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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: 4895
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: Good Condition, delivery time 10 to 12 Working days, via Priority airmail from UK
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| Customer Reviews:
 Excellent Bridge between Pre-industrial and Post-industrial Society December 31, 2007
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
If you have been curious of why Industrial Revolution started in England, and not other countries and how it spread into different world, you should check this book.
Upon the introduction of this book, I was getting into 'A Farewell to Alms' because of new perspective the author place on the cause of industrial revolution as "Cultural Difference". Well this is very unique component of the cause of industrial revolution and the author also makes it clear that social difference of Malthusian Trapped Society and more productive Society that began to support the population growth.
But the question still remains that more productive society betters off for everyone. The answner lies in how you utilize it upon new change for the individualistic level, not society level.
fascinating December 26, 2007
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
Clark presents and supports his theory on world economic development throughout his book in a very thorough and logical manner. Although it can be a slow read at times and somewhat over-burdened by statistics, it definitely leaves the reader enlightened.
 common sense vs. genes December 5, 2007
16 out of 21 found this review helpful
Walter Battaglia is correct in pointing out that Prof. Clark's claims about genetic change are not supported within his book or anywhere else. Besides, as Bearymore points out, it is "a ridiculous assumption to posit that thrift, hard work, and non-violence were upper class traits." It was the aristocratic traditions themselves that held back the people of England and made the progress in freedom stretch over eight centuries from the Magna Carta to the broadening of the electorates just in the past couple hundred years.
This curious attempt to attribute the unique economic progress of the West to "better genes" is just as unbelievable as its predecessor from the PU Press Series on Economic History of the Western World by Kenneth Pomerantz, "The Great Divergence." In the latter book, the author declared England and China were on a par in 1850 when a lucky discovery of coal in England tipped the balance and led to the expansion of the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. In Izaak VanGaalen's review, he correctly observed that such works rely heavily on theory that extends beyond the mere retelling of certain facts and events. Reviewer Bearymore is more concise, calling Clark's genetic theory "preposterous."
Clark' positions are more solid when he argues that an extended period of stability and security were requisite to the development of sound economies. And he is correct that such stability when combined with a citizenry embracing thrift and hard work often led to prosperity. These observations allow him to correctly avoid Jared Diamond's very questionable conclusion that natural endowments and geography were all important. All three scholars attempt the ultimate mission impossible of trying to shoehorn in a theory of divergence based on a single reason and occurring at a single point in time. Those that claim the 1850 date or the Industrial revolution as the turning point miss the many more critical points of the preceding millennia, all of which went the West's way. The world supremacy of the West had been demonstrated a couple centuries earlier with the discovery and development of the American continents.
The antecedents of the Industrial Revolution and eventual Western supremacy was a multi-step process: Without even looking back to the Judeo- Greco-Roman contributions, the hand-writing was on the wall with the development of Western universities in the 12th century, the establishment of Renaissance Republics with limited central power, the widespread application of the printing press in the 16thC, the indomitable call for freedom consonant with the Reformation in the 16thC, and most notably the transfer of world leadership to the United States in the 18thC.
The major fault with these three attempts at recapping the Western advance to freedom and prosperity is that they try to narrow the causes to one or two simplistic issues such as geography, climate, the English gentry's genes, the discover of a mother lode of coal, and the milking of colonies. None of those factors were determinant, nor could they be. Three thousand years ago there were over ten civilizations on this planet that had good geography, reasonable climates, and large established and secure national structures--and yet they all remained relatively stagnant except for one. The "outcome" may have been in doubt until 500 to 1,000 years ago, but never since that time. When Al Ghazali turned the Islamic nations inward in the 11th C, and when the Chinese grounded Admiral Cheng-Ho's fleet in the 15th C, those cultures never recovered, and Decline set in. The oppression from the top denied their people the freedom to exercise their genius and innovative skills.
Anyone interested in the way Western people were able to reach supremacy should read Wayne Te Brake's book "Shaping History." He details how between 1500 and 1700 the "ordinary people" carved out the advances in freedom that revolutionized politics in Europe. He gives considerable detail on how the 16thC citizens within the Swiss confederacies and the United Netherlands built on the independent spirit of the Reformation to overthrow not only their high priests, but their lay leaders as well. It is impossible to trace the divergences that led to Western supremacy without looking at the role played by Luther, Calvin, and Knox in establishing that both priests and kings derived their authority from the people.
In "Common Genius" I have traced how it was the happy occurrence of economic freedom and open societies in a few isolated locales sprinkled within European history that demonstrated the inevitable superiority of free people. Julian Simon's book, "The Ultimate Resource," posits that it was the free citizenry of a nation that created growth by overcoming shortages and creating goods. This principle was evidenced more often than not in the worst geographical spots--the swamps of Venice, the tidelands of Holland, the mountains of the Basques, the off-shore islands of the Phoenicians, and the northern coastal cities of the Hanseatic League. Such locales, undesired by surrounding empires, allowed periods of stability, free of aristocracies and oppressive clergies, where the common people could, in Prof. Te Brake's term, "shape history." These locales were the only places in the world where common artisans could become entrepreneurs and they led the way. Centuries later Adam Smith tried to summarize what they had done and laissez-faire economics allowed the Industrial revolution to unfold. Prof. Clark's thesis about upper crust genes is undermined by the persistence of those elites in maintaining the inefficiencies and injustices of mercantilism. It took the efforts of countless illegals, smugglers and entrepreneurs (commoners all) to topple that oppressive form of central government regulations. Clark's idea about thrift and hard work as valid contributors to progress is correct but their source was not the English gentry but came up from the bottom and dated back to the merchants in Florence, the "sea beggars" in Holland, and many of the persecuted sects that sprang from the Protestant Reformation. Reviewer Bearymore is fully justified in objecting to today's academic assertions that luck, genes or climate made the difference and in calling such theories preposterous! Bill Greene (real name)
An important and controversial book November 23, 2007
4 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is an important book for someone interested in the Industrial Revolution debate and its historiography. Although some of the author's remarks on the subject are adequate - especially those about the policy of international institutions towards developing countries - there are some generalizations that are debatable: one cannot put history inside a model of explanation. This is therefore not really a book of economic history but rather of "retrospective Economics."
Preposterous thesis November 19, 2007
40 out of 52 found this review helpful
Gregory Clark is not the first, nor will he be the last, to compile demographic data about medieval and early modern Europe. The fact that the rich had more surviving children than the poor in most pre-modern societies is about as controversial a proposition to an historical demographer as the sun rising in the east is to an astronomer. What he does with this flash of the mundane, is preposterous.
First, even assuming his Darwinian hypothesis is correct, it is a ridiculous assumption to posit that thrift, hard work, and non-violence were upper class traits in medieval Britain. The nobility, if anything, was a warrior class based on institutionalized violence. Apart from warring and managing its estates, it was essentially a leisure class and a shockingly illiterate one at that. If it transmitted behavior through its genes, then we would expect a society made up of indolent, violent, over-consumers, not thrifty savers.
Second, while I don't doubt Clark's English data, his comparison to other cultures is just wrong. Throughout its history, China had far greater social mobility than any European society -- from cracked rice bowl back to cracked rice bowl in three generations as the Chinese proverb has it. It had an institutionalized meritocratic mechanism for social advancement in its imperial examination system -- one dependent on hyper-literacy which required long hours and years of dedication in order to achieve success. Without participation in this system, furthermore, downward mobility was assured -- China didn't have primogeniture and large estates tended to fragment over time. Continued membership in the gentry depended on the talent and hard work required by the examination system. If genetic transmission of upper class values was the catalyst for modernization, this is the society where it should have happened first, not in warlike, class bound England.
Third, in most pre-modern societies, including China, upper economic families tended to have more surviving children than poorer families. Clark needs to show me some evidence that the differential in England was so much greater than the differential in other countries that the genetic composition of the population would have changed significantly faster. In any case, mathematical demographic models show that if you go back far enough (the 8th century I believe), every one of us has at least one common ancestor. Given this and the power of endogamy, this effect, if indeed there is one, should have been in evidence far earlier than 1800.
The problem here is one that seems to be endemic to economics as a discipline. Like Marx, the modern academic economist sees history and society as measured by a single criterion - material goods. In these world views, virtue is measured by what you have not what you do. If you have it, ipso facto, you must have been entitled to it. That being the case, a writer such as Clark discovers anew a truism that has been known for years in other social science disciplines and, ignoring 50 or more years of theorizing and exegesis, proceeds to invent his own explanation of this astonishing "new" fact. It's as if someone discovered on his own that atoms consisted of particles and produced a Newtonian explanation -- ignoring more than 80 years of quantum physics.
In any case, in an age of rising inequality is it surprising that someone would reinvent the theory that the rich deserve what they get because of their superior genes? Look where that theory led during the last century.
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