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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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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
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by Gregory Clark
Sales Rank: 3987
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List Price: $29.95
$19.77
At Amazon
on 6-17-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 440 pages
Published by: Princeton University Press July 24, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0691121354
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0691121352
Book Dimensions:
9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
Weighs: 1.7 pounds
Clive Crook, Financial Times
" As absorbing, as memorable and as well written as Mr Diamond's remarkable bestseller. It deserves to be as widely read."
Product Review
Benjamin M. Friedman New York Times Book Review : Right or wrong, or perhaps somewhere in between, Clark's is about as stimulating an account of world economic history as one is likely to find. Let's hope that the human traits to which he attributes economic progress are acquired, not genetic, and that the countries that grow in population over the next 50 years turn out to be good at imparting them. Alternatively, we can simply hope he's wrong.
Tyler Cowen New York Times : Clark's idea-rich book may just prove to be the next blockbuster in economics. He offers us a daring story of the economic foundations of good institutions and the climb out of recurring poverty. We may not have cracked the mystery of human progress, but A Farewell to Alms brings us closer than before.
Robert Solow New York Review of Books : Clark is very good at piecing together figures from here and there, including those from isolated groups of hunter-gatherers alive today. He makes a plausible case for the basic pattern: for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, there was essentially no sustained improvement in mankind's general material standard of living, nor was there much variation from place to place around the world. The Industrial Revolution made all the difference.
Samuel Bowles Science : A Farewell to Alms asks the right questions, and it is full of fascinating details, like the speed at which information traveled over two millennia (prior to the 19th century, about one mile per hour). Clark's combination of passion and erudition makes his account engaging. When a light bulb goes off in my head, the first thing I ask myself is 'Would this be interest if it were true?' Clark's thesis definitely meets that test.
The Economist : Mr. Clarkhas produced a well written and thought-provoking thesis, refreshingly light on jargon and equations. It could well be the subject of debate for years to come.
Clive Crook Financial Times : Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms is fully as absorbing, as memorable and as well written as [Jared] Diamond's remarkable bestseller. It deserves to be as widely read. [A]ny book that is as bold, as fascinating, as conscientiously argued and as politically incorrect as this one demands to be read.
William R. Wineke The Wisconsin State Journal : Obviously, we¹ve got a controversial argument here. But Clark makes a compelling case for the idea that the fruits of industrialization were open to all societies, but only a handful seized the moment.
Edward Glaeser New York Sun : Gregory Clark's new book A Farewell to Alms is an investigation of both our nasty, brutish, and short past and our more prosperous present. Mr. Clark first makes the case that we owe our current prosperity to the gifts of the Industrial Revolution. He then attempts to explain why that revolution happened in 18th-century England.
Siddharth Singh LiveMint : Economic history often conjures images of musty tomes, bygone eras that no one knows about and in general, scholarship that is dry and difficult to relate to. Gregory Clark's new book A Farewell to Alms conveys a different image. Offering a sweep of history from the border between antiquity and the medieval age, the book is an attempt at tackling grand themes.
William Baldwin Forbes : For a novel and somewhat dispiriting theory of economic divergence, read A Farewell to Alms, published this year, by Gregory Clark of the University of California at Davis. He doesn't accept the view, common among the utopians, that natural endowments like soil and water explain why rich nations are 50 times as prosperous as poor ones. How can differences in natural resources possibly explain Zimbabwe's misery or Singapore's wealth? Clark amasses an extraordinary collection of historical data to explain why the Industrial Revolution was born in western Europe, not Africa or India.
Harold James The American Interest : Clark's ferociously systematic expounding of an alternative to the institutional explanation doesprovide many delightful insights, large and small, along the way. Some of the observations in this very well-written book do make for nice dinner party anecdotes.
Robert Samuelson The Washington Post : Comes now Gregory Clark, an economist who interestingly takes the side of culture. In an important new book, A Farewell to Alms Clark suggests that much of the world's remaining poverty is semi-permanent. Modern technology and management are widely available, but many societies can't take advantage because their values and social organization are antagonistic. Prescribing economically sensible policies (open markets, secure property rights, sound money) can't overcome this bedrock resistance.
Jack A. Goldstone World Economics : A Farewell to Alms is a brave new work, rich in both detailed facts and big ideas. Clark clears away much of the tangled brush of theories of long-term economic growth that have grown up in recent decades. This is the most ambitious and far-reaching book on long-term economic history to appear in many years, perhaps since Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Roger Gathman Austin American-Statesman : Clark's book A Farewell to Alms isambitious, staking out an entire vision of world history.Clark's Malthusian model is forcefully argued.
Roberta Fusaro Harvard Business Review : the author's engaging style and (relatively) jargon-free descriptions of the economic principles in play before, during, and after the Industrial Revolution in England turn this rich and detailed account into more of a sprint than a slogWhatever your reaction to this decidedly un-PC take on economic aid, [A Farewell to Alms] serves as a useful explanation of how we got where we are today and a reminder that new approaches are needed to close the yawning gap between the world's richest and poorest societies.
MoneySense Magazine : Clark argues the English evolved biologically in ways that created prosperity. Before you dismiss the notion, read this brilliant tour of economic history.
A. R. Sanderson Choice : Clark adds substantively to an understanding of perhaps the important questions of this--or any--era: what makes economies grow, and why have some not experienced any success at all?.Alms is provocative, authoritative, insightful, readable, well documented, and an inescapable detour for anyone wanting to tackle economic growth and development topics and enter into these conversations.
Ian R. Harper The Melbourne Review : Gregory Clark has written a fascinating book which is chock-full of insight and ideas. Clark paints on a big canvas and his deft handling of the puzzles and counterintuitive outcomes is delicious. 'No one,' he says, 'can claim to be truly intellectually alive without having understood and wrestled, at least a little, with these mysteries'. We are indebted to him for revealing more of them in such an electrifying fashion.
Reader Reviews
The perennial question asked by economic historians is why some countries grow excedingly rich and others remain miserably poor. It is a question that writers of "big history" have asked: notably Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (Bantam Classics), David S Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, and Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. These works rely heavily on theory beyond the mere retelling of certain facts and events. It is in this tradition that Gregory Clark, economic historian at the University of California at Davis, presents the economic history of the the world. The underlying theory that informs his version is that social and possibly biological evolution explains economic growth. The specter of social darwinism haunts his imagination. For Clark the critical stage of social evolution is when a society is able to emerge from the Malthusian trap of poverty. It is at this point where they diverge from the pack and actually experience social progress and economic growth. Regarding the Malthusian trap, Clark argues that the well-being of the average person around 1800 was no better than the average hunter-gatherer 10,000 years earlier. According to Malthus' "Essay on the Principle of Population," with every technological advance that increases the efficiency of production, there is a corresponding increase in population, thus neutralizing any gains made in production. In short, there are just more mouths to feed. The principle being that the population only grows as fast as the food supply. That was the case until the Industrial Revolution. After 1800, something happened in England that caused production to outpace population growth. It was the first time in history that a society actually escaped from the Malthusian trap. For the first time incomes and consumption per capita began to rise. To find out why this occurred, Clark undertook a study of wills in England going back hundreds of years. He discovered that the rich had twice as many offspring as the poor, thus they outpopulated the poor. The rich brought with them certain skills and behaviors such as literacy, numeracy, work discipline, deferral of gratification, etc., that eventually permeated the rest of society in a downwardly mobile fashion. This is truely an original hypothesis. It was this evolutinary shift, according to Clark, that triggered the Industrial Revolution and set England apart from other countries Why did England take off and others did not? Why the Great Divergence? The phrase is taken from Kenneth Pomeranz's book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. which deals with the same subject. Clark asks why the gap between rich and poor countries went from 4:1 in 1800 to 50:1 today. His answer is that in countries such as China and Japan the rich did not produce enough offspring to spread their productive behaviors downward through the rest of the population. East Asian and other economies were not able to push their agarian economies out of the Malthusian trap. The title of this book is a pun on the title of a Hemingway novel, suggesting that alms or aid to the poor will do them no good. Clark is in the camp of those who believe that a change in behavior or, in this case, an advancement in the evolutionary process will allow poor countries to emerge from poverty. The implications of this are very controversial, to say the least, and still very inconclusive. Nevertheless, it is an interesting explanation of economic history that will be debated for years to come.
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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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