Reddit reviews A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World (25))
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Princeton University Press
I made the same mistake but the comment actually suggests A Farewall to ALms, a "sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention."
... Which sounds exactly as relevant as Hemingway. I doubt Clark argues that poor countries should kill their homeless in order to develop.
The easy answer is "because that's where the Industrial Revolution happened".
But that's just pushing the question back a little bit. The next level is "Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in England?".
This is a very well-researched topic, and there are a couple of competing theories. I'm going to summarize one strain of research, which I personallyu know the best and find the most compelling: Greg Clark's theory that English primogeniture laws in the medieval period caused discount rates in England to decrease due to an increase in self-control capacity.
Needless to say, this is a fairly controversial theory.
*
Let's go back a bit to Clark's 2003 paper The Great Escape: The Industrial Revolution in Theory and in History. It concludes:
> The Industrial Revolution remains one of histories great mysteries. We have seen in this
survey that the attempts by economists to model this transition have been largely unsuccessful.
The first approach emphasizing an exogenous switch in property rights stemming from political
changes, despite its continuing popularity, fails in terms of the timing of political changes, and
their observed effects on the incentives for innovation. The second approach, which looks for a
shift between equilibria again fails because there is little sign of any major changes in the
underlying parameters of the economy which would lead to changed behavior by individuals.
> The most promising class of models are those based on endogenous growth. The problem here is
to find some kind of “driver” that is changing over time that will induce changes in productivity
growth rates. Previously these models seemed to face insuperable difficulties in that they find it
very hard to model the kind of one time upward shift in productivity growth rates that the
Industrial Revolution seemed to involve. But as we gather more information on the empirics of
the Industrial Revolution and the years before the discontinuity in TFP growth rates seems less
than has been imagined, and the transition between the old world of zero productivity growth
rates and the new world of rapid productivity growth much more gradual. This bodes well for
endogenous growth models.
Note that endogenous growth models are a fairly recent addition to our toolbox - primarily coming out of Paul Romer's work in the early 1990s.
Clark proposed a mechanism for this endogenous growth in Survival of the Richest: The Malhtusian mechanism in Pre-Industrial England.
Abstract**
> Fundamental to the Malthusian model of pre-industrial society is the assumption
that higher income increased reproductive success. Despite the seemingly inescapable logic of this model, its empirical support is weak. We examine the link
between income and net fertility using data from wills on reproductive success,
social status and income for England 1585–1638. We find that for this society,
close to a Malthusian equilibrium, wealth robustly predicted reproductive succapable logic of this model, its empirical support is weak. We examine the link
between income and net fertility using data from wills on reproductive success,
social status and income for England 1585–1638. We find that for this society,
close to a Malthusian equilibrium, wealth robustly predicted reproductive success. The richest testators left twice as many children as the poorest. Consequently, in this static economy, social mobility was predominantly downwards.
The result extends back to at least 1250 in England.
In his book A Farewell to Alms, Clark shows posits the following model:
The data Clark presents is, in my opinion, quite convincing, and I haven't seen an effective refutation.
While I think the institutional explanation is dominant within economics, it's worth noting that there are some adherent to a geographic explanation, such as the one Diamond explains in "Guns, Germs and Steel". It posits that the main driver of the English IR was geographic - England has more coal, and Europeans were in general more resistant to disease, which allowed for European expansion.
Read the excerpt below carefully.
I even took the trouble of cropping out Figure 14.3 for you. You are welcome.
A better understanding of history might help you.
From Clark's Farewell to Alms:
Chapter 7:
>The Industrial Revolution was driven by the expansion of knowledge. Yet, stunningly, unskilled labor has reaped more gains than any other group.... By 1815 real wages in England for both farm laborers and the urban unskilled had begun the inexorable rise that has created affluence for all.
>Thus modern growth, right from its start, by benefiting the most disadvantaged groups in preindustrial society, particularly unskilled workers, has reduced inequality within societies.
>Land, in the long run, received none of the gains from the Industrial Revolution. David Ricardo, the first economist to focus explicitly on the distribution of income, writing in the England of 1817 during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, foresaw a future in which wages would stay at subsistence, land rents would increase, and the return on capital would decline as population increased, because land was the fixed factor in production. The actual future in England could hardly have been more different.
>Because there is a fixed stock of land, the failure of real rents per acre to increase significantly has meant that, as economic output marched upward, the share of land rents in national income has correspondingly declined to insignificance...
>Physical capital owners also received none of the gains from growth. The real rental of capital (net depreciation) is just the real interest rate. But consider figure 9.1. It shows that the real interest rate, if anything, declined since the Industrial Revolution.
Total payments to capital have expanded enormously since the Industrial Revolution, but only because the stock of capital grew rapidly. The stock of capital has been indefinitely expandable. It has grown as fast as output, and its abundance has kept real returns per unit of capital low.
>We might have expected wage gains to have gone disproportionately to skilled workers with much human capital, especially since innovation and new technology were the basis of growth. But as figure 9.4 showed unskilled male wages in England have risen more since the Industrial Revolution than skilled wages, and this result holds for all advanced economies.9 The wage premium for skilled building workers has declined from about 100 percent in the thirteenth century to 25 percent today. Figure 14.3 shows the real wages per hour for building laborers, the unskilled, in England from 1220 to 2000. The enormous gains even for these unskilled workers are evident.
I'm not conflating the two, I'm expressly contrasting them. I know there was a long time between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution... the Malthusian misery that I mentioned occurred precisely in that interlude. Of course that period included societies existing peacefully -- peacefulness is consistent with Malthusian misery, and in fact more conducive to it because spikes in the death rate are (together with drops in the birth rate) one of precisely two things that periodically pulled societies out of the Malthusian depths prior to the industrial revolution.
Clark's A Farewell to Alms covers these topics in depth.
http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282
No, not really.
In the U.S., life expectancy at age 20 has increased by ~50% since 1850. There are no "official" stats going back much further than this, although some researchers have attempted to guess based on wills, church records, etc.
There were four different econ history courses at mine! One of them is on iTunes U, if you're so inclined. And/or you can buy the professor's (very reasonably priced) book. It's a light read.
^(Please ignore the normative policy implications of the title. The author just wanted to be clever. Source: I took his class.)
Coming to this a little late but wanted to say that (a) I completely agree, and (b) I'd take it a little further.
The thought that there was some Valhalla of wonderful food in earlier days is easily proven wrong. We live in the best time for eating there has ever been. For instance this article explains at some length and convincingly to me that food has only improved. Think about it - name one major city in the US where food was better 15 years ago. I can't think of any.
And if you go back further in time, you find that agriculture is coincident with higher population but also with malnutrition. This book is awful in some parts but it explains at length the accepted knowledge that agriculture = more people, but is also = disease and malnutrition at significant levels.
Skipping forward, I think 'modern' agriculture starts with crop rotation, Source, and pretty soon you have the British Agricultural revolution that kickstarts the industrial revolution.
Coincident with that you have the greatest rise in per-capita GDP there has ever been. Source, The Great Divergence.
And then that's why I get to work at a desk instead of doing mind-numbing, back-breaking work in the fields, and that's why I enjoy more material plenty than anybody could imagine 200 years ago, and why I can choose among multiple places, in my major urban center, to get pretty damn good pho. Lo those many years ago when I was young, sushi was a foreign concept. Now I can get it (or a rough approximation of it) in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere.
There is a downside to removing people from their food. There is also a downside to industrial agriculture. A lot of folks eat out more often. We have lost the spiritual connection to our food in large part that is created by hunting for your food or growing it and shepherding it the whole way through. We don't take food as seriously, and we don't contemplate as closely where it came from. We are complicit in the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi and in the overuse of antibiotics in, and ill-treatment of, our livestock, to name but a couple examples.
But come the fuck on. I more than likely owe my life to my forebearers moving away from the fields and working in factories. I certainly owe my material comforts to that. I don't have to wonder whether I'm going to have a crop failure and starve to death.
That some of us can turn back and re-discover a better connection with food is a wonderful luxury. Appreciate it as such.
I think downward social pressure is an important point in this discussion and raises a bunch of interesting economic and ethical issues .
Side stepping those issues for a moment, an interesting data point is Gregory Clark's book A Farewell to Alms which is about how downward social pressure impacted England in the 1600's. Clark's argument is that limited land and the Malthusian trap (which was more prevalent in England than Europe because England is an island) caused the children of rich children in England to move down the social ladder which crowded out the poor and essentially pushed them off the ladder. Clark also claims that these new lower class workers had more upper class values which made them more industrious and better works which in turn provided England with the labor force necessary to get a jump start on the industrial revolution, though this second claim clearly has issues (e.g. did the morals really make that big a difference; couldn't economic incentives teach people to be industrious rather than the values needing to be taught by wealthy parents or grand parents). That said, I think the first claim is spot on as a positive claim (though I don't endorse the normative claim that it's good since that smacks of social darwinism).
Jumping back to today, we were already seeing some of this happening prior to the great recession where lower middle class men aren't able to get married and start families because of poor financial prospects, driven partly by lack of education. I think the great recession though is only making things worse as the generation that graduated from 2008 to today is seeing similar diminished opportunities and will increase that downward pressure.
So it will be very interesting to see how this plays out. There's clearly huge economic concerns at stake (e.g. how do you stop people from investing $200k into education for a career which pays $30k and how do you stop the educational arms race) but there's also huge ethical issues too (e.g. is there an intrinsic value to education? who deserves to be educated and on what basis? what do you do about those who get left behind?).
> I understood it to be the ACLU’s goal to delicately balance competing rights to ensure that any infringements are narrowly tailored
What? This woman actually believes it is possible to "Narrowly Tailor" ANYTHING that happens in the public sphere?
Where do liberals get this belief that the world of human behavior CAN controlled? It's the same belief that lets them look at something as mind-numbingly complex as the economy and think that it can be centrally planned. It's the same hubris that causes them to believe that passing a law to ban a fire arm will actually cause people to not own it.
It's SO AGGRAVATING. The foundation of my conservative political views is the simple consequence of two facts:
Therefore, I conclude that Human Nature can not be changed by human intention... and we shouldn't try!
First, for many systems (such as the economy) sufficiently accurate and detailed information can not be collected fast enough to predict the consequences of that information before it actually happens. This feeds into Chaos Theory.
Second, for many systems (such as the economy again) the fact that predictions are being made from data is itself altering the system... this creates a feedback loop where looking at the system alters it to the point where your tools to look at it are no longer effective.
Third, all systems are subject to the incompleteness theorems that in non-mathematical-terms means that they always have either a flaw in their own rules, or their rules are incomplete. Connected to this, there are certain classes of problems that are literally "unsolvable"... that is they have properties that simply can not be derived except by experimentation... no amount of computation, even with perfect data can ever derive the answer, and as has recently been proven, this includes material properties of at least some things in the real material world, not just abstract math problems.
Fourth, humans have a proven inability to figure out complex systems with multiple interlocking feedback loops leading them to attempt simple direct fixes that have unpredicted and disastrous effects well out of proportion to anticipated effects. Perhaps the most classical solution is Rent Control... a policy meant to increase housing availability that actually reduces it.
Therefore, we should never assume that we can simply figure something out by looking at it and assuming that we're smart enough to manipulate it.
Seriously, accept these two ideas, both of which are incredibly well supported by history and math, and small government conservatism is the natural result.
I liked Empire as well, and Ferguson's Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World is pretty good too.
If you're into economics, I just finished Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms. It's heavy on the numerical data, but it makes some really interesting points about the history of economic development before and after the industrial revolution.
A lot of good ones have already been said but here are a few less famous ones...
A Farewell to Alms
The Mystery of Capital
The White Tiger: A Novel
A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark. It's about economic growth throughout human history. I don't want to portray it as some seminal work in the field of economic history, because evidently it's debated intensely. It is however one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in recent memory.
I found this data after getting interested reading this book (which is great so far)
https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486831380&sr=8-1&keywords=farewell+to+alms
If your local library has a copy it might be worth checking out
You are really stupid. Let me quote from your response, "Africa and Mexico did not have the same resources as Britain". Britain got cheap resources from America and Africa. Remember colonialism? Africans had cheap resources, they just didn't know how to exploit them like the British did. The Industrial Revolution happened in Britain due to a hundreds of years of eugenics. http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1393692365&sr=8-1&keywords=a+farewell+to+alms Half your post is also off topic and irrelevant to the conversation.
>So what? People are also pissed of at the pricing of HBO and still people pay for it.
People would like all prices to be lower, but they still pay them. That isn't evidence that consumers don't have power in the industry, as they clearly do, even in cases where people still wished that costs were lower. If the cost was high enough, they'd stop watching HBO.
>Until you realize you have to pay more, but don't get more in the end. And when you don't have net neutrality it also questionable if they even want to improve the infrastructure.
This might be true if we were only talking about poor customers who aren't able to move. However, many are able to move, and BUSINESSES can move even more easily. A company that offers fast speeds and lots of infrastructure will get the richest customers. As they continually upgrade the infrastructure, faster speeds are eventually passed onto lower paying customers as well. Net Neutrality actually takes money away from the suppliers of infrastructure and transfers the benefits to content creators, which consists of powerful companies such as google and facebook. I'm not seeing how that rewards more decentralized markets.
>At least they will make a wage they can live of in the end and aren't exploited by some corporations making billions in profit.
If you take the job voluntarily, and the government isn't preventing you from getting a better job, then you can't say that you were "exploited" in any malicious sense. Yes, it is important for people to have money to live, but this is not manna from heaven, and the economic process if very important for producing enough wealth to take care of all of these people.
>I rather pay some taxes to provide for people who can't get a job instead of subsidizing big companies who cut wages and then giving out foodstamps to the people working there so they can make it rough the month.
Okay, this has little to do with what we're talking about here.
>And who pays the bill in the end when they end up in a hospital without insurance?
Nobody should be forced to pay for a bill for something they never asked for. That was the chance the worker took. It isn't our job to now take care of people who didn't have foresight to find a less dangerous job, even if it meant making less money.
>When a parent might even become unable to care for their children trough an accident?
Personally, I don't think that anybody should be having kids unless they are already very comfortable in life, but for these freak scenarios, charity often used to step in, before the government crowded them out. Their are also family members to turn to, as well as your local community.
>Yeah well tell that to the person who works in unsafe conditions not getting minimum wage. Or look to China, I bet some people would rather have their old farm live back instead of living in a small room near some factory.
For many, no, that isn't true. Statistically, and according to the evidence of the migration patterns within CHina, that's simply all false. For some, maybe so, and if they were forced off of their land, the government probably had something to do with it, which is usually the case when 3rd worlders are forced off of their land.
>Not if you would have passed it along with foodstamps.
Okay, I seriously suggest that you read some history from the time period. This is a good start:
http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282
People starved back then because there wasn't enough food. Even if the upper classes donated all of their money to charity, millions would still have starved.
Check out Greg Clark's work on this question. His hypothesis is that a change in primogeniture law in England led to a higher evolutionary advantage to high self control.
> 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.