Economic history probably sounds as b-o-r-i-n-g to most as does the history of accounting. But wait: "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."
Comes a new-ish book published by the PU Press from a nifty UCLA econ historian, Gregory Clark, suggesting that it was nature and not nurture ... er, rather that the fault lies in ourselves, not in our stars, ... er, that "people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work".
Sounds too expansive? Perhaps. One of the provocative assertions from pouring over medieval English docs appears to be that wealth was collapsing on itself, because of the fecundity of the wealthy, who had more children than did the poor, causing an economic gradient in England that did not occur in the Orient, "a constant downward social mobility". (I wasn't even aware that the births of people without name or title were rigorously kept on record in that period, so I'm a suspect reader on the issues of measurement, at least ...).
ECON DEVELOPMENT: PUSH NOT PULL?
My travels had taught me to believe that it was, as almost always, a change in the ownership structures that unleashed positive economic forces. Rather than land-reform, this time it was ... the Corn Laws.
More when the book becomes cheap or comes to the local, maybe.
Meanwhile, those with interest peeked might find meat in topics such as "Epidemics and Economic Social History: From Black Death to The Present". The "economics" of the Black Death lead to such things as the Peasants' Revolt.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
“A Farewell to Alms”
