Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms"

In the Preface to his book on the cause of the Industrial Revolution, A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark says:

This book takes a bold approach to history. ... It is an unabashed attempt at big history, in the tradition of The Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, The Rise of the Western World, and most recently Guns, Germs, and Steel. All these books, like this one, ask: How did we get here? Why did it take so long? Why are some rich and some poor? Where are we headed? ...

Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove oversimplified, or merely false. They are certainly controversial, even among my colleagues in economic history. But far better such error than the usual dreary academic sins, which now seem to define so much writing in the humanities, of willful obfuscation and jargon-laden vacuity. As Darwin himself noted, "false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."' Thus my hope is that, even if the book is wrong in parts, it will be clearly and productively wrong, leading us toward the light. ...

Here's part of a longer write-up on the book:

In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence, by Nicholas Wade, NY Times: For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty... But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.

Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. ...

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past. ...

The basis of Dr. Clark’s work is his recovery of data from which he can reconstruct many features of the English economy from 1200 to 1800. From this data, he shows, far more clearly than has been possible before, that the economy was locked in a Malthusian trap — each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level. ...

The ... Malthusian trap, Dr. Clark’s data show, governed the English economy from 1200 until the Industrial Revolution and has in his view probably constrained humankind throughout its existence. The only respite was during disasters like the Black Death, when population plummeted, and for several generations the survivors had more to eat.

Malthus’s book is well known because it gave Darwin the idea of natural selection. ...

Given that the English economy operated under Malthusian constraints, might it not have responded in some way to the forces of natural selection that Darwin had divined would flourish in such conditions? Dr. Clark started to wonder whether natural selection had indeed changed the nature of the population in some way and, if so, whether this might be the missing explanation for the Industrial Revolution. ...

Many explanations have been offered for this spurt in efficiency, ... but none is fully satisfactory, historians say. Dr. Clark’s first thought was that the population might have evolved greater resistance to disease. ...

In support of the disease-resistance idea, cities like London were so filthy and disease ridden that a third of their populations died off every generation, and the losses were restored by immigrants from the countryside. That suggested to Dr. Clark that the surviving population of England might be the descendants of peasants.

A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, but in quite the opposite direction to what he had expected.

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor... That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

Another significant change in behavior, Dr. Clark argues, was an increase in people’s preference for saving over instant consumption, which he sees reflected in the steady decline in interest rates from 1200 to 1800. ...

[T]here is no agreed explanation for the Industrial Revolution... Many commentators point to a failure of political and social institutions... But the proposed medicine of institutional reform “has failed repeatedly to cure the patient,” Dr. Clark writes. He likens the “cult centers” of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to prescientific physicians who prescribed bloodletting for ailments they did not understand. ...

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. ...

What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence — being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was “a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.”

Reaction to Dr. Clark’s thesis from other economic historians seems largely favorable, although few agree with all of it, and many are skeptical of the most novel part, his suggestion that evolutionary change is a factor to be considered in history.

Historians used to accept changes in people’s behavior as an explanation for economic events, like Max Weber’s thesis linking the rise of capitalism with Protestantism. But most have now swung to the economists’ view that all people are alike and will respond in the same way to the same incentives. Hence they seek to explain events like the Industrial Revolution in terms of changes in institutions, not people.

Dr. Clark’s view is that institutions and incentives have been much the same all along and explain very little... In saying the answer lies in people’s behavior, he is asking his fellow economic historians to revert to a type of explanation they had mostly abandoned and in addition is evoking an idea that historians seldom consider as an explanatory variable, that of evolution. ...

“The actual data underlying this stuff is hard to dispute,” Dr. Clark said. “When people see the logic, they say ‘I don’t necessarily believe it, but it’s hard to dismiss.’ ”

Comments

says...

And what about Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc? And has he forgot that there was an earlier agricultural/urbanization/industrial period in Europe. I remain unconvinced, perhaps the stylized facts (we are decendents of the better off) could be otherwise interpreted.

I wonder if he has kids? Surely, he couldn't have failed to notice that hard work, non-violence and prudence require constant indoctrination and are not inborn.

We are still looking for the answer.

says...

I just thought, maybe I stumbled on the answer. It is more determined parenting that has been selected for.

[Stephen Heyer]

Hmm… Well… First for the less controversial part.

“A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, but in quite the opposite direction to what he had expected.”
“Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor...”

I’ve rather been carrying on about this for some time and about the enormous, rapid evolutionary pressure this would place on any population. Of course, it not only selects for pleasant, liberal, middle class values, but also for a switch to much less pleasant behavior given the first hint of real wealth.

Oh! And given that there is very good historical evidence that better off males used their wealth to acquire greater sexual access, something that would not show up in Dr. Clark’s analysis of wills, the reproductive advantages of wealth would have been even greater than he suggests.

Not of course that I thought of all this myself, but rather gathered it from the writings of people like Jared Diamond who seemed to be well aware of the effect, but perhaps considered it too controversial to emphasize.

Now for the really hard, dangerous bit.

“Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. ...”

Warning! Think this one through very carefully, it leads into very dangerous waters!

For example, to recap a little history:

About any educated, liberal, late nineteenth century person would have been quite comfortable and familiar with the idea that countries that were prosperous and fairly pleasant places to live (England) were like that at least partially because of some subtle difference in the innate behavior of the population. From listening to the old people talk, and from reading writings of the time, I doubt that most people thought that difference was large, neither were they sure whether it was genetic or cultural (same as Dr Clark).

At least in more liberal, intellectual circles, in countries like Britain, Australia and Canada, it seems the resulting suspicion that if large numbers of people were admitted from less successful, pleasant societies they would dilute whatever the factor was that made the society so successful was more instrumental in shaping public opinion that raw racism.

Neither was it considered that there was much difference in intelligence, in fact some of the pioneers I’m familiar with considered the native Australians noticeably more intelligent on average than Europeans, an opinion Jared Diamond seems to share.

That is where this idea leads, so be careful.

By the way, the history of Australian Immigration gives very little credence to those ideas: Successive waves of immigrants from diverse sources settled in remarkably well and blended into the Australian population within a generation of two.

The really strange thing is that currently some countries are not having the same positive experience with their recent immigrants. Either Australia was lucky in just happening to get people who would settle in, or it somehow handled the settling in process better than some other advanced countries, and still does.

[evagrius]

I guess the "New World", African and Asian, ( India), and Far Eastern colonization had nothing to do with it.

[Meh]

Um... is this really for real? Or is it just an elaborate joke on poor saps like me?

I mean, I'm no techological determinist, but it seems at least worthy of mention that the Industrial Revolution comes about at the time where the wood stocks of England had been seriously depleted and this forced people to make the effort to dig up more coal.

And that coal is more energy dense than wood and that future switches in energy supply (gas and oil) also coincided with enormous changes in the structures of economies and steps out of various "wealth traps."

Throw in those charts that show both GDP and energy extraction over time and which show an interesting potential correlation and it would just seem possible that there is some fossil fuel issue involved in the Industrial Revolution?

(As an aside, existing studies tend to show that it's not even food production that limits societal growth so much as cloth production, which might be worth integrating into the timelines in question.)

[ken melvin]

Sanitation systems, science, ... were more relevant.

[Stephen Heyer]

Meh: "I mean, I'm no techological determinist, but it seems at least worthy of mention that the Industrial Revolution comes about at the time where the wood stocks of England had been seriously depleted and this forced people to make the effort to dig up more coal.

"And that coal is more energy dense than wood and that future switches in energy supply (gas and oil) also coincided with enormous changes in the structures of economies and steps out of various "wealth traps.""

There are some fairly complex arguments about why other countries did not do this (I gather oil and coal were well known in China long before) but I'm inclined to side with Meh (and the Peal Oil crowd) about the huge increase in prosperity that flowed from the widespread use of coal and oil.

Ditto for Ken Melvin's comments about Sanitation and science (or rather, Western Science.

[reason]

The first two comments were mine, in case anyone was wondering.

[GIl]

I suggest two answers:

1. Respect for science and technological innovation coupled with trying to be decent and cooperate with others. This presumes a higher standard of living where people realise it's better to help one another than keep killing each other. As well as not being a Luddite who prefers superstition and religious mystery as to why things are bad.

2. Stop making endless babies. For some reason a lot of poor societies seem to rank maniless and womanliness on how many children an adult can sire. It may have been playing the odds in societies where infant mortality was the norm, but, as pointed out, in a not-so-hard-done-by society it leads to Malthus prediction being just around the corner.

Then again maybe this guy has the ultimate answer:

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM

Though I do like to question the notion that all the world's population was living in homogenous abject poverty til Westerners made technological progress. I heard that people of Tahiti was rather well-off for living standards until Europeans arrived.

[Stephen Heyer]

reason: "I just thought, maybe I stumbled on the answer. It is more determined parenting that has been selected for."

You are very probably right!

Evolution just doesn't care: If coding for more determined parenting is easier and more flexible than coding for a specific set of behaviors, that's what Evolution will do.

I remember a similar debate about the observed higher average intelligence of a certain ethnic group. This was thought to be a simple case of selection for genes for higher IQ until it was pointed out that the group's diet was unusually healthy.

Given what we now know about the importance of nutrition for the fetus and young child the higher intelligence could about be explained by diet alone.

But of course that does nothing to rule out natural selection. If Evolution needs to increase intelligence and finds it easier to code for a preference for a healthy diet rather than specific intelligence increasing genes, that is exactly what it will do.

[chris]

The genetics thing is insane. Australia is whole damned country made up of poor people expelled from Britain and Ireland (a lot of them just for being Irish), and I'll be damned if anyone thinks they're premodern in their time preference for money.

[chris]

More obvious to me is the trade with North America. Here you have a vast continent of old-growth timber, basically free capital just standing around.

Not only was the standard of living for British-Americans higher by 1750 than for those back in Britain, the trade with America was creating huge fortunes back in the old country.

It is remarkable how little gangsterism there was in the early days of the US. You don't read about Ben Franklin having his rivals shot, or George Washington making himself King. My bet is that there were too few iterations in the power struggle in America for anyone to get much ahead of anyone else. Even still the republican ideology of that period is amazing. It's best seen as a continuation of the parliamentary struggles going back to the Glorious Revolution and before. The American Revolution wasn't really the first step towards democracy.

I'm sure there's a Sugarscape program out there with a simple algorithm that captures this better than some weird natural selection argument.

[robertdfeinman]

The superiority of the Anglo-Saxons raises its head again using pseudo-science.

The chances that evolutionary pressure could affect something so fundamental as personality traits over a period of several hundred years is just ridiculous. The one example that people like to cite of adaption to lactose took place over 5000 years and was only a slight change. All babies are born able to digest lactose, it is only as people get older that some of them lose this ability. So all that happened was that the gene that codes for the correct enzyme stays on longer. This is a tiny change and the time period was ten times as long.

The stream of implicit racist arguments never ceases. If the facts don't support your prejudices make them up. Charles Murray anyone?

[Stephen Heyer]

chris: "Australia is whole damned country made up of poor people expelled from Britain and Ireland"

Actually, while at some periods in it's history British (English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh) people were predominate, the ethnic mix was always much more complex with people from all over the world.

Both my parents families were originally pioneer settlers and neither were British: One was German and one Christian Lebanese.

Nevertheless, given a generation or two, all these people blended together without much trouble to create the easy going, law abiding, non violent population Australia enjoys today. In other words, a society often very different from the one their parents or grandparents came from.

Neither has this process weakened: Despite a few hiccups the recent wave of Islamic immigrants is showing evidence of settling in just as well.

Like I said, either Australia has been lucky in just happening to get people who settle in without trouble, or it somehow handles the settling in process better than some other advanced countries.

I suppose Gregory Clark would argue that the immigration experience was strongly self-selecting for exactly the qualities he suggests leads to successful societies but then that does not explain the much less positive results some other countries (France) have had with their recent immigrants.

[anne]

Robert Feinman:

"The chances that evolutionary pressure could affect something so fundamental as personality traits over a period of several hundred years is just ridiculous."

Precisely.

[jonfernquest]

Are genetic explanations such as he proposes even falsifiable?

"...it was 'a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.'"

Lordy, lordy, we have how many cultures scattered across the globe and endemic warfare was pretty common over large streatches of time in many agricultural societies, the 100 years war, the 30 years war, I am finishing a paper on a 45 years war in Burma, and peace seemed to be the exception for hundreds of years.

Big generalisations about thousands of years of history demand a closer look at those 1000s of years of history, massive generalisations from one tiny island with good data collection practices named England?

There are probably just as many intersections/contentions between different forms of subsistence, take Purdue's (MIT) work which uses demography and ecology to analyze warfare between the settled Qing and nomadic groups to the north.

Still, I really enjoy professor Clark's books, especially when he makes them available online. Hundreds of students that I taught at one university read the draft version of his demography text. They certainly couldn't have afforded a real expensive bound textbook, but demography and warfare of pre-modern states in general is not covered very well anywhere, except possibly Turchin but his model doesn't really apply to chieftainships.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/business/02scene.html?ex=1320123600&en=45c0cd3f64070ad2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

November 2, 2006

What Makes a Nation Wealthy? Maybe It's the Working Stiff
By TYLER COWEN

Economists typically explain the wealth of a nation by pointing to good policies and the quality of a country's institutions. But why do these differences exist in the first place?

In "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World" (forthcoming, Princeton University Press,

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/FTA2006.pdf),

Gregory Clark, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, identifies the quality of labor as the fundamental factor behind economic growth. Poor labor quality discourages capital from flowing into a country, which means that poverty persists. Good institutions never have a chance to develop.

Professor Clark's pessimistic view is that most forms of policy advice or financial aid do not solve the problem of economic development. Unless the quality of labor rises, those would-be remedies are addressing symptoms, not causes.

Professor Clark's analysis counters Jared M. Diamond, who in his "Guns, Germs and Steel" (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999) located the ultimate sources of European advantage in geography, like safety from tropical diseases, and a greater number of available animals that could be domesticated.

A simple example from Professor Clark shows the importance of labor in economic development. As early as the 19th century, textile factories in the West and in India had essentially the same machinery, and it was not hard to transport the final product. Yet the difference in cultures could be seen on the factory floor. Although Indian labor costs were many times lower, Indian labor was far less efficient at many basic tasks....

[anne]

The idea of course is to counter Jared Diamond's work and show that my-oh-my are we ever clever, whoever we happen to be....

"A simple example from Professor Clark shows the importance of labor in economic development. As early as the 19th century, textile factories in the West and in India had essentially the same machinery, and it was not hard to transport the final product. Yet the difference in cultures could be seen on the factory floor. Although Indian labor costs were many times lower, Indian labor was far less efficient at many basic tasks...."

Huh??? Whatever could we find wrong with such an example, such a simple or simple-minded example?

[anne]

There we have colonial India, remember colonialism? There we have Britain. Why oh why might the colonial labor force, ever so low paid colonial labor force even, be less productive than the British labor force? British character, obviously. Pip, pip.

[richard]

"A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills . . ."

Wills and their final settlement are near universal among the affluent, but far less so amongst the poor. That is still true today; imagine how much truer it might have been several hundred years ago.

I would have thought the error of Whig histories would have been apparent by now.

[anne]

To me, this was a mannerly stroll along with Herbert Spencer and social Darwinism. So, British labor was descended from the British aristocracy and was all shiny gened while Indian labor was descended, well, from Indian labor and never could get learn to love those British spinning machines. Remember Gandhi? Gandhi never cared for British spinners either, too poorly bred I imagine.

[ana_too]

I am absolutely stunned by Gregory Clark's theory and consider it representative for the American fascism. How can this ***t can be taken seriously in the Academia?!

[oops]

it seems like de soto said that this was about the time that informal economy changed to private property rights. it was basically the beginning of the end of economy for the elite only but i can't remember the timeframe for london and the surrounding area that he covered.

as for the critism of personality traits evolving- if we're talking about growing a physical trait like a third eye, that's one thing but are personality traits evolving over a couple hundred years really impossible? even if a third eye eveloved wouldn't there be an inflection point? i'm ignorant on this- would appreciate info.

[donna]

I blame women and selective breeding to cut down on the number of stupid alpha males. Gate to Women's Country, Sherri Tepper....

Hey, at least it works in my life. ;^)

[Bruce Wilder]

The implicit attack on institutional explanations is actually more provocative to me than the implicit racism and ludicrous genetics.

The evolution of institutions in England between 1200 and 1800 is truly remarkable, and to dismiss it out of hand, in favor of an atomism of personality, (never mind the bad genetics), is to favor historical and economic ignorance on a grand scale.

Feudalism involved a set of economic and social institutions completely different in every respect from the institutions of the modern world -- the story of the period, 1200-1800 is the story of the overthrow and replacement of those institutions. Little things like the breakdown of serfdom under the pressure of the labor shortages of the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation in England, with its dissolution of the Monasteries (which were dominating economic institutions of feudalism), the Enclosure movement that eliminated the commons from manorial agriculture, the creation of business corporations, banking and a stock market, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

It is all very well for Clark to sniff at the pretensions of the World Bank, but the historical fact is that the advent of the industrial revolution coincided with the often violent overthrow of feudal institutions. The whole history of political conflict in Europe since 16th century has revolved around the series of civil and international wars occasioned by the overthrow of feudal institutions and their replacement by modern ones: the Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the liberal revolutions of 1830-32, the failed revolutions of 1848, the nation-building of 1864-1870, World Wars I & II. How does he think Europe got from Charles V (Hapsburg) to the European Union?

There's no doubt in my mind that documenting the Malthusian cycle is an advance for History. Progress in historical studies consists largely in integrating documentation of social and economic events and cultural change, affecting masses of people into the evolving historical narrative, so that history is much more than a chronicle of the doings of the Kings and their generals. Generating an agricultural surplus and diverting it to support non-agricultural pursuits, including cities and trade, is a critical element to the economics of the evolution of civilization on a large scale. The Black Death left a permanent mark on Europe, in altering the balance of labor surplus and, consequently expected labor productivity in agriculture, and the availability of agricultural surplus to be diverted to other activity.

I think I should mention that England escaped the Malthusian trap around 1700, not 1800. Jethro Tull, enclosure and all that combined in a prologue to the Industrial Revolution itself, which did not get seriously underway until the Duke of Bridgewater opened his eponymous canal in 1763, making coal cheap in proto-industrial Manchester. The remarkable rise in English population, 1700-1750, which immediately proceeded (or coincided with) the earliest stages of the industrial revolution in England is well documented.

The institutional developments -- the rule of law protecting religious dissent and property, the Bank England, the end of klepto-warfare as a channel of noble ambition, the end of religious superstition and the rise of the Scientific Revolution -- were mostly 17th century events. But, they were institutional events -- not a bubbling up of atomistic personality from an amorphous mass.

[wjd123]

Interesting article. But wouldn't the downward affluence of middle class children lead to a change in their values? If so, it would weaken the argument that the mass populations of the Chinese and Japanese didn't cause more affluence in their societies because their middle class didn't have as many children.

Dr. Clark is assuming the staying power of middle class values by genetics and not environment. I suspect there are multiple reasons why wealth grew faster in some areas than others without discounting values.

And if the divergence in wealth between poor nations and rich nations was 4 to 1 in 1800 and 50 to 1 today it might be better to look for very persistent traits and work backwards to find out why the Industrial Revolution took off in some environments and didn't it others. Adaption through imitation is always a possibility but evidently it took certain preconditions for even that to happen.

Historians used to accept changes in people’s behavior as an explanation for economic events, like Max Weber’s thesis linking the rise of capitalism with Protestantism. But most have now swung to the economists’ view that all people are alike and will respond in the same way to the same incentives. Hence they seek to explain events like the Industrial Revolution in terms of changes in institutions, not people.

Dr. Clark’s view is that institutions and incentives have been much the same all along and explain very little, which is why there is so little agreement on the causes of the Industrial Revolution. In saying the answer lies in people’s behavior, he is asking his fellow economic historians to revert to a type of explanation they had mostly abandoned and in addition is evoking an idea that historians seldom consider as an explanatory variable, that of evolution.

In one respect I'm more old style historian here than new style economist. I don't "view that all people are alike and will respond in the same way to the same incentives." Culture and environment matter. I think Emile Durkheim, was more correct in believing that there were as many human natures as there were societies.

[Bruce Webb]

Boy you don't know where to start. Professor Clark has entered into a couple of areas in which I actually studied in graduate school. Standards of living in the middle ages, economic effects of the Black Death, medieval literacy and English wills.

Although it is unfair to judge without reading the book (and I may try to pick it up) there seem to be some typical distortions in play. First of all almost all of the historiography among nineteenth and early twentieth century English economic history falls in three camps: Liberals, Marxists, and Whigs. The first two groups had divergent but related ideas of Progress which required exaggerating the poverty of the typical peasant, the latter were committed to a vision of Merrie Olde England of happy (and obedient) peasants dancing around the Maypole on the Village Green. The truth as usual (and to the extent that we can identify 'truth') is somewhere in between. A fact inadvertently revealed by Clark:
"The ... Malthusian trap, Dr. Clark’s data show, governed the English economy from 1200 until the Industrial Revolution and has in his view probably constrained humankind throughout its existence. The only respite was during disasters like the Black Death, when population plummeted, and for several generations the survivors had more to eat."
From my reading the general economic position of the peasantry was actually pretty good around 1200 but degenerated in the period between say 1250 and 1346 as population pressures and new interpretations of the land laws combined. But to suggest that the population was consistently up against a Malthusian limit the whole time? Once again I'll have to read the book, but I strongly suspect he is over pressing the available data. And then he grants "several generations" where peasants escaped the trap. As a corrective I might suggest Christopher Dyer Standard of Living in the Later Middle Ages ... c.1200-1520)
---------

Now to wills The actual number of surviving wills from before about 1400 is quite small, and even smaller for peasants. There are reasons for this but perhaps the biggest one is that most people did not need a will because of one rather surprising aspect of English Law. At least through the time we are discussing (1800) the English could not devise real property by will. That is while you could sell or otherwise transfer land and fixtures during life, at death they transferred by the laws of inheritence which in turn were governed by the type of tenure under which you held the property. The result is that even among that small group that actually left wills the bulk of their assets would not appear, your real estate and the main instruments of production would pass automatically to your legal heir or in some areas like Kent heirs. The function of the English will was to transfer your personal property, or more properly a portion of your personal property. By tradition, and one that seems to have held pretty well, a third of your personal property would go to your widow, a third to your dependent children and a third that you could leave as you wished. Often this came in the form of buying prayers for your soul but it could also take the form of sentimental bequests to servants and friends.

The way to see this in operation is to examine the wills of people who are well documented and see what and who are missing. For example I did an analysis of the will of Richard de la Pole from 1345. The de la Pole's were a fabulously wealthy family, Richard's nephew became the First Earl of Suffolk, and in turn his grandson became the first Duke of Suffolk. But little of this shows in the will, in particular his sons seem oddly shorted. The answer is that the younger son and older daughter had been established already and the older son inherited the main estate.

In fact you can find wills where not only the real estate was missing but the heir as well. I found one where the eldest son was named as executor but was totally excluded from the will, his share of the estate transferred right outside the bounds of the will.

Which is to say that this may be missing the point entirely:
"A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, but in quite the opposite direction to what he had expected.

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor."

You cannot draw that conclusion on an examination of ancient wills. That the rich had more named children in their wills was more likely a reflection of their increased likelyhood to have extensive personal property. A successful peasant in England would have established his grown children on their own holdings and so satisfying his responsibilities to them during his own lifetime. That they don't show in the will doesn't mean they didn't exist.

So color me unconvinced. Sight unseen this smacks too much of the typical apologia for the Industrial Revolution which crams, stretches and lops data to fit a preconceived Procrustean Bed of Progress. Which is to say that I am in 100% agreement with this statement by Professor Clark:

"Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove oversimplified, or merely false."

I suspect strongly that is a safe bet.

[Bruce Webb]

Oops. Looks like I missed a tag. The underlining doesn't show up in Preview so maybe its not a problem.

[gcochran]

A noticeable change in the distribution of personality traits over, say, 1000 years is not impossible. You need only modest narrow-sense heritability of personality traits and modest correlation of those traits with reproductive success. We routinely select for changes in the behavior of domesticated animals, dogs for example, over a few decades. Belyaev managed to _completely_ change fox behavior in 40 years. That was the result of strong selection, but weaker selection can do as much given time.

As for the example of lactose, that took time because intially _no_ adult was lactose tolerant. If you start out with a single copy of an advantageous gene, reaching high frequency over a subcontinent takes several thousand years. Of course we know of at least a couple of hundred such selective sweeps in progress in Europeans that originated less than ten thousand years ago - lactose tolerance is not the only one.

[Ed]

According to Samuel Bowles (see for example his book The apple does not fall far from the tree) intergenerational mobility in America is way lower than it was thought to be. If this is true in America today it must have been true for England pre industrial revolution. In other words the rich get married to the rich, the midle-class to the middle-class and the poor to the poor. Could it be, then, that the rich have been passing genes that favour "capitalistic behaviours" to their descendants? I am sure a geneticist out there is already working on a correlation between a certain gene sequence and intergenerational social standing that would seen to support Mr Clark's theory. And yet if you pause to think for a while it is evident that the rich eat better than the other social classes, they have better access to education and so on and so forth. Thus the causation is from culture (in this case represented by social standing) to behaviour and not from genes to behaviour. Can I prove my case? Sure, look at a number of studies measuring the academic performance of adopted children (see for example Bruce Sacerdote's The Nature and Nurture of Economic Outcomes). These studies show that adopted children underperform their new siblings up to high school. When they reach college or university the performance of adopted children versus new siblings is not statiscally significant. Thus it seems that it takes only 20 years for culture to delete any traces of yet to be confirmed genetically acquired traits (and please note that the adopting families are almost always of a higher social standing that the biological families of the adopted children).

[Louis Proyect]

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/the-transition-to-capitalism-is-it-in-our-genes/

[Louis Proyect]

Silly commenting software clipped my url.

Just go to:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com

It is the topmost article.

[evagrius]

Has Clark looked at the "Byzantine Empire" which lasted a 1000 or so years after the collapse of the Roman and was the premier economic power for a good number of those years?

Really, the "Anglo" supremacy story has to be refuted. He's in the same league as Huntington,Phelps, and others who argue for some innate superiority of Anglo culture. Using evolution is a new low.

[Stephen Heyer]

gcochran: " A noticeable change in the distribution of personality traits over, say, 1000 years is not impossible. You need only modest narrow-sense heritability of personality traits and modest correlation of those traits with reproductive success. We routinely select for changes in the behavior of domesticated animals, dogs for example, over a few decades. Belyaev managed to _completely_ change fox behavior in 40 years. That was the result of strong selection, but weaker selection can do as much given time.

"As for the example of lactose, that took time because intially _no_ adult was lactose tolerant. If you start out with a single copy of an advantageous gene, reaching high frequency over a subcontinent takes several thousand years. Of course we know of at least a couple of hundred such selective sweeps in progress in Europeans that originated less than ten thousand years ago - lactose tolerance is not the only one."

Nice comment, pretty much what I was thinking of writing. Only thing I would add is that when you read history, I mean below the level of official history, you realise that the "selection" was often quite "strong".

While I've argued in other postings that genetic selection seems to be a poor explanation for the broad population traits Gregory Clark claims shaped the English success, I'm firmly convinced that similar selection utterly changed the nature of all post agricultural populations over the past 12 thousand years. It's just that the very strong flow of genes from the more successful (especially males) that is abundantly recorded in many sources caused quite different, often less pleasant behaviours to become more common.

Further, this happened in all agricultural societies, though in some the mixture of behaviours selected for was more constructive or more toxic than in others.

Which means, of course, that while differences in how this played out in different populations may have had some effect on their capacity to industrialise, the major explanation for the Industrial Revolution must come from other sources.

Personally, I'll look to Adam Smith for explanations of "The Wealth of Nations".

[bruce webb]

The rich Englishman of 1600 was not by and large the ancestor of the rich man of 1800. If any his actual descendants would more likely than not be hostile to capitalism. A good part of the early Reform movement was to gain Parliamentary representation for industrial cities like Manchester and the opposition led by old money largely drawn from agriculture and overseas trade.

Any argument drawn from genetic grounds for capitalism fails on encounter with the facts.

[Disinterested Observer]

Stephen Heyer has referred to the success of migrants in Australia. I'm not exactly sure why this issue is relevant to the book being discussed but there are fairly obvious reasons why this should be the case. Migrants to Australia - like migrants to Canada and also to New Zealand, where migrants are also relatively successful - have a very large component who are selected according to criteria that are supposed to be associated with economic success. In most European countries many more migrants come from ex-empires/colonies, or are refugees or family reunion migrants. (I think that the OECD would have comparative statistics on this.)

So Australian migrants are relatively successful because more of them are chosen from the people most likely to be successful. Generally speaking the migrants to Australia who do worst are those who have come as refugees - this is true everywhere - but they are a larger share in Nordic countries, for example.

I also think that Australia's and Canada's approach to multiculturalism - while now derided in some quarters - has actually been successful as a sophisticated form of integration policy. Australia puts quite a lot of resources into English-language courses for new migrants, but it also provides a lot of access to information in migrant languages, which helps people while they learn English.

[hey]

gcochran: "Belyaev managed to _completely_ change fox behavior in 40 years."

just a remark:
40 years in that experiment were app. 10 generations of foxes and the selection was indeed very strict. only about 5% of the male offspring and roughly 20% the female survived.
furthermore the starting population was chosen from foxes in commercial fur farms, thus they were already tamer than normal wild foxes.
so by very drastic interventions one could change one behaviour trait in about 15 - 20 genrations in foxes. for humans 15 generations span around 500 years.
if the selection is weaker nobody knows how many generation would be needed.

[gcochran]

It depends how common the alleles causing the traits you want are. The alleles that make foxes act like dogs were originally very rare - none of the original foxes were comfortable with people. If, say, 10% of them had been, it would not have taken that long for selection to change that number to 50%. Along these lines, people have managed to change the average temperament of dog breeds in far shorter times when a noticeable fraction of the breed already had the desired temperament.

[oops]

the whole evolution thing seems like a reach for an explaination. the book review actually says he believes it could be cultural or evolutionary.

it happened and it doesn't really matter to me why. that the author "seems" to lean to evolution as an explaination sot of leads me to believe that this really has little bearing on what the book is about.

[Bruce Webb]

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/ftahome.html

oops: "little bearing on what the book is about."

Well given that chapter six is called "Darwin and Malthus: Survival of the Richest" I suspect the critics are on to something here.

[Stephen Heyer]

oops: "it happened and it doesn't really matter to me why."

Some of us worry quite a bit about the fact that our society is a wealthy, comfortable, law abiding, decent place to live yet, despite a lot of theories about why this is so, we really do not know why we are so lucky/blessed. We look back through history and see many other blessed societies - and all of them are dead.

Not knowing what our society is doing right means that one day we could stop doing it and our society could become not so lucky (this may be happening in the USA right now, just as China and India are becoming lucky/blessed). Worse, when a society falls from favour it seems to do so very quickly and with little warning.

Also, if we really understood what makes some societies both successful and nice places to live (it's not much good being one without the other) we could perhaps help more societies become like this.

[Stephen Heyer]

Disinterested Observer: "Stephen Heyer has referred to the success of migrants in Australia. I'm not exactly sure why this issue is relevant to the book being discussed"

Immigrants' success, or rather their blending in to a pleasant and successful society, was a counter argument to the book's assertion that selection acting on either genetics or culture, or perhaps both, had caused the English population to have innate behaviours (uniquely?) favourable to the formation of a wealthy, pleasant industrial economy/society.

Disinterested Observer: "So Australian migrants are relatively successful because more of them are chosen from the people most likely to be successful. Generally speaking the migrants to Australia who do worst are those who have come as refugees - this is true everywhere - but they are a larger share in Nordic countries, for example."

Disinterested Observer may be right, but I hope not as this would suggest a return to nineteenth century ideas that the exact makeup of a nation's population was important to it's success or failure and the characteristics of it's society. In other words, if you were lucky enough to have a nice nation you had better be very careful about who you let come live there.

Although I've shifted my opinion on some of these matters several times in the course of this debate (thanks folks, great debate) I still believe (allright, more hope) that Australia's experience demonstrates that the genetic and cultural heritage of groups does not determine the kind of society they can build/live in.

[notsneaky]

Alright, once again I'd like to point out, for those who haven't actually read the book or at least those parts which are/were freely available on the web, that the review given above is MISLEADING in one important aspect which is what's freakin' a lot of people out, both along the evolutionary angle and the English angle.

The review states:
"The ... Malthusian trap, Dr. Clark’s data show, governed the English economy from 1200 until the Industrial Revolution"

Now, it is true that this is what Dr. Clark's data show and it is probably true that this was indeed the case. However, Dr. Clark's data also show, and it is probably also true that the Malthusian trap goes way way before England, 1200. In fact, it pretty much characterizes ALL human existence up until the Industrial Revolution, the existence of pretty much all other species and perhaps some societies today. In fact, if you actually read the damn book a lot of it is devoted to discussion to all pre-IR societies and the point is that they were more or less all the same, as far as things as technological innovation and standard of living goes.
The reviewer decided to focus on the time period 1200-1800, in one particular economy, England, and makes it seem like the whole book bases its argument on what happened in that one particular place, in that particular time. It makes it also seem like the argument is that in 1200 England folks started evolving, whether culturally or genetically, the "values" that eventually made for the Industrial Revolution, like patience and hard work. This is not the argument of the book.

My guess is the reviewer read only one chapter of the book - the one on England 1200 to 1800 - and skimmed the rest. The reason there's a chapter+ on England between 1200 and 1800 is because that's where the most detailed data are available. But Dr. Clark also uses a lot of data - though these are more sporadic 0 from a lot of difference places and going back all the way to ancient Sumer to argue that similar phenomenon were going on there too.

The argument is this - in a world where the ability too transfer resources from one period to the next (i.e. from parents to children) is non existent or prohibitively costly, a high level of saving does not make sense from either the economic or evolutionary point of view. Hence, in economies where savings technology is not available, there's no selection pressure, either cultural or biological for patience and related behaviors. However, once a saving technology is available then high savings possibly starts making sense - although how much anyone individual will want to save still depends on their rate of "impatience". But in such societies, over a long enough period of time, there will be cultural or biological pressure to select those who are more patient and save more (and are less violent, more hard working, etc.)
So what is what? Well, Clark argues that before the invention of agriculture saving technologies were not existent. It was only when humans became sedentary and started farming that it became possible to save - even if only by bequeathing land to your progeny.

So, it didn't start in 1200 England. It started in 10,000 BC or thereabouts in the Fertile Crescent, or in China and in other places that agriculture was independently invented, including the New World.

To be perfectly honest I don't think the book really tackles the question of "why England in 1800?" head on. The answer based on the above seems to be, "why not?". If people have been becoming more patient (etc.) ever since agriculture, then an Industrial Revolution was going to happen somewhere at some point. Perhaps England had some advantages but it could've - would've - been someplace eventually. The other - more difficult - aspect of this is about what explains the income differentials that have arisen since the IR. And here is where Dr. Clark leaves the door open for cultural explanation. Which is a dangerous door to open, obviously, since all kinds of nastiness can and has before, waddled in through it.

But I don't know how many times I've heard folks telling economists that they should pay more attention to "culture", "values", and the possibility of "tastes changing".

Some of the other concerns above are also addressed in the book, for those who actually will bother to read it. At this point though I think I've done my social duty of doing folks' job for them so I'm not gonna go into it.

[cm]

I think the genetic angle, if at all significant, is way overplayed in what are effectively matters of society and culture. I'm not disputing that physical traits including endocrinological phenomena (e.g. hormone levels) affecting neural activity patterns are passed on through genes, but I contend the resulting effects are by far dominated by education, indoctrination, and general exposure to the social environment, with the family and the immediate social environment in which the family is embedded usually having a large formative impact, falsely suggesting a genetic link.

[J. L. Wood]

There is so much to contend in Gregory's theory, one hardly knows where to begin, from an 'economist' decyphering historical biological data, to perusing 'wills' to make leaping conclusions about a society where the poor had no wills and thus no data to consider. This looks pecularly like an attempt to superimpose right wing ideology on economic theory, using carefully sifted historical data. Which is not surprising in right wing ideology--they ALWAYS sift through reality to find what helps them.

[burritoboy]

More additional seeming problems (I haven't, like others, read the book yet) is that:

1. The UK wasn't especially super-wealthy until relatively late in history (probably the seventeenth or eighteenth century). The wealthiest merchants in the Middle Ages were largely Italian or Flemish. In essence, there's not much point in correlating later economic success with much earlier events - English merchants, even the wealthiest and most savvy ones, weren't unusually prosperous by world standards and it's difficult to see, if Clark's theory was correct, why the world economic capital in 1750-1900 wasn't Brugges or Florence rather than London.

2. The consistently wealthiest people in England were landed aristocrats, not merchants. Merchants were often wealthier than the lower ranks of aristocrats, but their fortunes tended to rise and fall rapidly unless they became landed gentry themselves (which was the favorite path to longterm success for urban merchant families). Landed aristocrats were precisely not hardworking, sober or diligent. They tended not to "work" whatsoever at all, unless you consider occasional meetings with estate managers "work". As Kautsky makes clear in his "Aristocratic Empires", aristocrats do not create wealth at all, but primarily use war as a method to redistribute already existing agricultural wealth from one group of aristocrats to another.

3. Since England and the UK had the smallest percentage of nobility to population of European countries, descendants of nobility would be far more common in continental Europe (particularly in Germany and Italy, where the dozens of small states could all create titles of nobility) than in the UK, where the old nobility was largely destroyed in the Wars of the Roses, and comparatively few new titles were created for another 200+ years. This is why in 1700 there were only 10 ducal families in England, 28 earldoms, 3 viscounts and roughly 50-60 baronetcies as compared to 16 pricely houses, 34 ducal families in Italy, etc. The larger provinces of Italy each had about half as many barons (or more) as the entire whole of England. Thus, Clark's theory would predict that Italy or Germany would be the site of the Industrial Revolution.

[Bruce Webb]

"There is good evidence that the productivity growth rate did not experience a
clean upward break, but instead fluctuated irregularly between periods in England all the way back to 1200, so that arguments can be made for 1600, for 1800 or even for 1860 as the true break between the Malthusian and the modern economy."

"Thus though an Industrial Revolution of some kind certainly occurred between 1200 and 1860 in Europe, though there is a divide which mankind crossed, a materialist’s Jordan at the gates of the Promised Land,"

It wasn't the reviewer who picked out 1200, Clark set the limits here. As for this:
"My guess is the reviewer read only one chapter of the book - the one on England 1200 to 1800 - and skimmed the rest." Well if only one chapter of the book dealt with England in this period it would be one thing. But darned if I can pick that chapter out.

1.Introduction……………………………………..
1-19

The Malthusian Trap: Economic Life to 1800
2. The Logic of the Malthusian Economy………….
20-44

3. Material Living Standards………………………..
45-84

4.Fertility…………………………………………..
85-110

5.Life Expectancy………………………………….
111-138

6.Malthus and Darwin: Survival of the Richest…….
139-165

7.Technological Advance…………………………..
166-181

8. Institutions...............................................................
182-205

9. The Emergence of Modern Man................................
206-235

It makes you wonder if notsneaky actually read the book himself.

[notsneaky]

Sigh.

burritoboy. #1 is in the book. In fact, the fact that England was probably wealthier in 1350 than in 1650 is also in the book. There is something to #2, but only partially since even if just richer merchants and peasants left more surviving children than poorer merchants and peasants you still get the correlation. In fact there's a bit too much fixation on the word "nobility" here.

Bruce. The chapter on Technological Advance is the one that is essentially all about England. Like I said there's stuff about England throughout the book, but a lot of it has nothing to do with England. The "Industrial Revolution of some kind certainly occurred between 1200 and 1860 in Europe" is a reference to the larger body of research on the Industrial Revolution. Some folks have argued that it happened in 1860. Some would put it in earlier 19th century. Some want it to be late 18th century. Some see it's beginnings in the 17th century Enlightenment others in 15th century Renaissance or the Explorations. Some would push it even further back to the aftermath of Black Plague or the end of the Dark Ages. Clark's just saying, I don't wanna get into that. Something obviously happened between those two dates otherwise we wouldn't be where we are now.

You're trying to play silly "gotcha" games here.

Oh. And I should note. I don't even really necessarily buy the main idea - that people got more patient over time and that that's what led to IR - though I think it's at least intriguing. But even if you think it's pure nonsense, the book is still worth reading. There's a lot more in it. And it also does a nice job of pulling down other "grand" theories of the IR and economic history.

[notsneaky]

Oh. And the fact that poor people were much less likely to leave wills, and how that affects everything is ... I can't remember if it's discussed in the book, maybe briefly ... but it's certainly in Greg Clark's journal articles.

[gcochran]

If you're thinking evolution, you have to consider the reproductive rate in each group _and_ the size of that group. Thus a group of fairly successful farmers that managed to raise three kids would contribute more to the next generation than rare aristocrats, also would intend to increase its share of the gene pool compared to landless laborerers that couldn't maintain their numbers.

[burritoboy]

"There is something to #2, but only partially since even if just richer merchants and peasants left more surviving children than poorer merchants and peasants you still get the correlation. In fact there's a bit too much fixation on the word "nobility" here."

My point doesn't only depend on formal titles of nobility. The fact is that Clark's mechanism would lead to the prediction that Flanders or Italy or the Hanse would be the locus of the Industrial Revolution. There were many, many more merchants and urban workers in Flanders or Italy than England. That means that the training one's children in diligence, hard work and so on was much more prevalent in Italy or Flanders than in England, where the population remained much more agricultural (which meant more irregular hours, more saint's days, more drunkeness, etc) - one primary source of English medieval wealth being as an agricultural supplier of wool to Flanders' textile industry. Raising sheep is not the same as running or working in a textiles plant.

[notsneaky]

Sure, but this is - as I said before - where I think the review is misleading by making it seem like the whole focus is on just England.

Suppose a powerful demigod of, uh, indeterminate morality, came along in say 1701 and just plucked England out of existence (let's not get started on the weird historical What Ifs that would generate)(except, uh, for this one). The point is, as I understand it, that then the Industrial Revolution would've still happened. In Flanders if you'd like. And if not Flanders then Italy. And if not either of those than maybe China. And if not China then ... well, just pick any society that has adopted agriculture. Maybe 20 years later, maybe 100 years later. But it would've happen, given the underlying changes that have taken place since 10,000 BC or whatever. England looks special to us because it was "the first". There might some important reasons why it was "the first" but given that it was gonna happen somewhere there had to be a first and England's just as good a place as any. In a slightly different world we'd be sitting here wondering "Why Southern Bulgaria?"

[Bruce Webb]

"but it's certainly in Greg Clark's journal articles."

Yes it always is. Sloppy scholars make grand sweeping, totalizing, over simplified claims in books designed for the public and then defend themselves by pointing to an obscure article in the Journal of Economic History or Econometrics. To accept notsneaky's defense in toto is to believe that Clark was making no particular claim about any specific group of people in any specific time or place, in other words that this really important "brilliant" book really boils down to "the Industrial Revolution happened"

Notsneaky:"The point is, as I understand it, that then the Industrial Revolution would've still happened. In Flanders if you'd like. And if not Flanders then Italy. And if not either of those than maybe China. And if not China then"

Well I suggest that you don't understand it. Because Clark goes out of his way to explain "if not China" or so I am led to believe by him titling chapter 13 "Why England? Why not China, Japan or India?......." which following up chapter 12. "The English Industrial Revolution,1760-1860…....." makes your contention that this book is not focused on England a little ridiculous.

For that matter Clark frames it explicitly on page 3 of the introduction (bolding mine):

"Thus world economic history poses three interconnected
problems: why the Malthusian trap persisted so long, why the
escape from that trap in the Industrial Revolution came in one tiny
island, England, in 1800, and why there was the consequent Great
Divergence. This book proposes answers to these puzzles that
connect all three. "

Certainly Clark makes claims that go far beyond England, but in saying "the review is misleading by making it seem like the whole focus is on just England" methinks the non sneaker doth protest too much.

[notsneaky]

Yes it always is. Sloppy scholars make grand sweeping, totalizing, over simplified claims in books designed for the public and then defend themselves by pointing to an obscure article in the Journal of Economic History or Econometrics.

You know, if you just toned it down a bit we could have ourselves a nice conversation here. Anyway, first I said that it COULD be in the book but I couldn't recall precisely (I didn't wanna get nit picked on this). Second, your contention was that Greg Clark seemed to be unaware of the problem and my point was that this was false - basically just an assumption on your part. Third, yes, publications for the public are different than scholarly articles. I mean, who wouldda thunk it? But if you do your work in the scholarly article, address all the caveats, issues and potential problems and you still get something, I think it's okay to present that something without going into all the details.

in other words that this really important "brilliant" book really boils down to "the Industrial Revolution happened"

...because people, since the beginning of agriculture, got more patient, less violent and less myopic. These were the preconditions. Also "brilliant" because even if you don't agree with any of that it's still a great description of the Malthusian economic history of the world, of the how the Industrial Revolution happened (not the "why") and many other topics.

Well I suggest that...

"Why England? Why Not China?" has been one of the big QUESTIONS in this area for a long time so of course it's gotta be confronted, lest someone else, someone very much like Bruce Webb come along and starts saying "Clark does not seem to be aware of the fact that the IR could've happened in China". But the fact that the book confronts it does not make the whole book about England.
Look at that list of chapters again. At best a fifth, maybe a fourth are directly about England, which is after all this place where this thing called the Industrial Revolution happened. Throw in the stuff that's scarred throughout the other chapters and you'll get more. But it's pretty obvious that the scope of the book is much much wider. Which was my original point that got you all huffin' and puffin'.

[Gil]

Why England? Surely some people have heard one good reason is location. Being a large island nation makes life easy compared to a continental locale. Britain and Japan have had it easier because invasion meant taking a large seagoing risk for the invaders. The Spanish invasion lost out as much due to unfavourable weather conditions as much as the presumpion that the Spanish fleet thought it was to be a walk in the park and didn't properly prepare their for the serious repulsion they faced. And remember what happened when the Mongols tried to invade Japan? Twice the Mongols had a serious armada to take over Japan and twice a giant storm sent them to a watery grave. Compare with mainland Europe and Asia where an enemy can in engage in longterm warfare and siege behaviour.

[Oran Kelley]

For me, the real question here is "Are wills a good way of measuring the reproduction rates of an entire population?"

My guess would be that many folks who were poor (who had no substantial assets) wouldn't bother making a will.