Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, Chapter 1: A Summary

Chapter 1 of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (2007) is called “The Sixteen-Page Economic History of the World,” which briefly summaries the broad, long-run economic history of humanity.

Gregory Clark contends that the most important long-run, historical reality of world history can be summed up in two ideas:

(1) from the earliest times of hunter-gatherers until roughly 1800 humanity was stuck in a long-run Malthusian trap: per capita wealth may have varied somewhat in different times and places, but there was no sustained, great upward trend in global per capita wealth. While some societies managed short-run economic growth even in per capita terms (and here the phrase “short-run” might mean as long as a century or so), nevertheless, in the long run, advances in per capita wealth by means of technological or other advantages were inevitably lost because of population growth.

(2) after 1800 the power of Western science, technology and the Industrial Revolution ended the Malthusian trap for Europeans and most of their colonial societies, and for much of humanity (Clark 2007: 1), though the Malthusian trap persists in some places.

The “broad-brush” economic history of the world, in the two ideas above, can be seen in this graph (which can be opened in a new window):



Clark (2007: 2) argues that, for the average person in 1800 (even in a place like Britain), life was not much better than in Stone Age hunter gatherer societies, a claim I find a bit absurd and exaggerated.

Nevertheless, the broad points about the historically important limitations of the Malthusian trap through much of history seem sound.

Clark (2007: 3) contends that, even today, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the introduction of Western technology has not allowed all societies there to escape the Malthusian trap because of excessive population growth. Paradoxically, the Industrial Revolution has created a Great Divergence between the richest, industrialised nations and the poorest nations of the Third World (Clark 2007: 3).

Clark’s A Farewell to Alms seeks to answer three questions:

(1) Why did humanity remain trapped in a Malthusian world for so long?;

(2) Why did the first escape from the Malthusian trap happen in England? (and spreading to other countries in Europe);

(3) Why did the Great Divergence happen and persist? (Clark 2007: 3).

Humanity was trapped in a Malthusian world before 1800 because the rate of technological innovation was too low: perhaps the pre-1800, average rate of technological advancement was considerably below 0.05% per year (Clark 2007: 5).

Paradoxically – in a pre-modern world subject to Malthusianism – prosperous periods of peace, order, stability, public health, welfare to the poor, and economic growth stimulated the population growth that ultimately impoverished those societies and reduced per capita wealth (Clark 2007: 5). Hence fertility control was a major driver of improved material prosperity in pre-industrial societies (Clark 2007: 5).

Clark points to an important principle that is also stressed by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: humanity was still subject to Darwinian evolution by natural selection in the Malthusian era, and even after the development of old agrarian societies after the Neolithic Revolution from 10,000 BC (Clark 2007: 6).

As an aside, it is very interesting that Charles Darwin was driven to one of his most important insights into biological evolution by reading Thomas Robert Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798; revised 2nd edn. 1803; 6th edn. 1826) in 1838 in the sixth edition (Desmond and Moore 1991: 264–265), during a terrible depression in England:



Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) read Malthus while in the Spice Islands in 1858 – and made the same deduction as Darwin, and in the process developing a theory of evolution too (Desmond and Moore 1991: 468).

Darwin and Wallace discovered evolution by natural selection not long before the horrors of the Malthusian world were finally ending for the European peoples.

And this leads us directly to Clark’s thought-provoking hypothesis about the possible evolution that people in England experienced from 1250–1800:

(1) because of wealth inequality and the emergence of a rich productive middle class, economic success in England translated into powerful reproductive success;

(2) since in England the richest families generally had twice as many surviving children as the poorest families, the poor in Malthusian England gradually died out through differential birth and survival rates (a simple foundational principle of evolution);

(3) pre-industrial England was therefore a society of constant downward mobility, in the sense that the children of the elite and wealthier classes, on average, moved downwards in the social hierarchy in order to live and find work (Clark 2007: 7).

So therefore the general genetic traits of the wealthier classes in England – plausibly likely to be higher intelligence, patience, hard work, innovativeness, and low time preference – were thus spreading genetically throughout the population for centuries as a pre-condition for the Industrial Revolution (Clark 2007: 8).

The same type of genetic changes may well have happened in other mercantile, commercial societies where the success of people with given biological traits led to long-run reproductive advantage and general evolutionary change.

As the Industrial Revolution – with its application of major technological advances to production – transformed European societies, fertility declined. This can be seen in the graph below:



As we can see, there was a sharp fall in the fertility rate throughout the West from the 1870s, but this accelerated the declines that were already underway after about 1800. Shockingly, some nations like Britain and Germany even had sub-replacement fertility rates below the magic rate of 2.1 even by the 1920s/1930s.

As Clark points out, it was not just the rapid and historically unparalleled economic growth that broke the Malthusian trap for Europeans, the falling fertility rate also was a major factor in the rising real per capita GDP and wealth of the West (Clark 2007: 8).

Clark also argues that the explanation for the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in England requires a complex set of factors in the long-run from 1250–1860 (Clark 2007: 10).

Crucially, Clark even argues that the whole economic history of humanity must be set within possible differential evolution of human beings in different societies, not only in terms of culture, but also under different selective pressures. Above all, Old Agricultural Societies may have produced people with different genetic and behavioural traits from other peoples (Clark 2007: 10).

Why did an Industrial Revolution occur in England in the time it happened, and not in China or Japan? Whether natural resource advantages in coal, or colonies, or cultural changes of the Protestant Reformation contributed, Clark thinks that evolutionary change brought about by demographic trends in England, both in culture and possibly genetics, created a people who were also a fundamental condition for the Industrial Revolution (Clark 2007: 11).

Finally, Clark turns to the Great Divergence and the persistence of failed economic growth in parts of the Third World, and thinks that failure to adapt to the cultural values and institutions of the industrialised societies are major factors. Here the discussion suffers from Clark’s ignorance of left heterodox and Post Keynesian economics.

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

Desmond, Adrian and James Moore. 1991. Darwin. Penguin Books, London.

The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 1: A Summary

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is a truly extraordinary book that every person on the Left should read. Critical reviews of the book can be found in Wills (2009), Arden (2009) and Gorelik and Shackelford (2010).

In essence, Cochran and Harpending challenge the notion that human evolution stopped around 50,000 years ago.

In Chapter 1 of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending (2009: 1) argue that

(1) human evolution has actually been accelerated by various pressures and historical developments over the past 10,000 years, as the environments and niches occupied by human beings radically changed, and

(2) that evolution in human beings has been about 100 times faster in the past 10,000 years than the long-run, average rate during all 6 million years of human and hominid evolution (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 23, citing Hawks et al. 2007).

The view that Cochran and Harpending oppose is as follows: the idea that the last stage of significant human evolution occurred between about 50,000 to 40,000 years ago and then ceased. That is to say, from 50,000 to 40,000 years ago during the Upper Palaeolithic humans went through a flowering of culture and material culture (such as weapons, tools, art and clothing), but then human evolution of the mind and body, in significant ways, ended around this time, and modern humans are essentially the same as humans of about c. 40,000 years ago (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 2).

The assumption lying behind this is that the environment occupied by humans became basically static about 50,000–40,000 years ago, and so no great new selective pressures caused by new environments continued to modify the human genome and phenotypes (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 2). Such a scenario is not impossible if a species occupies an environment that is stable: e.g., horseshoe crabs today are probably genetically and phenotypically much the same as horseshoe crabs 100 million years ago, because these organisms have occupied the same stable, static environment.

But Cochran and Harpending (2009: 3) contend that this assumption about the environments occupied by humans within the past 40,000 years – and especially the last 10,000 years – cannot possibly be taken seriously.

Instead, the evidence suggests that, while many species may well exist for long periods in stasis in stable environments, they can then easily be subject to rapid evolution in response to rapid environmental and selective pressures from natural selection (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 5, 19). For example, modern breeds of dogs have been created very recently in the space of about 15,000 years by human beings through artificial selection and breeding: to take one example, we have been able to change wolves into chihuahuas.

Changes can also happen rapidly in cognition or behaviour, e.g., domesticated dogs are significantly different in their cognitive and behavioural characteristics from wolves. And the Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev was able to breed domesticated foxes from wild foxes in about 10 years of selective breeding (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 7), as described in this video:



Cochran and Harpending point to the following reasons for rejecting the stable environment hypothesis with respect to humans over the past 40,000 years:

(1) even after 40,000 years ago, humans continued to migrate around the surface of the planet, into southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, and also into northern Eurasia, Japan, and the Americas, where they experienced different environments and different evolutionary pressures for the following 10,000s of years, and, above all, some experienced the extremely harsh environment of the last Ice Age in the area of northern Eurasia (the last phase of which was the Last Glacial Maximum when the ice sheets were at their greatest extension from 27,000–18,000 BC).

(2) humans outside of Africa encountered and competed with other archaic humans such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as new animals and pathogens in these environments. Humans outside of Africa also interbred with Neanderthals and acquired a small amount of Neanderthal DNA.

(3) differential cultural and technological development occurred in these different regions, which in turn caused new selective pressures on the people in various areas, e.g., spears and arrows drove selection for faster, lighter humans who could hunt more successfully with these weapons (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 3).

(4) the agricultural revolution from c. 10,000 BC and the emergence of cities also created radically new environments from those inhabited by hunter gatherers before this time.

(5) as human populations rose with farming, mutations and beneficial individual traits caused by genetic mixing in sexual reproduction were more likely to occur (and then spread in these populations) than in much smaller populations of hunter-gatherers. And, importantly, even comparatively minor genotypic changes in alleles or gene variants, but occurring more frequently, can cause very profound and deep phenotypic changes quite rapidly in a species.

In short, Cochran and Harpending contend that these different environments have continued to shape human beings and even accelerate human evolution well after 50,000 years ago, and that even minor changes in allele frequencies in different human populations driven by selective pressures have caused phenotypic differences in external appearance, morphology, metabolism, defence against infectious diseases, and even cognitive and behavioural traits (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 19, 22).

This of course means not only that human beings of around 100,000 years ago were different from human beings c. 40,000 years ago, but also that humans c. 40,000 years ago or even 10,000 years ago were phenotypically different – in significant ways – from human beings alive today (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 18–19).

Cochran and Harpending (2009: 18–19) also contend that accelerated human evolution means that even humans in historical times from around 1,000 BC should be regarded as different – both genotypically and phenotypically – from us today. This has profound implications for our understanding of human history, and our understanding of why and how humans historically developed in terms of their cultures, technologies, economies, and social organisation.

To end with some concrete examples: most Europeans today are lactose-tolerant into adulthood. Europeans are generally lactose-tolerant because they have a mutation that allows the synthesis of lactase – an enzyme that digests milk sugar. But this evolutionary trait is quite recent: it only spread amongst Europeans from 3,000 to 2,000 BC as Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya-culture people from what is now southern Russia migrated into Europe and spread this mutation that they had evolved (Allentoft et al. 2015: 171). Before about 3,000 BC, Europeans were not lactose-tolerant into adulthood.

And if we went back in time to Europe of about 40,000 BC, we’d discover that Europeans of that era looked quite different from their modern descendants: e.g., they would have had heavy brow ridges, prognathism from the much larger teeth that humans had before the Neolithic farming revolution, and probably much darker skin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allentoft, Morten E. et al. 2015. “Population Genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia,” Nature 522 (11 June): 167–172.

Arden, Rosalind. 2009. Review of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, Twin Research and Human Genetics 12.4: 409–410.

Cochran, Gregory and Henry Harpending. 2009. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Basic Books, New York.

Gorelik, G. and T. K. Shackelford. 2010. Review of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, Evolutionary Psychology 1: 113–118.

Hawks, John, Wang, Eric T., Cochran, Gregory M., Harpending, Henry C. and Robert K. Moyzis. 2007. “Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104.52 (December 26): 20753–20758.

Wills, Christopher. 2009. Review of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, New Scientist 201.2695: 46–47.