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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History…
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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World) (urspr publ 2007; utgåvan 2008)

av Gregory Clark

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573941,265 (3.61)3
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.… (mer)
Medlem:lansink
Titel:A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
Författare:Gregory Clark
Info:Princeton University Press (2008), Paperback, 432 pages
Samlingar:Ditt bibliotek
Betyg:****
Taggar:economics, history, politics, globalization

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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World av Gregory Clark (2007)

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the Malthusian trap of society from stone age to 1800 and why other cultures haven't caught up. Doesn't really clarify
  ritaer | Aug 18, 2021 |
I keep thinking that someday, all these Big History books I read that violently disagree with each other on even minor points of history, data, or inferential technique will eventually add up to a single consistent theory, like lights of different wavelengths suddenly cohering prismatically into a pleasant glow of insight. Why are some societies more successful than others? Some argue national real estate (Diamond), others evolutionary dynamics (Turchin), others institutions (Acemoglu/Robinson), others genetics (Harpending/Clark), others religion (pick the religion of your choice), and so on. Whatever Jared Diamond's faults, he deserves a lot of praise for the explosion of books attempting to refine, restate, or refute his arguments in Guns Germs & Steel (which I think has, in the main, held up well), because even if his competitors couldn't disagree with him more, they've all got to at least grudgingly acknowledge his entry into the ring. Clark's work here falls into the latter of those three camps, and is itself divided into three sections: the first, an overview of the logic of the nearly economically static Malthusian trap that every society in the world inhabited until approximately 1800; the second, an explanation of the math behind the Industrial Revolution which allowed a select group of societies to escape that trap; and finally, a cursory look at why many of the poorer nations of the world currently struggle to escape their own Malthusian shackles. His "reverse Idiocracy" thesis of consistent selection pressures leading to increased entrepreneurialism is intriguing, to say the least.

Robert Malthus is one of those infamous writers whose ideas began to carry a lot of uncomfortable ideological baggage almost immediately. Put basically, a Malthusian trap is a condition where a population living in a habitat with fixed resources eventually reaches a state where each additional mouth to feed lowers the standard of living, while an increase in the death rate makes people better off in real terms as the average standard of living goes up, at least until greater birth rates drive wages back down to subsistence level. Thus, in a world with stagnant technology (i.e. 99% of human history), people are stuck endlessly fighting for scraps without any hope of escape. Clark spends a large amount of time reviewing the available evidence showing that in many ways the average European peasant in the 1700s was no better off than their ancestors of a millennium before, or even those of two millennia before in other societies. This led to elaborate measures to restrict output, such as high percentages of the population never marrying, or the imposition of mandatory festival/feast days. He even presents table 2.2, a list of Malthusian "virtues" and "vices", showing how many qualities we currently think of as emblematic of civilization, such as cleanliness or hard work, would in a Malthusian world have the perverse effect of raising the birth rate and therefore lowering everyone's standard of living:
Virtues - Vices:
Fertility limitation - Fecundity
Bad sanitation - Cleanliness
Violence - Peace
Harvest failures - Public granaries
Infanticide - Parental solicitude
Income inequality - Income equality
Selfishness - Charity
Indolence - Hard work

The political implications of those paradoxical effects - such as that efforts to aid the poor were counterproductive and merely enabling misery - were immediately controversial, of course, and spawned a lot of awful social Darwinist thinking, but while Malthus had the misfortune to publish his thoughts right before the Industrial Revolution rendered them obsolete, his thinking lives on in many situations where one can assume a fixed quantity of some resource and conditions where individual attempts to gain more can lead to less overall (e.g. Malthus' work was of great interest to the economist John Maynard Keynes when the Great Depression led to his theories of the liquidity trap and the paradox of thrift and so on). Clark's takeaway, backed up by a lot of data on things like the average amount of money left in 18th century English wills, is somewhat social Darwinist as well: in England, the forced downward mobility generated by the Malthusian trap - meaning that rich people tended to have less rich children, even less rich grandchildren, etc. - combined with a slightly greater chance of the children of the rich (though not necessarily of the aristocracy, who frequently died in stupid conflicts) would survive compared to the children of the poor meant that over generations, even though society as a whole was not getting a lot richer, rich people traits were being spread, merely awaiting the right moment to saltate society up to the next level. One could argue that higher death rates might be corrosive to social institutions that help people escape the trap, but in England, in particular, death due to violence was not very high, and even today people do not react to deaths from disease the way they do to deaths from crime or war.

The idea that societies can exert genetic selection pressures on themselves is not new, of course - when in history have societies not praised themselves for being superior to their neighbors? - but Clark asks us to hold that thought while he discusses the extremely slow rate of technological progress over time. While pre-1800 Europe did manage to borrow, develop, or invent a number of technologies that the Romans and Greeks did not, such as stirrups, windmills, buttons, spinning wheels, clocks, spectacles, firearms, and printing, according to Clark in chapter 7 the effect of these inventions on growth was surprisingly small: "In the 1,750 years between the birth of Christ and the eve of the Industrial Revolution the technology improved by a total of 24 percent, based on these population estimates. That is, on aggregate economies in 1750 produced on 24 percent more output per acre of land, at a given level of people per acre, than in AD 1. That was why the world was trapped in the Malthusian era for so long."

There's a brief digression on the interaction between population density and technological progress which is about the closest he comes to meeting Diamond head on. Guns Germs & Steel mentioned places like Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego where the inhabitants lived miserable primitive existences bereft of all but the most rudimentary technology; Diamond's theory was very straightforward about how those place's lack of useful resources doomed their societies to being perpetual also-rans. Clark, on the other hand, while he points out that in many cases those societies had actually regressed (e.g. Easter Islanders losing the ability to make more statues, or Inuits moving from large permanent houses to smaller snow huts), he doesn't really integrate those examples into the main body of this theory. Clark's assumption is that comparing societies to each other over time can be done with the equivalent of a simple inflation adjustment - if technology has progressed by 24 percent by 1750, then just deflate modern figures by 24 percent and so peasants are at about the same level they were under the Emperor Augustus or whoever. Yet Tasmania has obviously never been truly comparable to Tang dynasty China in wealth, population, sophistication, etc., and no amount of simple renormalization can hide that. Unfortunately without at least a rough quantitative measure it's impossible to do anything but vague qualitative comparisons, so while I see the limitations of Clark's approach I think it's useful enough for his purposes.

This is where something like an institutional theory would be useful, and Clark presents a sharply different view on institutions and incentives than Acemoglu and Robinson. Table 8.1 accompanies an interesting argument that institutions alone can't explain economic success, because most medieval societies were in many ways far closer to the low-tax, low-debt, low-inflation, free-market, Adam Smithian ideal of how economies should be run than their highly regulated modern descendants who typically enjoy much faster growth even in bad decades. That sounds a bit glib to me - as discussed in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, even if tax rates themselves were much lower, and the government's ability to collect was limited, the amount of arbitrary in-kind levies on the populace to ransom captured nobles or pay for pointless wars had large effects on medieval populations. Furthermore, in many cases merchants had restrictions placed on them by governments, capital markets were weak or nonexistent (or were frequently obliterated if they were run by Jews), and guilds were not on the level of modern labor markets. But that aside, Clark's discussions of the phenomenon of falling real interest rates in Northwest Europe and the slow spread of literacy are but a prelude to the beginning of the second section, where shows that "investments in knowledge capital that generate efficiency growth not only explain most modern growth at the proximate level, they explain all modern growth."

I'm a big fan of the way he phrases the third paragraph of chapter 11, because it really puts into perspective the enormous gap between modern first world societies and all premodern societies, European or not: "What makes the Industrial Revolution so difficult to understand is the need to comprehend why - despite huge variation in the customs, mores, and institutions of preindustrial societies - none of them managed to sustain even moderate rates of productivity growth, by modern standards, over any significant time period. What was different about ALL preindustrial societies that generated such low and faltering rates of efficiency growth? What change to such a stable nongrowth configuration generated the Industrial Revolution?" His answer: "Millennia of living in stable societies, under tight Malthusian pressures that rewarded effort, accumulation, and fertility limitation, encouraged the development of cultural forms - in terms of work inputs, time preference, and family formation - which facilitated modern economic growth."

To a first approximation, the story of the Industrial Revolution (or as he calls it, the "Industrious" Revolution) is the story of the cotton textile industry, yet Clark is firmly anti-Carlyle in his assertion that history of the study of aggregates, not individuals. Therefore while the stories of the people who innovated in the industry are interesting, their parts are details. Put briefly, the second section demonstrates that the Industrial Revolution was a dramatic shift in the importance of skilled labor in its contributions to the efficiency of the economy overall. Whereas before land was a large percentage of any country's economy, since the majority were farmers, in seemingly the blink of an eye land became nearly irrelevant, and workers became more more effective at turning a given amount of input into output. The increase in literacy and numeracy in England gave workers there the advantage in propelling the increase in living standards, although most other similar societies were not far behind, and since successful people had more children than unsuccessful ones, soon a critical mass of the population of the country became industrious, and the rest is history. The majority of the chapters in the section are devoted to technical breakdowns of demographic changes, productivity increases, resource utilization, returns to capital investments, etc., yet some parts jumped out at me, like where he talked about the lack of British Carnegies/Rockefellers/Stanfords:

"... It is for this reason that in Britain, unlike in the United States, there are very few universities and major charities funded by private donors. The Industrial Revolution did not result in great personal or family fortunes in England. By the 1860s the rich were still by and large the descendants of the landed aristocracy. Of 379 men dying between 1860 and 1879 in Britain who left at least .5 million pounds, 256 (68 percent) owed their wealth to inherited land. As we saw in chapter 11, only 17 (4 percent) were textile magnates, even though the textile industry had driven the productivity advance of the Industrial Revolution."

The final section discusses why so many parts of the world are still so poor, despite the fact that transportation costs have plummeted, information travels nearly instantaneously, capital investments in poor countries bring in profitable returns, and low labor costs should be a powerful competitive advantage. His conclusion, simply, is that poorer countries are really bad in terms of both generating human capital and translating labor into value. Like most people, I'm wary of explanations for societal success that smack of "Well, some peoples are just meant to be hewers of wood and drawers of water", and one thing to mention that most readers will have noticed by now is that Clark's math/data-based conclusions are highly dependent on the quality of that data. Much like with my earlier comment on the Tasmania comparison, garbage in is garbage out, and so it's fair to wonder how it's possible to accurately compare all these different societies across time and space in the way he does. Well, a strong argument in his favor is that the societies with the best historical data (above all England, but there are plenty of others) are also the societies that ended up being successful, so the presence of data itself should be a good indicator that a society has key factors together. Further, his productivity statistics are basically inarguable, so the challenge for doubters would be to come up with alternate measures, which seems tough to do.

Also note that the question he's trying to answer is "Why was the Industrial Revolution in England FIRST?" Obviously the world is rapidly getting richer, and it's reasonable to think that within another generation or two a majority of the world's population will be either at or reasonably close to the technological possibility frontier currently enjoyed by only a small minority. While his explanation for Europe's prominence here relies on the genetic diffusion of bourgeois middle values thanks to Malthusian selection, he wrote a response to his critics titled "In Defense of the Malthusian Interpretation of History" where he discusses other possibilities for how those could be spread through a population. The "right" answer to that question aside, everyday experience indicates that immigrants from poorer countries who move to first world countries make such massive income leaps that culture plays a huge role, at least at the individual level. Since this is a book of data, "culture" is too big a subject to get a lot of time, which prevents this book from being anything close to the last word, but I think the Malthusian explanation is interesting enough that I would love to see him and Peter Turchin compare notes to see if there's a way to model the spread of bourgeois genes/values that Clark posits. I firmly believe that the cure for bad models and data isn't no models and data, it's more models and data, so hopefully Clark keeps writing.

Regardless of any shortcomings, this is still an interesting book, and definitely worthy of a place on the Big History shelf alongside all the others. ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
Ha ha. No. ( )
  johnclaydon | Feb 19, 2021 |
Greg Clark has an interesting take on the origins of the Industrial Revolution and what he calls the Great Divergence in the development of various nations, the divergence between the rich and poor nations. He also offers some interesting and controversial speculations. Clark's basic point seems to be that the Industrial Revolution was an evolutionary process and only appears to be a discontinuity with all previous economic history. To say more would perhaps undermine his argument, but I will say that Clark makes a persuasive case for incremental increases in innovation and incremental changes in social behavior that tended to make innovation more acceptable. Worth reading. ( )
  nmele | Apr 6, 2013 |
This book has been trashed by the "political correctness" crowd, and they have employed their usual slash and burn technique of accusing the author of statements and arguments that are not to be found in the book itself. What Clark DOES argue -- that "economic success translated powerfully into reproductive success," with relatively richer individuals producing more surviving offspring and, thus increasing their genetic clout -- hardly seems controversial. Moreover, Clark's argument is supported by impressive work in archival sources and buttressed by his long years of experience as a leading demographic and economic historian. For those interested in an honest and open exploration of the perennially intriguing question of why capitalist development took off precisely when and where it did, Clark's claim that "the attributes that [ensured] later economic dynamism -- patience, hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education ..." were spread through the population as a result of the relative reproductive success of certain groups of individuals is challenging indeed. Clark makes NO attempt to argue that those groups were morally or intellectually superior (although he has been accused of that). He argues only that they possessed certain skills and traits which enabled them to adapt with greater success to the (frequently mind-numbing) requirements of a capitalist economy. ( )
  MarkStickle | Mar 14, 2010 |
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Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers for both questions.
tillagd av mikeg2 | ändraNew York Times, Nicholas Wade (Aug 7, 2007)
 
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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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