Greg Clark's New Book: "A Farewell to Alms"

Greg Clark's new book may be right, may be wrong, but it is brilliant--the pre-industrial chapters may well be the best short treatment of the topic ever.

Nicholas Wade reviews:

Review - A Farewell to Alms: For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.... Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution ... occurred because of a change... 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.... Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past....

“This is a great book and deserves attention,” said Philip Hoffman, a historian at the California Institute of Technology. He described it as “delightfully provocative” and a “real challenge” to the prevailing school of thought that it is institutions that shape economic history. Samuel Bowles, an economist who studies cultural evolution at the Santa Fe Institute, said Dr. Clark’s work was “great historical sociology and, unlike the sociology of the past, is informed by modern economic theory.”...

[F]rom 1200 to 1800... 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.... 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.... “Primitive man ate well compared with one of the richest societies in the world in 1800,” Dr. Clark observes....

The Industrial Revolution... occurred when the efficiency of production at last accelerated, growing fast enough to outpace population growth and allow average incomes to rise....

[A]ncient wills... reveal[ed] a connection between wealth and the number of progeny.... Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor.... “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....

After the Industrial Revolution, the gap in living standards between the richest and the poorest countries started to accelerate, from a wealth disparity of about 4 to 1 in 1800 to more than 50 to 1 today. Just as there is no agreed explanation for the Industrial Revolution, economists cannot account well for the divergence between rich and poor nations or they would have better remedies to offer.... [T]he middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. “Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world.”...

Dr. Clark’s view is that institutions and incentives have been much the same all along and explain very little....

“He deserves kudos for assembling all this data,” said Dr. Hoffman, the Caltech historian, “but I don’t agree with his underlying argument.” The decline in English interest rates, for example, could have been caused by the state’s providing better domestic security and enforcing property rights, Dr. Hoffman said, not by a change in people’s willingness to save, as Dr. Clark asserts.... Dr. Bowles, the Santa Fe economist, said he was “not averse to the idea” that genetic transmission of capitalist values is important, but that the evidence for it was not yet there.... He also took issue with Dr. Clark’s suggestion that the unwillingness to postpone consumption, called time preference by economists, had changed in people over the centuries. “If I were as poor as the people who take out payday loans, I might also have a high time preference,” he said....

“The actual data underlying this stuff is hard to dispute,” Dr. Clark said. “When people see the logic, they say ‘I don’t necessarily believe it, but it’s hard to dismiss.’”

IMHO, in all Malthusian economies downward mobility is the rule: that's what being rich buys you--enough food to feed your children. I am much more inclined to see virtuous circles--especially longer lifespan leading to a longer planning horizon and lower interest rates--and successful institutions driving changes in attitudes and the pace of technological improvement.

But the book is brilliant.

Comments

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/business/02scene.html?ex=1320123600&en=45c0cd3f64070ad2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

November 2, 2006

What Makes a Nation Wealthy? Maybe It's the Working Stiff
By TYLER COWEN

Economists typically explain the wealth of a nation by pointing to good policies and the quality of a country's institutions. But why do these differences exist in the first place?

In "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World" (forthcoming, Princeton University Press,

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/FTA2006.pdf),

Gregory Clark, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, identifies the quality of labor as the fundamental factor behind economic growth. Poor labor quality discourages capital from flowing into a country, which means that poverty persists. Good institutions never have a chance to develop.

Professor Clark's pessimistic view is that most forms of policy advice or financial aid do not solve the problem of economic development. Unless the quality of labor rises, those would-be remedies are addressing symptoms, not causes.

Professor Clark's analysis counters Jared M. Diamond, who in his "Guns, Germs and Steel" (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999) located the ultimate sources of European advantage in geography, like safety from tropical diseases, and a greater number of available animals that could be domesticated.

A simple example from Professor Clark shows the importance of labor in economic development. As early as the 19th century, textile factories in the West and in India had essentially the same machinery, and it was not hard to transport the final product. Yet the difference in cultures could be seen on the factory floor. Although Indian labor costs were many times lower, Indian labor was far less efficient at many basic tasks....

[anne]

The idea of course is to counter Jared Diamond's work and show that my-oh-my are we ever clever, whoever we happen to be....

"A simple example from Professor Clark shows the importance of labor in economic development. As early as the 19th century, textile factories in the West and in India had essentially the same machinery, and it was not hard to transport the final product. Yet the difference in cultures could be seen on the factory floor. Although Indian labor costs were many times lower, Indian labor was far less efficient at many basic tasks...."

Huh??? Whatever could we find wrong with such an example, such a simple or simple-minded example?

There we have colonial India, remember colonialism? There we have Britain. Why oh why might the colonial labor force, ever so low paid colonial labor force even, be less productive than the British labor force? British character, obviously. Pip, pip.

[derek]

Every year, up to 80% of sage grouse chicks can claim the prettiest sage grouse cock in the neigborhood as their daddy, while only a couple of percent or two of sage grouse cocks have any offspring at all. And yet sage grouse don't get prettier year by year, not even to another sage grouse.

They just hang on to that plateau of loveliness, whle the 95-98% of unlucky male sage grouse suffer from one tiny genetic flaw or another, that makes them the four-minutes-and-one-second mile runners next to Roger Bannister.

[anne]

To me, this was a mannerly stroll along with Herbert Spencer and social Darwinism. So, British labor was descended from the British aristocracy and was all shiny gened while Indian labor was descended, well, from Indian labor and never could get learn to love those British spinning machines. Remember Gandhi? Gandhi never cared for British spinners either, too poorly bred I imagine.

[anne]

Derek:

"Every year, up to 80% of sage grouse chicks can claim the prettiest sage grouse cock in the neigborhood as their daddy, while only a couple of percent or two of sage grouse cocks have any offspring at all. And yet sage grouse don't get prettier year by year, not even to another sage grouse.

"They just hang on to that plateau of loveliness...."

Wonderful :)

[s9]

One wonders how much of the credit for avoiding the Malthusian trap should be given to the extraction of energy from finite natural resources.

[Art]

The placing of the difference in evolutionary selection seems designed to attract attention, and is succeeding wildly. Never mind that cultural transmission works about 73,000 times faster and is far more likely to account for things like attitude toward saving.

Also, I'm inclined to believe that the increases in productivity come from the systematic use of slave or corvee labor in the colonies. There's a reason that the few rich and numerous poor countries diverge. But most people would rather pat their evolved ancestors on the back.

[steve jennings]

Like S9 I see a close correlation between the use of enormously high energy density fuels such as oil and coal witht he exponential productivity gains of the industrial revolution period. It strikes me as odd that economists are always banging on about savings and interests rates, as if these were part of the real world and not just a means of bartering goods, and don't mention oil, as if oil was some imaginary stuff. A more distorted world view one could hardly imagine.
It doesn't take a genius to see what is going to happen to homo-petrolium once the black stuff runs out, and I'm not talking about Guiness!
Steve

[Half Sigma]

Oil wasn't discovered in large quantities until 1901 (in Beaumont Texas), by which time mankind at already broken out of the Malthusian trap.

[Justin X]

Anne: “ To me, this was a mannerly stroll along with Herbert Spencer and social Darwinism.”

Touche!

But don’t forget Bohm-Bawerk, Wicksell, Marshall, and Samuelson. According to these learned economists, “time preference” (or “cost of "waiting”, “impatience”, “thrift”, call it what you will) combined with primordial “productivity” explains all of capitalism’s emergence and growth.

In other words, the whole thesis seems a rather simple and straightforward (if imaginative) application of the whole reductionist apparatus of neoclassical capital theory. (“Seems”, because I haven’t read the book). No wonder it is so apppealing to the economists steeped in that tradition.

[Lord]

The Black Death greatly reduced the population during this time, so much so densities were not equalled until the 20th century. Are we to assume living standards did not rise due to that?

[david]

“great historical sociology and, unlike the sociology of the past, is informed by modern economic theory.”... That's very funny. This book sounds horrible, along the lines of Bryon Caplan's -- I think that also got a recommendation here.

Elicited great comments, though.

[bigTom]

Throwing in genetics strikes me as completely nuts. For genetics to have worked, selection would have had to be a major force operating over mnay generations. If the poor were procreating much less than the well-to-do there might be an argument, but this isn't what is observed.

The biggest factor in compounding the differences is the compounding effect of differing growth rates. If one nation, for whatever reasons has a lower growth rate it will fall further behind. The only thing countering this effect is the diffusion of wealth and ideas for rich to poor. Counter to that is the possibility that the rich may use their superior circumstances to exploit the poor.

[jon livesey]

All this elegant sarcasm at the expense of the English is very amusing, of course.

But isn't there some difference between the UK and India even today? A difference in productivity, in provision for the poor, in levels of corruption, in violence - by criminals and also by the police - even in public behaviour?

Just a sliver of difference, maybe?

[JonF]

Re: Professor Clark's analysis counters Jared M. Diamond, who in his "Guns, Germs and Steel" (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999) located the ultimate sources of European advantage in geography, like safety from tropical diseases, and a greater number of available animals that could be domesticated.

This is inaccurate: Diamond made no such argument about Europe specifically, his analysis applied to the whole of the Eurasian landmass and pointed much further back in time than Clark's period of consideration. Diamond was answering the question of why truly advanced civilizations arose in Europe and Asia, but not in tropical Africa, Australia, Oceana or the New World (the Aztecs and Incas were very primitive civilizations, about the level of Egypt and Sumer c 3000 BC). Diamond did apply some analysis to Europe specifically later in its history, mainly suggesting that its plentiful harbors, long seacoasts and fragmented political entities played a role in letting in take the lead. Which should not be controversial (a landlocked culture will not become world explorers by sea after all), though we are allowed to consider that other factors, including historical accidents like the Balck Death leaving behind a capital and infrastructure surplus for the survivors, may have played a role too.

[Marc]

Lamark would be proud, as would the Social Darwinists of the 19th century. A genetic explanation for factors with obvious cultural ingredients (such as savings rates) doesn't pass the laugh test.

[b hall]

"[T]he Aztecs and the Incas were very primitive civilizations," were they?

But see Greg Witherspoon, Inside Higher Ed, "The Churcill Firing - II:"

"Summarizing research and writing over the last 30-40 years, [Charles] Mann shows that in 1491 the population of the Americas surpassed that of Europe, that American cities such as Tenochtitlan were larger than any found in Europe at the same time and, unlike European cities, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens and clean streets. I would add that nowhere in Indigenous America in the areas of my research (North and Central America) have any jails been found, so far as I have been able to determine. The earliest American cities were thriving before the Egyptians built their pyramids, and the feats of Indigenous American agriculture were unparalleled anywhere else. The journal Science recently pronounced the development of corn from its ancient noble grass ancestors as probably the greatest botanical achievement of genetic engineering in human history."
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/30/witherspoon)

[b hall]

"[T]he Aztecs and the Incas were very primitive civilizations," were they?

But see Greg Witherspoon, Inside Higher Ed, "The Churcill Firing - II:"

"Summarizing research and writing over the last 30-40 years, [Charles] Mann shows that in 1491 the population of the Americas surpassed that of Europe, that American cities such as Tenochtitlan were larger than any found in Europe at the same time and, unlike European cities, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens and clean streets. I would add that nowhere in Indigenous America in the areas of my research (North and Central America) have any jails been found, so far as I have been able to determine. The earliest American cities were thriving before the Egyptians built their pyramids, and the feats of Indigenous American agriculture were unparalleled anywhere else. The journal Science recently pronounced the development of corn from its ancient noble grass ancestors as probably the greatest botanical achievement of genetic engineering in human history."
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/30/witherspoon)

[andres]

anne:

"There we have colonial India, remember colonialism? There we have Britain. Why oh why might the colonial labor force, ever so low paid colonial labor force even, be less productive than the British labor force? British character, obviously. Pip, pip."

Er, the urban legend popular in India and in some academic circles is that Indian spinners were less productive than their British counterparts because the British soldiers, perhaps with Arkwright and friends whispering in their ear, made it a practice to cut off the thumbs of Indian spinners. All is fair in love and business competition ;-)

[RC]

So corporations had nothing to do with this change? The British Empire reaching out to distant lands and snatching up other people, their lands and resources for these corporation to use? Economists do love to romanticize about the past. It was only the noble saver and diligent worker that caused this great event? Not likely.

[BillCross]

"

All this elegant sarcasm at the expense of the English is very amusing, of course.

But isn't there some difference between the UK and India even today? A difference in productivity, in provision for the poor, in levels of corruption, in violence - by criminals and also by the police - even in public behaviour?

Just a sliver of difference, maybe?"

perhaps the destructive evils of colonialism take more than 59 years to overcome?

[bruce webb]

I had my say at Thoma's and an iPhone doesn't support extended comment but I can say from my studies of English wills before 1500 in the Grad program at that obscure school known to some as UCB is that Clark clearly doesn't understand the function and structure of "ancient" Engglish wills. You cannot draw the kind of demographic conclusions Clark would want to from them. Absence of evidence of surviving children is not evidence of absence. Moreover there are reasons why wills of the relatively poor skew to the childless.

The book may be well written but from everything I see derived from some obsolete concepts of pre-industrial standards of living. More when I get back to a real keyboard.

[pjgoober]

BigTom writes: "Throwing in genetics strikes me as completely nuts. For genetics to have worked, selection would have had to be a major force operating over mnay generations."

It wouldn't have taken millions or hundreds of thousands of years. Gene frequencies have been found to change in much shorter time periods than you apparently think. See the work of Bruce Lahn and Greg Cochran, among others. Experiments with selective breeding in the Soviet Union produced tame foxes in a mere 50 years.

[wood turtle]

I don't think that the genome project located the genes that control "behaviors that make for wealth."

[P.M.Lawrence]

The fact that “Primitive man ate well compared with one of the richest societies in the world in 1800” shows that there was nothing abject about the lot of most in most of those earler periods.

Also, that idea that people are mostly descended from "the economic upper class" is only an accurate observation if it understands that to mean wealthy peasants and the lower aristocracy, with perhaps prosperous burghers (who however faced poor urban sanitation). The thing is, the true upper classes tended to get thinned out at regular intervals by increases in the endemic level of warfare; it's even noted in Shakespeare's speech with the lines ending with "where is Plantagenet?".

But the worst solecism is the idea that the Industrial Revolution as such helped overcome Malthusian constraints, rather than certain other parallel developments like opening up new lands and either importing their foodstuffs or allowing emigration there. The parallel developments did not rest on industrialisation but on the other changes that also allowed industrialisation. The first industrial change that improved food security was probably the mechanised reaper in about the 1830s, and even then there was a non-industrial alternative: the people that fed could have emigrated to the new lands that were instead worked that way. The first indubitable industrial improvement in food security was from artificial chemical fertilisers, very late in the day. The thing is, no amount of industrial activity before that could affect total food productION as opposed to productIVITY; the effect was a change in distribution, allowing factory rather than farm work. Improvements in British workers' conditions did occur, but that was merely moving food from mouth to mouth; you got food imports from Ireland and - after the Repeal of the Corn Laws - mainland Europe, but that only reduced food availability to people there, Les Miserables fashion, until they in their turn could repeat the industrialisation trick. And that, of course, wound up moving everything along in a wave until it was the new lands providing food as described above.

Oh, and British workers WERE more productive, as shown in some of the material Nassau Senior cites in his work on Wages (where the French were the people being compared). But it is clear that the reasons were a poorer environment stultifying the French workers, and (it seems to me, in the Indian case) less total demand per weaver when there were more weavers per head of the consumer base.

[bigTom]

"It wouldn't have taken millions or hundreds of thousands of years. Gene frequencies have been found to change in much shorter time periods than you apparently think. See the work of Bruce Lahn and Greg Cochran, among others. Experiments with selective breeding in the Soviet Union produced tame foxes in a mere 50 years."

True enough. However 50 fox breeding years are probably quite a few generations, say maybe 500 years worth of human generations. Then the strength of the selectivity of the fox breeders is likely to be very much stronger than normal Darwinian selection within a human population. I did hear plausable explanations that the Jews of Europe were forced to compete in economic areas such as money lending, where selection for intelligence was very likely strong enough for long enough to have made a substantial difference.

At least within roughly the last century, the poor seem to outbreed the well-to-do, so if any selection is going on, it's direction is not what we would like.

[gwui]

> man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world

This is the time you should stop reading it.

[assman]

"It wouldn't have taken millions or hundreds of thousands of years. Gene frequencies have been found to change in much shorter time periods than you apparently think. See the work of Bruce Lahn and Greg Cochran, among others. Experiments with selective breeding in the Soviet Union produced tame foxes in a mere 50 years."

Peter Gant has also done some measurements of Galapagos Island finches that demonstrated relatively significant evolutionary changes in a single year. Richard Dawkins discusses this on page 260 of his Ancestor's Tale. So it is possible for evolutionary changes to occur very very quickly.

[assman]

"The British Empire reaching out to distant lands and snatching up other people, their lands and resources for these corporation to use?"

This is nothing new. The British did not invent slavery, imperialism or even colonialism. Every single empire, Roman, Greek, Muslim, Chinese etc did this. But none of them achieved anything close to what was achieved during the Industrial revolution. This is a point even Marx understood. So your explanation does not explain anything.

[assman]

"It strikes me as odd that economists are always banging on about savings and interests rates, as if these were part of the real world and not just a means of bartering goods, and don't mention oil, as if oil was some imaginary stuff. A more distorted world view one could hardly imagine."

Savings and interest rates are part of the real world and are not just a means of bartering goods. Oil is useless without things like internal combustion engines, steam engines, rail ways etc. How were these machines developed? Someone must fund them and generally the funds either come from banks or private investors. In other words the funds come from savings. Savings basically represent forgone consumption, in favor of investment. Society has a choice we can either direct our activites to producing more things to consume in the present or to producing machines and factories that will allow us to produce more in the future.

BTW, according to your view places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Nigeria should be the most economically developed countries since they have the most oil. Oil alone is obviously not enough.

[gwui]

> Peter Gant has also done some measurements of Galapagos Island finches that demonstrated relatively significant evolutionary changes in a single year.

Right, and its not like there is any difference between the finches and humans anyways.

[SM]

Anne wrote:

There we have colonial India, remember colonialism? There we have Britain. Why oh why might the colonial labor force, ever so low paid colonial labor force even, be less productive than the British labor force? British character, obviously. Pip, pip.

Greg Clark's analysis may or may not be faulty but this type of criticism is...well, uninformed. This is what you (and many others, judging by the comments here) think of his scholarship?

Greg Clark has been obsessed with the question of what explains differences in economic performance of countries for a very long time and one of his best known papers is "Why isn't the whole world developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills", Journal of Economic History, 1987. The abstract reads: "In 1910 one New England cotton textile operative performed as much work as 1.5 British, 2.3 German, and nearly 6 Greek, Japanese, Indian, or Chinese workers. Input substitution, and differences in technology, management, and workers' training or inherent abilities do not explain this. Instead local culture seems to have determined worker performance. Such differences, if widespread, would explain much of the international variation in wages. They also have important consequences for understanding labor migration, the choice of technique, and the sources of economic growth."

Do read the paper. You might still disagree after reading it, of course. But you will discover that he (Clark) has considered the possibility that the superior performance of American and British workers can be attributed to the poorer health of Indians and Chinese workers and given reasons for rejecting this hypothesis.

[RC]

Assman,

You seem to miss the point that it was the combination of imperialism and the corporation that created the difference. This combination made the difference from the earlier ones you mention. Just sending a bunch of troops in to plunder is not the same as what I mentioned. Having this economic structure to manage the conquered lands rather than only a military one allowed them to make more than the one time gain from plunder.

[JonF]

Re: Summarizing research and writing over the last 30-40 years, [Charles] Mann shows that in 1491 the population of the Americas surpassed that of Europe, that American cities such as Tenochtitlan were larger than any found in Europe at the same time and, unlike European cities, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens and clean streets. I would add that nowhere in Indigenous America in the areas of my research (North and Central America) have any jails been found, so far as I have been able to determine.

All of which is totally irrelevant to my point, which is that the the Aztecs and Incas had the technical proficency of early Sumer or Egypt (both of which had some fascinating engineering miracles of their own. See: ziggurats and pyramids). Larger and denser populations were also possible in the New World due to the lack of "crowd plagues" nearly all of which derive from our domestic animals, of which the New World was badly deficient. Neither the Aztecs nor the Incas had the wheel (the Mayans knew it as a toy). The Incas lacked writing. Bronze metallurgy was barely known, iron not at all.

Re: The earliest American cities were thriving before the Egyptians built their pyramid

No, that is false. The first Mesoamerican civilziation, the Toletcs, arose in the first millennium BC, 2000 years after the Pyramids were built.

Re: the feats of Indigenous American agriculture were unparalleled anywhere else.

Huh? How so? Yes, the New World had crops the Old World lacked (duh!) but also vis versa. New World agriculture was actually rather primitive: hoes instead of plows, for example. You seem to be a victim of that peculiar nonsense knwon as Affirmative Action History.

[JonF]

Re: Just sending a bunch of troops in to plunder is not the same as what I mentioned. Having this economic structure to manage the conquered lands rather than only a military one allowed them to make more than the one time gain from plunder.

The Romans, Macedonians (Alexander's Successors) and the Chinese were hardly wanton plunderers. They introduced new technologies and economic structures into the lands they ruled.

[notsneaky]

The review is misleading in (at least) one respect;

"[F]rom 1200 to 1800... the economy was locked in a Malthusian trap"

Um, no. The economy was locked in a Malthusian trap from ... the time that modern homo sapiens appeared on the plains of West Africa until 1800. I think this has contributed to some confusion in the comments above.

Greg Clark is NOT arguing that in 1200 AD, in England, folks started to evolve (culturally or biologically) those values for hard work and savings. He's arguing that folks in all economies that became agricultural started to evolve'em in 10,000 BC or so when agriculture started out. So we're not talking 600 years of selective pressures (of whatever kind) but something like 12,000 years.

There's some evolutionary arguments for why we humans would have a rate of time preference equal to about 2%.
There's economic arguments why in the long run the real interest rate will be equal to the rate of time preference.
As it happens, real interest rates have been around 2% since, oh, about the time of the IR.

But, as FTA points out, the evolutionary argument for 2% time preference only works if there's a viable (i.e. fairly low cost) means of transferring resources over time (i.e. leaving some to your children). It is doubtful that such a technology existed before the invention of agriculture.

The focus on 1200 to 1800 in the review is probably because that's when fairly accurate, high frequency data for England become available. But the sporadic and incomplete data going back to ancient Summer is also consistent with the fact that people got "more patient" - real interest rates fell from very very high levels to that 2% and other factors (differences in risk, growth of the economy, etc.) cannot explain it.

[assman]

"You seem to miss the point that it was the combination of imperialism and the corporation that created the difference."

Okay your argument is still pretty bad. Firstly corporate colonialism does not coincide with the industrial revolution. It predates it. Corporations have a long history of being used for pillaging, louting and conquest (PLC) because PLC activities are 1) very very risky, 2)have very large potential payoffs. So corporations are a way of limiting individual risk by distributing it among shareholders. Muslims used them, Romans used them, and I suspect every empire used them to finance risky activities. Even European colonial corporations predate the industrial revolution by over 200 years.

Secondly the corporation was not the predominant economic entity during the industrial revolution. The family factories and small businessmen or as Marx called them bourgeoisie were the dominant economic players. Massive corporations like the Dutch East India Company only became predominant in the 20th century. This is you never see Marx criticizing corporations, because they were never really that important until recently.

[assman]

"Right, and its not like there is any difference between the finches and humans anyways."

Your right. There is some evidence than humans biologically evolve much faster than other animals :)

[Battlepanda]

What about China and Japan? Clark argues that the rich in those two countries reproduced surprisingly little, thus not enabling their genes/culture to be passed down and resulting in the relative weakness of their economies relative to England in the time of the industrial revolution.

However, nowdays populations in these countries pretty much embody "middle class, hard working values" to me. Just compare the savings rate of China with the savings rate of Americans of good Anglo-saxon stock that gave us the Industrial revolution. When did all that genetic evolution take place?

[sharon]

Two predictions.

1. At some point within the next 100 years (probably considerably less), we're going to discover the nasty truth that we haven't really escaped the Malthusian trap at all. Some societies have managed to delay it for somewhat longer than usual, that's all.

2. This book will have been forgotten by the end of the year. Actually, make that the end of the summer. Brilliant? Important? Empty hype. There have been dozens of theories of the causes of the Industrial Revolution; this is just one more, and not a specially good one.