The Next Econ Nobel Prize...?

Dr. Greg Clark, believes that natural section is the explanation for the Industrial Revolution.

Basically, people with economic values gradually outlived those without them. He uses this thesis as a base to criticize "the 'cult centers' of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as similar to prescientific physicians who prescribed bloodletting for ailments they did not understand."

Since, institutions are not responsible for economic growth, his work indicates that we should do nothing to fight poverty and let nature take its course.

I've attached also replies from Mervin Jebaraj and Michael Nicodemus.
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Well there are some faulty sweeping inferences about England's industrial revolution. Fully knowing that I am mostly speaking to a World Bank and IMF hating audience (and I do reserve a lot of criticism for them), let me say that Clark forgot an important piece to his analysis.

The Industrial Revolution coincided with the exploration and conquests of other continents. England led the way with the East Indian Company and many such establishments that traded (which in the day meant raped and plundered) with other countries. This was one of the most important reasons for the success of the industrial revolution( ie the emergence of new markets to supply raw materials and dump produced goods).

The same model was followed by the rest of Europe in subsequent years and the US (without any conquests) a few centuries later. So in reality, without absolutely dismissing Clark's thesis, much of Europe was enriched by trading (plundering), which further goes to say that people in modern developing and under developed countries helped lift Europeans out of poverty.

It sounds a little pretentious of Clark to assume that Europeans were the first to evolve out of poverty. If I remember correctly, they missed the ball on things like developing a number system, developing a calendar, complex architecture, irrigation etc.

Without sounding like a misguided idealist (and I was born 50 years too late to be bickering about colonialism), shouldn't the developed countries now turn around and help those who really helped them out of poverty. The bane of democracies are institutions and bureaucracies, but they are necessary for democracies to function so therefore, by extension the IMF and World Bank (as reform needy as they are) should not cease to exist.

-Mervin

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Mervin,

I would add that the increase in knowledge and rule of law had little to do with natural selection and more to do with improved communication through trade and society's trial and error with developing culture which had began to make legitimate gains during the enlightenment.

Trying to apply natural selection to human culture isn't practical since not only do self selecting biases occur, but it isn't feasible to judge evolution or universal paradigm changes in such a short chronological time period - it basically facilitate bigotry.

"Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is to confuse poverty with stupidity...

Throughout history, religious leaders and other honorable men of conscience have always warned against this shaming confusion. They remind us that the poor have hearts, minds, humanity, and wisdom like everyone else. ...

People might feel sorry for a man who's fallen on hard times, but when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes that all its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools. Instead of pity, the people provoke laughter. ...

In time the rest of the world may, some of them, begin to feel ashamed for having thought this way, and when they look around and see immigrants from that poor country mopping their floors and doing all the other lowest paying jobs, naturally they worry about what might happen if these workers one day rose up against them. So, to keep things sweet, they start taking an interest in the immigrants culture and sometimes even pretend to think of them as equals.

If I were in Germany, I'd worry that any man was looking down on me. I would instantly distrust him just for being a westerner. There's no escaping humiliation except by proving at the first opportunity that you think exactly as they do."

Excerpt from Snow by Orhan Pamuk
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Michael Nicodemus replies,

Mervin, first and foremost that was a very well written res ponce. However I think it is important to note that we are discussing Darwinism and not Buddhism. Survival of the fittest. Though Clark leads us to believe it was economic savvy, it is merely greed. Apparently the Europeans were the most greedy and therefore were the ones with the highest propensity to prosper, be it by the most disgusting in most unspeakable ways.

I also wonder what effect religion had on the "evolution." Because historically that is how man justifies his carnage. Christianity is a very capitalistic religion (see the parable of talents) and had just come out of the crusades; whereas the east was populated by nonviolent religions like Confucianism and the earlier mentioned. The parable of talents says God likes a man who profits and it is sinful to not engage in this behavior. Where as Confucius spoke of self denial and generally socialistic ideals.