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| 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
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Avg. Customer Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 10041
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
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| Customer Reviews:
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)
 The Great Divergence January 31, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Economists are rushing to answer the most urgent question of our time: Why is the 21st Century the time when both the richest and the poorest people have ever lived? Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, tackles this issue in a book whose title is misleading, as he scarcely addresses "alms" or aid at all. A better title would be "The Great Divergence" (already used by another author), as he assesses ideas that economists have been accumulating on the reasons for the vast disparity of wealth on the order of 50:1 between rich and poor today. Not only are the rich getting richer than ever, but Clark claims that the poor are worse off today than our Stone Age ancestors.
Briefly, Clark finds that the Great Divergence began in 1800 with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that, economics was easy to understand and the person who described it best in those days was Robert Malthus. Malthusian economics was based on agriculture, and with a fixed amount of land, the size of population determined average income. In that era, wars and plagues actually raised living standards for survivors as they reduced the population. On the other hand, an increase in population lowered living standards. Technological innovations had little effect on living standards because of the slow rate at which they were introduced. Thus, Clark estimates that living standards remained fairly static from the dawn of history to 1800. In that period the greatest disparity between rich and poor was only on the order of 4:1.
From 1800 onward, the rate of technological innovation increased so dramatically that population could finally increase together with income for the first time in history. Once the Malthusian dynamics changed, and agriculture was no longer the determining factor in economics, the Great Divergence began. Because of western dominance around the globe, new technology flowed freely to all parts of the world, yet this did not cause incomes to rise uniformly. Instead, some parts of the world became richer and others poorer.
In the final analysis, Clark admits that the Great Divergence is an acute conundrum for economists. In fact, many of the remedies prescribed amount only to "bloodletting" through ignorance, as in programs of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Clark has only three possible explanations for the Great Divergence: differences in social energy in various societies, modern medicine, and sophisticated technology requiring ever more efficient labor forces. Modern medicine has driven down the level of income needed to survive, so that the poorest people today live with lower standards than their prehistoric ancestors.
The only remedy that Clark offers to close the wealth gap in the world is to open up national borders to allow poor immigrants to enter the wealthier nations freely. That is the only proven way for the poor to enter into the rewards that rich countries enjoy. However, Clark cautions that rising wealth has not increased happiness as people expected it would.
In the end, this book is disappointing in not living up to the expectations one might have from reading the title, but at least it provides some much-needed honesty about what modern economic theory can actually deliver.
Anglo-centric January 16, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
"History of the World" texts have been quite the vogue the last 150 years. Starting with Kapital by Karl Marx, then Toynbee's "Rhythms of History" and culminating with Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winner "Guns, Germs and Steel", a whole slew of social scientists have taken a stab at explaining how human civilization has arrived at its present state. This book puts forth the idea that the variation in family size and fertility rates as a function of personal wealth differs from one nation to another, and this is what leads different nations to either get rich, or stay poor. The author argues this point by examining demographic data for England over the past 1000 years, and comparing it to available data for China, Japan, India, and other Western European nations when available. Comparable data for Eastern European nations, the Arab world, Latin America and Africa is rarely presented. This might be due to lack of information; the author does not fully explain.
In the process of putting forth its point, the author makes references to many other texts in the same subject matter; and numerous classical economics texts also, such as Smith's "Wealth of Nations". This is a plus as it is always good to reference works in the same field.
The book focuses its arguments on the divergence of living standards since 1800, or approximately the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The book surmises that the changes of the Industrial Revolution actually began in England during the early 1700's, something I agree with. However, the author's explanation of other countries' lack of progress in the 1800s and 1900s is somewhat lacking. Specifically, the author correctly surmises that the Industrial Revolution in England and the US was an mineral-intensive process of economic change. Coal, iron, aluminum, and eventually oil became important commodities. These needs drove political changes in both countries, which in turn drove foreign policies built around the control of natural resources, both within national borders, and overseas. Hence the colonial policies of both countries in Africa and the Middle East; policies that have generated poverty and thwarted any attempts at an Industrial Revolution in those countries. It is this last point that is wholly ignored by this book; hence my rating of only three stars for an otherwise great book.
 An Excellent Introduction to American Economic History January 15, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is an excellent text for both the undergraduate student of economic history and the informed amateur. This is most definitely not "a cocktail table book." Economic theory is employed to assay the economic causes and consequences of events. However, the authors manage to show the interrelationships between political social, cultural and economic forces as the they shaped American history. In most chapters,the impact of economic forces on historical events is clearly explained by setting forth and the elucidating an appropriate theory or model. I found the extentensive treatment of the colonial economy and the economic problems generated by Great Britain's Mercantilism especially interesting.
This book only takes the reader as far as 1985 - but that's about the threshold beyond which history stops and current events begin.
I recommend this book as both an informative text and a good read!!
 Don't base development policy on Clark's ideas! December 31, 2007
18 out of 29 found this review helpful
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms argues that the industrial revolution occurred first in England because natural selection operating over centuries created a sober and effective workforce, a "middle class" nation that could for the first time create sustainable economic progress. The implications he draws from his argument are straightforward - attempting to create economic progress in third world countries is essentially doomed. Just under the surface are more implications that are, at best, insulting to third world countries.
Although Clark presents a pile of economic history evidence that is a testament to his persistence, his core arguments are strikingly weak, and the data he brings to support them are, in many cases, simply irrelevant.
Clark starts from Malthus' argument that in the not-very-long run any increases in production will be absorbed by population growth, so that standards of living cannot rise beyond subsistence levels.
Clark makes and supports one very interesting addendum to Malthus' argument. "Subsistence" does not mean the same thing in all countries. In particular, for centuries a subsistence living was much higher in Western Europe, particularly England, than in Japan and China. Social custom and specific economic practices accounted for these differences. Although he doesn't put the argument this way, Clark shows how the broad Malthusian reality was shaped by differing social institutions.
Clark goes to great lengths to show how the upper class left more heirs than lower classes in Britain, creating downward mobility of offspring of the upper classes and, consequently, a spreading of their "middle class" habits. He pays much less attention to whether this is the case everywhere; whether, in fact, living longer and having more surviving children isn't part of the definition of higher social status. Having done this, Clark has established a more or less plausible argument that characteristics of the upper class might spread in this way, but he certainly doesn't establish that this circumstance is unique to Britain.
Of course, the time scale Clark is dealing with is all wrong. The industrial revolution took place over three or four lifetimes, whereas natural selection must take longer. To deal with this, he tries to push the beginning of the industrial revolution to centuries earlier than 1800.
Next, Clark must eliminate other explanations for the industrial revolution, particularly institutional explanations. He does this by arguing that Britain met the institutional requirements for the industrial revolution centuries before the revolution itself became apparent. However, the institutional requirements he puts forth and then debunks are those of the "Washington consensus," which much of the world has now rejected as mainly self-interested hogwash designed to serve the interests of American banks. The notion that institutional factors might take other forms requiring more thorough description never seems to cross Clark's mind. Having debunked one particular "institutional" explanation Clark dismisses the notion that unique social institutions might explain why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain.
Finally, Clark attempts to bolster his case that population characteristics, in particular the presence or absence of "middle class" habits, are key factors that supported economic growth in Britain and then Western Europe, but make it close to impossible elsewhere. His evidence comes from the fact that at the turn of the 20th Century, Indian textile mills operated at much lower levels of labor efficiency than British mills. European and American labor forces, he argues, are simply much more disciplined than those in India.
This may have been the case in some senses, but other arguments might be much better. In particular, one could argue that the British working class came into the dark satanic mills after having been beaten into submission by two centuries of enclosures and poor houses, half a century or more of gin, and then a transformation to sobriety and self-discipline encouraged by religion, particularly Methodism. If the alternative to self-discipline was a Dickinsian horror unmitigated by operating pre-industrial communal structures, it's no wonder the British working class showed remarkable discipline. In contrast, creating an industrial India required adapting industry to existing cultures and social structures not wiped so clean.
The current rapid economic progress in India, of course, reduces Clark's argument to simple irrelevance. Depending on how you define middle class, the Indian middle class has grown to between 50,000,000 and 150,000,000 in a few decades. Thank God the Indian people didn't read Clark and decide they had to wait for centuries of evolution.
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