Skip to content
Great Divergence

Clark (2007) — A Farewell to Alms

Citation. Clark, Gregory. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press, 2007.

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

A provocative, quantitatively serious, deliberately uncomfortable book. Clark argues that economic history is divided into two regimes — the Malthusian world before 1800, in which per-capita income was stagnant, and the modern world after 1800, in which it grew indefinitely — and that the transition was caused by a biological-cum-cultural transformation that took seven centuries: the gradual diffusion of the descendants of England’s medieval propertied class downward through the social structure, carrying with them heritable traits (patience, literacy, thrift, low violence) that selected for middle-class economic behavior. By 1800, England was populated by a downwardly-diffused bourgeois population, and the IR was the payoff.

The book is widely read as a provocation. Its empirical core — the long-run differential in reproductive success by wealth — is not seriously disputed. Its causal claim — that this drove the IR — is rejected by essentially the entire mainstream. Nevertheless, Farewell to Alms has forced the field to confront very-long-run and human-capital-distributional questions it had previously ignored.

Key claims

Section titled “Key claims”
  • The pre-industrial world was genuinely Malthusian; living standards barely moved for millennia and could only be raised by (usually catastrophic) population shocks.
  • In medieval and early modern England, wealthy testators had roughly 2× the surviving offspring of poor testators, over many generations.
  • Downward mobility of younger sons and daughters from propertied families diffused “bourgeois” behavioral traits through the broader population.
  • If these traits had non-zero heritability (biological and/or cultural), the cumulative effect over 25 generations was substantial and economically consequential.
  • The Industrial Revolution is the point at which this accumulated behavioral capital paid off, not an independent event requiring its own explanation.