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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
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Sales rank 36,368
Customers rating (based on 46 reviews)
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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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| Publisher | Princeton University Press | | Release date | 07/2007 | | Availability | Usually ships in 24 hours | | Edition | Hardcover |
| | List price | $29.95 | | Our price | $23.36 (you save 22.00%) | | Used price | from $7.01 |
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 Are we still talking about Malthus?
The reasons that 3rd world countries are so poor is because of planned-economies and interventionism. There's no other reason. No single group of man was born with an innate ability to participate in the Industrial Revolution! Look at the recent economic development of India and China, they are raising their life expectancy not because they had some societal/psychological shift! They're having it because they freed their markets, which in turn will allow comparative advantage to best use their resources! Also, what Clark seems to ignore is the ability for man to use land to sustain his own life. The reason we have such high rates of poverty is because we have such low rates of land usage. The redistribution of natural resources through taxation would lift the burden of speculation off the back of the working class and allow markets to actually be free. Clark is a moron. He ignores simple economic principles to create an "interesting and politically incorrect read!". Dumb. I'm returning it today.
Great think, long read.
Roughly, the title says it all.
Basic claim:
Contemporary analyses of why growth happens do not explain the Industrial Revolution. Pre-industrial revolution, Malthusian economics held sway. After the industrial revolution, it didn't. What changed, and why England, and not elsewhere?
Candidate answer, with lots of support, but not enough to advocate strongly is that between 1200 and 1800, the poor of England slowly died out, breeding at notably less than replacement. More interestingly, they were replaced, not by the children of the nobility, but by the children of the rich, be they nobles, merchants or otherwise. And whatever combination of traits (willingness to delay gratification, moderately higher intelligence, stronger work-ethic) led to richness in the parents, the children inherited as well. Since this selective population pressure was so much greater in England than anywhere else (nowhere else was it so true that the rich were the ones who bred more), the industrial revolution happened in England.
Great think. Long read.
Explaining poverty and riches
Why is it that some countries today are very rich while others are very poor, whereas in 1800 all countries were comparatively poor? The explanation of what happened, according to Gregory Clark in thsi book, is that the wealthy countries managed to increase productivity per capita through innovations. However, this does not explain why the productivity increases started when they did, or why some countries have benefitted greatly while others have not.
Clark's explanation for why the productivity increases started in England is the seemingly bizarre one that at the applicable time England's upper classes had higher birth rates than the lower classes, and the upper class skills such as literacy and a disciplined approach to work were thereby transmitted down through the society. His explanation for the current divergence between rich and poor countries is that workers in poorer countries are less productive.
The book is essentially a detailed examination of the history of the Industrial Revolution in England, with references to the current great divergence between rich and poor countries little more than an afterthought. The questions posed are very interesting, but I found the answers largely unconvincing. If workers in poor countries are less productive, why do they suddenly become more productive when they migrate to richer countries?
An Excellent Interdisciplinary Study
Hello.
This truly excellent book made an exhaustive study of the trends of different elements in the society of late medieval and rennaissance England to come to the conclusion that the rich by leaving more heirs were imparting their values and qualities to successively lower elements of the social strata. This led to the characteristics and habits, such as diligence, foresight, and inventiveness that led to the industrial revolution in 18th and early 19th century England rather than polotical and other institutional inputs.
Geoff
 Malthusian economics
The first - and longest - part of the book is a model of a Malthusian economy based on the econometrics of England between the thirteenth and the nineteeenth century. The model is based on three simple assumptions: the birth rate is an increasing function of income, the death rate is a decreasing function of income, and (most controversially in my view) the population is a decreasing function of income. The model fits pretty well with the econometric data for England. The mechanisms of the first two assumptions are described using available demographic data, however the mechanism for the third assumption (roughly, that population x income = constant) I find more difficult to comprehend, even if historical data support that equation. The chart showing real wages versus population in England, 1250-1869, is the most striking and sums up the thesis quite well.
The second part describes the industrial revolution, after which Western Europe escaped the Malthusian trap and never looked back: income now increases with population. Yet the author doesn't give a definitive reason why the Malthusian equation is no longer true. It seems that social capital, stability, low interest rates, decreased preference for the present over the ruture, all play a role. To be fair, I don't think anyone has a definitive explanation ! The third part looks at regions of the world which haven't succeeded at escaping Malthusian economics, and are often in an even worse situation than pre-1800 economies, a situation known as "the Great Divergence" (between rich and poor economies) in the words of Kenneth Pomeranz (who looked at this problem from the point of view of China). Using data from the British Empire around 1900, the author shows that the productivity of workers around the world for similar tasks was very diverse, and remains so today. The book raises more questions than it answers, but it is an important read in my view. The economic data from England is a unique source of figures for a pre-industrial economy and there is a lot of fascinating stuff about growth, innovation, influence of political structure, relative share of income of capital, work and land etc...
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