Robert Ellman (Intrepid Liberal Journal) interviews Gregory Clark on The Industrial Revolution Unplugged:
Yes, this is one of the paradoxes of history and an example of why this book is meant to be bold and controversial. It’s previously been known that England and the Netherlands had very high living standards compared to most pre-industrial societies in the eighteenth century. People have identified that with an idea of greater economic progress in those societies. What my book argues instead is that living standards were good there not because of any sophistication of their economies, but because of the nature of hygiene practices across different societies in the pre-industrial world.For a country like Japan living standards were only 1/3 or ½ of those in Western Europe. But that was because in Japan people bathed every day, and they carefully separated human waste products from people. When they used human waste in agriculture they carefully treated it to eliminate bacteria. They swept the floors of their houses. They swept the streets. Japan was a very orderly, hygienic society. But that has the perverse effect in a Malthusian world that you can live, you can sustain the population, at a much lower subsistence level. Material consumption can be much less, yet people still survive, and enough children can be born that the population can be replenished in each generation.
Whereas if you look at pre-industrial Western Europe, these people lived truly filthy (laughs). Before 1800 in England, no one seems to have bathed! It was just a relatively rare activity. For example Samuel Pepys, who was a high English civil servant in the 1660s, kept a famously detailed diary for almost ten years. And he records every minutia of his life. That’s why it’s so fascinating for historians. In that entire time he records his wife having a bath once!
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People didn’t bathe. Another thing is that in cities like London, what did people do with human waste? They stored it in their basement until it was emptied every few months by the night soil men. So they’re living on piles of shit in the richest areas of pre-industrial England. And Pepys again in his diary records going down into his basement when his neighbor’s waste storage has overflowed, and he’s stepping on turds!It’s just very interesting how little attention Europeans paid to hygiene and the book argues that everything in a Malthusian world that kills off the population – plagues, war, disease — actually ends up making the population richer because fewer people have to die because of the misery of every day life and material existence. We can actually see that English living standards in 1450 where double those of the 18th century even though there was much less technological advance. The reason for that is because the “Black Death” was raging across Europe in that period.
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One of the implications of this Malthusian existence, and this is deeply embedded in this Malthusian picture of the world, is better economic conditions allow people to be more successful reproductively. Within any of these societies there is a huge range of living standards. There are very poor people and very rich people. Those rich people, because they enjoy so much better material consumption, should be able to produce many more surviving children. The way this happens is you have more living space, you have more food, more changes in clothing. You have cleaner water. So we would expect in this society we would have a Darwinian element. Only two children will survive to adulthood in any period of the pre-industrial world because the population can only change slowly. But amongst the rich you’ll have many more than two children surviving. Among the poor, many fewer. And we can observe this process when reviewing 16th and 17th century England. It’s a very strong process.So the rich are taking over this society biologically. That leads to the question, does this get transmitted from one generation to the next? If you have the rich in one generation, are their children also likely to be rich? Are their children also likely to be successful economically and reproductively? It turns out we can show in England that’s the case.
This raises the intriguing possibility that if the rich are different from the poor, either culturally or genetically, then this process may be gradually transforming society because the rich and their descendants are taking over all the positions in society. So if it was a genetic advantage the rich had, there may actually be genetic changes in this long Malthusian interval between the arrival of settled agriculture and the Industrial Revolution.
It turns out we have very clear evidence of changes in peoples preferences over this long pre-industrial interval. The example the book gives is that people were becoming more patient as the Industrial Revolution approached. The measure of patience in these pre-industrial societies is the interest rates. Because the interest rate tells you much you have to reward people to own land or own houses. How much do you have to pay them not to consume immediately, but instead own that asset and wait for future consumption? If you go back to ancient Babylon they had mortgage markets but the interest rates were typically twenty to twenty-five percent. If you go to medieval Europe their interest rates were ten to twelve percent for things like land. By the eve of the Industrial Revolution the return on land in England dropped to about four percent. So in the pre-industrial world interest rates seem to indicate the amount of patience people are exhibiting.
Gavin Kennedy disagrees with Clark’s notion of using per-capita income to measure economic growth:
In the extreme, I have suggested that economic history of the last 10,000 years (and for long enough before that) the history of the poor is not the decisive factor in economic development: it is the history of the rich (all those above subsistence), plus the history of the politically powerful who diverted some proportion (from taxation, levies, duties, and oppression) of the annual production of wealth into stone built cities, infra-structure, cathedrals, harbours, canals, routes for trade, shipping, and the instruments of war.
(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)