A Marxian-Malthusian view of poverty and development

Abstract The names of Marx and Malthus are often linked in disjunction but never in conjunction. Nevertheless, the thesis argued in this paper is that the two historically dominant theories of poverty, the Marxian and the Malthusian, are not inconsistent, but complementary; that a union of the two yields a basic fourfold typology of social classes by differential ownership of property and differential fertility; that this typology can also be viewed as a way of disaggregating the meaningless average of 'GNP per head' in a way which gives social content (i.e. a distributional dimension) to the concept; that the typology provides more satisfactory definitions of 'development' and 'overpopulation'; and that these four categories are improved, or usefully supplemented, by replacing the flowof income by the stock of wealth in each case. Also the universality of the typology is discussed along with some preliminary empirical considerations.