Deborah Valenze is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College. A recipient of numerous fellowships, she has written four previous books on British culture and economic life. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and New York City.
This is a searching, serious, and thoroughly coherent critique of Malthusian thought and one of the most interesting and energizing book manuscripts that I have read in recent years. --Steve Hindle, author of On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550-1750 Moving beyond existing scholarship, Deborah Valenze offers an engaging and convincing new perspective on Malthus. --Timothy Alborn, author of All That Glittered: Britain's Most Previous Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush The Invention of Scarcity is a provocative account of how deeply held foundational beliefs made a very intelligent man unable to see his world as it was. --Thomas W. Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains The consequences of Thomas Malthus's thesis about populations and scarcity have been -- and still are -- devastating. Deborah Valenze brilliantly reveals what Malthus failed to see, especially about the resiliency of rural communities past and present. --Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World