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Daniel Brook in Triumph of the Wills reviews A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark.

For Clark it’s self-evident that breeding patterns explain why certain places industrialized, as well as why others did not. Places that never developed agriculture or places where the poor simply outreproduced the rich never developed middle-class values or a middle-class work ethic. As a result, they exhibit what Clark terms a “socially induced lethargy,” one that handicaps their economies to this day.

Clark attempts to defend this assertion with data measuring the slothfulness of Third World workers. He approvingly quotes an imperial-era textile expert from Britain who wrote in 1930, “Labour in India is undoubtedly on a very low par, probably it comes next to Chinese labour in inefficiency, wastefulness, and lack of discipline.” As one of Clark’s charts documents, in 1921 the average American mill worker could tend more than 700 spindles per hour, while the average Indian worker could tend just 118. That Indian textile workers weren’t giving their all for white managers in Raj-era mills genuinely seems to puzzle Clark. Why couldn’t sturdy British managers whip the natives into shape?

When the Klan, or skinheads, or the punditry at Fox preaches the virtue of social Darwinism it is pretty obvious as the holes in it as a philosophy. The ampish on the Right’s outrage is always set on the utterly incredulous level; to them social Darwinism is part and parcel of some kind of divine providence all supported by the daily smear, an antidote about someone of color, or non-fundamentalist Christian, or god forbid a nonconservative. When well educated scholars like Clark preach the virtue of the fit having survived and prospered because of some innate virtue, with footnotes non the less its the same Faux News bunk, but with high toned verbiage and claims to years of painstaking research, well there must be some truth to it. The data mashup of scholars like Clark eventually filter their way down to the Glenn Becks and National Reviews, then praises sung with a certain smug quality as they give their pretend everyman version. This ritual of passing down dubious scholarship and interpretation of data is performed is light of a certain irony over the course of time which always includes intermittent fire and brimstone speeches about how the elite intellectuals in universities are ruining either America or western Europe. If Conservatives made this into a pilot for TV it would never make it. The answers will always be the same. If a Conservative scholar wrote bunk like this, its a golden hued revelation. If anyone left of Benito Mussolini write about how entrenched attitudes of exceptionalism and elitism have done more harm then good, its liberal agitprop.

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