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Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Article Excerpt
Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Aims: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2008)

GREGORY CLARK'S brief economic history of the world seeks to explain the coming of the Industrial Revolution to England and the West and its failure to materialize in most under-developed countries. It is divided into three parts: the Malthusian Trap which presents a global model of traditional society that runs from the birth of civilization to 1800, the coming of the Industrial Revolution, and finally what Clark refers to as the Great Divergence or the failure of industrialization in most of the under-developed countries.

At the core of the British-educated economic historian's view is the notion that until 1800 the world's population was caught in a so-called Malthusian Trap in which such technological advance as there was created a larger population without generating any gains in income. Prior to 1800 the rate of technological advance or increase of the technological schedule was so low that incomes could not escape the Malthusian equilibrium in which living standards decline as population increases. Until...