For the past week I’ve been meaning to flag a provocative article discussing theories forwarded by Gregory Clark’s new economic history, A Farewell to Alms. In the spirit of Monty Python’s All-England Summarize Proust Competition, I’d say the core of Clark’s thesis is that the prime mover of the Industrial Revolution was the upper ranks of English society having more (surviving) children than the poor for about 500 years. This inverted population pyramid brought downward social mobility as the children of the wealthy were forced to take up occupations traditionally considered beneath them. But these new poor brought with them a “middle-class” ethos and, according to Clark, ‘“Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving.”

Clark apparently backs up his argument with staggering archival work, examining reams of medieval wills to demonstrate that “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages.”

By abandoning conventional rationale for why England was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution (a coherent polity, agricultural reform, rich natural resources, and a more meritocratic outlook are the usual suspects) for an evolution-based theory, Clark’s book seems to raise troubling questions.

First, can “values” be transmitted across generations? Lamarckism, the idea that an organism can pass on behaviours acquired during its lifetime, is largely discredited. So, relying on a conventional reading of Darwinian natural selection, you might conjecture that the medieval poor occasionally had offspring who, by chance, were better adapted to an emerging middle-class existence (presumably these characteristics would encompass an ability to stay still for long period, appreciate the magic of compound interest, and refrain from debauchery during the working week).

These “mutations” rose through society and eventually had children themselves. Having marginally better diets and less toxic working and living environments than the poor, more members of the nouveau riche succeeded in hanging around long enough to procreate. Although this virtuous cycle–middle-class values creating the circumstances suitable for breeding more people with middle-class values–might continue for generations, it would sometimes be disrupted by economic crises and lack of opportunities caused by too many people chasing a limited number of “appropriate” jobs.

The genetic legacy, inherited from the first striver who decided to learn book-keeping rather than drink sack all day, was now passed to those destined to rejoin the poor (whose numbers were shrinking relative to the healthier rich). However, the “new poor” were (presumably) genetically more inclined than the “old poor” to buckle down and apply their noses to the grindstone. And so, by increments, a society is transformed.

Plausible or far-fetched?

Second, does such a evolutionary reading of economic progress imply that only a brutal shake-out of the poorest strata of the poorest nations will grant them future prosperity (after a few hundred years to allow bourgeois values to percolate through society)?

And finally, if murder, infant mortality, and general ill-health once thinned the ranks of the “feckless” poor, what is supposed to happen to a rich society when these Malthusian shackles are off?

I can envision some wingnut bloggers exploring, in lurid detail, the implications.