Volume 25 · Number 3 · Spring 2008
Gregory Clark (Photo: Karin Higgins)
Survival of the Richest
Editor's note: This is an expanded version of the interview that appeared in the print issue.
Economic historian Gregory Clark created a stir with a new book Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton University Press), which argues that culture, biology and “survival of the richest” — rather than coal, political institutions or geography — led to the Industrial Revolution in England and explain why some parts of the world today are so wealthy and others so poor. Clark’s book, based on 20 years of quantitative research of historical data — including his examination of the wills of more than 3,000 people in 17th-century England — has provoked strong reactions and has been misunderstood as social Darwinism or a call for an end to foreign aid, neither of which he supports. The book makes the case that living conditions of humans in pre-industrial societies, like those of other animal populations, were determined by the balance of births and deaths, a principle first described by Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798 in An Essay on the Principle of Population. The English became richer than the rest of the world, Clark writes, largely due to poor hygiene; the death rate was high and fertility low because pre-industrial Europeans lived in close proximity to human and animal waste and they rarely bathed. However, in England, the wealthy survived in greater numbers and had more children, who moved down the social ladder as their family estates got divided into smaller portions. With that downward mobility, middle-class values spread throughout the society, a cultural shift that set the stage for a historical event like no other — the Industrial Revolution.
Why should it matter to people today what caused the Industrial Revolution?
In economic history, the Industrial Revolution is the great problem, like the origin of the universe in astronomy or the unification of forces in physics. The thing most people don’t understand about the Industrial Revolution is that it’s very mysterious. It’s a startling development in world history. In the pre-industrial world there weren’t many differences between the rich and the poor societies. One of the things that the book shows is that people in England in the 1800s, who lived then in one of the richest societies of the world, were no better off than hunter-gatherers — stone-age man was doing just as well on average. . . .Why is it we were all poor at one time, but now some societies have become very rich and some places are even poorer? If we can understand the Industrial Revolution, then we have a much better chance of understanding the modern world.
Another thing the book talks about is there is no evidence that we’ve become happier in the modern world as a result of our wealth. Happiness is a relative phenomenon — it’s how you’re doing relative to other people in your world. That’s a development also completely unexpected from the point of view of economics. It implies that if we’re going to heat up the whole globe in order to get economic growth, it’s hard to justify in terms of us needing more material stuff.
Central to your book is a biological idea, Malthus’ model for population growth. How did you come to that?
Quite long ago, I thought, if you have the Malthusian model, you would have these selective pressures within pre-industrial societies, and it would gradually change people’s economic behavior. But I had completely given up on pursuing that idea for something like 10 years. Then I saw a paper by some theorists arguing the same thing, and I realized that I could test this idea: I can get data and can see if there is any possibility. The bizarre thing was I thought I would prove the opposite . . . that the people who stayed on the farm, who were the least adventurous, the least innovative, would be the ones who actually survived to form modern populations. But when I got the data and looked at it, I was astonished to see a very clear pattern, that the rich were taking over the pre-industrial Western world. And even then, it took me a while to realize, oh, I could actually link that up with other changes that were occurring, such as that levels of violence had steadily dropped in English society since 1200, interest rates were going down — and interest rates measure how impatient we are.
Another thing that sparked my interest was Jared Diamond’s book [Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies]. In the introduction, he asks, Why are people in New Guinea so much poorer now than Europeans? It’s not because Europeans are any smarter than people in New Guinea. In fact, Diamond believes that people in New Guinea are selected by their social structure to be smarter than Europeans. He writes that it’s because in New Guinea you live by your wits, while in densely settled pre-industrial Europe disease resistance determines survival.
You take on a lot of presuppositions about our past and turn them upside down. Did that make you nervous?
There was kind of an aha moment, when my academic editor said, “People are not going to believe this. The book will be discredited.” I said, “I can make a case, and I’m going to take a risk of being wrong.” In fact, that’s what we should do, that’s what everybody should do in writing books. It produces more interesting books. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the ferocity of people’s reactions. . . . You realize there’s a raw nerve out there about potential connections between genetics, economics and race, and it’s very tricky getting anywhere near this area. The book is not saying that we got any better through these kinds of pre-industrial mechanisms. . . . We are fundamentally changing the climate so that we can all have three-car garages. . . . Perhaps there’s a reason in our past that we have this kind of addiction to material things. That doesn’t mean we are smarter than people in hunter-gatherer societies. We just have abilities in certain areas that are necessary for a productive capitalist economy.
You mentioned global warming and depletion of resources. Can we keep up this kind of society?
One of the things the book doesn’t dwell on is natural resources, particularly fossil fuel and energy. Again some people point to that as the key to developmental history — the switch from a self-sustaining economy to an extractive economy — because you have these vast deposits of coal in England that they started mining in the Industrial Revolution. . . . But while energy was very expensive in the pre-industrial world, you can show that wasn’t the crucial element in our development. We use so much energy in the modern world that we could actually use a lot less and still live well — much better than we did before the Industrial Revolution.
You say in the beginning of your book that there are not many people out there mining the data that you researched, doing economic history. Why is that?
There has been continental drift by the two big subjects — economics and history — that combine in economic history. History has moved closer to literature. . . . On the other hand, economics has become much more like physics and mathematics. . . . Economic history itself has been lost in the middle of the resulting ocean. . . . But we hold on, a small island hoping to re-establish contact with the great continents.
One of the encouragements about writing this book is that people outside our small island have taken an interest in it. Despite the fact that few study economic history, people have surprisingly strong beliefs about the economic past. People have written to me to tell me how I’ve got the Middle Ages all wrong. We all have some idea about the past. Unfortunately most of the popular ideas seem to come from Monte Python movies [or] some other Hollywood movie — Name of the Rose, The Return of Martin Guerre. Those movies vary greatly in the accuracy of their depiction.
Modern economics does very, very well at explaining 1–2 percent of the things that decide if we’re rich or poor. We’re very good at talking about markets, hedge funds and financial options. What economists don’t like to dwell on is that these things we understand explain very little of growth in the economy over time, or differences between economics. That is why there is some hope that economists will rediscover the need for history.
What kinds of reactions have you received to your book and its suggestion that things like patience or middle-class values could be genetically based?
People have liked a lot of it, and hated other things, but interestingly different bits for different people.
The spirit of the book is to say let’s try to make an argument. We don’t know if this will turn out to be the correct approach, and most likely it is not all correct. We don’t have much of the evidence. But rather than write a history of the form — “We don’t know about this. We don’t know about that” — the book chooses a horse to run the race. The race isn’t run yet. It develops ideas we should explore, and it includes ideas that most people haven’t included in the list of possibilities so far. Critics have said you have to prove that there’s a genetic basis to modern economic growth, but the book was never claiming I can prove that these things happened. It’s just saying, here’s something that’s completely unexpected to most people that turns out to be a real possibility. And it has interesting implications. But that hasn’t stopped the critics!
How did you come to focus on baths — or the avoidance of them — in pre-industrial England as a cause of the Industrial Revolution?
Once you have this very simple model [the Malthusian model] that explains how income is determined in a pre-industrial world, a lot of things can become puzzling that other people have not previously focused on. For example, the English in 1800 were much richer than the Japanese. Previously people have thought that was because the English had better technology than the Japanese. One of the things that became quite clear is that before the Industrial Revolution having better technology doesn’t make you rich. What makes you rich is either a low birth rate or a high death rate. That’s why the hunter-gatherers, we think, were just as rich as the English. . . . So then it’s puzzling why the English were two or three times richer than the Japanese. Both had sophisticated market societies. . . . The birth rates were the same. One thing that emerges nicely is they had very different attitudes toward hygiene, which would have reduced Japanese death rates and so immiserized them through the resulting population growth. Japan was an incredibly orderly and clean society. They separated human waste very carefully from people. They swept their floors, they swept outside the houses. They didn’t have animals running all over the place inside homes. It becomes very clear, when you compare English and Japanese societies, just how filthy Europeans were. The upper class in London in the 17th century, for example, never bathed.
In the 17th century in England, the government passed a law allowing them to take anyone’s floor. Why did they want people’s floors? Floors back then were mainly beaten earth with straw on top of them. The interiors of houses had such rich toppings of urine applied to the floor over time that they accumulated very rich deposits of urea, a precursor of gunpowder — they used it to make [saltpeter or niter]. That was the kind of health conditions Europeans were living in. They had such a rich dressing of urine in their kitchen floors that they were able to use them to make explosives. It is a startling fact. We now think of cleanliness as intrinsic to any well ordered society.
But being unclean was a bonus to the English because it supplied an additional source of mortality. . . The Japanese were so poor — they lived on almost nothing . . . on a very small amount of rice, a very small amount of clothing. That orderly society didn’t live as well. Whereas England had much better living conditions because people in the cities were dying out and mortality rates were so high. The previous supposition has been that the English were rich because of their advanced economy and technology. The book says, no, the English were rich before the Industrial Revolution because they were filthy.
But the rich still reproduced at a higher rate.
Within those social conditions, the rich have higher fertility because they have better food, more housing space and cleaner water. Before the Industrial Revolution the poor in England typically did not manage to produce two children each who survived to adulthood.
In another puzzle, the English in the 17th century stumbled upon Tahiti. It created quite a sensation in Europe because it was a stone-age society, but the Tahitians were living as well or better than the English, who then lived in one of the richest societies of the world. The Tahitians had been out of contact with the rest of the world for perhaps 1,000 years. Again, it illustrates that living standards had little to do with technology. Why were Tahitians so rich? Why did they have good food, good health and nice teeth? You would expect that population growth would drive down the standard of living there as elsewhere. It turns out Tahitians had a widespread practice of infanticide. Something like one-third to one-half of children were murdered at birth. Every paradise had to have its seamy underside.
Why is the book named A Farewell to Alms?
I sent the publisher literally 50 potential titles. This one was added at the end as a joke. All 49 others were rejected. The publisher said this is the title, memorable and playful. . . . It’s been misunderstood by people as a call to stop giving aid to poor countries. In fact, there’s nothing in the book that says that. It’s absolutely good to give aid. The book also suggests that for rich countries it’s not an expensive thing to do. . . . There’s every reason to give aid to poor societies.
Now that you’ve tackled the brief economic history of the world, do you have other projects in the works?
It’s very hard to follow the economic history of the world! I have a few half-formed ideas — other books that I would like to write. One of them would be the history of human ingenuity when confronting institutional limitations, how skilled people were in getting around church and government prohibitions on economic activities. The historical record contains many marvelous examples.
Kathleen Holder is associate editor of UC Davis Magazine.