Dear Prudence: W.F. Lloyd on Population Growth and the Natural Wage

Abstract

This paper examines the explanation for a long-period or natural wage given by W. F. Lloyd, the third Drummond professor of political economy at Oxford University (1832–37). In the aftermath of the Captain Swing disturbances and continuing debates over the Poor Law, Lloyd argued that the natural wage would settle at a subsistence level because of the high population growth rate. The behaviour of the ‘labouring class’ in having more children was, however, a reasoned response, in conditions of ignorance and uncertainty, to the perceptions and incentives generated by the contemporary institutional setting. This underpinned Lloyd’s references to the importance of property rights for understanding poverty and the role of the Poor Law. While Lloyd owed a good deal to T. R. Malthus, his analysis was quite different in the type of reasoning attributed to the mass of the population. Lloyd’s position was also markedly different from that of his predecessors in the Drummond chair, Nassau Senior and Richard Whately.