Elegant and clear analysis of the wealth and poverty of nations

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	• A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World) Gregory Clark Princeton University Press, 2007 - 440 pages average customer review:based on 36 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Elegant and clear analysis of the wealth and poverty of nations

The topic of this thrilling book, 20 years in the making, is nothing less than the history of civilization, from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution to today. Rather than relating history as a story of kings, Caesars, popes, prelates and presidents, Gregory Clark tells the story through economic data, much of which is the result of his own analysis of documentary evidence. Almost every other page contains a beautiful graph, table or chart illuminating some dimly lit bit of history. And Clark's detours are almost as wonderful as his main argument. His writing is elegant and clear, his sense of humor present but not annoying. While this book has outraged some commentators, it's hard to see why, given the caution with which Clark presents his conclusions. Most likely, the flash point is his stress on culture as enabling and retarding economic growth - views that sometimes get wrongly equated with racism. We recommend this book to anyone who wants to quantitatively enhance his or her conception of human history.

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New Thinking that Deserves Careful Consideration

Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution (IR) occur in 18th-century England, and not some other time or place? Why did it make some areas even poorer? Clark suggests culture, not exploitation, geography, or resources.

After extensive review of documents from early England, Clark concludes that stable political, legal and economic institutions existed in England long before industrialization. Thus, they were not the direct cause of its IR - what they did accomplish was to encourage people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts (violence and impatience), and adopt hard work, rationality, and education as values. Prior improvements (averaging a paltry 0.1%/year) had been lost through concomitant population growth - bringing overall standards of living back down to prior levels. (However, why this did not continue after the IR was not made clear.)

One startling observation in the book is that the average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 B.C. Life expectancy was also no better (30-35 years), and stature (measure of nutrition and exposure to childhood disease) was higher in the Stone Age. In addition, the hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian.

In sub-Saharan Africa, however, material consumption is now below the pre-industrial norm. They have been trapped in the Malthusian era, acerbated by modern medicine's reducing the minimum required to subsistence to below Stone Age levels. Thus, gaps in income inequality between societies has increased.

Clark's research led him to conclude that a major explanation of why the IR took place first in England is that it benefited from the extraordinary fecundity of its upper classes, vs. China and Japan. England also benefited from access to raw materials from its colonies - something not available to Asia. (Other economists believe that this is the real reason England's standard of living took off in the early 1800s.)

Missing from "A Farewell to Alms" is any in depth thought regarding why Asia has now achieved such dramatic growth. Their achievements argue strongly for the importance of effective governmental leadership. Regardless, another important Clark conclusion is that prescriptions from the World Bank and medical leaders are ineffective.

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The Descent of Economic Man

Did you know that the average person's life in the Stone Age was no worse then that of the average 17th century Briton? That given their more varied nutrition and lesser workload, the lives of hunter gatherers were superior to both? That the Black Death caused a major improvement in European standards of livings during the 14th to 16th centuries? That the institutional conditions for economic growth, as normally understood, were better in the Middle Ages then they are today?

These are only few of the mind blowing and well documented claims put forward in Gregory Clark's breathtaking - there is no other word - "A Farewell to Alms". Clark confronts the greatest mystery of human history - why did the West leap forward, breaking away from millennia of stasis, to create the modern, industrial world? Clark not only refutes most of the common wisdom about the rise of the West, but also brings forth an astonishing array of data in support of a radically new interpretation. No doubt some specialists would disagree with Clark's conclusions; I have my doubts, too - but Clark's methodology, his thoroughness, and the rigorous manner in which he addresses a huge quantity of data makes "A Farewell to Alms" an instant classic and a model for all economic history.

Clark describes world economic history as essentially a two-phase story. The first phase, from the dawn of time to the Industrial Revolution, featured a barely changing world governed by the cold and remorseless laws of Malthus and Darwin. But those same laws brought on a slow revolution, and a new phenomenon was emerging - first in Europe, and slower in India, China and Japan - Economic Man.

Reverend and Economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was the first to thus describe the world economy: in his model, people's wages were equal to the subsistence level; whenever wages increased, population increased, and pushed wages back to subsistence. Therefore, Clark argues, throughout history population was at equilibrium - whenever new technology increased productivity, the result was not higher living conditions, but higher population. Thus the difference in living conditions between times and places were caused by such effects as the different in hygiene level (improvements in hygiene ironically pushed down living standards by allowing people to survive on meager wages) and death by war and pestilence (which, equally ironically, pushed up wages).

And then, in the 18th century, in a relatively small island nation, everything changed. The Industrial Revolution transformed the world, or at least England, Europe, the US, Australia and nowadays China. Mankind broke free of the Malthusian trap. Productivity growth rose in two orders of magnitude; Productivity gains no longer led only to population increases, but also to increase in the standards of living. The West today is rich beyond the wildest dreams of its 17th century ancestors.

What happened? Most explanations suggest that Western Institutions were somehow improving: Markets were becoming freer, property rights more secure, the legal system more efficient, etc. Perhaps technology led returns on investment in human capital to increase

Not so, says Clark. Markets were much less regulated in pre modern times then they are today. Property rights, in England at least, more secure. And the return on human capital - as measured, for example, in the difference between the wages of master artisans and simple workers - decreased or stayed unchanged.

Furthermore, during the Industrial Revolution, hard work didn't pay; Inventors and Innovators repeatedly failed to reap the fruits of their inventions. Despite the gigantic leap in textile productivity, hardly anyone became really rich from textiles. Competition and knowledge leaks drove prices down, and the benefits were the consumer's, not the manufacturers'.

What changed, Clark argues, is not the environment in which the economic actors operated. The actors themselves were no longer the same.

In a Malthusian world, population was at equilibrium: barring efficiency growth, it did not increase. But while failing to increase, it was nonetheless very dynamic: a Darwinian struggle for survival, in which the Rich had many offspring, and the poor few. Thus, Clark suggests, through a combination to cultural transfers and Darwinian selection, the population changed. Upper class qualities spread to lower classes; Society was becoming Middle Class; Economic Man was born.

Or shall we say, selected?

As evidence, Clark sites several changes that did happen between 1000-1750: The Rise of Literacy, the Fall of Interpersonal Violence, the lengthening of working hours and the decrease in the time preference of money, which meant that people learned to postpone satisfaction. "Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work [became] values for communities that... [had been] spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving." (p.166)

The reason this process happened first in Europe and not in China or India, Clark argues, is because Europe was the most Darwinian. In other societies, the difference in birth rate between rich and poor was not as dramatic.

Clark's book is both exciting and troubling. Because it argues that the difference between the rich and poor nations is not in the way they organize their economies but in Cultural and likely genetic differences, it challenges both the right wing belief in the superiority of free markets, and the left wing faith in the equality of mankind. As a believer in both, I am troubled.

I don't think Clark's book is complete: If the differences between Modern and Pre Modern people are genetic, they should be discoverable in our DNA. If they are cultural, the mechanism of cultural transmission should be explored. And Clark doesn't say anything about democracy - is it a coincidence that democracy flourished side by side with the economy?

"A Farewell to Alms" is hands down the best book I read all year, and one of the best books on history, economics, or sociology I know. It is everything I look for in non-fiction - smart and elegantly written, challenging and illuminating, and grounded in both theory and empirical data. This one's for the ages.

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Both great and naif

Since the sixteenth century the scholarly community in the West has accepted the existence of scientific laws. Over the past four centuries modern science has been preoccupied with the discovery and practical application of these laws. This has revolutionized both the natural sciences and human civilization. While the humanities have also made progress during this time, their results have been less remarkable. They have been unable to account for the forces underlying the changing fortunes of human society. The book by Gregory Clark is another heroic attempt to discover the laws underlying the course of human history.

In 1930 Corrado Gini published his Harris Foundation lecture: "The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population". Gini understood much of the wheel of history, but made - because of the lack of empirical data - the wrong assumption, that the well-to-do have always fewer children than the poor. Indeed, such is the situation since the last quarter of the nineteenth century until up to today. For theoretical reasons Oded Galor and Moav Omer in their seminal paper "Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth" (2002) came to the conclusion that before 1850 the upper and medium stratum of society must have been more surviving children than the poor. Clark could confirm this assumption with empirical data of his own, and he makes this finding to the cornerstone of his theoretical derivations.

It is a pity that neither Galor and Moav nor Clark are aware of a large body of historical data, supporting their fundamental assumptions and claims. For example, in 1990 a preliminary summary on the "Social and Demographic Originis of the European Proletariat" was published in which we can read: "The data show that rural and urban proletarians are formed from the socially downward mobile sons and daughters and grandchildren of peasants." Despite Clark's staying of one sabbatical year at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin, he does not cite any German source. In the Inventory of the German Central Office for Genealogy. Part IV (second edition, 1998, ISBN 3-7686-2099-9), he could find not only a complete bibliography of historical demography of Central Europe, based on local family reconstitutions, but also an exhaustive review (p. 74-176) of studies of differential fertility supporting his core argument. Clark could strengthen his point immediately, if he were able to read original papers and books in French, Dutch, German and Swedish, because the development in West, Central and Northern Europe was in principle the same as in England. - By the way, Ernst Engel undertook not studies of Prussian but of Saxonian working-class budgets.

Nevertheless, Clark wrote a couragous book of high originality, enriched with a large number of very interesting figures and tables, touching with their overall message the borderline of political incorrectness. But he should have better nothing written about the last decades. The last two chapters of his book are extraordinarily weak.

Despite his awareness (Table 14.4) of a general negative relationship between the number of surviving children and the social status of their parents in the modern world - the so-called demographic-economic paradox - in sharp contrast to the preindustrial world, where more children of the rich survive, Clark does not dare to draw any conclusion from this. For example, as Francis Galton became aware of this paradox, he founded the eugenic movement. Clark, too, understands the centuries where larger numbers of children in the households of the rich survived also as a process of a genetic enrichment of the cognitive basis of society. Could be the turning point (in England already about 1850, in Germany three or four decades later) in differential fertility also be the turning point of the cycle of industrialized society? Could it be, that the rich because of their rising social density would be the first to regulate their numbers in a cyclic fashion? What does or could this mean for the Aristotelian cycle of political constitutions, for the future of democracy? What are the differences and the similarities of the industrialized society with the rise and fall of the Roman empire and the repeated cycles within China?

"Why Isn't the Whole Word Developed?" is the caption of last chapter of this book. In agreement with his overall message and insight Clark could maybe find a contribution to the answer in the books by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen IQ and the Wealth of Nations and IQ and Global Inequality as well as in the most recent papers by Heiner Rindermann, Erich Weede and Garett Jones. Seen from this point of view Clark has written the first part of a new world history. To imagine and to write the second part should not be an impossibility. However, it will also be a dangerous look into our future.
Most important in this respect is the article "The Population Cycle Drives Human History ... ", published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies (Number Fall 2007).

Physical scientists are able to observe the natural world more objectively, because the observer is not identical to the observed. Science is not a potential battlefield for the survival of the individual scientist, as history is for the historian. This is the root cause for the failure of the human sciences to generate any laws governing history. I am sure, anyone who discovers such a general law or even the dynamics of the cycle of population and constitutions of the global industrialized society will be doomed to drain the hemlock cup to the dregs as Socrates.

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