Buried under a head­line that rivals one in yesterday’s NYT for incom­pre­hen­si­bil­ity is an arti­cle by Nicholas Wade that struck me as inter­est­ing for all the wrong reasons.

Wade presents the work of Gre­gory Clark, an econ­o­mist whose research focuses on the changes that occurred in human pop­u­la­tions before, during, and after the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. Clark’s hypoth­e­sis is that genetic, and not merely cul­tural, changes are ulti­mately respon­si­ble for the increase in pro­duc­tion that allowed Euro­pean soci­eties to escape the so-​called “Malthusian trap.”

Clark’s book isn’t out yet, but Wade’s long arti­cle gives one good rea­sons to sus­pect that Clark’s hypoth­e­sis is at least untestable, if not wrong. (Most of the econ­o­mists quoted in Wade’s arti­cle praise Clark’s data gath­er­ing but are skep­ti­cal of his genetic claims.) But as a new episode in the long flir­ta­tion eco­nom­ics has kept up with biol­ogy, it’s worth paying atten­tion to.

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In 1798, Thomas Malthus pre­dicted that the population-​level ben­e­fits of tech­no­log­i­cal change would always be can­celled by an increase in pop­u­la­tion. Thus a new farm­ing tech­nique that pro­duced 5% more wheat would seem a sur­plus only until that bounty cre­ated 5% more mouths to feed.

Clark’s data, accord­ing to Wade, show that the Malthu­sian trap

gov­erned the Eng­lish econ­omy from 1200 until the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion and has in his view prob­a­bly con­strained humankind through­out its existence.

During the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, Wade says, “the effi­ciency of pro­duc­tion at last accel­er­ated, grow­ing fast enough to out­pace pop­u­la­tion growth.” An obvi­ous ques­tion fol­lows: what hap­pened to allow that efficiency?

Clark’s hypoth­e­sis, the most con­tro­ver­sial part of his work, is that in Europe at this time a par­tic­u­lar subset of human behav­iors, what he calls “middle-class values,” came to replace the values that had gov­erned the rest of human­ity for millenia:

Thrift, pru­dence, nego­ti­a­tion and hard work were becom­ing values for com­mu­ni­ties that pre­vi­ously had been spend­thrift, impul­sive, vio­lent, and leisure-​loving.

And Clark’s will­ing to go fur­ther: he believes that this shift in behav­iors is the result not only of cul­tural changes but also of bio­log­i­cal ones:

Through the long agrar­ian pas­sage lead­ing up to the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, man was becom­ing bio­log­i­cally more adapted to the modern eco­nomic world….The tri­umph of cap­i­tal­ism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ide­ol­ogy or rationality.

In other words, Clark is approach­ing from a dif­fer­ent direc­tion (and in a dif­fer­ent time period) the cen­tral ques­tion of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: in gen­eral, “why did human devel­op­ment pro­ceed at such dif­fer­ent rates on dif­fer­ent continents,” and in par­tic­u­lar, to quote GGS’s Yali, “Why is it that you white people devel­oped so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

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As I said, Clark’s book, A Farewell to Alms, isn’t out yet, and the links to PDF excerpts on Clark’s web­site are broken, so I’m rely­ing on Wade’s arti­cle. But sev­eral bits of the argu­ment as pre­sented there strike me as worthy of a healthy pre­lim­i­nary skepticism.

The first two sus­pi­cions are simple and methodological:

1/ I’ll be inter­ested to see how Clark thinks he can prove that the rise of so-​called “middle class values” (non­vi­o­lence, lit­er­acy, longer work­ing hours) caused the increase in pro­duc­tion that accom­pa­nied the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. No doubt he is as aware as anyone that cor­re­la­tion doesn’t imply cau­sa­tion, but it’s hard to imag­ine an argu­ment that would con­vinc­ingly demon­strate that those values really were respon­si­ble. Longer work­ing hours makes intu­itive sense, but what accounted for those? How was lit­er­acy impor­tant for the kind of labor that drove the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion? (I.e. does being able to sign one’s name, which Clark takes as the sign of lit­er­acy, really help you in the mill?) And why assume that a propen­sity for non­vi­o­lence leads to more effi­cient pro­duc­tion? You could equally imag­ine things going the other direc­tion: more food and more resources would mean less (and less-​fierce) com­pe­ti­tion, lead­ing to less violence.

2/ We’ve gotten to the point, some­times for better and some­times for worse, that the­o­ries argu­ing from genet­ics have come to rep­re­sent the gold stan­dard of explana­tory power. For many people noth­ing is more con­vinc­ing than an argu­ment that traces some behav­ior “to our genes.”

But doesn’t the extreme ver­sion of Clark’s hypothesis—that bio­log­i­cal changes are respon­si­ble for behav­ioral changes that caused the Indus­trial Revolution—sound famil­iar? Let’s see, yes, here:

Prob­a­bly the com­mon­est expla­na­tion involves implic­itly or explic­itly assum­ing bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences among peoples.

That, of course, was Jared Dia­mond, and his response to this expla­na­tion was unambiguous:

The objec­tion to such racist expla­na­tions is not just that they are loath­some, but that they are wrong. Sound evi­dence for the exis­tence of human dif­fer­ences in intel­li­gence that par­al­lel human dif­fer­ence in tech­nol­ogy is lacking.

To be sure, Clark’s argu­ment is not about intel­li­gence, it’s about “middle-class values”:

What was being inher­ited, in [Clark's] view, was not greater intelligence….Rather it was ‘a reper­toire of skills and dis­po­si­tions that were very dif­fer­ent from those of the pre-​agrarian world.’

Only a very thin line sep­a­rates Clark’s work from the charge of racism, since it pro­poses that the genetic dif­fer­ences con­ge­nial to cap­i­tal­ism evolved in a small pop­u­la­tion of the Eng­lish upper class. To prove that hypoth­e­sis, how­ever, he needs not only to demon­strate a con­nec­tion between those values and the increased effi­ciency of the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, but also between spe­cific genetic dif­fer­ences and the pop­u­la­tions who sup­pos­edly prize those values. Genetic expla­na­tions require genetic data.

But what would the those data look like? I sup­pose you could imag­ine some hypo­thet­i­cal genetic dif­fer­ence involv­ing testos­terone pro­duc­tion that might influ­ence vio­lence, but lit­er­acy? Long work­ing hours? As Wade says, “Tests of most social behav­iors are very weakly heritable.”

My third sus­pi­cion is method­olog­i­cal in a dif­fer­ent way:

3/ As a sci­en­tist you learn very early to dis­trust any results that flat­ter your beliefs too much. But Clark’s results con­firm, if that’s the right word, more than a few of the polit­i­cal opin­ions he expresses in the arti­cle and else­where, for exam­ple that polit­i­cal and social insti­tu­tions like the World Bank and Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund are “cult centers” basi­cally inca­pable of help­ing poor coun­tries. Or this, from an edi­to­r­ial he pub­lished in the LA Times: “the rise and decline of economies is beyond the reach of eco­nomic policy.”

My last sus­pi­cion brings me to the heart of the matter, and the reason why this arti­cle struck me as so indi­rectly fascinating:

4/ Wade treats Clark’s hypoth­e­sis as regres­sive, argu­ing that it hear­kens back to a form of argu­ment made pop­u­lar by Max Weber:

In saying the answer lies in people’s behav­ior, he is asking his fellow eco­nomic his­to­ri­ans to revert to a type of expla­na­tion they had mostly abandoned…

But econ­o­mists have been flirt­ing with biol­ogy for years, and I don’t think Wade rec­og­nizes the true impe­tus behind work of this kind. In 1977 Gary Becker wrote,

I believe that a more pow­er­ful analy­sis can be devel­oped by join­ing the [model of] indi­vid­ual ratio­nal­ity of the econ­o­mist to the [model of] group ratio­nal­ity of the sociobiologist.

If my hunch is right, Clark’s rhetoric—”middle-class values”, “the tri­umph of capitalism”—is tri­umphal­is­tic for a reason. Pace Wade, what Clark wants to do is not to go back but to go for­ward: to give, in the name of “middle-class values,” a bio­log­i­cal under­pin­ning to homo eco­nom­i­cus (Paul Samuelson’s Max U), the the­o­ret­i­cal model at the heart of modern eco­nomic theory.

In 1977 as now, homo eco­nom­i­cus was noth­ing more (and noth­ing less) than a the­o­ret­i­cal model that works (if Deirdre McCloskey is right, it is not even that). But trans­late Clark’s list of values—thrift, pru­dence, nego­ti­a­tion, and hard work—into eco­nomic quan­ti­ties (sav­ings, util­ity max­i­miza­tion, effi­ciency, labor) and you’ve got your­self most of the way toward a work­ing model of cap­i­tal­ism whose grounds are inscribed in our very DNA.

Making cul­tural con­structs seem nat­ural: didn’t Karl Marx have a name for that?