Customer Rating:  
Summary: Great subject matter
Comment: This book is very thorough in a research-analysis sense, but it reads as though the author is defending himself from hostile peers (other economists). The average reader, who is at best a novice economist, will find this endless detail tiresome. The subject matter and the points made are very interesting, however.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Unless you're an economist, wait for the movie version
Comment: This book may or may not be important or correct but prospective purchasers should be aware of what it surely is: a snappy title attached to a dry economic treatise. The book consists of charts and diagrams and equations and of text discussing the charts and diagrams and equations. Those who read economics and mathematics textbooks for fun will eat this up; those looking for the political/policy discussion suggested by the title will be frustrated and disappointed.
Why "a farewell to alms?" In a nutshell: poor countries are poor because their people do not work hard enough, for which there is no explanation (or at least no politically-correct explanation); reforming their institutions and giving them money does not help. But that message - which, whether it is true or not, could make an intriguing book - waits for the last couple of chapters and is largely presented by statistics. What goes before could be the source of at least two more interesting books, one about living standards in the past and the other about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. This is not any of those books, though perhaps someday someone else will use it to write them.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Data for Tough Love, not handouts
Comment: Clark says he spent 20 years writing this. I believe it. Despite frequent
amusing anecdotes, this is not a fun read. Clark is an academic who has hammered together what may be decades of project notes, charts, tables and yes, you know it is an academic writing when there are 24 pages of references and a bonus technical appendix.
His five main conclusions are: 1)mankind in 1800 was no better off than the caveman 100,000 years earlier, 2)since 1800, the unskilled worker has been the major beneficiary of the potentially stunning fruits of the industrial/technology revolution, 3) modern production techniques demand workers who exhibit discipline, hard work, meticulous attention to task completion, patience,literacy, thrift, prudence, 4)handouts of money to developing diverging countries where workers have poor attitudes are wasted(i.e. wasted "Alms"), 5)happiness does not depend upon absolute well being.
I like all the data he has, especially the trove from England 1200-1870,
and can use some of it in my Megatrend research, but will the average reader wade through the numbers and charts? I strongly disagree with his comment on page 289 that demography is unimportant in the U.S. and UK because of reductions in fertility. My research suggests that the reduction in fertility in the U.S. and most industrialized nations is leading to negative economic consequences that will rival an asteroid hit. Maybe the birthrate at UC-Davis is still OK?
Why Clark gets into the "happiness" issue is not clear? After he has demonstrated that good work ethic people are well rewarded with enormous per capita income, he bursts our balloon with the notion that it won't make you happy, unless you have more than your next door neighbor. For a more useful definition of happiness, Gregory should check out the research papers from the University of Chicago's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, or see his book "Flow" published in 1990.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Thought Provoking
Comment: Despite the punning title, this is a serious and thoughtful attempt to present large scale overview of economic history. Clark deals with 3 major topics - the Malthusian nature of the pre-industrial economy, the industrial revolution, and the great divergence of economic performance between the industrialized core and the non-industrialized periphery. Of these sections, the first, dealing with the Malthusian nature of the pre-industrial world, is the best. This is perhaps because Clark has done extensive research on pre-industrial England. Clark has a very nice series of discussions of pre-industrial economics and demography. This is essentially a description of the basic structure of economies stuck in the "Malthusian trap" in which living standards are reciprocally coupled to population. While Clark shows this to be probably true for all pre-industrial economies, he is not trying to fit all pre-industrial societies into one tight mold. The interaction between population and production tends towards a different equilibrium point for each given society. Clark argues that Europe, for example, was distinguished by relatively high mortality and relatively high living standards while China had lower adult mortality and probably equilibrated at a lower standard of living. A further point is that while Clark emphasizes the Malthusian trap as an equilibrium state, most human history actually takes place away from the equilibrium point. Clark is careful to point out that the pre-industrial world was not static. While change was slow, he points to 4 long-term important trends - declining real interest rates, increasing literacy and numeracy, rising work hours, and falling inter-personal violence. Clark argues these trends were crucial to the emergence of industrial economies. His model is interesting. He argues for the existence of a Darwinian process in which upper class individuals reproduced at a higher rate with downward mobility resulting in a diffusion of middle class values and/or genotypes throughout society. This is a melding of economic history and the French Annales school emphasis on long views of history and "mentalities" as important drivers of history. Clark's point is very interesting and argued well though a detailed examination of the argument reveals problems and his suggestion that this process involves genetic change is easily arguable. For example, it was European cities that emerged as the cockpits of the Industrial Revolution but given the incredibly high mortality rates within European towns and the constant replenishment of town populations from the countryside, Clark's downward mobility model doesn't seem to fit the facts. Some of the long term changes described by Clark, such as falling interest rates and declining interpersonal violence could have more to do with the emergence of more powerful states than the model Clark presents. As for genetic change, Clark is assuming uniform, constant, and intense selection pressure, which is unlikely.
In the second section, Clark discusses the Industrial Revolution. This section includes a short description of the Industrial Revolution and then Clark's analysis of why the Industrial Revolution occurred. Clark mentions briefly the important counterpart of the Industrial Revolution, the Demographic Transition, the drop in fertility that probably prevented the Industrial Revolution from becoming merely another Malthusian equilibrium shift. Clark has a nice, concise discussion of prior theories of the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Like a number of other recent economic historians, he is quite critical of the institutionalist explanation, which sees the Industrial Revolution as the result of the development of Smithian economic/political institutions. Clark's explanation of the Industrial Revolution is an extension of his view of the long term changes in the Malthusian world. Clark is arguing that Smithian people as opposed to Smithian institutions were the crucial factor in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution. In Clark's model, China and Japan were proceeding along the same path as Europe and given time, an Industrial Revolution would have occurred in one of those nations eventually. This is arguable in several ways. Any monocausal theory is likely to be wrong. Even if we concede the reality of Clark's model of longterm change, its insufficient to account for the Industrial Revolution. As Clark points out, the Industrial economy required consistent technological innovation at a fairly high level. This probably requires both a high rate of literacy/numeracy and a fairly widely diffused scientific world view. The relatively high rate of literacy in pre-modern Western Europe probably has less to do with Clark's Smithian process than the need of European governments and the Church for literate personnel, followed by the great boost to literacy provoked by the Reformation. Similarly, there is no evidence that China or Japan were on their way to something like the emergence of modern science. Clark's model suggests that an Industrial Revolution was inevitable somewhere. The alternative is to see the Industrial Revolution as the result of a series of fortunate coincidences. For a particularly good and concise presentation of this attractive alternative see the relevant chapter of the recent Power and Plenty.
The third section, on the Great Divergence, is the shortest and least satisfactory. Clark points out that the Great Divergence is not only the result of the increasing productivity of the industrialized core but also of impoverishment of the non-industrialized periphery. Clark argues that poor labor productivity is the key feature explaining the Great Divergence. I think Clark's discussion is to brief to be really useful. For example, he omits the relative deindustrialization of non-industrialized countries that followed the Industrial Revolution in Europe, a phenomenon pointed out first by W. Arthur Lewis some years ago.
Clark makes some additional good points. He points out that the institutionalist explanation for the Industrial Revolution is one of the principal supports for the neo-liberal model of development. But if the institutionalist model is wrong, then the neo-liberal model is likely to be wrong, a point with substantial practical significance. Clark also makes some very amusing comments about economics in general. His opinion is that economic theory is very good at explaining the equilibrium conditions of pre-industrial economies but not very good at explaining the innovative structure of modern economies.
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Summary: Clarks two big, but different, questions
Comment: An ambitious and provocative new book by University of California at Davis economic historian Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World attempts to explain two huge questions:
1. Why did one part of the human race finally break out of the "Malthusian trap"--in which growth in per capita income is washed away by subsequent population growth--namely England, at the end of the 18th Century, through rapid and sustained technological advance?
2. And why did the prosperity made possible by the Industrial Revolution successfully spread to some countries but not to others?
In the process, Clark offers a stunning rebuke to economists:
"God clearly created the laws of the economic world in order to have a little fun at economists' expense. In other areas of inquiry, such as the physical sciences, there has been a steady accumulation of knowledge over the past four hundred years. ... In economics, however, we see instead that our ability to describe and predict the economic world reached a peak around 1800. In the years since the Industrial Revolution there has been a progressive and continuing disengagement of economic models from any ability to predict differences of income and wealth across time and across countries and regions."
In other words, economists were closer to understanding the wealth of nations in 1776 than they are today.
The pioneering economic works of Smith and Thomas Malthus (1798) accurately described the world before the Industrial Revolution that was just getting underway then with the employment of the steam engine in cotton mills. By 1817, when David Ricardo was pessimistically propounding what later came to be known as "the Iron Law of Wages," England was moving in a new, liberating direction unexpected by economists: a shortage of cheap labor turned out to be a blessing . The future belonged to countries with high wage, high quality work forces.
Clark's book idiosyncratically combines the strengths and weaknesses of both economists and historians.
The strong point of economists is that they believe in "theory" in the same sense that hard scientists do--as a tool for simplifying our understanding of reality and for making more accurate predictions.
Yet, because economists have mastered some theory, they tend to view reality not as what needs to be explained but as a vague inspiration for the occasional stylized example to illustrate their theories.
In particular, economists don't read much by non-economists. Just as their theory would predict, economists are driven by self-interest, and their profession does not much reward curiosity about anything written by outsiders.
In sharp contrast to economists, historians love facts and hate theories, a predilection that has the opposite advantages and disadvantages. Historians tend to be omnivorously curious and humble about how much they don't know. On the other hand, their love of detail makes them less likely to see the big patterns. While they are less often wrong than scientists, they are also less often right.
In the uneasy middle reside the economic historians.
Economic historian Gregory Clark begins A Farewell to Alms with a description of Malthusian England from 1200-1800. Due to England's wonderful stability, we have legal documents about property ownership and other economic facts going back 800 years.
Even though medieval England had a free market economy with negligible taxes, and while the lives of the affluent improved due to inventions such as eyeglasses and the printing press, farm laborers saw no increase in their daily calorie intake over these 600 years.
Clark's most important original research involves tabulating a couple of thousand wills from Will Shakespeare's era. Although today we expect the poor to have more children than the rich, the opposite was true before the Industrial Revolution. The richest testators' had twice as many surviving children as the poorest. Therefore, laborers tended to die out, while the lineages of the successful flourished.
Thus the modern English are descended primarily from well-to-do farmers.
So the English are mostly the offspring of what Clark calls "the strivers" of generations past: the people who farmed hard and effectively and saved their money to buy more land.
From this, Clark deduces an explanation for the rise and spread of the Industrial Revolution that has surprised the economics profession.
As Nicholas Wade, the genetics reporter of the New York Times, explained in his August 7, 2007 article In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence, Clark believes the Industrial Revolution
"... occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues. "
Is Clark's Darwinian explanation plausible?
The crucial thing to realize about A Farewell to Alms is that Clark is trying to answer these two very different types of questions with one response.
1.
2. Why the Industrial Revolution happened in England in the late 18th Century--rather than in, say, the Low Countries, or the Ruhr Valley, or Japan at some other time
This is a historian's question because it's a unique event. There's no point in developing a general theory about where and when the Industrial Revolution is most likely to take place, because it will never happen again.
My guess is that the Industrial Revolution took both middle class habits of mind, for which the Japanese had evolved plenty of capability, and a little of the "zigzag lightning in the brain" that the Japanese have always claimed they lack in comparison to the more innovative Europeans.
In contrast, Clark's second question--Why have the blessings of the Industrial Revolution spread to some countries but not to others?--is more important for the future. It can tell us something about where we're all going to live the rest of our lives--and our children, in their lives.
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