A Farewell to Alms: A Brief History of the World (Book Review‪)‬

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief History of the World Gregory Clark Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007, 420 pp. The thesis of Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms is that, for most of human history and prehistory, there prevailed an essentially Malthusian social dynamic, one in which improvements in technology or wealth were turned almost immediately into increased population rather than increased individual wealth or technological innovation. Only calamities, such as the Black Death of the 14th century, could raise the average wealth of a society, and they did so by reducing the population.