Part X. The Inheritance of Gregory Clark

But the main failure of Clark’s eugenic hypothesis in Clark’s hands, by Clark’s own intellectual ideology, is its non-quantitative character. A book filled with ingenious calculations (hundreds upon hundreds of them exhibiting Clark’s historical imagination — the scientific virtue of asking questions and seeing your way to answering them) does not calculate enough. It doesn’t ask or answer the crucial quantitative historical questions, even though Clark insists dogmatically that the only valid evidence for a hypothesis is quantitative.

The argument of the book can be diagrammed like this, as four states 1, 2, 3, 4 linked by three causal and transforming causal arrows A, B. C. Notice the bold, large-type entries:

The two large and bolded states at the ends, 1 and especially 4, are the ones that get satisfying amounts of empirical attention. Still, even the arguments about state 1, Rich Breed More, have quite a few problems. For example, the bourgeois breeding rich whom Clark is talking about lived of course in cities, which were death traps until the late nineteenth century, and especially for the poor, casting doubt on his supposition that the heirs of rich burghers would survive to cascade down the social hierarchy. The heirs were mostly dead, and their places were made up with symbolic heirs adopted from whatever likely nephew or journeyman from the countryside presented himself. Such is the plot of a hundred European plays and novels and operas, as for example those about Dick Whittington (c. 1355-1423) of Gloucester, thrice Lord Mayor of London. As Goldstone noted in his comments in a session about Clark’s book at the November, 2007 meetings of the Social Science History Association, “if the brightest merchants are drawn to London. . . . [it is] fine [if] they have more kids. But if their kids drift down the social ladder, they die. So [Clark's genetic embourgeoisfication effect has] to peter out after a generation. There’s no way it can accumulate once you take the urban death rate into account.”²³ The economic historian Timothy Guinnane has declared a propos of Clark’s comparisons that anyway the demographic rates in the European countryside in early times, to be compared with those of burghers, are never going to be accurately calculable.²⁴ But in the early eighteenth century life expectancy at birth in England and Wales as a whole was 38.5 years. In London, grotesquely large as a share of British population even by the standard of Paris as a share of French population, it was 18.5 years. The gap disfavoring urban life increased steadily as one moved from the Wiltshire countryside to Bristol to the Great Wen of London.²⁵

On state 4, the Enrichment of All, his quantitative evidence is better, if entirely conventional. The numbers concerning state 4, about which, to repeat, we post-Polanyi economic historians all agree and on which all of us have worked and of which it is most important that we persuade non-economic intellectuals, is nailed. Good for Clark.

Yet Clark insists throughout on hammering on exclusively quantitative nails. So he skimps state 3, More Patience, Work, Innovation and especially state 2, Rich People’s Values Spread. Clark, who believes that if you cannot measure, then your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory, is not comfortable with literary and other “ego-document” sources, as German historians call them nowadays. And so he does not realize that written sources can themselves be counted — and in any case that part of the empirical evidence is what people say. That Jesus is said to have said “render unto Caesar” is part of the empirical evidence about early Christianity’s relationship to the state. That Luther said “one prince, one faith” is similar evidence in the Reformation. The consequence of Clark’s aversion to words is that he does not have much to say about how one would know that “informal, self-reinforcing social norms” of rich people had spread. Therefore about State 2 his work is notably thin.

State 3 gets more attention, sometimes of a quantitative sort. Clark follows Mokyr and others, as I do, in emphasizing the applied innovation in cotton and iron and so forth, and uses the template of a table I devised a long time ago to show that the applied innovation in England 1780-1860 was in fact apparent beyond such heroic industries.²⁶ That’s good.

The rest is not so good. What is notably missing in Clark’s argument are calculations justifying the causal links A, B, C between the states 1, 2, 3, 4. It’s a big, big problem. Consider link C, that between the state of having More Patience, Work, Innovation and the state of the Enrichment of All. Clark notes that in countries with ill-disciplined labor forces, such as India, the employer doesn’t get as much output as in England, because the non-bourgeois values of the Indian workers and the employers do not inspire enough work. (One wonders, though, if Clark has seen Peter Seller’s portrayal of an English shop-steward in I’m All Right, Jack [1959]: “We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal,” declares Sellars. “That is victimization.”). But the “as much” and “not . . . enough” are nothing like the 20 to 30 times gap of real income per head between poor India and rich England nowadays that he claims to be explaining. True, Rodolfo Manuelli and Ananth Seshadri have argued somewhat plausibly, in line with dogma from the (usually empirically vacuous) claims of growth theory, that quite large gaps can be explained by a small difference in efficiency (strictly speaking, what economists call “total factor productivity”). The small difference is supposed to make for greater returns to education and training, and still greater accumulations of human capital in rich countries.²⁷ Maybe. The trouble is that their model implies that a small change in the ethical evaluation of education at any time would have had the same strong effects, which it did not for instance in early Modern Europe. Shakespeare’s and Molière’s contemporaries benefited from a much improved system of education in England and France, as the historian George Huppert has shown, and the merchant academies in both countries were vigorous among the Protestants. Yet an industrial revolution didn’t occur — or occurred with a mysterious 200-year lag. Be that as it may, the point here is that Clark doesn’t make such an argument — he doesn’t attend to the links. Mind the gap. Clark has not. Clark has failed to show how much Enrichment depends on Work, state 4 on state 3. “Magnitudes matter here,” as Clark declared in a review of Avner Greif’s book in the year his own book came out, “and the proofs wielded by [Clark] are not geared to magnitudes.”²⁸ He hasn’t done a calculation on the size of link C. He hasn’t asked about the oomph of the link. And so he has no answer.

Clark has long noted the fact of South Asian employees working less.²⁹ His argument is similar to that of the historian of Holland, Jan de Vries, who has beautifully documented an “industrious revolution” of more application to work in first the Dutch and then the English lands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (confirmed in the imaginative work of Hans-Joachim Voth). Clark now claims that the greater industriousness in England came from distressed bourgeois pushed down into the working class, an implausible story on its face, for which indeed he offers little evidence. De Vries’ more plausible story is that, as David Hume put it, “Everything in the world is purchased with labor; and our passions are the only cause of labor” — that is, greater variety of goods, for which de Vries offers a book full of evidence, tempted early modern Dutch and English people to work 303 days per year in the eighteenth century as against only 255 days in the sixteenth century.³⁰ As Anne Goldgar notes in her book deflating the myths about the tulip mania in the 1630s, the Dutch at the time viewed “the flower trade. . . as a trade in a new product, one of many new products that had been flooding the country for the previous forty and more years.”³¹ The pretty well-off early-modern person said to himself: “I must have some of those tulips, that sugar, that tobacco, that porcelain,” in the same way that nowadays you must have the latest cell phone or blue jeans or high speed internet hookup. De Vries cites a finding from colonial Massachusetts that inventories at death in the 1640s had no chairs (merely stools and benches) but in the 1790s had on average sixteen chairs, and these often elegant items purchased from England or from skilled colonial craftsmen imitating English designs, such that of the Windsor chair.³² Wages were not leaping up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as they did in the late nineteenth. Instead the people were laboring more at the same wages to satisfy their passion for flowers and tobacco, oil paintings and brass castings, for Delft china and for delicate and doubtfully — inheritable Windsor chairs. But de Vries does not claim that a 19 percent increase of industriousness, 255 days of work each year rising to 303 days, can explain a 2100 percent difference between Indian and English incomes nowadays, or a 600 percent difference in 1800, or a 100 percent rise from 1700 to 1860 in British income per person, or a rise since the year 1800 of 1500 percent. Clark does make such a claim.

Working harder is a fine thing, in other words, and is an important characteristic of the modern world. In 1998 Hans-Joachim Voth brilliantly used records of mentions of witnesses to alleged crimes to show that early in the eighteenth century on “Saint-Monday” people were standing around watching the human comedy rather than working.³³ But he concludes nonetheless that the work week was similar to that in poor countries now, and “[E. P.] Thompson’s image of a ‘merry old England’ where hours were short and work highly irregular is probably incorrect.”³⁴ Harried young lawyers in Manhattan working 70 hours a week can reflect ruefully that their factory-hand great-great grandparent got along on 60 hours a week, their peasant forebears on 40, and their hunter-gatherer deep ancestors on a mere 19 hours.³⁵ If British workers had carried on with their pre-industrial Saint-Mondays and drunk-at-work habits their bourgeois employers would have had to hire more of them to do the same work, paying each one less. British and Dutch incomes per head 1700-1800 would probably have fallen some as population increased, rather than as they did staying level (against what were soon to be called Malthusian expectations). The bourgeois men would have faced a servant problem of the sort that dominated the domestic duties of their wives, always in the business of hiring new workers to replace the ones recently dismissed for insolence or immorality or drunkenness.³⁶ But the bourgeois passion for innovation would not have been affected. Inventing a dying process that in the 1790s substituted chlorine for sunshine, sharply decreasing the real cost of pure white linens, once a product exclusively for the rich, would still have been a fine and profitable thing, even if it took 19 percent more badly disciplined workers to make it.

Nor does Clark do a calculation on link B, to show that state 3 depended mightily on state 2, that, say, that applied innovation depended on the spread of bourgeois values. It’s deucedly hard to do. I agree with Clark that the link was important, yet I can’t think of ways to quantify it with the usual economic and demographic statistics. I have had to rely instead on the metaphysically unsatisfactory but enormously rich and ubiquitous qualitative evidence which the other students of applied innovation such as Mokyr and Jacobs and Goldstone have exploited and which Clark spurns. Given his methodological rule of number, Clark is not to blame that even his admirable if strictly quantitative historical imagination is stymied by the question of how much bourgeois values acted to increase applied innovation. Still, his methodological stridency about number — having myself been strident about such matters in my youth, I am familiar with the temptation — does make it a trifle embarrassing that he doesn’t mention that for link Bhe has failed to provide any numbers at all. We old fools like Jack Goldstone or Deirdre McCloskey or George Grantham or Richard Easterlin or Claudia Goldin — who listen to what people at the time were saying about B or similar links between the quantitative and the qualitative — get a certain grumpy satisfaction that Clark is thus hoist by his own methodological petard.³⁷

In light of Clark’s methodological convictions, though, the most embarrassing broken link is A, between “Rich Breed More” and “Rich People’s Values Spread.” As the economic historian Robert Margo wrote in another of the numerous vexed reviews by other historical scientists that the book has evoked, “even if I believe the data to be trustworthy, how do I know I am observing a causal link between ‘good’ behaviors (for example, patience) that, in the best of circumstances (and these are far from the best) are barely, if at all, observable to the econometrician? What, precisely, are the mechanisms that allow good behaviors to be transmitted across generations? Don’t institutions of one type or other play a role?”³⁸ Nowhere in a book that trumpets calculation as the Only Real Science does Clark calculate what higher breeding rates could have accomplished by way of rhetorical change, or talk about the new institutions, such as grammar schools. It could easily be done, at any rate under Clark’s mechanical assumption about how the social construction of values works, and is not even a matter as Margo assumes of econometric fit. It is a matter of simulation.

Clark assumes that the children of rich people are by their richness the carriers of the sort of bourgeois values that made for an Industrial Revolution. I would say on the contrary that a rapid change around 1700 in attitudes towards the bourgeoisie mattered much more. But in any case Clark’s argument depends on a strange characterization of the medieval or early modern relatively rich. A rich bourgeois of London in 1400 or 1600 depended on special protection for his wool-trading monopoly. Dick Whittington was appointed to his first of three terms as Mayor of London by Richard II, because the King was in Whittington’s debt. One is not surprised to find the secretary of the Society of Merchant Adventurers, John Wheeler, writing in 1601 against “dispersed, straggling, and promiscuous trades,” that is, interlopers who threatened the state-sponsored monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers.³⁹ The younger sons of such a merchant might well take away the lesson, repeated by protectionists left and right down to the present, that it is a good idea for the state to control everything it can, and quite a bad thing to let people make the deals they wish to make without a state supervisor appointed by the country club or by populist politicians. And likewise a Brave Sir Botany who had stolen his riches, say, or was a successful state bureaucrat who had received his riches from Henry VIII dissolving the monasteries, say, would not automatically, one would think, transmit sober, hard-working, market-respecting bourgeois values to younger sons.

Around 1700, Peter Earle has found, about a quarter of the London middling sort he sampled at their deaths were sons of literal gentlemen, as one can judge from their adolescent contracts of indentures to drapers and merchants and bankers.⁴⁰ Bourgeois values were not going to be spread down the social order mechanically when the boys in fact started out from the idle class of landowners and knights of the shire — yet such boys became many of the merchants of London in the eighteenth century. If the boys prospered in the upper reaches of bourgeois London it was because they had learned their trades (getting into the trades with expensive apprenticeships), and were encouraged to practice the trades of overseas merchants or domestic bankers in a society according dignity and liberty to middleclass folk, not because they had inherited bourgeois values by being bourgeois sons.

Of course, the gentry and even the aristocracy of England, it is often claimed, tended to bourgeois values and behaviors that would have disqualified a Frenchman from the nobility. The same John Wheeler in 1601 praises merchandising as “an honorable estate” (a claim that would, however, have raised a laugh in many circles of Elizabethan England) “which may be practiced by both commoners and nobles . . . without any derogation to their nobilities.”⁴¹ Not in France or Spain. But an embourgeoisfying change in values among the gentry, making the social origin of merchants or workers irrelevant, would be the opposite of Clark’s materialist argument. In the other direction a society that greatly admired aristocratic or Christian virtues could corrupt even a Medici banker into thinking of himself as quite the lord and yet also a godly son of the Church. Likewise nowadays an extravagant admiration for the neo-aristocratic values of the clerisy — she learned them at the University of Iowa — corrupts a bourgeois daughter into scorning her father’s selling of insurance or running of a furniture factory.

23. [back] Goldstone 2007b.
24. [back] Guinnane 2009.
25. [back] Ó Gráda 2007, p. 350.
26. [back] The table is Clark p.233; and mine is in McCloskey 1981 and Harley 1983.
27. [back] Manuelli and Seshadri 2005.
28. [back] Clark 2007c, p. 731.
29. [back] Clark 1987.
30. [back] De Vries 2008a, p. 14; and de Vries 2008b for the full story. Compare Voth 1998, 2001, 2003. The Hume quotation, which de Vries gives, is from Hume's essay "On Commerce," first published in 1741.
31. [back] Goldgar 2007, p. 224.
32. [back] De Vries 2008a, note 35.
33. [back] Voth 1998.
34. [back] Voth 2003, p. 256.
35. [back] Hill and Hurtado 2003, p. 11.
36. [back] Vickery 1998, pp. 135-146, as for example p. 135, "hardly a week went by when a mistress might not be reeling from a servant's flight," as one can also see in realist novels that mention such matters, such as Fielding's Tom Jones.
37. [back] Compare Easterlin 2004, pp. 21-31.
38. [back] Margo 2008.
39. [back] Wheeler A Treatise on Commerce (1601), p. 73, quoted in Barbalet 2008, p. 79.
40. [back] Earle 1989, pp. 86-87. Earle handily defeats Lawrence Stone's counterclaim that the "gentlemen" fathers were themselves urban "men of limited means," as Stone wrote, who "did not dream of swaggering about with a sword at their sides."
41. [back] Quoted in Barbalet 2008, p. 79.

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1. [...] McCloskey says Clark is way wrong, and I’m basically persuaded by McCloskey’s argument. Clark’s Farewell to Alms [...]

   Written by The Cause of the Industrial Revolution: Not Genes « William’s Continued Adventures on June 2nd, 2010.