A Farewell to Alms: A Brief History of the World.

• Author: Kuznicki, Jason
• Position: Book review

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief History of the World Gregory Clark Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007, 420 pp.

The thesis of Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms is that, for most of human history and prehistory, there prevailed an essentially Malthusian social dynamic, one in which improvements in technology or wealth were turned almost immediately into increased population rather than increased individual wealth or technological innovation. Only calamities, such as the Black Death of the 14th century, could raise the average wealth of a society, and they did so by reducing the population.

These conditions meant that Europe (but why was it only Europe?) experienced a continual downward social mobility: The rich had more children, on average, while the poor had fewer, and all children could expect to be poorer than their parents. Downward mobility meant that something essential--let us call it breeding--was disseminated from the upper classes to the lower. This breeding, when spread sufficiently, produced the values and habits necessary for the Industrial Revolution.

Breeding: The double meaning of the word is deliberate, and it parallels Clark's oven ambiguity. He repeatedly suggests both genetics and transmitted culture as possible sources of the mysterious changes that wrought the Industrial Revolution. He declines to offer much evidence for either mechanism. At times he seems to dismiss culture as an epiphenomenon, so perhaps it is good that he does not take these speculations much farther.

The thesis is bold indeed, and it is presented both as a direct challenge to institutional accounts of the Industrial Revolution, and as an indirect challenge to development policies stressing institutional soundness today. Clark presents an enormous amount of data on the economic and demographic conditions of early modern life, and he does so with more historical sophistication than most economists bring to these issues.

Yet errors and questionable propositions still abound. Clark claims that animals and humans of the Malthusian era faced "precisely" the same economic laws (p. 32), neglecting that even before 1800, many people did not produce their own food or clothing, but traded for them using money in markets--not, I hope, a pedantic difference. A graph (p. 180) supposedly showing "no evidence" for incentives toward education in the medieval era in fact shows that skilled workers consistently earned 1.5 times what their unskilled counterparts made. In the early modern era, Clark notes that unmarried women were almost always childless, while married women bore children, but he seems unaware that this is in part because women frequently got married only after discovering that they were pregnant. (1) It is problematic to assume as he does a constant number of parishes in England from 14.50 to 1801. And the Church of England owes its independence to Henry VIII's marital problems, not Henry III's.

Other errors are more serious. Clark incorrectly formulates the Malthusian dynamic in premodern societies:

[The] Malthusian world thus exhibits a counterintuitive logic. Anything that raised the death rate schedule--war, disorder, disease, poor...