12.12.07
Farewell to the Wrong History of the World
Dress any idea in modish clothing and it will have legs. Express an idea vaguely enough and it will be immune to attack. Modish today are commercial and scholarly plugs for laissez faire capitalism. Whatever idea can make pure economic anarchy look “natural” is assumed to make it most palatable to those it is most likely to consume. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before an economic historian would attribute to evolution some aspect of the industrial revolution. And now it has happened.
The question at hand is this: What caused the industrial revolution in England in the ninteenth century? Why did it happen first there? Why did it spread to Europe, America, and Japan quickly? Why did it spread to Korea later? What explains the fact that Mali and Chad and Bolivia are just about as far from the industrial revolution as they would be had it never taken place anywhere in the world? To what extent is the difference cultural? Assuming the difference is cultural, where, when, and how did the culture arise? What, precisely, are the cultural elements? And how are they propagated in society? To what extent is it correct to think of the industrial revolution as a heritable trait? To what extent is it more useful to think of capitalism as an infectious disease to which some cultures are immune?
These are the ideas and questions inspired by reading Benjamin Friedman’s book review of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms : A Brief Economic History of the World. Clark’s work sets about to provide a new explanation for the industrial revolution, the rise of England and the rise of the West. Clark sets out to prove that the industrie\al revolution was a cultural event and that the culture evolved. He argues that cultural change was driven by environmental factors in England. Rich and well educted people have survived and reproduced preferentially there for almost a millennium. This he can prove with records, we are told. His argument might be summarized as “survival of the richest.” It is an argument that financial success is an inherited trait and that evolution has made western man fit for capitalism.
Clark is clearly saying that wealth conveyed survival and reproductive advantages. And that those advantages were a primary cause of the industrial revolution, of the success of capitalism.
Benjamin Friedman describes the central pillar of Clark’s research.
The heart of Clark’s analysis consists of a detailed examination of births, deaths, income and wealth in England between 1250 and 1800, as evidenced primrily by wills. Although the records are scant, he finds that on average richer people were more likely to marry than pooere people, they married at earlier ages, they lived longer once married, they bore more children per year of marriage, and their children were more likely to survive and to bear children themeselves. The result was cneturies of downward mobility in which the offspring of richer families continually moved to lower rungs of society. Along the way their behavioral traits and attitudes became more dominant.
The thesis evidently assumes that in 1250 there was a particular set of cultural values widespread in the British aristocracy, but not widespread in its underclasses. It goes on to assert that over the centuries between 1250 and 1800 the particular set of cultural values spread to the underclasses via evolutionary means. The particular cultural values Clark chooses are “thrift and industry.”
In order for Clark’s thesis to be meaningful he would have to establish:
1) Precisely how wide-spread the cultural values in question were within the aristocracy in 1250.
2) Precisely how wide-spread they were in the underclasses in 1250.
3) How wide-spread the values were in 1800.
4) How wide-spread they would have to be for the industrial revolution to survive.
5) How consistently the values propagate within families.
6) How they move from family to unrelated family or why they do not.
7) How precisely the same mechanism explains the success of the industrial revolution in America, China, Korea, and Japan.
His thesis depends upon some aspect of each ot these ideas.
1) In order for Clark’s thesis to have any predictive value he must chose values that have two properties. First, they must be uniquely English. If they are more widespread in other cultures and if the same values propagate because of the survival benefits they confer, then if the cultural values he identifies exist more widely in other populations, they would lead to the industrial revolution in those populations first. So, if Clark is talking about a cultural value brought to England from somewhere else by, say, the Normans then one would expect that the cultural value was one that lurked in their cultural background, one held broadly in a culture from which they descended. The value would necessarily be more widespread in the populations from which the Normans descended than it was in England in 1250. So for Clark’s thesis to succeed he must choose a cultural value uniquely English. And he must choose a cultural value that is practically non-existent anywhere but within the British aristocracy. He’s in luck here, because it is possible to do this. But he doesn’t. We’ll talk more about this below.
2) Clark’s thesis depends on the slow spread of a cultural value or practice through a population. If the idea or practice is in wide currency in 1250, then his thesis fails technically. He would have described a process that didn’t actually occur. Clark has chosen the Calvinist values of “thrift and industry.” This pattern of values attaches a kind of holiness to hard work and to plain living. This is a nice start. And, in fact, Clark will not be the first to notice that the industrial revolution advanced fastest in cultures that had these values, once it started.
But his thesis fails on two points here. The first failure we talked about above; any value more widely spread about in some population outside England is a non-starter for it suggests that the industrial revolution, if it depended on that value alone, would start elsewhere. The second failure is the assumption that it was only the British aristocracy who had these values. If we assume, as did Clark, that the population of England did not have these values before the first wave of Germanic invasions we can agree with him that there could have been a point in time when the values in question were not widespread in England. But the Angles and Saxons began invading England in 450 AD. The Anglo-Saxon yoeman farmer had been a fixture in that land for nearly 800 years when Clark’s story begins. There is simply no question that the Anglo Saxon would have embraced the ideas of thrift and industry. And there is no question that the values would be widely spread geographically in England by 1250 and they would be deeply rooted in the middle classes by then. But Clark’s thesis requires the values to be relatively scarce when he starts the clock. Otherwise the process he discribes is not responsible for changing things very much.
3 and 4) For Clark’s thesis to survive he would have to show that the values in question were sufficiently wide spread through the English population in 1800 for the initiation and the sustenance of the industrial revolution; but not before. Here again, Clark has set up an impossible game. If Clark were arguing that “thrift and industry” were necessary conditions within a population for the sustenance of a capital intensive industrial revolution, there would be a hope for his argument. But, according to Friedman, he is not. He is instead arguing that they are sufficient.
The difference is crucial. If the industrial revolution depended on two or more crucial factors, then the cultural ideals upon which it would reliably be sustained could have been in place for centuries before the event actually took place. All one would have to establish was that there was good reason to believe the cultural ideals were held widely enough. One could still explain why cultures lacking “thrift and industry” frequently failed or underperformed in capitalist pursuits. But according to Friedman, Clark is arguing sufficiency. His thesis, therefore, must establish the threshold level of “thrift and industry” within a population and prove that England reached precisely that threshold at the start of the industrial revolution, decades or centurlies before other industrial nations. If the industrial revolution depended entirely on this one mechanism, it’s not much of a theory if it cannot specify with some exactitude precisely what level is required and precisely how that level changed in time. We are talking about quantitative measurements, here.
We must leave the judgment of whether Clark does this up to someone who has actually read the book. But we are skeptical that he has done so adequately because we doubt that the mensuration tools so far developed are capable of providing the data.
5 and 6) The issue of propagation is a thorny one for Clark’s thesis. First, he is vague about the mechanism. Is his thesis a biological one? Do people literally inherit “thrift and industry” genes. Or are people acculturated to thrift and industry. Because the idea of biological evolution is much more orthodox than the idea of cultural evolution, Clark would be able to dress his theory in a cloak of respectability if he could prove it was a biological phenomenon.
We know that some kinds of behavior can be bred into populations a famous Soviet scientist showed that he could selectively breed populations of aggressive or docile foxes, minks, and rats. So the idea that one could set up environmental conditions that favor “thrift and industry” is a plausible one. In fact, people who live in cold climates inhabit environments where food is unavailable most of the year. That is, one cannot simply go outside and pick fruit off a tree. Such an environment does differentially favor thrift and industry. Europeans and North Asians with agricultural heritages have been living with this reality for between two and five thousand years. They could not have survived long in many of those environments without these values. So there is a strong likelihood that coping strategies that look exactly like “thrift and industry” would be found in all such populations. The fishing populations of the Mediterranean had less need for such cultural values. And hunter gatherers in tropical lands had essentially none. It is, therefore, no surprise that Clark finds the values of “thrift and industry” in the British population.
But here again Clark runs into the problem of setting up an argument that applies much better to other places. London’s climate is positively balmy when compared to the climate of St. Petersburg. So one would expect Clark’s “thrift and industry” genes to preferentially propagate there.
Thrift and industry are behaviors. And behaviors all have some learned component. Therefore the values he is talking about might be passed through families through some shared experience. If they are learned, then they would necessarily propagate at a speed differnt from the speed of biological evolution. And that speed could be significantly higher. Good ideas spread quickly. Practices that always convey benefits spread quickly. So we would expect thrift and industry as cultural values, if not as actual practices, to spread through a population reasonably quickly.
Clark does not specify whether he is talking about biological evolution or cultural evolution. We cannot help but wonder whether this is a purposeful dodge. The idea that “thrift and industry” might have a genetic component is not politically correct. And it is all but impossible to prove. So one would not try. On the other hand, learned behaviors we would expect to propagate too quickly for the time frame of Clark’s thesis to apply. One would have to demonstrate precisely why this one propagates at an evolutionary rate. And if one succeeded, then the theory would be less popular because most people are not very familiar with the idea of cultural evolution. It is not widely accepted as a sound scientific theory. So the simple act of comitting to a mechanism undercuts the public acceptance of the thesis.
But this choice not to specify is precisely what sets the book outside the realm of good science or even of good scientific speculation. Clark, by evoking evolutionary processes has dressed his thesis in the robe of science, but if it is to be a scientific theory it must have the bones of science. Good science requires that a specification be made and defended if the thesis is to survive.
7) At the end of the day a good scientific thesis is both simple and powerfully explanatory. A good scientific thesis that fully explains the industrial revolution in England must fully explain how capitalism and industry fare in other spots around the world: how it fares in other geographical settings different in kind from England’s, and how it fares in other cultural settings different in kind from England’s.
Clark’s notion of “thrift and industry” do well enough in predicting in which cultures capitalism is likely to thrive and in which it is likely to flounder. But the thesis would falsely predict the emergence of capitalism in locations where people are a great deal more thrifty and industrious than are the English. Nor does it do well at predicting failures that are largely due to geographical factors.
For example, the Chinese and the Japanese are thrifty and industrious. If we were to compare the level of thrift and industry of the the typical Chinese or Japanese worker to that of the typical American or European worker, we would find that the Asian worker expends more energy at work, works longer hours, and saves a much larger portion of his income. One economic estimate I saw recently in the Economist suggested that the average Chinese may be saving over 30% of his income. And for the last ten years most of the western economies have been accumulating debt while China and Japan have been almost exclusively financing that debt. It’s a macroeconomic testament to the thrift and industry of the oriental cultures.
On a more easily comprehended level we recently read about cases of Chinese workers who literally collapse and die from exhaustion, working twelve or more hours a day, seven days per week, three hundred sixty five days per year. They are exceptional cases, but they are suggestive of a kind of commitment to industry that westerners cannot begin to imagine. Nor is this simply an artifact of geography: Asian expatriates in the US, Europe, and Canada display the same qualities, though not necessarily to the same degree. And those same behaviors extend through at least two or three generations. So if Clark’s theory were correct - if thrift and industry are sufficient conditions for the industrial revolution - the industrial revolution would have started in China or Japan.
And if Clark‘s theory is formally correct - that is, if he got the right mechanism and propagation rate but specified the wrong cultural values - and the values in question originated with the British Aristocracy circa 1250 and were propagated via breeding, then the British must have gotten around more than we ever imagined. When one realizes that Korea went from solid third-world status in the 1950’s to solid first world status by 2000, one cannot help but imagine that the ministrations of the British Aristocracy in that population of nearly 50 million people must have been much more vigorous than their ministrations in England between 1250 and 1800. But this pales in comparison to what Clark’s thesis requires of the British Aristocracy in China. Who would have guessed that 1.3 billion Chinese descend from British Aristocracy? And all since WWII.
According to Friedman, Clark writes with fluidity. He tells good stories in support of his thesis. But we see a thesis plagued with problems. One can raise two kinds of objections to Clark’s work. One kind focuses on questions of adequacy in Clark’s thesis. These are about whether his methods are sound and whether his claims are coherent and well supported. And so on. The other type of objection is to question the assumption that it is reasonable to attribute the industrial revolution to a single factor. And if so whether he has the best one. We will start by touching on a few difficulties inherent to Clark’s treament. Then we will look at the bigger question.
Technical Questions
There are a few technical questions. One may ask, for instance, to what extent the records Clark used were about males. And to what extent they were about females. Wills in western culture, at least before 1800, generally dealt with disposing estates to male heirs. We remain to be convinced that wills would mention female offspring often enough to be useful. It seems likely that they would do a poor job describing unmarried females in a household. Furthermore, the poor and illiterate had no property and left no wills. So it seems a little puzzling how one could properly ascribe to the population a relative measure of breeding success on the basis of wills.
It would be very interesting to know how Clark dealt with the regression problem. One of the most famous erroneous arguments in the field of statistics was the proof that people were getting shorter. A statistician measured a large population of very tall men and discovered that, on average, their sons were shorter. And their grandsons were shorter yet. He concluded that people were getting shorter. He had very compelling statistics to support the claim. But the issue was not that people were getting shorter; the issue was that the measurement method had a built-in bias. He was not using representative samples of the population. The statistical method he used is still called “regression” in honor of the correct observation that in large populations characteristics that are the result of a large number of genetic and biological processes tend to “regress toward the mean” over generations. Measure height or weight or any other characteristic that has a wide spectrum of genetic components, and one will find, if one starts with samples at the statistical fringes that subsequent generations will tend to “regress toward the mean.”
The use of wills presents analogous sampling problems. Wills exist preferentially among the rich. And they typically make one descendent relatively rich and one or more relatively poor. Or they make all descendents relatively poor compared to their parents. Thus, the simple fact that wills exist preferentially among rich landholders will produce the illusion of downward mobility. But to some extent this is nothing but an artifact of the sampling method.
Look at it another way. Imagine there were a collection of English documents from 1250 to 1800 that preferentially tracked the daughters of the poorest folk in the county. Middle class daughers would have fewer records. Upper class ones would be represented rarely. It is impossible to imagine why such a collection might exist; we simply need to imagine that it could. Given a large enough collection of these, one could easily show that the women from the underclasses percolated up through society, perhaps reaching very high levels. One could then write a book demonstrating that the industrial revolution in England was caused by the culture of its most indigent womenfolk. And the logic would precisely match the logic of Clark’s thesis. It would make no less sense.
In short, if one wishes to maintain that the industrial revolution was an inevitable consequence of a quality uniquely British, one passed down by evolutionary means, one creates a thicket of untenable problems. This is not to say Clark’s thesis has absolutely no merit. It’s merit is not in what it says, but in what it suggests. If we start as Clark did, looking for one or more cultural values uniquely British, and we assume that these values or practices, while not sufficient to trigger the industrial revolution, caused England to progress more quickly than other countries that had England beat on “thrift and industry” then we might learn something useful.
One would have to look for a cultural value that was unique to England and relatively new to that land in 1250 AD. Clark’s thesis is framed as a question of culture. So we will look for a unique cultural value or set of values among the British.
A Quuestion of Culture
There is no question that some cultures fare better with the transition to an industrial society than others. One can cast it as a game theory question. What cultural values and practices cause the fundamental practices and institutions of the industrial revolution to thrive, to be stable? Here’s a counterexample, the Massai think schooling is stupid. They only allow their dullest children to engage in the practice. This is a cultural practice much better suited to preserving a herding culture than to creating an industrial society. It may be argued that under such conditions, an industrial society simply cannot get started. And if it did get started, it could not survive. Literacy is a necessary condition of a stable, dense agrarian society; and a stable, dense agrarian society is a necessary condition of an industrial society. Therefore, reading and writing are a requirement of an industrial society. It’s not that the Massai are stupid, it’s that they have a completely different set of values. They value manufactured goods differently than do people who descend from agricultural cultures. They see work and ownership differently, too. But this set of values actively undermines the success of an industrial society.
At the other end of the spectrum one might find the Japanese. The Japanese were scrupulous about isolating westerners from their culture until after WWII. And only a few cultural ideas and practices in currency in Japan today can be traced directly to the west. Yet the Japanese have one of the most industrialized societies on earth. By a number of measures it outstrips all Anglophone cultures. So how would Clark’s theory explain the ascent of Japan? How did 125 million Japanese descend from a handful of British aristocracy when not one in ten thousand has ever so much as seen one pass in a street? Korean culture starting from a trigger point in the mid twentieth century. In a matter of less than fifty years it has completely caught up with the west in many aspects. The South Koreans have more high speed internet access points per capita than Americans.
Maybe it would be better to start out asking what these cultures share in common? How are they the same? How are they different? How can we explain their common successes in terms of similarities? How can we explain their different histories in terms of differences?
The similarities are actually quite profound. They all have long histories of agriculture, living in towns too large for each person to know each other person. Written language, rule of law, a long history of government by local and distant bureaucratic institutions, cultural attitudes that value commerce, arts, study, and work. Ownership of property and individual ownership of the gains from cultivating land are all part of a long-standing tradition. On the surface the customs may seem unfamiliar, but when one compares cultures with a long history of agricultural practice, individual ownership of property, and urban life, one sees they have all undergone a transformation from communal, unspecialized, hunter-gather cultures.
Take the industrial revolution to places lacking every one of these values and what is the result? Aboriginal hunter-gatherers do not cultivate the land and they frequently have no meaningful property rights. In such societies the industrial revolution must fare poorly. When returns on investments of effort or capital bring no preferential advantages to those who would invest, there can never be extraordinary efforts, conentration of capital, or investment. Fuzzy notions of ownership make keeping extraordinary gains that come from extraordinary efforts completely infeasible except through means of extraordinary force.
The consequence is that enterprises that rely on these sorts of notions must fail miserably in these cultures. It is frequently true, too, that crime and corruption flourish in all densely populated areas, and for many of the same reasons. These are problems faced by every culture when it faces a transition from low density communal living to higher density urban living. And the problems have been dealt with by the impostion of special codes of behavior: laws, ethical norms, and so on. Where these are weak, compromised, or nonexistent, commerce always flounders.
So, to the extent that Clark is asserting that the British aristocracy had a post agricultural culture but the aboriginal English did not, he might have a legitimate point. But one would get into some difficulty defining the aboriginal English. Was it the population in England before the Romans arrived? Or the one there just before the Angles and Saxons arrived? Or the one there when the Normans arrived in 1066 with their large contingent of Celtic expatriates?
One might argue that the British aristocratic culture took some form resembling the current form with the signing of the Great Charter. This defined many of the relationships between low and high nobility. And it set up the general shape of society, one in which power flowed up and down the chain of command. The Great Charter, too, placed significant limits on the amount of power that could accumulate in the office of the monarchy. It was at this point in history that England defined itself in a way that would meaningfully and permanently distinguish itself from the continent.
The charter and all that it meant created a world in which ideas could live or die primarily on the basis of their merit rather than on the basis of the favor they curried with an omnipotent monarch. We have already mentioned the rule of law, by which we refer to the idea that the provisions of law apply to all peopl; and that government status not convey privileges that put one beyond its sanction. Attitudes of fairness and noblesse oblige were also part of the British ideal.
Having not read Clark’s book, we are at a disadvantage: we do not know to what extent he is talking about these ennobling ideals. But unless the book is ironically titled, Clark is thinking about something else. The ideal Clark has in mind is, says Frieman, the list of Calvinist, bourgois values. Max Weber a century ago called it the “Protestant Work Ethic.” In Weber’s work northern European nations that became Protestant during the reformation had it. Southern European nations that did not become Protestant, did not. We will refer to this set of values as “industry and thrift.”
For Clark’s thesis to survive, the ethic in England has to be somehow different from the ethic in Sweden or Denmark. It has to be different either in type or extent. Surely Clark does not wish us to believe that the English aristocracy - latecomers to and equivocators with the Reformation - were more steeped in these values than their counterparts on the continent. There is nothing uniqutely British about the values he espouses. There is no reason to believe thay arrived in England in 1250.
Nor is there anything necessarily “upper crust” about them. The ruling class after 1066 were Normans. The Normans were nominally French. But they were also Vikings, sort of. So they had a strong Germanic heritage that would propagate precisely the values of industry and thrift Clark is talking about. This makes them distinct from the English commoners who were Angles and Saxons, how? The Angles and Saxons had a similar Germanic heritage. They were no less keen on the ideas of industry and thrift. You see the problem. To the extent that Normans are Latin, French, they cannot be exemplars of the work ethic Clark is talking about. To the extent that they are Germanic, they become indestinct form the Angles and Saxons. And the body of values he is talking about had to be broadly practiced in England by the yoeman class for centuries before the Normans showed up. You simly cannot get anywhere with the thesis until you define cultural ideas that are uniquely English.
We must grant Clark some part of his argument. The process he describes might work; but it might work on a cultural element different than the one he described. For the one he described was at work on the continent and it was at work in the far east, too. It seems likely that over a long enough period of time there is differential breeding success between classes in an agricultural society. (One that defines individual ownership and welfare distinct from the group’s, one that defines the concept of ownership of means of production in any meaningful sense, and so on.) In essentially all agricultural and post-agricultural societies there is a “survival of the richest effect.” If this is true, then Clark’s thesis might be technically true but still have absolutely no explanatory power. It fails to distinguish the England’s experience from that of other populations.
We can certainly agree with Clark that cultures that lack thrift and industry can fail quite profoundly with modern industrial ways. But the culture of thrift and industry must have been widespread in England long before 1250. And it cannot have been unique to England or unique to the west. If it is a set of values spread by evolutionary processes, it must have been in place long before the industrial revolution; otherwise it is impossible to explain the relatively quick industrialization of China and Korea.
We have identified a cultural component unique to England, exclusive to its upper class, and newly formed in 1250 which may have played some role. So one could imagine a thesis that suggests the uniquely libertarian point of view of the British - a point of view that imbued individuals with liberties rarely defined or honored under rule of law in other nations - allowed members of British society more latitude to vary from some expected cultural norm. The practice of being different was so dear to the British that at one point being called “mad” amounted to the highest praise one could give a fellow aristocrat and “boring: amounted to the greatest insult. Such a culture is bound to produce new ideas eventually.
But this is evidently not what Clark’s thesis is about. It is about thrift and industry and the evolutionary processes that propagate this value.
A cursory study of Chinese history suggests that the differential breeding process has been happening there for about five millennia. Once every six or twelve of fifteen centuries the country has a social upheaval and land is distributyed among peasants in a way that allocates it evenly across a vast swath of the population. But some peasants prove better farmers than others. And they begin to accumulate land. Others move off the land to become tradespeople. Or they work the land under directions from its landowners. In the early stages of this process ever larger plots of land come under the ownership of the most successful farming families. Their superior methods realize returns to scale, farms grow highly productive, food is cheap, the economy flourishes. Arts and industry flourish. People are happy. They reproduce quickly.
But after a number of generations land ownership becomes concentrated among a small number of families, maybe ten percent of the population. These families become wealthy. Once they are wealthy, their welfare becomes less closely tied to the agricultural success of their farms. This means that less effort is spent improving working methods and processes. Instead, landowners engage in commerce. They seek educations. They pursue the arts.
While they attend to other business their farms become less productive. Meanwhile, the population has grown and is dependent on the high outputs of the farms. At some point, perhaps centuries after the last upheaval, the economy stagnates. At this point landowners have no difficulty marrying, breeding, raising children. But peasants without land may have difficulty doing so. Nor do the professional classes. One consequence of this cycle is that certain cultural values are propagated at least among a large minority of the population: value of study, value of hard work and industry, value of cultural arts, value of thrift, value of correctly reconning one’s place in society. For these are the values of the people who survive.
The whole cycle can take many centuries. In China’s most recent two thousand years of history land has been redistributed two, maybe three times. The act itself starts a cycle of death and rebirth. And that cycle started most recently in post WWII China. Westerners may argue that much of China’s success owes to outside investment. But the returns on that investment are ensured by the success of China’s culture and its social institutions; a stable and productive agricultural base, and effective educational system, and effective means of keeping social order and of limiting corruption. Those profits are also ensured by a level of thrift and industry among the Chinese that is simply unimaginable to Americans. There are Chinese who literally work themselves to death. And by some estimates Chinese save over thirty percent of their earned income. If it is thrift and industry alone that power industrial societies, then the industrial revolution was destined to happen first in the far east. But it did not.
If Clark were right in assuming that the “right culture” was unique to thirteenth century British aristocrats, and that the culture only propagates along family lines, then the only possible explanation for the recent industrial revolution in China is that a fair portion of the 1.3 billion Chinese descend from British aristocracy. It is a proposition too absurd even to be reliably humorous.
The title of Clark’s work fails in the humor area, too. “A Farewell to Alms” is meant to suggest that it’s a rough and tumble world. And that we must rely on natural forces to weed out the weakest of us. Let the strongest reproduce most. Who are the strongest? The richest, of course. Everything is precisely as it ought to be so long as we let the rich do precisely what they please and just let the miserable poor die. For if they do the world the courteousy of dying before they reproduce, the act leaves it a better place. While this may be factually true, it may strike some as being a gratuitously cruel sentiment. But perhaps it is not quite so true as we are inclined to believe.
Let us suppose for a moment that Clark’s idea of weeding out the impoverished by means of the preferential reproduction of the rich were the only cultural idea that is required for success. Where should the industrial revolution started? In Islamic lands a man can take up to four wives. The richest men do this. As a consequence, the poorest men take none. It is assumed among evolutionary biologists that almost all females reproduce, and to the extent this is true, evolutionary processes depend much more profoundly on male selection. Following this logic, the strongest selection force of the type “survival of the richest” to be found among humans exists in Islamic lands. For it is only here that rich men have four wives. If Clark’s thesis is meant to suggest that capitalism and the industrial revolution are natural and inevitable results of natural selection, we would expect it to arise first in Arab lands. But it did not.
Alternative Hypothesis
So why did the industrial revolution arise in England? And why did it spread in precisely the way it did? Any person with a bit of British schooling would be quick to suggest that it is probably not a good idea to settle for quick and easy answers to such a question. The answer has lots of parts. There are lots of helpful ways of looking at the question. We have already suggested that one of the necessary conditions was culture. In fact, we have suggested that there were two cultural components. One was the culture of “thrift and industry” that was already widespread in England when the Normans landed. The other was a unique liberal culture unique to England. But culture is not enough.
Jared Diamond answered part of the question in Guns, Germs, Steel. Diamond asked why Eurasia was so technologically advanced compared to the most advanced civilizations of the Americas. He explained how the west overran America in terms of geographical assets. The fertile crescent had better grains and pulses. And it had animals more amenable to domestication. Furthermore, the east-west orientation of Asia and Europe facilitated an exchange of agricultural goods and methods that was less practical in lands oriented north and south. Diamond’s explanation will suffice in explaining why the industrial revolution did not take place in Patagonia or Mozambique. But it does not expain why the industrial revolution occurred in England rather than in Spain. Or Turkey or China. All of these cultures had equal access to the geographical heritage in Diamond’s discourse.
We will argue here that it had to do with the particularly productive relationship the English cultivated with their overseas colonies.We might make some headway by comparing England and Spain. Spain had a favorable climate. It was once rich with minerals. And it was once at the intersection of the Moslem, Jewish, and Christian world. These attributes made it Europe’s richest and most promising area a millenium ago. Then, when the New World was discovered and Spain annexed an area twenty times the size of her original self, it would rightly be assumed that Spain would be the world’s premiere nation.
But it never happened.
England, by contrast, was tiny. It was miserably cold. It had no gold or silver or precious jewels. England was seen by Latinate nations as a kind of distant outpost of civilization. And was treated almost parenthetically. The English responded by asking themselves what it would take for them to be taken seriously in Europe. Early on they built Oxford and Cambridge to educate the ruling classes. Every young aristocrat learned Greek and Latin. This rigorous training taught discipline. And it taught them to see the world from a different perspective. Both of these were cultural distinctions of the British when compared to other European cultures.
This ability to see the world from different perspectives would foster the rise of a liberal tradition that would tolerate a vast range of eccentric ideas. During Ferdinand and Isabella’s purges, by contrast, Jews were cast out. Religious orthodoxy was enforced by the inquisition. And the intellectual culture of the Spanish grew narrow and dim. The Jews composed much of the Spanish middle classes moved to England or the Netherlands. And it was not long before these nations eclipsed Spain in the area of commerce. The liberal tradition that welcomed the Jews into England was running strong several centuries later in the mid ninteenth century. It is no accident that Karl Marx wrote and published his works there; no other European nation would have him.
The liberal tradion is inextricably linked to another tradition, the tradition of commerce. The British, having no natural resources, learned that if they were to play a part on the world stage, they must be better at commerce. They would import raw materials, transform those raw materials to finished goods, and trade those finished goods on the free market for more raw materials. To win at such a game, one had to be much better at the processes of transforming goods than one’s competitors; for they may have the advantage of not having to move raw materials quite so far to be finished.
So being good at commerce almost axiomatically meant being good at industry. (There are other commercial traditions. In the mideast, for instance, the tradition is to be good at controlling markets. Commerce, in this tradition is not about making, but about connecting customer with producer in a way that makes each invisible to the other. It was this tradition that forced the Europeans to find alternative paths to the far east for spices. And it was this tradition that will force Europeans at some point to find alternatives to oil. )
In terms of commerce and industry the Spanish viewed the New World in more of an extractive sense. For example, they rounded up Easter Islanders, and indigenous Peruvians and used them as slaves in their silver mines. The silver they then traded with the Chinese for silk, porcelain, and other finished goods. Their focus on extraction was not entirely accidental; for Spain was originally a Roman outpost, a collection of silver mining settlements. Spanish aristocratic culture had, at some point, defined itself in terms of extraction. Commercial opportunities in the New World, then, were somewhat less evident. And they were less exploited by the Spanish than they were by the British.
In fact, the English saw the Spanish loading galleon after galleon with gold and silver and hauling it back to Spain. When this great haul of precious metal was used to launch the Spanish Armada, the English made a number of crucial decisions. One was to hire “privateers” to sink Spanish ships. This unfortunate decision spawned a whole class of “pirates” who would board the ships and hoard the loot. It played havoc with commerce in the Caribbean for more than a century. (An early experiment in privatization of the military that went terribly wrong)
But the English also decided that their material defense lay in defending their isle on the seas. This proved a remarkably good decision. First, it meant that they could minimize the number of standing army. Second, it meant that their armed forces were highly mobiile well aligned with their commercial enterprises, defending ports and colonial enterprises. Third, it meant they would trade capital for labor in the arms race. It was good guns that held the Spanish Armada to a stalemate. And it was problems of navigation on the part of the Spanish that led to its demise. If the British could keep an upper hand in these technologies, they could beat the Spanish and anyone else with a minimum number of troops. All of these strategic decisions point in the direction of bolstering commerce and gaining technological advantages that overcome shortages of manpower.
While the Spanish were enslaving local populations to serve in gold and silver mines, the English were writing charters, giving North America to some of its prominent citizens. Those citizens would move to the new lands, set up farms, colonize, produce manufactured goods and raw materials of many kinds that would find their way back to England. Even by Adam Smith’s day England had been enjoying a steady flow of goods from its colonies for some time. It is impossible to know what impact these raw materials and finished products had on British welfare; but the thirteen colonies covered an area many times the size of England they were well populated, and they were highly productive.
It is likely that some of the success of the British economy that Adam Smith attributed to “laissez faire” capitalism would have been better attributed to other attributes of British culture, namely,
1) The focus on commerce
2) The cultivation of a middle class
3) A culture of industry and broad ownership of capital
4) Its cultivation of highly productive colonies in the new world
5) Its outward-looking and highly disciplined educational system
These qualities distinguished the British from the French and Spanish in the way they settled of the new world and exploited its resources. And they can be at least as explanatory as the absence of government interference. In fact, one might argue, it was not lack of government interference that set up the English colonies. Rather, it was England’s guarantee to defend her grants to private citizens. This is nothing like “laissez faire” economics. It is government sponsored commerce. The government guaranteed a body of supporting services to new and promising commercial enterprises. It removed the greatest risks. And the result was productive overseas colonies that quickly raised the standard of living in England.
British superiority over other European nations arose primarily from its success in exploiting commerce with the new world. Here it had several advantages. One advantage was the attitude of cultivating new commercial enterprises, which we have talked about. Another advantage was geographical. The British were geographically closer to their colonies than the Spanish. This was a small incremental benefit. But it was a real one. It made the return on capital slightly larger for any given load of cargo in any given vessel. This would make commerce betwen England and her colonies slightly more profitable than it could be for Spain. And compounded over a few centuries and extra percent or so as a return on investment can provide a huge incremental benefit.
The Elephant in the Room
The issue of frontier is a big one. It is, in fact, so big that we usually cannot see it. Frontier is where radical new agricultural or industrial methods reach fertile new ground. When this happens there is a great explosion of wealth. This happens because in lands where the agricultural and industrial methods are old, populations have expanded over time to make resources scarce. But in frontiers new methods can bring huge excess returns. And if the the frontier is large enough, it can be centuries before the population reaches a level that fully draws down all the excesses.
Meanwhile, this explosion of wealth leads to a flourishing of arts and culture. It enables education and the learning of specialized skills. And this culture of learning can bring new methods to bear on old ground, raising productivity where it might otherwise have saturated. Bringing potatoes to Poland and Ireland and tomatoes to Spain and Italy might be examples. Or the creation of shorter, high yield wheat.
European history since the plague has been profoundly affected by the frontier of the Americas, the greatest frontier since the end of the ice ages exposed Europe. And while it is true that European culture made the exploitation of this frontier possible; the resources provided by the new world completely changed European history. It was the intersection of rich resources and a particular set of cultures and technologies that explains both the industrial revolution itself and England’s role in it. It explains, too the ascent of the west, the present distribution of relatively rich and relatively poor nations, and the way this distribution is changing. Clark’s thesis, by contrast fails completely on every count.
The excess goods from the New World, then, were what propelled European growth. Because the British were the most successful in cultivating the new lands they enjoyed the benefits first. The industrial revolution occurred in England simply because it enjoyed all of the cultural assets of old civilization equally with old world nations and it enjoyed the assets of the New World differentially.
The industrial revolution depends on thrift and industry. It depends on commerce. It depends on information. It depends on rule of law and principled behavior. Groups with certain geographical attributes and cultures succeed. Groups with other geographical attributes and cultures lag far behind. In places that border the ocean, places with good natural ports, commerce frequently thrives. Commercial interests can be powerful forces in tranforming cultures at the margins. Commerce necessarily makes one more open to ideas from far away places. Because transport by ocean-going vessel is now and has for five centuries been the most cost effective means of transport for most goods, all commercially successful areas are closely connected to the ocean. Places actually from the ocean may thrive, but only when connected well by road or rail. And usually they thrive only because of the concentration of a rare resource, as gold in Timbuktu ( once long ago) or Johannesburg today.
There are places poor in resources, as was England, that have taken the European colonial model and run with it. The Japanese did it early on; they were working on it contemporaneously with the Europeans. The Japanese culture of cooperation, hard work, and study meant that the industrial revolution would take root their early on. Koreans were further behind; but they mastered it. The Chinese were even further behind; but they have too. So have the Indians.
In the case of the Chinese, one discovers that they have expended huge efforts to copy or supplant European relationships with governments whose territories are rich in strategic resources. They started building railways in Zambia in the 1960s; and the Chinese are the largest expatriate population in Zambia’s capital city, Lusaka. Zambia, by the way, has some of the world’s richest copper ore deposits. They have a strong presence in Sudan and one frequently hears of resource deals between Latin American nations and the Chinese. The Chinese, then, are learning the European strategy of looking globally for resources to power industry at home. Gone is the isolated, inward looking China of the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries. Then, China lagged England not for the cultural reasons Clark identified, but for reasons of resource limitation borne of the medieval value of self-sufficiency. Once the Chinese rejected that value, looked globally for resources, and became successful at getting them, the missing resources were provided the industrial revolution was as alive and well in China as it ever was in England. Whether one defines the issue that stopped the Chinese from joining the industrial revolution in terms of cultural attitudes or in terms of access to material resources, it is completely clear that the culture of thrift and industry is a very old one in China; and it was not sufficient to start the industrial revolution.
There are places blessed with resources and good geography where industry and commerce have not managed to take hold and produce strongly rising standards of living. When all other variables have been eliminated, one is left with the idea that culture must play a strong role.
Full Circle
This brings us full circle. Jared Diamond explains in some detail in his work Guns, Germs, Steel that culture bifurcates when civilizations become dense due to successful agricultural practices. Hunter-gatherer civilizations tend to be egalitarian and non-specialized. Agricultural and post-agricultural societies tend to be specialized and heirarchical. It is, he reasoned, a natural outcome of the conditions. His argument is mostly empirical; things work out this way over and over. There are are no exceptions. And the reasons for the differences are compelling. It is this bifurcation that makes the difference. It probably was working itself out at some time in the last two millennia in England, but probably it had gotten much farther along by 1250 Clark asserts. And certain populations on the European continent and in Asia were much further along in the expression of industry and thrift.
Clark is almost certainly correct that “thrift and industry” is a necessary component of an industrial society. But the idea that “thrift and industry” provide sufficient conditions for the initiation or sustenance of an industrial society is simply absurd. Clark may be right that the British aristocracy on or around 1250 produced a new set of cultural values. He might be right that these cultural values diffused into the broader population by some means resembling the one he talks about. But this cultural value or practice could not have been “thrift and industry.” It had to be something else. It might be that the cultural value in question does give some kinds of advantages to cultures that have it; and it might be that where it works along with industry and thrift it augments the success of commerce and industry.
I happen to imagine that there is a set of cultural values that makes industrial society work. Thrift and industry must surely be among them. But there might be other values such as those that encourage the free flow of information and ideas, or those that set people on equal standing before the law. Some of these, in fact, appear in the “transparency” indices published periodically in the Economist. They have real, measurable economic impact. There might be others, too. For example, ideas about constraining one’s actions on the basis of principle, not just by social pressures and institutions. It might be useful to try to work out what all the useful values are and what their effects are on society. To the extent Clark is trying to do this we give him credit.
We note in passing that despite all its benefits the industrial revolution is not everything. There are a great many values that convey greater satisfactions on man than do the values we find underlying the success of capitalism. The values Clark is peddling don’t necessarily satisfy. Except in cultures that succeed completely in convincing its members of the holiness of work, these ideas tend to spread mostly frustration, anxiety, and disaffection. It is, we imagine, the divorce of industry from the Calvinist God who sanctified it that is responsible for much of America’s sense of meaninglessness. And for a resurgence of fundamentalism in the West. And we might see Clark’s work as an effort to prop up with bad science what bad religion has failed to do.
After exploring the many ways in which it fails we must conclude tha Clark’s thesis makes sense only to those predisposed to hold the same prejudices. The thesis seems to come perilously close to simply assuming a kind of “King Arthur” class unique to England’s thirteenth century aristocracy, and pretending it might breed its way to a kind of worldwide hegemony. By comparing it to an accepted scientific theory the author pretends to prove that the outcome was an inevitable result of the qualities of the people in that mythical class. It comes out as a new twist on an old theme “We are desceded from the Gods; but you are not.” Whether Clark does so intentionally or not, his work clears a path for just such an ethnocentric intepretation. That’s dangerous stuff.
It looks like Clark’s work will do a fine job of bolstering prejudice and of giving rich Anglos a sense of righteous entitlement. This is bound to make the work a bestseller, to make Clark a rich man, and to place his work in the western canon for some time. But if one cares about actually describing the causes of the industrial revolution, the central thesis of Farewell to Alms seems perfectly poised to stop us from looking in all the right places. We cannot help but wonder whether that’s the point.