★★★★☆ How little we know!

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

Gregory Clark

I think the publisher's blurb for this book gives an inaccurate impression of what it's about. It is true that Gregory Clark comes to a conclusion about the Industrial Revolution that is at odds with what you may have heard and with much contemporary scholarship. (And it may indeed be wrong!) However, the real point is not where he arrives, but how he gets there.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the reason the origins of the Industrial Revolution are obscure is that we don't know what happened. People who are accustomed to living in a world in which economic activity is obsessively and quantitatively tracked (that would include everyone reading this review -- even if economic data is not top of mind for you personally, you do live in a world that has it) usually don't realize how very, very little we know of economic activity earlier than a couple hundred years ago. People who confidently make pronouncements about the economy of the Roman Empire, for instance, almost certainly don't know what they're talking about.

Gregory Clark is an economist who has built a career out of reconstructing economic history of distant times from such inadequate sources as are available. If you enjoy real investigations, then you will admire the ingenious ways Clark comes up with to collect data from the distant past and extract economic numbers from it. His The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (you may notice that he likes to make his book titles puns on Hemingway novels) traces the history of surnames to study economic mobility.

Clark is one of a kind. There's probably not enough room in his field for another, but it is good that we have one. People who remind us how little we know are invaluable.

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