So simple, in fact, that he needs no more than one graph and about 17 pages to recount everything that has ever happened to humans in terms of wealth and incomes – and other related things – from Mesopotamia until today. The basic outline of world economic history,” writes Gregory Clark at the beginning of “A Farewell to Alms,” “is surprisingly simple. He has written one more book, the title of which is, once again, a pun on Ernest Hemingway’s novel, “The Son Also Rises.”įind out more at “A Farewell to Alms PDF Summary” degree at Harvard in 1985.Įver since then, he has been researching topics such as social mobility, the wealth of nations, long-term economic growth, and, particularly, the economic history of England and India. Gregory Clark is an economic historian and a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis.īorn in Scotland, Clark attended King’s College, Cambridge before obtaining a Ph.D.
The best part: even though it features hundreds of graphs and discusses serious problems in economics, no formal economics training is necessary to understand any part of the book. Or read it yourself if you are interested in economics, racial and political history and the nature of social mobility. Probably the best answer to this question is “Malthusian,” but we’ll go for the more general one: “a very unique one.”īecause, as far as we know, it’s the only one of its kind. What kind of an economic history is this? – you start to wonder. However, you’re in for a big surprise as early as the table of contents where you’ll certainly notice the suspicious absence of any title suggesting a discussion of the ideas of Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes or of the economic theories of capitalism or socialism. “A Farewell to Arms” purports to be a brief economic history of the world.
Who Should Read “A Farewell to Alms”? And Why? Well, Gregory Clark has – and for most of his life.Īnd in “ A Farewell to Alms” he offers a rather controversial answer. Or, say, why some of the latter can’t get out of poverty regardless of their systems or the number of benevolent outside interventions? Have you ever wondered why some nations are rich and others poor? 7 min read ⌚ A Brief Economic History of the World
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