The roots of ideas like austerity and artificial scarcity are mostly in property, class power, and early political economy, especially in 18th- and 19th-century Britain, where elites and theorists argued that poverty, hunger, and restricted access to resources were useful for discipline, labor control, and social order.

Main roots

One root is enclosure and privatization: common lands and shared resources were fenced off, turning previously shared or self-provisioning systems into markets controlled by owners. That created real scarcity for many people, even when food or land still existed in broader society, because access had been blocked or priced.

Another root is Malthusian thinking, the idea that population naturally outruns resources and that aid only worsens dependency. This became one of the strongest intellectual justifications for making relief harsh, limited, or humiliating, on the theory that hardship would force “responsibility.”

A third root is Benthamite utilitarian poor-law reform, which treated relief as something that should be designed to deter reliance on it. In practice, this fed workhouse systems and “less eligibility” policies, where assistance had to be made worse than low-wage labor so that the poor would keep working.

Who promoted it

A key early figure was Joseph Townsend, whose 1786 Dissertation on the Poor Laws argued that hunger and destitution were discipline mechanisms and that poor relief should be abolished or made far less available. He is often treated as a foundational source for the “starvation principle” in poor-law ideology.

Arthur Young is another important voice. He explicitly argued that lower classes “must be kept poor” or they would not be industrious, which is a blunt statement of the idea that scarcity disciplines labor.

Thomas Malthus popularized a broader version of the same logic, arguing that population pressure and relief systems made poverty worse and that restraint, not generosity, was the answer. His framework was not identical to Townsend’s, but it reinforced the same policy direction.

Deeper intellectual pattern

At a deeper level, the ideology rests on the claim that scarcity is morally productive: people supposedly work harder, obey more, and consume more carefully when they are constrained. In modern terms, this shows up in policies that normalize austerity, discipline welfare recipients, or treat abundance as dangerous because it might reduce labor compliance.

So the tradition is not one single school but a convergence of enclosure economics, poor-law deterrence, Malthusian population theory, and disciplinary social policy. 

Modern medicine, neuroscience and psychiatry strongly reject the idea that hunger and deprivation are useful motives for productivity. Instead, they show that hunger and deprivation are harmful to both physical and mental health, and that poverty and scarcity actively impair cognitive function, emotional regulation, and work capacity.

Starvation and severe undernutrition cause serious physiological damage, including intestinal atrophy, reduced acid secretion, malabsorption, and barrier defects in the gut, which increase the risk of infection and disease. These changes are not just temporary—effects can persist long after food is restored.

Clinical evidence shows that malnutrition leads to organ failure, muscle wasting, weakened immunity, and increased mortality. In medical settings, undernutrition is associated with worse outcomes in surgery, critical illness, and recovery.

Psychiatry and psychology show that poverty and deprivation have profound negative impacts on mental health. Research shows poverty is reciprocally linked to mental illness, where poverty increases risk of mental illness and mental illness can deepen poverty, creating a destructive cycle.

Studies document that poverty and food insecurity are associated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders, and that material deprivation creates chronic stress that impairs cognitive performance and emotional stability.

In high-poverty areas, rates of mental illness and poor health outcomes are significantly elevated, and reducing inequality and poverty correlates with better mental health outcomes.

Modern research shows that poverty and scarcity reduce cognitive bandwidth, decision-making quality, and self-control—not because poor people are inherently flawed, but because chronic stress and resource insecurity impair cogitative function in measurable ways. This directly contradicts the Townsend-Young view that hunger improves productivity.

The medical consensus is that adequate nutrition and material security are prerequisites for health, well-being, and the ability to function effectively, not obstacles to productivity.

Townsend and Young's claim that hunger "spurs and goads" people to productive labor is rejected by modern science. Instead, medicine and psychiatry show that deprivation damages physical health, mental health, cognitive function, and long-term productivity. The consensus is that poverty and hunger are problems to be solved, not useful tools for labor discipline.