow over time, but that its rate of growth was linear while population was exponential. As a result the amount of food produced formed an upper bound for the population. When populations approached the limits of food production “positive checks” (i.e. war, famine, disease) would force the population into rapid – though temporary – decline. These moments which were the result of statistical inevitabilities were referred to as “Malthusian Crises.”

The “Dismal Science”Malthus’s contemporary, stockbroker David Ricardo (1772-1823), applied the same sort of quantitative analysis to wages in the new industrial factories. Ricardo’s observation was that due to classical market forces of supply and demand the working class would always be forced to live at the minimum wage necessary to support life – the subsistence level.

Ricardo reasoned that rising wages go hand in hand with increases in population so that as wages increased so did the birthrate. As this happened, the supply of labor would go up (over time) while demand for workers would only increase slightly, resulting in more workers competing for wages. The increased competition would drive down wages to the point where workers could no longer support their families, resulting in a kind of Malthusian crisis that would result in poverty and – in extreme cases – widespread starvation which would reduce the supply of labor. This was widely popularized as Ricardo’s “Iron Law of Wages.”

David Ricardo

Social Criticism and Reform

The increasingly bleak view of society’s destiny put forward by Malthus and Ricardo combined with contemporary observations about the abysmal conditions facing workers in factories and mines undermined the sense of progress and optimism fostered by the Industrial Revolution and led many to take a hard look at the problems of the early nineteenth century.

One of the most important social critics was the German writer Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), better known for his close collaboration with Karl Marx. Engels, who came from a middle class background himself, accused his social peers of subjecting the working classes to worse conditions than any endured during the age of feudalism in order to further their own greed. His continuing examination of plight of the working classes in England radicalized him and would motivate him to seek sweeping social reforms. His most popular work among contemporaries, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), was based on his observations of the Manchester textile mills in which his father was a prominent shareholder.

Friedrich Engels