A Review of Gregory Clark'sA Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

Abstract

A Farewell to Alms advances striking claims about the economic history of the world. These include (1) the preindustrial world was in a Malthusian preventive check equilibrium, (2) living standards were unchanging and above subsistence for the last 100,000 years, (3) bad institutions were not the cause of economic backwardness, (4) successful economic growth was due to the spread of “middle class” values from the elite to the rest of society for “biological” reasons, (5) workers were the big gainers in the British Industrial Revolution, and (6) the absence of middle class values, for biological reasons, explains why most of the world is poor. The empirical support for these claims is examined, and all are questionable.

Toward a theory of business

“…2 While economic historians can debate the Industrial Revolution's legacy [see Allen's (2008) review of Clark (2007), for example], some facts are clear. Perhaps most fundamentally, Riley (2001) observed that human life expectancy more than doubled in the past two hundred years (moving from about 30 to 65 years).…”

Property rights and the first great divergence: Europe 1500–1800

“…Allen, whose work has focused squarely on this reversal of fortune, credits the success of this region to its productive agriculture, which, he in turn attributes to its vigorous urban economy (Allen (1998), Allen (2000), Allen (2003) The mechanism I highlight in this paper operates through the differences in the property rights in land that different European regions inherited from their past as a result of the political success of different segments of the medieval societies from which they emerged. For the purposes of the argument, it helps to think of Europe at the 18 This last point is also made by Allen when he compares England and Netherlands to France and Germany on the one hand and Italy and Spain on the other (Allen (2008)). The other key feature Allen cites for success, participation in the intraeuropean trade (which preceded by a century the rise of the Atlantic trade emphasized by Acemoglu et al (2005) and is more in line with the dating of the rise of northwestern Europe) would not do either as many eastern European countries participated heavily in this trade but remained economic failures.…”

The Historical Origins of Poverty in Developing Countries

“…Clark (2007) on the other hand emphasizes the role of religion and middle class virtues of thrift and hard work. In spite of their intellectual appeal, the supporting evidence provided by these authors is often found to be unreliable (Allen, 2008).…”