A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World) (Hardcover)

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Review
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." --Financial Times

The Economist "It could well be the subject of debate for years to come." --The Economist

Review
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.
(Tyler Cowen New York Times )

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.
(Benjamin M. Friedman New York Times Book Review )

[C]lark 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.
(Robert Solow New York Review of Books )

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.
(Samuel Bowles Science )

Mr. Clark...has 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.
(The Economist )

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.
(Clive Crook Financial Times )

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.
(William R. Wineke The Wisconsin State Journal )

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.
(Edward Glaeser New York Sun )

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.
(Siddharth Singh LiveMint )

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.
(William Baldwin Forbes )

Clark's ferociously systematic expounding of an alternative to the institutional explanation does...provide 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.
(Harold James The American Interest )

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.
(Robert Samuelson The Washington Post )

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.
(Jack A. Goldstone World Economics )

Clark's book A Farewell to Alms is...ambitious, staking out an entire vision of world history....Clark's Malthusian model is forcefully argued.
(Roger Gathman Austin American-Statesman )

[T]he 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 slog...Whatever 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.
(Roberta Fusaro Harvard Business Review )

Clark argues the English evolved biologically in ways that created prosperity. Before you dismiss the notion, read this brilliant tour of economic history.
(MoneySense Magazine )

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.
(A. R. Sanderson Choice )

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.
(Ian R. Harper The Melbourne Review )

[A Farewell to Alms] is one of the most fascinating, and the most disturbing, historical works I have read. It seems to suggest that the gross inequality of our world has less to do with the inherent unfairness of global capitalism and more with scarcely ineradicable cultural difference. . . [T]his is economic history as you never read it before.
(A.N. Wilson The Daily Telegraph )

Why do some nations get rich while others stay poor? What are the conditions that allow an economy to take off and grow? These questions have puzzled economists for many years. But no explanation is more startling than the one proposed by Gregory Clark in his book A Farewell to Alms.
(Ross Gittins Sydney Morning Herald )

This is a fine book, bristling with interesting data and opinions, more extensive than this review can possibly convey. Readily accessible to non-fiction readers, this book should fire more debate about a historical episode of unfailing fascination.
(Michael G. Sargent Interdisciplinary Science Reviews )

This is . . . a remarkable book, with an unerring focus on the fundamentals of the Malthusian economy and the large-scale economic trends. It is a unique source of factual information, beautifully presented in almost 200 tables and figures, and will make an excellent textbook for college-level courses of history and economics.
(Gerhard Meisenberg Journal of Biosocial Science )

[P]erhaps there is no higher praise for an author than to say that I disagreed with the arguments but liked the book. It made me think in new ways about the course of economic history. I recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the economic history of the world.
(Rick Szostak New Global Studies )

I derived enormous stimulation from this book. At a superficial level, Clark offers a richly documented picture of England's economic history, put into perspective by comparisons with other parts of Europe and with the Far East, and sometimes even by references to amazing facts about ancient forager societies. . . . More fundamentally, the layman gets a good understanding here of what made for the Industrial Revolution and how its preconditions evolved in England over a period of centuries. Clark accuses economists of being undereducated about history. This will be somewhat remedied if they read his provocative book.
(Wolfgang Kasper Policy )

As a self-proclaimed exercise in 'big history' this work succeeds extraordinarily well: it is engaging and readable, and it renders abstruse economic models and empirical results accessible to nonspecialists.
(Zorina Khan Technology and Culture )

A Farewell to Alms is . . . worth scrutinizing. The book offers a distinct line of thought on evolutionary affairs. It is also valuable in historiographical terms as it recalls historical explanation forsaken due to shifting scholarly fashions.
(Ian Morley The History Teacher )

Gregory Clark has written a stimulating, provocative, witty, and ambitious book. It is accessible to the uninitiated and a pleasure to read. Clark's valuable insights are presented with an admirable forcefulness, as are his grievous errors. In short, this is a book very much worth reading for the sake of argument and debate.
(Jan De Vries Journal of Economic History )

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4 Reviews 5 star:  (3) 4 star:    (0) 3 star:  (1) 2 star:    (0) 1 star:    (0)           Average Customer Review 4.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   13 of 15 people found the following review helpful: 3.0 out of 5 stars Stimulating but wrong-headed, 19 May 2008 By  Miles Saltiel "Miles Saltiel" (London England) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark asks good questions: why did we wait so long for the industrial revolution? why did it occur when and where it did? why has it still not taken universal effect? He attacks the conventional story which sees the crucial pre-condition as the inalienability of property rights, first occurring in England. In other words, he argues that institutional arrangements don't matter that much. A Farewell to Alms has three broad strands. First, from the agricultural to the industrial revolution, accumulated capital and improved technology served largely to increase population. This section of the book presents some wonderful data, but Clark's argument is close to circular and less novel than he suggests. In any event, by his own account his analysis allows for a substantial variation in living standards between one and another society. Second, the industrial revolution was triggered by a slow accumulation of habits and values in English society, making for successful economic practices, which did not occur in (for example) China and Japan. If true, this would be very interesting, so let's explore it a little. Clark's argument draws attention to literacy, violence and interest rates. Let's focus on interest rates, which have the most objective data and are most relevant to economic life. Clark points out that rates in Western Europe fell from 10% or so in the middle ages to 4-5% on the eve of the industrial revolution. He goes on to note that rates include a "risk premium" and a "time-preference", capturing the universal inclination to consume today rather than tomorrow. The customary account of this fall emphasises the decline in the risk premium due to the improvement of property rights. By contrast, Clark argues that property rights were always pretty secure in England. Instead he proposes that there was an alteration in time-preference: that over the 400 to 500-year period, Englishmen became more willing to defer immediate gratification. His explanation for this is bizarre: that middle-class values (or possibly genes) permeated English society, because of the downward mobility of the surfeit of children born to the wealthy (but not the aristocracy, who killed themselves in battle with such gusto as to fail to reproduce altogether). On its face this is plain odd: everyday observation tells us that those undergoing downward mobility are keen to forget their parents' values. In addition, Clark's evidence won't haul the freight. He compares the surfeit of children born to wealthy testators (makers of wills) in England to the relative dearth born to Samurai and the royal family of Qin Dynasty China. But this fails to compare like with like. Wealthy testators in pre-industrial England were a mix of aristocrats, gentry-farmers and merchants. Samurai were military retainers (presumably not unlike the English aristocrats who also failed to reproduce), while members of the Chinese royal family were just that. We learn nothing from this comparison: Clark has failed to provide a reason to focus on time-preference rather than risk-premium in interest rates. So perhaps property rights are more important than he allows. Finally, Clark tries to account for the divergence in economic performance between the developed and less-developed world. To simplify matters, he argues that folks in the third world simply work less hard, once again possibly because their genes may incline them to do so. Setting aside the insalubrious whiff of this reasoning, it doesn't dispel the need to consider institutions and property rights. How otherwise to explain the comparative performance of East and West Germany; the success of China after Deng or Spain after Franco, the latter suggestively excluding the Hispanic economies of the Americas over the same period. A Farewell to Alms presents some wonderful data but its author strains for controversy so much as to undermine his arguments' effect. Clark is stimulating but wrong-headed. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   13 of 15 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant and clear analysis of the wealth and poverty of nations, 15 Nov 2007 By  Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract.com" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    The topic of this thrilling book, 20 years in the making, is nothing less than the history of civilization, from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution to today. Rather than relating history as a story of kings, Caesars, popes, prelates and presidents, Gregory Clark tells the story through economic data, much of which is the result of his own analysis of documentary evidence. Almost every other page contains a beautiful graph, table or chart illuminating some dimly lit bit of history. And Clark's detours are almost as wonderful as his main argument. His writing is elegant and clear, his sense of humor present but not annoying. While this book has outraged some commentators, it's hard to see why, given the caution with which Clark presents his conclusions. Most likely, the flash point is his stress on culture as enabling and retarding economic growth - views that sometimes get wrongly equated with racism. We recommend this book to anyone who wants to quantitatively enhance his or her conception of human history. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   5 of 8 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Both great and naif, 5 Jan 2008 By  Volkmar Weiss - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    Since the sixteenth century the scholarly community in the West has accepted the existence of scientific laws. Over the past four centuries modern science has been preoccupied with the discovery and practical application of these laws. This has revolutionized both the natural sciences and human civilization. While the humanities have also made progress during this time, their results have been less remarkable. They have been unable to account for the forces underlying the changing fortunes of human society. The book by Gregory Clark is another heroic attempt to discover the laws underlying the course of human history. In 1930 Corrado Gini published his Harris Foundation lecture: "The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population". Gini understood much of the wheel of history, but made - because of the lack of empirical data - the wrong assumption, that the well-to-do have always fewer children than the poor. Indeed, such is the situation since the last quarter of the nineteenth century until up to today. For theoretical reasons Oded Galor and Moav Omer in their seminal paper "Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth" (2002) came to the conclusion that before 1850 the upper and medium stratum of society must have been more surviving children than the poor. Clark could confirm this assumption with empirical data of his own, and he makes this finding to the cornerstone of his theoretical derivations. It is a pity that neither Galor and Moav nor Clark are aware of a large body of historical data, supporting their fundamental assumptions and claims. For example, in 1990 a preliminary summary on the "Social and Demographic Originis of the European Proletariat" was published in which we can read: "The data show that rural and urban proletarians are formed from the socially downward mobile sons and daughters and grandchildren of peasants." Despite Clark's staying of one sabbatical year at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin, he does not cite any German source. In the Inventory of the German Central Office for Genealogy. Part IV (second edition, 1998, ISBN 3-7686-2099-9), he could find not only a complete bibliography of historical demography of Central Europe, based on local family reconstitutions, but also an exhaustive review (p. 74-176) of studies of differential fertility supporting his core argument. Clark could strengthen his point immediately, if he were able to read original papers and books in French, Dutch, German and Swedish, because the development in West, Central and Northern Europe was in principle the same as in England. - By the way, Ernst Engel undertook not studies of Prussian but of Saxonian working-class budgets. Nevertheless, Clark wrote a couragous book of high originality, enriched with a large number of very interesting figures and tables, touching with their overall message the borderline of political incorrectness. But he should have better nothing written about the last decades. The last two chapters of his book are extraordinarily weak. Despite his awareness (Table 14.4) of a general negative relationship between the number of surviving children and the social status of their parents in the modern world - the so-called demographic-economic paradox - in sharp contrast to the preindustrial world, where more children of the rich survive, Clark does not dare to draw any conclusion from this. For example, as Francis Galton became aware of this paradox, he founded the eugenic movement. Clark, too, understands the centuries where larger numbers of children in the households of the rich survived also as a process of a genetic enrichment of the cognitive basis of society. Could be the turning point (in England already about 1850, in Germany three or four decades later) in differential fertility also be the turning point of the cycle of industrialized society? Could it be, that the rich because of their rising social density would be the first to regulate their numbers in a cyclic fashion? What does or could this mean for the Aristotelian cycle of political constitutions, for the future of democracy? What are the differences and the similarities of the industrialized society with the rise and fall of the Roman empire and the repeated cycles within China? "Why Isn't the Whole Word Developed?" is the caption of last chapter of this book. In agreement with his overall message and insight Clark could maybe find a contribution to the answer in the books by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen IQ and the Wealth of Nations and IQ and Global Inequality as well as in the most recent papers by Heiner Rindermann, Erich Weede and Garett Jones. Seen from this point of view Clark has written the first part of a new world history. To imagine and to write the second part should not be an impossibility. However, it will also be a dangerous look into our future. Most important in this respect is the article "The Population Cycle Drives Human History ... ", published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies (Number Fall 2007). Physical scientists are able to observe the natural world more objectively, because the observer is not identical to the observed. Science is not a potential battlefield for the survival of the individual scientist, as history is for the historian. This is the root cause for the failure of the human sciences to generate any laws governing history. I am sure, anyone who discovers such a general law or even the dynamics of the cycle of population and constitutions of the global industrialized society will be doomed to drain the hemlock cup to the dregs as Socrates. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all 4 customer reviews...		Most Recent Customer Reviews 5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant beginning A strange and memorable book by an author, who repeatedly tells his readers, not to have a theory of his subject and yet he most adroitly nudges us into a direction, where truth... Read more Published 17 months ago by Knoebel Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews › See all 4 customer reviews...

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