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A Farewell to Alms, pp.1-112
To start the book Greg lays out his central claim that most of human history can be explained by a Malthusian model. By this he means that changes in birth and death rates are the means of changing the real wage in the long run. He also suggests it is very hard to raise living standards in the long run, again short of leaving Malthusian conditions, as England later did.
These pages contain some of the book's most important material. If Clark is right, one relatively simple model can explain a great deal of human history.
From reading his book, I've upped my attachment to the Malthusian model from p = 0.2 to p = 0.37; that's a big shift and it's to Clark's credit. But I am still not convinced or even at p = 0.5, and here is why...
1. Did hunter-gatherers really have living standards as high as people in 18th century England? By focusing on the long run, Clark neglects the pains of equilibration. Hunter-gatherers who survived to 30 maybe had decent lives, but population was very low. It was kept low, in part, by lots of brutal and painful death. We can't just focus on the steady-state conditions in making welfare comparisons. Modern research is also discovering that primitive societies have very high levels of war and violent death; if we're playing time travel games, I'm opting for 1800, and not just to have a chance of hearing Haydn. I'll also take modern Tanzania over the hunter-gatherers, in a heartbeat, contra what Clark implies.
2. Why should we aggregate income comparisons by country (or the whole world) rather than by city? World history looks very different if we do the latter. Aren't most countries relatively recent inventions anyway? More generally, I would like a more disaggregated look at the data. Big chunks of the urbanized human population -- pre 1800 -- seem to have violated Malthusian precepts for centuries on end. "Stadtluft macht frei" was the old German saying.
3. How long is the long run? This is one of my biggest questions about the work and about Malthusian predictions more generally. Are we just comparing 30,000 B.C. to 1800 A.D.? If so, we have only two data points. If we look at times in between, there is much more scope for non-Malthusian results, even if they hold for "only centuries."
4. Violent conflict and predation are not given enough (any?) importance. Cities that avoid violent conflict do pretty well. Admittedly, violence is itself endogenous to Malthusian considerations, but I'm not going to reduce war to population pressures (and certainly Clark never tries to.) Isn't part of the historical inability to boost long-run living standards simply the result of recurring wars and depredations? 17th century European history, among other times, shows just how much war matters.
5. Should I reject the Julian Simon model I grew up with? In that view there are increasing returns to scale within cities, where people usually don't starve. The countryside languishes in poor countries, in part because it is underpopulated. Rather than having a "one population model" with an aggregate "n," labor markets are local. The "plagued by diseconomies of scale rural folk" cannot sufficiently connect with the "economies of scale urban sophisticates," mostly because of bad institutions and backward infrastructure. And the cities prove unable to protect themselves against all ongoing predations. Doesn't that model fit the data too, and fit the disaggregated and shorter-run data better?
6. I can't find the single place where Clark directly tests the Malthusian model. I fear he will regard this observation as unfair, since there is argumentation and data of some kind on virtually every page. But I still am not satisfied. I see lots of evidence for "history shows mean-reversion and population pressures are one factor affecting wages." It is harder to find a) what "best alternative" the Malthusian model is being tested against, b) what evidence would adjudicate between models, c) what is the short-run claim about the response of population to real wages, and d) what in history are the "hard cases" for the Malthusian model and how does Clark handle them?
7. Charles Kenny argues that the Malthusian model does not explain observed short-run dynamics for population and real wages. I don't regard this piece as a refutation of Clark by any means, but the evidence on how well real wages predict population growth seems to me murky rather than decisively in Clark's favor. There's just not a single, simple model at work here.
If you are coming to the book blind, here is a short piece by Clark. Here is my earlier column on the manuscript. Here is a survey paper on the Industrial Revolution and the Malthusian trap. Here is more good background. Peter Lindert considers how much real wages predict population growth in British history. Read this too.
What do you all think?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 21, 2007 at 07:31 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
I have just started the book (I got it late from Amazon) so I can't fully discuss all of the issues in the first hundred pages. But one question I do have is this: if people in industrial societies weren't really better off than those in rural backwards hunter gatherer societies up until the 1800s (which the book argues), is there any evidence of people moving from the cities of Europe to live a hunter gatherer lifestyle? If not, why not? There doesn't seem to be many barriers to entry into the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the author suggests that many hunter-gatherers lived a better life than those at the bottom of societies in cities.
Posted by: willgarvin at Aug 21, 2007 8:04:33 AM
Tyler- As far as point one goes I think your criticism isn't specific to the book, but more to any discussion of standard of living. People can always end up arguing over their opinion of what is the best way to live. I think given a steady environment (the same conditions for a few years in a row) people from any two times or countries would report the same level of “happiness” depending on their cultural norms for how happy they are supposed to say they feel.
Turn your point of view around: ancient hunter-gatherers might be disgusted by our poverty of spirit, or lack of adventure.
I agree your perspective is helpful. We certainly don't want to make policy decisions based on statistics like improving people's height or calorie consumption. But if we want to make comparisons between groups of people and not get trapped in relativism we have to dehumanize them, strip away their culture and treat them like animals.
Perhaps this view is another form a relativism, a Malthusian one, but if it gives us insight into the way people behave and helps us understand and solve problems I see nothing wrong with it. (As long as we can rehumanize people in our minds when we're done.)
Posted by: Jason at Aug 21, 2007 8:10:42 AM
Probalby because anyone opting to become a hunter gatherer in say the King of Frances private deer forest would have a very low probabilty of long term survival. Execution is a fairly standard punishment for poaching...
Posted by: at Aug 21, 2007 8:13:58 AM
Farewell to Alms is strong on evidence, but weak on theory. Gregory Clark presents an impressive array of data showing that, prior to 1800, the standard of living for most of mankind changed little for several millennia and maybe even for all of human history. But as Clark implicitly acknowledges, you need a theory of culture to explain why people are living at the subsistence level, rather than at the lower, starvation level and why some countries rise above subsistence. Yet Clark has no real theory of culture, unless you count poorly specified, loose social Darwinism as a theory.
Even without a theory, however, Clark bowls you over with the evidence. He says that walking the earth today are the richest people who ever lived and the poorest people who ever lived. And the reason why the poor are so poor is because they have contact with the rich.
In light of the African aid efforts of Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, George Bush, Laura Bush, Barbara Bush, Bono, Madonna, Pink Floyd, Elton John, Sting, Paul McCartney and various other rock stars and Hollywood luminaries, Clark’s conclusion is absolutely mind boggling.’’
Request for Help
The National Center for Policy Analysis maintains a site for high school debaters and the topic this year is public health aid to Africa. We have summaries of Farewell to Alms, White Man’s Burden, The Bottom Billion and much more. We welcome all suggestions and we also are looking for “experts” the students can send an occasional question to.
Thanks.
Posted by: John Goodman at Aug 21, 2007 8:22:38 AM
Let me try to push Tyler's priors on the Malthusian model explaining all human history before 1800 a little higher.
The finding that life in 1800 in England was no better than that of hunter-gatherers was a surprise to me also. But after months of reflection I concluded it was not just right empirically, but right in a deep theoretical way.
(1) Logic - think of the logic of the Malthusian model. Living standards are all about birth rates and death rates. Hunter-gatherer birth rates are no higher than in England in 1800. And they had deaths from violence to match those from disease in England - all good in creating high living standards. If you admit the premises of the model then this conclusion follows very soon. So which premise (of the three) do you want to reject? And why?
(2) Evidence - Tyler worries about violent death in the hunter-gatherer world. But look at the life expectancy figures (pp. 91-5): they are nearly as good as for England. Unless you have a preference for dying in a squalid hovel from fever or spitting up tubercular blood, compared with a sudden and probably unexpected blow to the head, why would you prefer England on this basis?
Posted by: Gregory Clark at Aug 21, 2007 8:57:01 AM
The theories about hunters-gatherers being better-off than 15th century Europeans are largely based on anthropometric data about body stature. Now it's well possible that an average hunter was taller - and hence supposedly richer, better-off - because he could consume meat more frequently than city dwellers whose lifes were, by and large, better but whose diet was corn-based.
Posted by: J. at Aug 21, 2007 9:07:17 AM
I am coming late to the discussion too and, due to new semester prep pressures, have not kept up with the reading pace. My comment may be covered in pages I have not yet read.
That said, wouldn't the Malthusian Trap occur only at the *margin* of society? That is, the poorest "strata" of society will always be at subsistence, balancing between reproductive viability and starvation. However, members of infra-marginal strata, to the extent that they exist, earn Ricardian rents, or higher incomes. Hunter-gatherer societies, I suspect, are more uniform in productivity terms, implying that more of the population are near the margin. Today, some people may still live on the margins of society, but this margin is much thinner in developed economies and the rents to the most important scarce productive assets (human capital?) are greater.
In between, as societies developed more specialized roles for their members, those who had the scarce resources that enabled them to move into more productive roles (brawn, brains, disease resistance, entrepreneurial skill), would out-produce those at subsistence levels. To the extent that division of labor has been increasingly possible and that entry into the higher echelons has been increasingly unavailable to those at the margin, *average* income should have risen even if *marginal* income did not.
Posted by: MW at Aug 21, 2007 9:09:36 AM
"And the reason why the poor are so poor is because they have contact with the rich."
Unless you mean that they are poor (and not dead), I cannot imagine how this is possible.
Tyler: Without doing any research, I think that Malthus plays an overwhelming role in the violence of hunter-gatherer societies. Given a particular level of technology and social organization, an area can support a certain number of people. Exceed that number, and your options are expansion, starvation and culling. And excess are guaranteed by the survival rate to puberty.
With this as the background, a nascent agrarian community will turn expansionist because of the higher density supported by the new technology and accompanying social structure. But once the barbarian lands are conquered, the cycle restarts. It is notable that in the early fourteenth century, western Europe had about 75% of the food it needed, and that the plague took out 25% of the population.
Once the industrial revolution got going, however, advances in technology started coming fast enough to keep up with a steadily rising population. What's more, improved health care allowed an important upper-class value to trickle down: fewer children.
Now, our social structures have evolved to the point that Malthus is pretty well mooted. If food gets short, (hah!) the ensuing price rise will drive not only increased acreage to be planted, but for money to be invested in improving the efficiency of existing acreage. So instead of waiting four years for the next generation of Nintendo/Sony/M$ game box, you wait eight--but you won't starve.
Willgarvin: First, you might want to study why people were moving off the farm to live in squalid cities. Second, if you really think that the barrier to entry is low, take a couple of months off & live in the Amazon--take nothing in.
You will quickly discover you need knowledge about:
Which plants are food & which are poisonous
Where & when the food plants can be found
What are the hunting methods of predators which might come after you, and how to defend against them
Medicinal herbs--which, where, when and how
I'm going to assume you can figure out adequate shelter--it's not like you have to deal with serious cold.
Of all these, predators are the most serious. If you want to have any real hope of survival for a few years, you better take a hundred of your closest relatives with you. That means that you also need a social structure appropriate to your new lifestyle. No private property here!
Posted by: Nathan Zook at Aug 21, 2007 9:11:45 AM
I am going to have to restrain myself from intervening too often here, but let me make one more response to Tyler's comments on pp 1-112.
Those pages of the book basically have the form - technological advance before 1800 was very slow everywhere, what are the economic consequences of that?
Many of Tyler's comments are addressed to the issue "Why was technological advance so slow?" That is addressed in chapters 7-9 (where I know he will strongly disagree). But I could accept one of Tyler's alternative accounts of slow growth before 1800, and still have everything on pp. 1-112 be correct.
Posted by: Gregory Clark at Aug 21, 2007 9:15:58 AM
This book was the first time I have taken an in-depth look at the Malthusian model. I was comforted to read your opening paragraph and learn that you aren't convinced either. I believe that I understand the Malthusian model now. But there are too many holes in Clark's presentation to convince me.
I haven't figured out if this is all of the material that Clark has, or if he is dumbing it down for a broader audience. I wonder if Clark shouldn't have written the peer-reviewed technical version of this content first. Then the pop-econ version (this book) could refer back to that one for deeper discussion of points that aren't clear here. Maybe it is simply the case that broad history doesn't lend itself to the pop-econ writing style requirements.
I've finished the first 5 chapters (through page 111 in my copy). I'm having trouble working up the desire to wade through any more of it. I think I'll probably skip to the beginning of Part II to get Clark's explanation for how England got out of the Malthusian trap.
Posted by: Randy at Aug 21, 2007 9:29:35 AM
"Hunter-gatherers who survived to 30 maybe had decent lives"
Sorry for what might appear to be an aside, but...
What is the definition of "life expectancy"? I have always taken it to mean the total number of years lived by all members of a population divided by the number of people... so in a two-person population, if person X dies at 60 and person Y dies just after birth, life expectancy is 30. But there are other possible definitions, such as the median age of death for people who survive to age 20.
I ask the question because it has always struck me as implausible that any society in which the "average" person died at 30 could possibly survive, given the huge number of orphans that would result. (Surely this is a testable hypothesis, right?)
Posted by: Rich at Aug 21, 2007 9:42:12 AM
Isn’t population growth itself an economic good? I would consider more surviving children a benefit.
Also is it not possible as Julian Simon (boy I wish that he was still around) has said that it was the increase in population in England that lead to more and more technological advance because of more division of labor.
Posted by: Floccina at Aug 21, 2007 9:52:14 AM
For a brief moment, I have to play the blithering sycophant. What a terrific moment for blogging. I am sure similar book reviews have been done elsewhere, and surely, this blog has always been something of a salon, but this may be a high point. A critical, but respectful discussion of one of the most interesting recent 'big books' led by an excellent thinker like Tyler, with the author occasionally popping in to offer his thoughts on the questioning/criticism. A great joy.
Posted by: Christopher at Aug 21, 2007 10:02:41 AM
If one thinks about the relative welfare of hunter-gatherers versus medieval peasants it is not enough to compare consumption levels. We would also want to know about volatility. If people are risk averse then volatile consumption would provide less utility (I think this is what Tyler meant). Of course it is hard to ask for that data. But it does seem that hunter gatherers may have had more volatile consumption -- it is harder for them to save. So even if their consumption levels were higher welfare may have been lower. Which may explain why they moved to agriculture. Still that does not take much away from Clark's overall argument at all, as I read it.
Posted by: Barry Ickes at Aug 21, 2007 10:08:31 AM
Greg, I hope you intervene often. I hope you also read this post: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/08/cowen_clark_and_1.html At one point, I write, "if Clark does not believe that institutions matter, then why does he choose a country as his unit of analysis? Why not choose a unit that more closely maps to his thesis of population characteristics and tipping points?"
Posted by: Arnold Kling at Aug 21, 2007 10:21:39 AM
Yes, I agree with Arnold, Greg should feel free to chip in repeatedly...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Aug 21, 2007 10:26:10 AM
Does it really mean nothing that there seemed to be reasonably broad acceptance of the feudal social contract? The implication here seems to be that acceptance of some form of law in exchange for a tithe was a fool's bargain.
I'm having trouble understanding how the Malthus argument maintains its power across both a case where people are killing each other over resources and a case where there is disease killing off city dwellers. Is it really the same force the keeps life expectancy low?
Posted by: JasonL at Aug 21, 2007 10:29:16 AM
Thanks. It's helpful for us laypeople to get a better sense of the acceptance in the profession of a Malthusian past, more on this if possible please.
The strongest single piece of evidence simply is the negligible population growth over a very long haul. If true, clearly there have been broad factors suppressing population growth across a very wide time span and range of cultures. Then the alternatives are between steady flat growth (i.e. constant grinding subsistence) or higher volatility (i.e. boom to near extinction). Neither are attractive (either for the past or our prospects) but at least this seems like a determinable question.
The conclusions Clark draws about living in a Malthusian trap seem often to wrongly assume the consequent, i.e. stable population. I do not expect that reducing fertility would extend lifespan, and will be right surprised if he can prove this with a population of immortal eunuchs. Likewise for the remainder of his list of Malthusian virtues and vices.
Havent read on but I'm quite interested in Clark's assessment of how England got out of the trap (and if he can do this and rule out the benefits of empire on increasing arable land, outsourcing peasantry and exporting the violent).
Am not sure where the policy recommendations of this go, but can't imagine that downward social mobility and the need for a Protestant work ethic will go over well. Believe the commentary on Malthusian social programmes was already well played by Swift.
Posted by: mkl at Aug 21, 2007 10:32:34 AM
This discussion would benefit from more, not less, response from Gregory Clark.
I find the book so far to be tremendously stimulating, and I'm looking forward to the rest.
Like Tyler, I too would greatly prefer life in London in 1800, or Athens 450 BC. But this is because of the general benefits of civilization, not standard of living of the average person as defined by Clark. If we are just talking about caloric intake and general health, I'll be a plains Indian around 1600 -- with horses, but without Europeans.
I also happen to be reading Rousseau's second discourse at the same time. Makes for a great comparison.
Posted by: Kent Guida at Aug 21, 2007 10:35:50 AM
"There doesn't seem to be many barriers to entry into the hunter-gatherer lifestyle..."
Except an enormous amount of skill. And, as someone else pointed out, the nobles' gamekeepers are stock literary characters in putting down hungry peasants.
One side-thought: how extensive were those noble hunting forests in Europe? (Pick your time period but I assume that 1000 to 1800 is germane.)
Is it possible that those forests and hunting preserves acted -- by design or happenstance -- to keep the mass of the population hungry and working at whatever the nobles wanted? Plus, there is only a small step from a hunter-gatherer adapt at killing deer to one able to kill the king's own soldiers.
So my question is a side one about the possible political purpose and function of (what I understand were) fairly vast hunting preserves. Does anyone have any pointers to works on these lands? Did England have fewer? More? etc etc Thanks.
Posted by: David Sucher at Aug 21, 2007 11:00:47 AM
Let me add a comment on the volatility of consumption in the hunter-gatherer world versus England in 1800.
I agree volatility was higher in the hunter-gatherer world. England in 1800 had the poor law to provide a minimum. No one starved, which did happen sometimes to hunter-gatherers. BUT in the Malthusian world volatility can be a good thing, producing higher average levels of consumption. Life has to be very good on average to get you through the bad patches. Since life expectancy at birth is determined by the birth rate, if that is the same in two societies, the one with greater volatility of consumption will produce higher average living standards with no cost in life expectancy.
As the book emphasizes, the Malthusian world has a very different logic from the modern.
Posted by: Gregory Clark at Aug 21, 2007 11:06:33 AM
Just to answer the life expectancy question:
There are lots of ways to quote life expectancy, but the one usually being reported is life expectancy from birth, which works the way you mention, though you need to be careful: sometimes it's quoted for a particular year, in which you're averaging all the death ages during that year; sometimes it's quoted for a particular cohort, meaning people who were born in a certain year (or certain range of years). If mortality rates are changing, capturing that change is better understood using cohort bases.
Finally, you can talk about life expectancy given that people have survived to a certain age. This is important for lots of different purposes. For example, General life expectancy is not that important for figuring out Social Security or other pension costs, but life expectancy given that someone has survived to age 62 or age 65. Or perhaps you're looking at the costs compared to someone starting to pay FICA, so you might be looking at life expectancy given you survived to age 25. That cuts out all infant mortality and the like. FWIW, there is a heightened male mortality rate from the age of about 15-25 in modern, developed societies (from undeveloped societies, it's hard to get good mortality data). Deaths in those ranges are usually due to accidental and/or violent causes - adolescent guys tend to do some really stupid and dangerous things. Mortality for ages 25 to about 35 is actually lower for men.
It is entirely believable that in pre-industrial societies that if you lasted to a fairly advanced age, such as mid-30s, chances were good that you could live til your 60s or 70s. You just ran a gauntlet of all sorts of disease and mishaps, and your life wasn't going to get appreciably more dangerous. The question is, what is the likelihood you made it to 30. In America, that probability is very high: checking Social Security tables from 1970 cohort (as we can tell if they made it to 30 or not), I see that the probability of survival to 30 is 99.9%. I'm wondering what those figures were for 1800, even just conditioning on getting up to age 5 or something.
Posted by: meep at Aug 21, 2007 11:13:50 AM
On Arnold Kling and institutions:
I think if we debate institutions now, it will get ahead of where Tyler is in the book. When he gets to chapter 8 you can be sure that I will be there to defend myself against the unreasoned love affair most economists have with institutions.
BUT let me add that I am very sympathetic to the idea that countries are in economic terms generally bad units of analysis. India now, for example, is one country but with radically different economic conditions and living standards betweem Mumbai and Uttar Pradesh.
The reason I use them is
(a) Political units collect and publish data at the country level.
(b) Other people think in terms of countries, and so it is an easy shorthand.
Posted by: Gregory Clark at Aug 21, 2007 11:19:50 AM
someone mentioned the plains indians, a pretty good example. lots of evidence that the indians, and later the colonials, were far healthier than the europeans. put another way, being a hunter gatherer often wasn't so bad -- though the term's too loose to have much use, the plains indians could do what they did because smallpox or some ebola variant had killed almost everyone in the new world, they had horses from the spanish, etc. another example: inuit. they lived pretty well for the most part, but it was cold, sometimes the ice didn't cooperate (either kept you from hunting or broke under you). seems like a pick your poison situation. and even if being poor in 1400s london doesn't sound like much fun, people can be happy just about anywhere, you'd get to see some good theatre, etc.
Posted by: dj superflat at Aug 21, 2007 11:20:03 AM
I agree that the Malthusian model does not adequately explain the historical data. The reason why I think it seems to (at first glace) is that all the data in pre-industrial revolution England is completely dwarfed by the Black Death. The Black Death was not a Malthusian crisis but a particularly virulent epidemic.
A good paper on this is be JP Chavas and a co-author:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1477-9552.2005.00001.x
This paper indicates that because the Black Death reduced population so drastically and suddenly, a standard Malthusian model would predict a increase in population after 1350 yet population does not actually begin to rise again until 1520. In other words it attempts to test the Malthusian hypothesis against the idea that population pressure led to improvements in productivity.
One problem with city life that Tyler neglects and I think Clark mentions in the book is that they were swamps of disease and death. In 17th century Amsterdam I have seen life expectancy estimates of 23 – 24 years. In other words, there were diseconomies of scale as well as economies of scale and the high wages and living standards of the Dutch were the other side of their low life expectancies.
Posted by: Mark Koyama at Aug 21, 2007 11:40:02 AM
