|
| A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World) | 
| Author: Gregory Clark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $18.43
You Save: $11.52 (38%)
New (46) from $18.43
Avg. Customer Rating:  35 reviews
Sales Rank: 3416
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 440
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 0691121354
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.9
EAN: 9780691121352
ASIN: 0691121354
Publication Date: July 24, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
|
| Customer Reviews:
An Inconvenient Truth April 26, 2008
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Gregory Clark has presented here a very detailed analysis of why and how the Global rate of economic whealth creation has skyrocketed with the industiral revolution after many millenia of stagnation. More interestingly, he focuses why this breakthrough first took place in the England of 1800s. Even more controversial is his conclusions on why the same productivity increases have not taken place in many other parts of the world thus causing the widening gap between the haves and have nots.
His arguments are presented very clearly and there is much data, maybe too much, that he presents very cleverly in support of his theories. Countless graphs and charts give the book a texbook feel, in addition to a high level of credibility.
The final conclusion, that there may be "culturual" roots to labor inefficiency obviously has caused much discomfort and even anger judging from some of the reviews. As hard as this may be to digest for many of us, we need to keep morality out of a pure technical discussion. One should also be aware that given any body of data, it may be possible to present it in a way to support almost any position and conclusion or argue against it. Clark seems to have tried hard though to stick to the facts.
This would not satisfy many who see many historical reasons, such as colonialism that is at the root of many of the economic injustices and inequalities of today.
Regardless, for a layperson, this book is very educational and revealing. One gets a good idea of the modern tools and analytic methods employed in cutting edge economic research. Over last decade or so this branch of study has clearly become much more scientific and rigorous.
As a side note, for some reason he has not included the whealth of data available from Middle East on this topic. He should have also noted that while plague was decimating populations in Europe in Middle Ages, many of the Middle Eastern countries very rarely sufferd this terrible fate. Islamic hygine kept many such diseases at bay. He neglects the cultural aspect of the economic subsistence level. Societies where social bonds are stronger and culture of support for the weak is the norm, the subsistence level can be much lower.
It is not easy reading as Clark throws a lot at the reader. Some of the quantitiative details should have been removed to the appendices to keep the flow of logic and analysis a bit clearer. The book is full of interesting facts and details. I enjoyed it much and found it to be very thought provoking.
 Some useful data hampered by weak arguments and tendentious reasoning April 18, 2008
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
Clark tries to draw big ideas (i.e. the origins of the Industrial Revolution) from little evidence (i.e. a few wills from England and an even more cursory set of figures from Japan). He portrays his arguments as innovative, but they often merely rehash the social Darwinism of the Victorian age. His critique of institutional explanations for development is cursory and, when coherent, rests on the straw man fallacy.
One can use his book as a good reference point and data source, but his interpretations are extremely weak. For example, he argues that poor countries remained poor because they were less productive (which is basically a tautology, since productivity implies affluence). His evidence for this rests on the assumption that capital markets were perfect in the 19th century and that anyone who wanted to invest in India could have but choose not to because Indians didn't work as hard as the English. He then shows data that Indians had lower productivity, but he never adjusts productivity for the capital stock. Instead he says the potential capital stock was equal, or whatever disparity existed couldn't have accounted for the differences. Yet, his own data in Chapter 15 show that rails density in India was over an order of magnitude lower than that of England in 1890 (except he doesn't adjust for density, as if England and India have the same size and population, so I had to do the calculations). By 1910 India had doubled its rail millage and England's had barely increased, but India's still had 10 times less dense rail miles per square km. This suggests that investment was profitable in India, despite the fact their textile factories were overstaffed, as Clark argues, compared to the English equivalents. One explanation for over-staffing could be political comprises, another could simply be the fact that having 10 times fewer rail miles or less advanced port operations raised export costs. Clark never accounts for this rather obvious explanation for differences in labor efficiency (which is merely output/labor, where output is derived from labor and capital). Nor does he mention that labor efficiency could be related to the fact that Indians were not educated by their imperial overlords, or they may be resentful of being controlled by an English dictatorship. These are just some examples of the extraordinary bias and narrow-minded reasoning that Clark employs throughout the book. Other than that, it is an entertaining and informative read.
 Very Generative of New Thinking in Economic History March 26, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
The value of this book is enormous and is reflected well in the large number of high quality reviews posted. Above all else the value of the book is that it makes you look at data both new and familiar in radically different ways. I admire a book that sets out right at the beginning its intent to provoke new research, counter argument and hope to move our knowledge without arrogantly asserting that it has found the Holy Grail of explanation. I was not entirely convinced by his thesis that differential survival rates deployed middle class values downward; but it is very challenging and intriguing. I was even less convinced by this application of this to current developing countries, but as part of an explanation I could see many of his insight contributing to understanding if not taken in isolation. So I strongly recommend this book as a primer in new data and new approaches and I think that the author really wants us to think deeply about what he is saying and improve on it, refine it, refute it and this is a welcome change. I hope the University of California Davis increases his salary as per his humorous footnote on economists being overpaid everywhere but Davis.
Economic history in a nutshell February 13, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms is the most informative book about economic history that I know. On about 380 pages and with nearly 200 illustrations, Clark describes the dynamics of the Malthusian economy that prevailed worldwide up to the time of the industrial revolution, and the industrial revolution itself. It is smoothly written, focuses on the important issues in economic history, and is immensely informative. This combination makes it suitable both for the historically interested non-specialist and the expert. Above all, I recommend it as a textbook for undergraduate courses in economics and history.
However, the author goes beyond the traditional stock-in-trade of the field. He emphasizes that the industrial revolution in England was preceded by behavioral changes whose consequences he sees manifested in declining homicide rates and declining interest rates, both indicative of a population that became less impulsive and more focused on long-term goals than had been the case in earlier times. He might as well have added the unprecedented proliferation of ideas and innovations in the arts, sciences and philosophy that characterized Europe throughout the centuries from the Italian Renaissance to the French Enlightenment. This trend shows rising intellectual sophistication not only in England, but in most or all parts of Europe.
In particular, he shows that in preindustrial England there was differential reproduction on a massive scale: Generation after generation, rich men had nearly twice as many surrviving children as poor men. This meant not only downward social mobility, which was certainly deplorable. It also implied that both the cultural values and the genes of economically successful people penetrated throughout the society. Today's Europeans are, by and large, descended from the upper social classes in medieval and early modern times. Clark is one of the first economic historians to realize the importance of Darwinian mechanisms in cultural and economic advance, even on a time scale of only some hundreds of years.
I recommend this book for its clarity, the wealth of data that the author uses to illustrate the points he is making, and especially the focus on the important issues: How did the Malthusian economy work? What were the determinants of fertility, mortality and wealth during pre-industrial times? Why was pre-industrial Europe more prosperous than pre-industrial China and India? What trigered the industrial revolution in England? When did efficiency gains outpace population growth? Why did large wealth differentials between countries develop since the mid-19th century?
Cultural learnings of upper classes for make benefit glorious nation of Britannia February 11, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
As if the book's subtitle weren't a dead giveaway, Gregory Clark confesses in the first paragraph to another unabashed attempt at a sweeping world history. Clark yearns to know "How did we get here? Why did it take so long? Why are some rich and some poor?" He claims that no one can be truly intellectually alive unless they've had a little go at these big mysteries.
The main title is less obvious. It summarises Clark's belief that "fanciful" economic notions drive the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in their global alms-race to rescue the poor nations. The Scottish-raised University of California economist gives plenty of cheek to his own profession.
Although I concede this "simple set of ideas" is accessible to non-economists, you have to raise a sweat in the economics gym. The exercise machines are the Malthusian Trap, Industrial Revolution and Great Divergence. The machinery is lubricated by a happy scholarly coincidence. England, home of the Revolution, offers a "uniquely well documented wage and price history" going back to the early 1200s.
The Malthusian Trap "ensured that short-term gains in income through technological advances were inevitably lost through population growth. Thus the average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 BC." Average means average, not the idle rich. "Better off" means relative to stuff that economists can measure - diet, health, work hours, and life expectancy.
The "Trap" assumes that each society had a "customary" birth rate that rose with living standards, a death rate that fell as living standards went up, and living standards that went down (or up) as population grew (or fell). So the 14th-century Black Death was an unexpected fillip for the lifestyle of survivors.
Despite these medieval fluctuations, Clark contends that average Englishpersons of the year 1800 hadn't gained much, compared with those of 1200. Their real wages were about par. They still produced fewer "food calories per worker-hour" than some forager societies and they weren't living long lives.
What really matters to Clark are the underlying shifts in English family and wealth over 1200-1800. He infers that the rich could readily become poor - and the poor get rich. But the richest individuals were leaving twice as many surviving children as the poorest. The surviving sons of the rich tended to die rich too. That held true even if son had to share father's initial bequest with many siblings. So, reasons Clark, the successful fathers must have been passing on the cultural learning or even inborn attributes for further economic and family success. The nerdish (some would say pious) virtues of hard work and deferred gratification were becoming the inside run for reproductive advantage, rather than the forager's supposed strategy of whacking the opposition. The author deduces that the gradual population buildup of these cultural virtues must have induced the Industrial Revolution.
"Well, what else did you think it could be?" a duffer might say. But we ordinary folk are not Clark's problem. His main target is the "priestly cast" of economists that influences aid policy. It perceives a Revolution that was institutionally not culturally inspired. Yet the institutional levers - low taxes and spending, security of property and person, liberal markets for goods and capital - had apparently been around for ages. Medieval England, the author asserts, would outscore any modern high-income economy on the IMF criteria for economic incentive. It, not us, would tick the boxes for low taxes and low debt.
For Clark the actual timing of the Industrial Revolution remains "the enduring puzzle of human history". Conventional explanations for this timing fail his tests of reasonableness. The Revolution, arriving thousands of years after various "institutionally stable economies" rose and fell, must hinge on the gradual development of useful cultural adaptations. That is, your above-mentioned toil and patience.
With the revolution finally springing the Trap, English real income could rise yet population could grow at the same time. "Population rose from 6 million in the 1740s, no more than its medieval maximum, to 20 million in the 1860s."
Ironically, the deathly medieval "filthiness" of the English hadn't held them back compared with the fastidious Chinese and Japanese. But why didn't these developed eastern economies also take off around 1800? Maybe, Clark speculates, they'd leant too much on physical "advantages" like boosting their croplands or yields. Maybe the rich weren't "spreading constantly downward through the ranks" as in England. The morbid English, meanwhile, were forced into useful intangibles like better education and lower interest rates.
In Clark's long view, a modicum of education goes a long way. He figures that unskilled wages have gained on skilled wages ever since the Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, modern economies still prize "regular and meticulous completion of work tasks".
The approach to the labour question is significant. Clark says that 19th-century communication and transport breakthroughs gave "every hope" poor countries would join the industrial club. But many didn't. Again, the author discounts the conventional accounts for this. Relying heavily on Indian subcontinent data sets, his take is that poor countries just couldn't get their workers to use new technologies effectively. In economist-speak, "extra workers per machine [lent no] corresponding gain in output per unit of capital".
The result today is that Western Europe, North America, and Oceania remain well ahead of other regions in terms of output (income) per person. Borrowing another book's title, this is the "Great Divergence".
Clark is not linking the Divergence to general intelligence, more to acquired cultural attitudes and behaviours. He pleads ignorance as to the underlying causes of peculiar differences over time in the national quality of labour. "[Developed] economies seem, to us, to alternate more or less randomly between relatively energetic phases and periods of somnolence". So, Ireland surges as New Zealand falters.
Our interpreter cheerfully concludes that his profession has never been worse at predicting changes in income and wealth across time and space. It follows that he declines to make global prognoses of his own. He just says rich nations should liberalise immigration - because the "complicated economic surgery" offers scant local relief to poor nations. And, small consolation, all that cash barely keeps the rich nerds happy.
What about the Green Revolution? Overpopulation? Africa? Environmental degradation? Global warming? Hardly a word on these as the canny author ducks the rope. Leaving a great contribution, with the inherent difficulties in the data comparisons offering wriggle room for enthusiastic scholars to return fire.
(Canberra Times December 2007)
|
|
|
Wildlife, nature and the Environment
Sponsored Links
Learn how to get your own Amazon Book shop | |
