A Farewell to Alms
"What caused the Industrial Revolution? Gregory Clark has a brilliant and fascinating explanation for this event which permanently changed the life of humankind after 100,000 years of stagnation."--George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics and Koshland Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley "This is a very important book. Gregory Clark argues that the Industrial Revolution was the gradual but inevitable result of a kind of natural selection during the harsh struggle for existence in the pre-industrial era, in which economically successful families were also more reproductively successful. They transmitted to their descendants, culturally and perhaps genetically, such productive attitudes as foresight, thrift, and devotion to hard work. This audacious thesis, which dismisses rival explanations in terms of prior ideological, technological, or institutional revolutions, will be debated by historians for many years to come."--Paul Seabright, author of "The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life" "Challenging the prevailing wisdom that institutions explain why some societies become rich, Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms" will appeal to a broad audience. I can think of nothing else like it."--Philip T. Hoffman, author of "Growth in a Traditional Society" "You may not always agree with Gregory Clark, but he will capture your attention, make you think, and make you reconsider. He is a provocative and imaginative scholar and a true original.
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What Hacker News says
- True.
Just as the Industrial Revolution has reduced income inequalities within societies, it has increased them between societies. There lives now both the richest people who ever walked the earth, and the poorest. This divergence in regional and national fortunes since the Industrial Revolution has recently been labeled the Great Divergence.
Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms, (2006) pp 3--4.
<https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/FTA20...>
NB: Clark's book is from the Princeton University Press's "Economic History of the Western World" series edited by Joel Mokyr. It's an absolutely phenomenal treasury of books about economic history with a special focus on the immense transformation of the Industrial Revolution(s). Some may have heard of Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth, one of the 50+ books in the series. It's not all the books I'd recommend reading on the topic, but it's a dense treasury of quite good ones.
<https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-princeton-economic-hi...>
- Some popularisations:
"A Troublesome Inheritance" https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G3L7VFM/ref=kinw_myk_ro...
"A Farewell to Alms" https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001EQ4OLA/ref=kinw_myk_ro...
"Human Diversity" https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Y8K5FX8/ref=kinw_myk_ro...
Read the citations and go from there.
- You could start with the guy who was there, and coined the term, Arnold Toynbee (not to be confused with his similarly-named nephew, who writes the preface to this edition), The Industrial Revolution, developed from a series of lecture notes 1880-81:
<https://archive.org/details/industrialrevol00toyngoog/page/n...>
See note on Worldcat links / surveillance below.
I'm strongly partial to looking at history through the lens / frame of energy. Several books and authors do this:
- Matthieu Auzanneau, Oil, Power, and War: a dark history. Chelsea Green Publishing Co., (2020). https://www.worldcat.org/title/oil-power-and-war-a-dark-hist...
- Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History. Routledge (1994) https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/...
- Vaclav Smil, Energy and civilization : a history. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, (2018) https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...
- Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of power : how energy forges human history (2 vols). Praeger, (2009). https://www.worldcat.org/title/sources-of-power-how-energy-f...
- Richard Rhodes, Energy : a human history. Simon & Schuster (2019) https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-a-human-history/oclc/1...
- Economic history of energy and environment. Springer (2016). https://www.worldcat.org/title/economic-history-of-energy-an...
- Anthony N Penna, A history of energy flows : from human labor to renewable power. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, (2020). https://www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-energy-flows-from-...
- Cutler J Cleveland, Concise encyclopedia of history of energy. Elsevier, (2009) https://www.worldcat.org/title/concise-encyclopedia-of-histo...
- Joseph A Pratt, Energy Capitals : Local Impact, Global Influence. University of Pittsburgh Press, (2014). https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-capitals-local-impact-...
There's a series edited by Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University and published by the Princeton University Press, "The Princeton Economic History of the Western World" with a number of highly recommended titles:
<https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-princeton-economic-hi...>
In particular:
- Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms, looking specifically at why the Industrial Revolution arose in Britain in the 19th century.
- Robert J. Gordon The Rise and Fall of American Growth, on the 150 years from 1870--2020, and the trajectory of growth in the US over that period.
(There are far more books in the series, and I've read only a small fraction. Numerous other titles look highly promising.)
There's Joel Mokyr's own The Gifts of Athena: <https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691120133/th...>
R.U. Ayres (Robert) has written a number of articles and essays looking at technological development which are IMO highly underrated.
The question of why the IR arose in the UK has been called "the Needham Question" (especially in contrast with why it did not arise in China, which has a long and deep history of technological innovation). I'm not aware of any single treatment of this, and Needham's own Science and Civilisation in China despite its excellence in cataloguing China's accomplishments really doesn't serve as a concise answer either.
Warning that Worldcat seems to exfiltrate both search terms and searcher's IPs to Facebook and Google. See: <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1570183006689673222.html>.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of a suitable replacement service presently, though Internet Archive's Open Library is getting there.
- A very good book on this is "Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World" by Gregory Clark.
- Read A Farewell to Alms.
Malthus's thinking was objectively correct up to the time of writing. He just made & recorded the observations at almost exactly the wrong time, right before the trend reversed, during the industrial revolution.
I'm not claiming that we have reached a new era where - once again - growing population = worse living conditions.
But there are a lot of good arguments WRT to limits on fossil fuel extraction, physical limitations on technological progress, etc...
Light bulbs can't get much more efficient. Neither can electricity transmission. Energy generation still has a healthy amount to improve. Maybe there's enough progress left to be made for the population to double again.
But the idea that the population could be near infinite on this planet and that would only lead to more progress and better living conditions is laughable.
There's clearly some limit.
My crystal ball isn't working. I don't know if we've passed it, or are even close to it...
- Slaves aren't free.
I would imagine that an oversupply of laborers (i.e. too many people, not enough places for them to be productive) was a bigger factor.
If you read A Farewell to Alms - it has a pretty convincing argument that the industrial revolution only happened because England ran out of land and birth rates declined and that, combined with thriving merchant and textile and finance industries, led to a shortage of labor - which led to innovation.
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