Here is a copy of a critique I wrote back in March about a fascinating non-fiction book which my father gave to me for Christmas. It is called A Farewell to Alms and it is an economic commentary written by Gregory Clark.
Alright, here goes:
Gregory Clark is an economics professor at UC-Davis. Clark is also the author of A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. In his 2007 “blockbuster of economics,” as a reviewer dubs it, he takes a journey through human economic history, analyzing particular constants along the way. He grapples with fellow scholars such as Thomas Malthus, William Godwin, Adam Smith, Michael Kremer, Kenneth Pomeranz and Jared Diamond. Clark makes the claim that income per person remained constant up until about 1800. If this is true, wouldn’t that mean that total wealth is generated when society’s population expands? No, says Gregory Clark. In the long run it may work out that way, but this is because wealth generated by advances in technology which would benefit the population as a whole are offset by population growth. This situation was turned around at about 1800 by the Industrial Revolution. Thus, according to Clark, Thomas Malthus, an 18th-19th century political economist who studied population discovered how the world works just as the world stopped working that way. Clark does not explicitly point this out himself, but it is an ironic twist that is noticeable. Adam Smith, by contrast, orchestrated hypothesizes that were relatively irrelevant to the old world but became the basis for economics in the modern world.
On the whole, A Farewell to Alms is fascinating and should in time intrigue anyone who takes the time to read it. However, it requires a very patient reader and the structure of the writing is questionable. Clark states the problems he tries to solve at the beginning. Why are some parts of the world better off than other parts? What caused the Industrial Revolution? Why was it England that initiated it? Clark then appears to leave these questions behind for the bulk of the book and come back to them near the end after giving a mountain of background information. The reader may have to flip back to the beginning to remember what Clark’s mission was when he starts discussing it again. Or, if the reader was hooked by the questions he asked, they will probably be disappointed when he does not address them right away. In the end, Clark contends that long-term cultural trends and values played a role in creating our new modern economy.
