Sismondi

Sismondi’s position on population was considerably different from the formulation pro­vided by Malthus. In his New Principles of Political Economy (1819) he argues against Malthus’s vision, challenging the idea of the availability of resources as the element regulating population growth, placing the change in population size in a national insti­tutional context, and declaring that “every nation very soon arrives at the degree of population which it can attain without changing its social institutions.

What is fundamental for Sismondi is therefore the institutional context in which the demographic dynamic works, because it greatly affects the overall size and growth of the population. Sismondi argued that behind the individual’s decision to create a family there was a rational calculation based on a trade-off between the benefits deriving respectively from marriage and celibacy. The benefits of marriage were represented by the “pleas­ures of conjugal life”, by “parenthood” and by “reciprocal understanding”. Celibacy on the other hand was generated by the consideration of “needs” and by “the fear of privation” (Sismondi 1819 [1990]: 513). According to Sismondi, the rational calculation about the choice of marriage applied only when workers did not impoverish. This hap­pened because the size of the working population depended exclusively on income and if this relation became disproportioned, it was always due to the fact that society had deceived the workers on this point. The deception was due to the fact that workers could not determine the exact amount of their income. This came about because the demand for labour depended on events beyond their control. Wage-work in manufacturing was a clear example of this situation: the worker did not know the level of demand for the products he was making and, once employed, could only make calculations envisaging an income that, if there was a drop in demand, was denied to him if he was fired (or laid off, or worked less hours, became seriously ill or disabled, and so on). While for Malthus and the classical authors, poor workers were responsible for their own situation of indi­gence due to their thoughtless behaviour, for Sismondi, on the other hand, they lost their “moral capacities” owing to the way the system of production operated, leading them at best to take decisions based on erroneous forecasts or, when their income was extremely low, not to make any calculation at all.