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20 Aug 07

a surprising yet instantly plausible argument about
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World* is fully as absorbing, as memorable and as well written as Mr Diamond's remarkable bestseller. It deserves to be as widely read.
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- Mr Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, has gathered a wealth of intriguing evidence and argument in support of this claim, and does not flinch from drawing some disturbing inferences.
- a Malthusian trap
- Abundance was self- cancelling: so far as economic laws were concerned, humans and animals were much alike.
- fertility declined
- fed through to
- the Protestant Reformation
- t was the combination of social stability stretching back more than 500 years, and the relative fecundity of the materially successful
- bourgeois values
- arc long before
- virtue and vice in public policy
- appalling standards of hygiene
- The book's tone is by no means as bleak as you might suppose (or maybe as it should be): Mr Clark writes with disarming wit.
- Growth miracles such as that confound cultural pessimism.
- I believe that culture is much more malleable, for good or ill, than Mr Clark allows.
- But any book that is as bold, as fascinating, as conscientiously argued and as politically incorrect as this one demands to be read.