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A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.9
EAN: 9780691121352
ISBN: 0691121354
Label: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 440
Publication Date: July 24, 2007
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press
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Editorial Review: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. Countering 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. 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. 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. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. 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. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Thought Provoking
Despite the punning title, this is a serious and thoughtful attempt to present large scale overview of economic history. Clark deals with 3 major topics - the Malthusian nature of the pre-industrial economy, the industrial revolution, and the great divergence of economic performance between the industrialized core and the non-industrialized periphery. Of these sections, the first, dealing with the Malthusian nature of the pre-industrial world, is the best. This is perhaps because Clark has done ... Read More
Rating:  - Clarks two big, but different, questions
An ambitious and provocative new book by University of California at Davis economic historian Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World attempts to explain two huge questions:
1. Why did one part of the human race finally break out of the "Malthusian trap"--in which growth in per capita income is washed away by subsequent population growth--namely England, at the end of the 18th Century, through rapid and sustained technological advance?
2. ... Read More
Rating:  - Stimulating but wrong-headed
In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark asks good questions: why did we wait so long for the industrial revolution? why did it occur when and where it did? why has it still not taken universal effect? He attacks the conventional story which sees the crucial pre-condition as the inalienability of property rights, first occurring in England. In other words, he argues that institutional arrangements don't matter that much.
A Farewell to Alms has three broad strands. First, from the agricultural ... Read More
Rating: - excellent
When I finshed this book and read it again to make sure I had absorbed all the information in it. It is excellent.
Rating: - An Inconvenient Truth
Gregory Clark has presented here a very detailed analysis of why and how the Global rate of economic whealth creation has skyrocketed with the industiral revolution after many millenia of stagnation. More interestingly, he focuses why this breakthrough first took place in the England of 1800s. Even more controversial is his conclusions on why the same productivity increases have not taken place in many other parts of the world thus causing the widening gap between the haves and have nots.
His ... Read More
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