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. Would you like a short timeline of these ideas from enclosure through the New Poor Law?