A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

Ouch, A.N. Wilson today, (rightly) praising Greg Clark's book:

His canvas is exhilaratingly broad, and it presents us with some extraordinary facts. Until about 1800, the economies of the world, whether of the most primitive prehistoric societies, or of Europe, were remarkably similar.

The populations remained stable. Everything seemed to be determined by the trap in which the Reverend Thomas Malthus saw the human race imprisoned: namely, that if the population rose too much, the surplus had to be culled by war or starvation.

Erm, no, that's not the Malthusian trap at all. For as a cursory glance at the statistics, or even the book itself, will show, population did not remain stable. The trap is, rather, that technological advance did not lead to sustained rises in per capita living standards. For better technology in farming led to more food being produced, thus more of the next generation survived to procreate themselves, leading to that increased population hitting the Malthusian limits again asnd thus per capita standards decreasing to the starting point.

Population, technology, food production, none of them remained stable: per capita living standards did, or rather yo-yoed around that subsistence limit.

For this reason, natural disasters such as the Black Death were a tremendous boon to societies.

No, not to societies, to the living standards of  those who survived them rather.

But, says Clark, these institutions were in place long before the revolution itself. He sees it as a result of breeding. With a liberating lack of concern for political correctness, Clark identifies the richer and more aristocratic classes with the cleverest.

Now we're being a little more contentious, for that's not how I read his argument at all. It wasn't the downward mobility of the aristocracy that he identifies as the source of the cultural change (and it's certainly not cleverness). Rather, the outbreeding by the commercial classes of both the aristocracy and the labouring classes. While he havers over whether it was genetic or cultural, it was the spread of bourgeois values, not aristocratic ones that led to the breakthrough.

There was a culture of hard work, and applied cleverness which, Clark believes, made the Industrial Revolution "take off".

That is indeed the argument.

For, one of the implications of his book is, surely, that if the Western world has abandoned the traditions of ingenuity and hard work which led to its enrichment, and has humanely allowed the unskilled to breed as successfully as the skilled, then, has not our civilisation sown the seeds of its own destruction?

Well, that's only if you read it as arguing for a genetic inheritance, rather than a cultural one. If you, as I do, take his argument to be about cultural inheritance, then that abandonment of those middle class virtues of hard work and ingenuity is indeed a problem: but it's nothing to do with breeding: we do now, as you might note, have a universal education system, so it's more about what that teaches than the genetic inheritance of those who go through it.

That last argument is perilously close to eugenics for this classical liberal to want to accept.