Home > Work > A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
1 " Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine. "
― Gregory Clark , A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
2 " The argument is instead that it rewarded with economic and hence reproductive success a certain repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world, such as the ability to perform simple repetitive tasks hour after hour, day after day. There is nothing natural or harmonic, for example, in having a disposition to work even when all the basic needs of survival have been achieved. "
3 " The time and energy that innovators invested in new methods thus yielded a much higher social return than the meager private return they reaped. "
4 " But the generalized spillovers from innovation activities are not in practice measurable. Nor is the total amount of activity designed to improve production processes measurable. Investments in innovation occur in all economies. But unknown factors speed and retard this process across different epochs and different economies. "
5 " Another irony is that the achievement of mass affluence in much of the world--the decline in child mortality, the extension of adult life spans, and the reduction in inequality--have not made us any happier than our hunter-gatherer forebears. "
