Joseph Townsend
British geologist
Died when: 77 years 219 days (931 months)Star Sign: Aries
Joseph Townsend (4 April 1739 – 9 November 1816) was a British medical doctor, geologist and vicar of Pewsey in Wiltshire, perhaps best known for his 1786 treatise A Dissertation on the Poor Laws in which he expounded a naturalistic theory of economics and opposed state provision, either outdoor or otherwise.
In A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, Townsend criticized relief as allowing the population to swell by protecting the weak (see his parable of the goats and dogs on the Island of Fernandez), and thus called for the abolition of any state relief in pursuance of greater productivity, as "it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour." (Townsend, 1971:23) In another statement, he more explicitly said: "[Direct] legal constraint [to labor] . . . is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, . . . whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. . . .
Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse." Townsend has been credited with anticipating Thomas Malthus' argument against public welfare assistance in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
Unlike Malthus, however, Townsend advocated a system of social insurance through compulsory membership of friendly societies, which would meet the health and burial costs of the poor.
Related People
British geologist
.jpg?width=300)
British geologist
British geologist