A lot of effort is put in to build the foundations of the argument. The book builds its argument very painstakingly, with numerous diagrams and with a surfeit of statistics. And for much of the book, Clark gives the impression that he is going to pull it off. To make a simple theory work - that is a major achievement. In fact in the very beginning the author classes himself with the Diamonds, the Adam Smiths and the North & Thomass of the world and puts his own book in the same league.
This is one more response/alternative to how the modern world is the way it is. He has kicked off so many responses and counter-responses that it has enlivened an entire gamut of fields. If not for anything else but for getting historians and economists up in arms shouting “Our field is not That simple, Mister!!”.
Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs, and Steel," that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution-and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it-occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich-and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In "A Farewell to Alms," Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture-not exploitation, geography, or resources-explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations.Ĭountering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization.
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