The Wealth of Nations Bundled with An Essay on the Principle of Population

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The collection contains the following two books with an active table of contents for readers to easy access to each chapter of the two books:

1) The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
2) An Essay on the Principle of Population – Thomas Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus was ten years old when Smith published The Wealth of Nations and he is most influential for his book An Essay on the Principle of Population. Where Smith saw a society benefiting from economic growth driven by specialization and free markets, Malthus had a contrary view.

Thomas Malthus took Adam Smith’s work “The Wealth of Nations” as a starting point to build his population theory from an economic perspective. However, Malthus Population Theory contradicts the Smith’s theory regarding the supply and demand and considers that they will never counterbalance each other because the accumulation of capital will not allow it. In his book An Essay on the Principle of Population Malthus predicted that the power of population growth would outstrip the ability of agriculture to provide enough food for the expanding population.

The ideas of Smith and Malthus still define the greatest challenge for our globalization today. Can capitalism continue to chase growth as an economic ideal without exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet without triggering the ultimate Malthusian catastrophe?

The collection is not only a must-read for learning the contributions of the two greatest minds to build so called classical economics but also a must-read to study the population theory with two different views founded by Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus.