Was an Industrial Revolution Inevitable? (Part Two)

Today's post is a direct continuation from yesterday's.  Gregory Clark's paper is The Sixteen Page Economic History of the World, recommended by Integralds at Reddit.

On page three of his paper, Gregory Clark writes:

Thus world economic history poses three interconnected problems:
  • Why did the Malthusian Trap persist for so long?
  • Why did the initial escape from that trap in the Industrial Revolution occur on one tiny island, England, in 1800?
  • Why was there the consequent Great Divergence?
This book proposes an­swers to all three of these puzzles — answers that point up the connections among them. The explanation for both the timing and the nature of the In­dustrial Revolution, and at least in part for the Great Divergence, lies in pro­cesses that began thousands of years ago, deep in the Malthusian era.

Clark asks: "Why did the initial escape from that trap in the Industrial Revolution occur on one tiny island, England, in 1800?"

Integralds asks: "Why Britain? Why not Japan, China, India, or Europe?"

Yeah. So, what does Gregory Clark have to say about it?

His is an odd analysis, and I have some trouble with it because of the way I was brought up. Clark's "processes that began thousands of years ago" is a euphemism for "ongoing human evolution". For openers, he writes:

In this model the economy of humans in the years before 1800 turns out to be just the natural economy of all animal species, with the same kinds of factors determining the living conditions of animals and humans.

In the years before 1800, Clark suggests, we were still like dogs and cats and goldfish. He writes:

The Darwinian struggle that shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution but continued right up until the Industrial Revolution.

Note: the Darwinian struggle. For Gregory Clark this is not a metaphor. It is an explanation. Not only did we evolve from apes; later, we evolved from cave men. We evolved from hunter-gatherers into agricultural societies and then at least some of us evolved yet again, and it became possible to have an industrial revolution. And then I suppose we evolved further because we had an industrial revolution. Clark plays fast and loose with the concept of evolution.

For me, human nature is human nature. That's what makes us human. For me, human nature doesn't change. (I'm not offering evidence to support my view; I'm just telling you what I have always thought.) I read something one time about Hitler and his "master race" and how after World War Two in the U.S. we have de-emphasized the idea of genetic superiority as a causal factor. And I think that's probably true, and I think that's how I was raised, and I have to say that for me, the idea of human evolution as the cause of the Industrial Revolution is way off base.

Clark writes:

For England we will see compelling evidence of differential survival of types in the years 1250–1800. In particular, economic success translated powerfully into reproductive success. The richest men had twice as many surviving chil­dren at death as the poorest. The poorest individuals in Malthusian England had so few surviving children that their families were dying out.

The genes of poor people were filtered out of the gene pool, and the genes of rich people spread. I have trouble evaluating this idea because it's creepy. Plus I want to say it is wrong. People are not poor because of their genes. It's a there but for the grace of God thing. You know: "those whose courage and initiative have not been supplemented by exceptional skill or unusual good fortune."

And yet, Clark seems to be backing his argument with data. All I have is the word creepy.

Clark:

The attributes that would ensure later economic dynamism—patience, hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education—were thus spread­ing biologically throughout the population.

Yeah, I still have "creepy". Clark softens his touch, saying "the economy of the preindustrial era was shaping people, at least culturally and perhaps also genetically." (Emphasis added.) Perhaps. But I cannot evaluate the merits of his idea.

What I can say is, it's not my kind of economics. Economists always seem to want to manipulate people, to change people's behavior in particular ways so as to create particular economic effects. I think that's bullshit. I think the economists who do that are the ones who don't have a clue about the economy. And that's just what Gregory Clark is doing with evolution.

One more quote from Clark. This must be the one Integralds had in mind:

Why an Industrial Revolution in England? Why not China, India, or Japan? The answer hazarded here is that England’s advantages were not coal, not colonies, not the Protestant Reformation, not the Enlightenment, but the accidents of institutional stability and demography: in particular the extraordinary stability of England back to at least 1200, the slow growth of English population between 1300 and 1760, and the extraordinary fecundity of the rich and economically successful. The embedding of bourgeois values into the culture, and perhaps even the genetics, was for these reasons the most advanced in England.

Fecundity and genetics and values. Oh, my!