Population studies

Tuesday, November 11, 2025 09:08PM

Franklin had a major influence on the emerging science of demography or population studies.[206] In the 1730s and 1740s, he began taking notes on population growth, finding that the American population had the fastest growth rate on Earth.[207] Emphasizing that population growth depended on food supplies, he emphasized the abundance of food and available farmland in America. He calculated that America's population was doubling every 20 years and would surpass that of England in a century.[208] In 1751, he drafted Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. Four years later, it was anonymously printed in Boston and was quickly reproduced in Britain, where it influenced the economist Adam Smith and later the demographer Thomas Malthus, who credited Franklin for discovering a rule of population growth.[209] Franklin's predictions on how British mercantilism was unsustainable alarmed British leaders who did not want to be surpassed by the colonies, so they became more willing to impose restrictions on the colonial economy.[210]

Kammen (1990) and Drake (2011) say Franklin's Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind (1755) stands alongside Ezra Stiles' "Discourse on Christian Union" (1760) as the leading works of 18th-century Anglo-American demography; Drake credits Franklin's "wide readership and prophetic insight."[211][212] Franklin was also a pioneer in the study of slave demography, as shown in his 1755 essay.[213] In his capacity as a farmer, he wrote at least one critique about the negative consequences of price controls, trade restrictions, and subsidy of the poor. This is succinctly preserved in his letter to the London Chronicle published November 29, 1766, titled "On the Price of Corn, and Management of the poor."[214]

Tuesday, November 11, 2025 09:09PM