Positive Liberty

Maybe the pros at Cliopatria can help me out with this one.

I’m reading a review of A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark’s new book about the rise of industrialism and mass affluence. Arguably the rise industrial capitalism is the single most significant development in all of human history. But it’s also been extensively studied by others, and — this is where things get weird — Clark is presented as having made some major new discoveries.

Yet nothing reported in the review is particularly new or original. I kept scratching my head at it, asking, “Didn’t Fernand Braudel write about this stuff? I mean, right along with many, many others?”

The basis of Dr. Clark’s work is his recovery of data from which he can reconstruct many features of the English economy from 1200 to 1800. From this data, he shows, far more clearly than has been possible before, that the economy was locked in a Malthusian trap _ — each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level.

This income was pitifully low in terms of the amount of wheat it could buy. By 1790, the average person’s consumption in England was still just 2,322 calories a day, with the poor eating a mere 1,508. Living hunter-gatherer societies enjoy diets of 2,300 calories or more.

“Primitive man ate well compared with one of the richest societies in the world in 1800,” Dr. Clark observes.

The tendency of population to grow faster than the food supply, keeping most people at the edge of starvation, was described by Thomas Malthus in a 1798 book, “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” This Malthusian trap, Dr. Clark’s data show, governed the English economy from 1200 until the Industrial Revolution and has in his view probably constrained humankind throughout its existence. The only respite was during disasters like the Black Death, when population plummeted, and for several generations the survivors had more to eat.

Not particularly original, as I said. This type of history, and the cliometric data to go with it, has been under construction since the middle of the last century. (Earlier, if one counts the massive work of Victorian antiquarians, whose corpus has fed every generation of historians since.)

Then things take a strange turn:

Malthus’s book is well known because it gave Darwin the idea of natural selection. Reading of the struggle for existence that Malthus predicted, Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. … Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work.”

Given that the English economy operated under Malthusian constraints, might it not have responded in some way to the forces of natural selection that Darwin had divined would flourish in such conditions? Dr. Clark started to wonder whether natural selection had indeed changed the nature of the population in some way and, if so, whether this might be the missing explanation for the Industrial Revolution….

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

Another significant change in behavior, Dr. Clark argues, was an increase in people’s preference for saving over instant consumption, which he sees reflected in the steady decline in interest rates from 1200 to 1800.

“Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,” Dr. Clark writes.

Well… this is just… great. I fail, however, to see any evidence that this transformation has a genetic basis. What we seem to have here is the annales school, combined with an intriguing but unevidenced hypothesis.

There’s also the glaring risk of genetic fatalism, which Clark himself seems to embrace:

Many commentators point to a failure of political and social institutions as the reason that poor countries remain poor. But the proposed medicine of institutional reform “has failed repeatedly to cure the patient,” Dr. Clark writes. He likens the “cult centers” of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to prescientific physicians who prescribed bloodletting for ailments they did not understand.

If the Industrial Revolution was caused by changes in people’s behavior, then populations that have not had time to adapt to the Malthusian constraints of agrarian economies will not be able to achieve the same production efficiencies, his thesis implies.

I’m no fan of the World Bank or the IMF, but they are hardly the only institutional structures trying to lift people out of poverty. Indeed, plenty of formerly poor countries have ceased being poor, or are becoming rich today, through changes in their legal, political, and economic systems. Given the current state of China, India, and a few others, this state of affairs arguably obtains for most of the world’s population, and they have reached it within the space of two generations, a time far too short for genetic factors to play a significant part. Only fifty years ago, China was in the throes of the Great Leap Forward, in which famine claimed tens of millions. Genetic change can’t possibly have been a factor here.

So here’s my question to those of you who are still in the academy: Is this all a lot of hokum? Or is it just a reviewer who hasn’t captured the real argument of a book?

Trackback URI |