A Farewell to Alms
About
Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World is a 2007 book by the economic historian Gregory Clark (Princeton University Press). It offers a Malthusian account of world economic history before roughly 1800: for millennia, technological improvements raised output, but any resulting gain was absorbed by population growth, leaving average living standards no higher — often lower — than in the Stone Age. Clark’s explanation for why England broke this trap first is controversial and distinctive: a process of ‘survival of the richest’, in which the wealthy in pre-industrial England produced disproportionately more surviving children than the poor, so that generation after generation the population downwardly mobile from richer families replaced the poor and diffused bourgeois behaviours — patience, thrift, a work ethic, low time preference — throughout English society. On this account the Industrial Revolution was less a matter of institutions or geography than of a slow change in the character of the population itself, driven by differential fertility and downward social mobility among the wealthy.
In the wiki
- Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating — Clark cites the book repeatedly in defending his broader, related claim that relative social status is stable across centuries and societies. He restates the book’s Malthusian frame in a deliberately idiosyncratic sense — a society is ‘Malthusian’ whenever fertility rises with living standards under a fixed resource constraint, a condition he argues can coexist with real material comfort, illustrated with pre-industrial England after the Black Death (population under two million, yet daily meat consumption and houses ‘a modern Arlington resident would be happy to move into’).
See also
- Gregory Clark — the author
- The Son Also Rises — Clark’s later book on surname-tracked social mobility