For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.
In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence
Gregory Clark, an economic historian at UCal Davis believes that the surge in economic growth that occurred first in Europe around 1800 happened 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.
His theory is the subject of his new book
Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor.
“The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” says Dr. Clark.
Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.
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“Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,” Dr. Clark writes.
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“The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”