A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Gregory Clark
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gregory ClarkEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2007-07-24
ISBN: 0691121354
Number of pages: 440
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Book Reviews of A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
Book Review: Thought Provoking
Summary: 4 Stars
Despite the punning title, this is a serious and thoughtful attempt to present large scale overview of economic history. Clark deals with 3 major topics - the Malthusian nature of the pre-industrial economy, the industrial revolution, and the great divergence of economic performance between the industrialized core and the non-industrialized periphery. Of these sections, the first, dealing with the Malthusian nature of the pre-industrial world, is the best. This is perhaps because Clark has done extensive research on pre-industrial England. Clark has a very nice series of discussions of pre-industrial economics and demography. This is essentially a description of the basic structure of economies stuck in the "Malthusian trap" in which living standards are reciprocally coupled to population. While Clark shows this to be probably true for all pre-industrial economies, he is not trying to fit all pre-industrial societies into one tight mold. The interaction between population and production tends towards a different equilibrium point for each given society. Clark argues that Europe, for example, was distinguished by relatively high mortality and relatively high living standards while China had lower adult mortality and probably equilibrated at a lower standard of living. A further point is that while Clark emphasizes the Malthusian trap as an equilibrium state, most human history actually takes place away from the equilibrium point. Clark is careful to point out that the pre-industrial world was not static. While change was slow, he points to 4 long-term important trends - declining real interest rates, increasing literacy and numeracy, rising work hours, and falling inter-personal violence. Clark argues these trends were crucial to the emergence of industrial economies. His model is interesting. He argues for the existence of a Darwinian process in which upper class individuals reproduced at a higher rate with downward mobility resulting in a diffusion of middle class values and/or genotypes throughout society. This is a melding of economic history and the French Annales school emphasis on long views of history and "mentalities" as important drivers of history. Clark's point is very interesting and argued well though a detailed examination of the argument reveals problems and his suggestion that this process involves genetic change is easily arguable. For example, it was European cities that emerged as the cockpits of the Industrial Revolution but given the incredibly high mortality rates within European towns and the constant replenishment of town populations from the countryside, Clark's downward mobility model doesn't seem to fit the facts. Some of the long term changes described by Clark, such as falling interest rates and declining interpersonal violence could have more to do with the emergence of more powerful states than the model Clark presents. As for genetic change, Clark is assuming uniform, constant, and intense selection pressure, which is unlikely.
In the second section, Clark discusses the Industrial Revolution. This section includes a short description of the Industrial Revolution and then Clark's analysis of why the Industrial Revolution occurred. Clark mentions briefly the important counterpart of the Industrial Revolution, the Demographic Transition, the drop in fertility that probably prevented the Industrial Revolution from becoming merely another Malthusian equilibrium shift. Clark has a nice, concise discussion of prior theories of the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Like a number of other recent economic historians, he is quite critical of the institutionalist explanation, which sees the Industrial Revolution as the result of the development of Smithian economic/political institutions. Clark's explanation of the Industrial Revolution is an extension of his view of the long term changes in the Malthusian world. Clark is arguing that Smithian people as opposed to Smithian institutions were the crucial factor in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution. In Clark's model, China and Japan were proceeding along the same path as Europe and given time, an Industrial Revolution would have occurred in one of those nations eventually. This is arguable in several ways. Any monocausal theory is likely to be wrong. Even if we concede the reality of Clark's model of longterm change, its insufficient to account for the Industrial Revolution. As Clark points out, the Industrial economy required consistent technological innovation at a fairly high level. This probably requires both a high rate of literacy/numeracy and a fairly widely diffused scientific world view. The relatively high rate of literacy in pre-modern Western Europe probably has less to do with Clark's Smithian process than the need of European governments and the Church for literate personnel, followed by the great boost to literacy provoked by the Reformation. Similarly, there is no evidence that China or Japan were on their way to something like the emergence of modern science. Clark's model suggests that an Industrial Revolution was inevitable somewhere. The alternative is to see the Industrial Revolution as the result of a series of fortunate coincidences. For a particularly good and concise presentation of this attractive alternative see the relevant chapter of the recent Power and Plenty.
The third section, on the Great Divergence, is the shortest and least satisfactory. Clark points out that the Great Divergence is not only the result of the increasing productivity of the industrialized core but also of impoverishment of the non-industrialized periphery. Clark argues that poor labor productivity is the key feature explaining the Great Divergence. I think Clark's discussion is to brief to be really useful. For example, he omits the relative deindustrialization of non-industrialized countries that followed the Industrial Revolution in Europe, a phenomenon pointed out first by W. Arthur Lewis some years ago.
Clark makes some additional good points. He points out that the institutionalist explanation for the Industrial Revolution is one of the principal supports for the neo-liberal model of development. But if the institutionalist model is wrong, then the neo-liberal model is likely to be wrong, a point with substantial practical significance. Clark also makes some very amusing comments about economics in general. His opinion is that economic theory is very good at explaining the equilibrium conditions of pre-industrial economies but not very good at explaining the innovative structure of modern economies.
Summary of A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations.
Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education.
The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations.
A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.
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