"Survival of the Richest" and "Genetically Capatilistic"

As mentioned earlier, Clark borrows his differing explanation from Malthus and Darwin. He argues that during the Malthusian era the societies were subjected to limited/fixed resources. This forced the people to utilize the available resources in the most prudent and optimal way possible, subjecting them to natural selection, as described by Darwin in the Origin of Species. The rapid economic growth during the Industrial Revolution was not a drastic phenomenon because gradual change in peoples’ behavior and the stock of useful knowledge was undergoing in the English society. The stage for the Industrial Revolution was set well ahead when the English society was subject to natural selection.

Particularly, in the English society the richer bred more than the poorer. The riches of the rich were inherited by their children, who were well oriented with middle-class values, hardworking habits, and entrepreneurial instincts. This was essentially “the survival of the richest.” Moreover, the higher fertility among the rich families was transmitted (culturally and genetically) throughout the lower ranks through constant downward social mobility. Even though some of the richer offsprings were delegated to lower classes, they still inherited the bourgeois virtues, which was absent from countries like Japan and China. In fact, this made the English societies “genetically capitalistic.” In England, economic success was translated into reproductive success. Higher income of the richer families contributed to higher survival rates of their children, and thus transmission of good bourgeois virtues. These good bourgeois virtues were the main factors behind the high innovation rate in England even though the reward for innovation (i.e. incentives) was very low.

According to Clark, the good values that were transmitted culturally and genetically in the English society are: low interest rates, literacy and numeracy, increased working hours, decreased interpersonal violence, patience and hardworking class among others. The perfection in these virtues was achieved through an evolutionary process. These good virtues were absent in the agricultural societies because the people then were “impulsive, violent, innumerate, illiterate, and lazy.” Apart from our ideology and rationality, he argues that the success of capitalism lies in our culture and genes.

Extending the “survival of the richest” and “genetically capitalistic” arguments for rapid economic growth, Clark argues that today’s society is characterized by upward mobility, meaning that the poor people rise up in the social hierarchy without changing bad virtues. He argues that this is now evident in the developing countries.

Clark reveals that his interest on natural selection was ignited by a paper titled ‘Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth’, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, in 2002. Galor and Moav floated a new hypothesis about the biological origins of the Industrial Revolution. Their “unified growth theory”, which encompassed the observed evolution of population, technology, and income per capita in the long Malthusian era, showed that “prolonged economic stagnation prior to the transition to sustained growth stimulated natural selection that shaped the evolution of the human species, whereas the evolution of the human species was the origin of the take-off from an epoch of stagnation to sustained growth” (Galor and Moav 2002).

Bowles (2007) disagrees with Clark and argues that the “survival of the richest” trend in English society was not unique. Clark compares the reproductive success of richer families in the English societies with the Japanese samurai and the Chinese Qing nobility. The samurais, though relatively richer classes, were fighters and rulers during the Tokugawa and Meiji era. They were hard working, had deep nationalistic feelings and were intent on national progress through innovation, irrespective of incentives (Johnson 1996). Their less reproductive rate, if true, does not mean that downward social mobility did not occur and their values were not transmitted to the lower classes. It should be noted that the samurais were not only from the noble classes but they were distributed in all the classes in the Japanese society. Moreover, if breeding by richer class is a crucial factor for growth, then why did India and Nepal languish behind given that the richer castes (Brahmins and Kshetriys) had higher children and higher wealth? In a tightly caste-based society, the “good virtues” of these richer classes were transmitted across generations but without changes in living standards.

Bowles agrees that transmission of personality traits is possible from parents to children and this could mould social behaviors. However, he questions Clark’s extension of this particular evidence to bourgeois virtues like hard work, patience, non violence, etc. Bowles is also not convinced by Clark’s argument that low interest rates and low interpersonal violence led to proliferation of good virtues and its transmission to descendants either culturally or genetically. Low interest rate does not show that the English people were patience because patience could be a result of both nurture and nature (Glaeser 2007). Bowles also questions the timing of the Industrial Revolution based on Clark’s explanation: “If from 1250 or even earlier these “capitalistic” values were spreading as the surplus children of the rich cascaded down the social ladder, why do we not observe a gradual acceleration of the economy beginning in the 13th century rather than the abrupt take-off that Clark documents occurring more than half a millennium later? And why did the equally capitalistic Netherlands not also take off?”

Solow (2007) is also not totally convinced by the cultural and biological arguments. He doubts the evidence on comparative downward social mobility in England and the assertion on relatively higher fertility of the upper class in England vis-a-vis other countries because of the largely undocumented periods in Japan, China, and India. Moreover, Solow charges that Clark is using the genetic argument, rather indirectly, to fend off criticisms from those favoring biological basis for the success of the English people. He wants to see “whether the trait responsiveness of pecuniary incentives had spread more widely in English society than it had earlier or elsewhere by the end of the eighteenth century.” Here, Solow misses Clark’s point that pecuniary incentives were not responsible for the widespread innovation in the English society because innovation was high even though market reward to innovators was fairly low according to today’s standard.

Tyler Cowen is also not totally convinced by Clark’s cultural and biological argument. He argues that England’s rapid economic growth and subsequent escape from the Malthusian era was caused not only by cultural factors but because of its geographic (island) and military (navy) advantage (Atefi 2007). Similarly Jared Diamond argues that natural endowments like geography and environment were responsible for the success of the English economy. He maintains, “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves" (Diamond 1997).

Economic historian Kenneth L. Pomeranz , University of California, Irvine, feels that Clark’s argument on natural selection is weak, and unnecessary, if we can trace the changes in the institutions as a source of economic growth (Wade 2007). Pomeranz argues that the escape from Malthusian era was caused by tapping new sources of energy like coal and bringing new land into cultivation (from its colonies throughout the world), leading to increase in productivity. This means that limited land inside Britain alone did not matter, thus freeing it from Malthusian constraint on land productivity.

Similarly, Robert P. Brenner, economic historian at UCLA, believes that institutional explanations hold the real answer to economic growth and Clark’s genetically capitalist argument is just a speculative leap (Wade 2007).