Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Speenhamland system" in English language version.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)part 3(1)Another clergyman, Thomas Malthus, drew out Townsend's ideas. In 1798, he described 'the great difficulty' on the road to progress, 'that to me appears insurmountable'. His premise was twofold: (1) humans need food to survive, and (2) the passion between the sexes is ineradicable. Conclusion: population growth will always exceed food production.... But the Speenhamland system apparently encouraged people to marry as fast and procreate as prolifically as possible. Malthus was convinced England was teetering on the brink of a disaster as terrible as the Black Death, which wiped out half the population between 1349 and 1353.
Fears of declining food production were baseless as well. Agricultural production experienced a steady upward trajectory, increasing by a third between 1790 and 1830. "But while food was more plentiful than ever, a decreasing share of the English population could afford it. Not because they were lazy, but because they were losing the race against the machine.
The population explosion that so worried Malthus was attributable chiefly to the growing demand for child labor, not basic income [i.e., the Speenhamland system].
Economist David Ricardo (a close friend of Malthus) was equally skeptical. He believed basic income [i.e., the Speenhamland system] would create a poverty trap: the poor would work less, causing food production to fall, fanning the flames of a French-style revolution.
Ricardo's analysis was equally faulty. There was no poverty trap in the Speenhamland system: wage earners were permitted to keep at least part of their allowances when their earnings increased. And the rural unrest that so worried Ricardo was actually a result of price hikes caused by England's return to the gold standard (which he recommended), not basic income [i.e., the Speenhamland system].
Recent scholarship also highlights a mismatch between adoption of the policy and unrest; villages with and without the policy rioted in 1830. All English peasants suffered from the return to the gold standard, along with industrialization in the north and the invention of the threshing machine. Threshers (which separate the wheat from the chaff) destroyed thousands of jobs in one fell swoop, depressing wages and inflating the cost of poor relief.
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