New Book Makes Dangerous Claim That Inequality Is Genetic

By Jesse Reynolds, AlterNet. Posted January 18, 2008.

Bold books that offer grand theses to explain the course of human history are risky endeavors. Few such attempts rightfully linger in the collective conscious: from the 18th century's The Wealth of Nations to the following century's Das Capital and potentially to the relatively recent Guns, Germs, and Steel. But most are quickly forgotten. If these are judged on the merit of the arguments, Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, will quickly end up in the latter category.

Clark, an economic historian and the chair of the economics department at the University of California, Davis, asks a fundamental question of history: Why did the Industrial Revolution occur where and when it did? In other words, why did the global economy diverge? Why did northern Europe, particularly England, grow rich while the most of the rest of the world remained in poverty? And why haven't other areas caught up?

The answer he proposes is both beautifully simple and excessively reductionist. By essentially ignoring institutions such as government and religion, major developments, and power relations, his analysis is shackled by historical myopia. But the implications of his hypothesis go beyond 19th century British history. Clark's proposals have both explicit and implicit consequences for current political and economic debates. The author would have us embrace a retrograde social Darwinism, in which the wealthy of the world are on top of society's ladder due to superior culture and genetics.

Before 1800, Clark asserts, Britain was mired for centuries in a "Malthusian trap." Resources for survival were more limited than reproduction, causing a significant portion of people to die before having children. Innovations may have improved life temporarily, but the economic gains were quickly diluted among the subsequent greater number of surviving descendants.

During this time, four behaviors critical to the rise of industrial capitalism and the break from the trap became more prevalent: literacy, thrift, hard work and less violence. Although these "middle class values," as Clark dubs them, emerged gradually among the British, the wealthy exhibited them earlier and to a greater degree. Furthermore, the upper class also had better reproductive success than the general population, a result that Clark calls the "survival of the richest." Since the higher number of survivors among the wealthy split inheritances, medieval Britain was characterized by downward mobility. Though the heirs of the wealthy were poorer than their parents, their generational economic descent helped propagate their cultural characteristics of success throughout society.

Clark provides fascinating evidence to back up some of these claims. A key part of his extensive economic research is a survey of wills. Contrary to intuition, plenty of poorer British men (and the testators were overwhelming male) bequeathed their meager possessions to their children. The wills demonstrate that the wealthy did, in fact, have a greater numbers of surviving children. Using the ability to sign one's name as a proxy for literacy, Clark concludes that they were also more likely to be literate. Clark uses similar methods based on an impressive, diverse array of historical sources to demonstrate the rise of longer work hours, decreased interpersonal violence and stronger savings. Unfortunately, he too often supports broad generalizations with temporally and spatially narrow data. While this is understandable, given the limitations of records, it occasionally weakens his assertions.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of Clark's theory is its radical "economism." He reduces major institutional or political developments to simple quests for greater economic efficiency. Slavery, for example, is presented as merely an economically inefficient allocation of labor resources, as it prevented slaves from seeking the most productive use of their labor. Like other suboptimal institutions, it was only a matter of time before the economic advantages outweigh the benefits of oppression. So much for abolitionism's moral sway.

This reductionism allows, or causes, Clark to ignore history beyond his lens of efficiency. However, shifts such as the Magna Carta, the Protestant Reformation, the Glorious Revolution, the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War certainly played no small part in altering balances of power within British society, consequently laying the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution.

For example, Clark chooses to overlook the enormous competitive advantages utilized by the northern European nations, and particularly their elite classes, by centuries of slavery and colonialism. However inefficient these systems may have been, they were forcefully maintained by their beneficiaries to transfer staggering values of expropriated labor and natural resources from conquered lands. But just as his brief discourse on slavery merely highlights its inefficiency, one of Clark's few passages on colonialism asserts that subjugated areas actually benefited economically due to the increased political stability conferred by their imperial conquerors. In an interview about his book, the author revives the white man's burden, claiming that the British "were not systematically exploiting India. They were in fact offering India the enormous possibility of becoming the second great industrial power in the world. That didn't happen, but it wasn't because of anything the British did. It was because of what happened internally in India."

See more stories tagged with: class, race, values, genetics, inequality, middle class, a farewell to alms, gregory clark, england

Jesse Reynolds is the director of the project on Biotechnology in the Public Interest at the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit advocacy organization and a contributor to its Biopolitical Times blog.

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