Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations.</p>
Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education.</p>
The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations.</p>
A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.</p>

The importance of the international monetary system is clearly evident in daily news stories about fluctuating currencies and in dramatic events such as the recent reversals in the Mexican economy. It has become increasingly apparent that one cannot understand the international economy without knowing how its monetary system operates. Now Barry Eichengreen presents a brief, lucid book that tells the story of the international financial system over the past 150 years. Globalizing Capital is intended not only for economists but also for a general audience of historians, political scientists, professionals in government and business, and anyone with a broad interest in international economic and political relations. Eichengreen's work demonstrates that insights into the international monetary system and effective principles for governing it can result only if it is seen a historical phenomenon extending from the gold standard period to interwar instability, then to Bretton Woods, and finally to the post-1973 period of fluctuating currencies.
Eichengreen analyzes the shift from pegged to floating exchange rates in the 1970s and ascribes that change to the growing capital mobility that has made pegged rates difficult to maintain. However, he shows that capital mobility was also high prior to World War I, yet this did not prevent the maintenance of fixed exchange rates. What was critical for the successful maintenance of fixed exchange rates during that period was the fact that governments were relatively insulated from democratic politics and thus from pressure to trade off exchange rate stability for other goals, such as the reduction of unemployment. Today pegging exchange rates would require very radical reforms of a sort that governments are understandably reluctant to embrace. The implication seems undeniable: floating rates are here to stay.

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. Using a novel technique--tracking family names over generations to measure social mobility across countries and periods--renowned economic historian Gregory Clark reveals that mobility rates are lower than conventionally estimated, do not vary across societies, and are resistant to social policies. The good news is that these patterns are driven by strong inheritance of abilities and lineage does not beget unwarranted advantage. The bad news is that much of our fate is predictable from lineage. Clark argues that since a greater part of our place in the world is predetermined, we must avoid creating winner-take-all societies.
Clark examines and compares surnames in such diverse cases as modern Sweden, fourteenth-century England, and Qing Dynasty China. He demonstrates how fate is determined by ancestry and that almost all societies--as different as the modern United States, Communist China, and modern Japan--have similarly low social mobility rates. These figures are impervious to institutions, and it takes hundreds of years for descendants to shake off the advantages and disadvantages of their ancestors. For these reasons, Clark contends that societies should act to limit the disparities in rewards between those of high and low social rank.
Challenging popular assumptions about mobility and revealing the deeply entrenched force of inherited advantage, The Son Also Rises is sure to prompt intense debate for years to come.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.
Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.
A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

This book is the first comprehensive account of how Australia attained the world's highest living standards within a few decades of European settlement, and how the nation has sustained an enviable level of income to the present. Beginning with the Aboriginal economy at the end of the eighteenth century, Ian McLean argues that Australia's remarkable prosperity across nearly two centuries was reached and maintained by several shifting factors. These included imperial policies, favorable demographic characteristics, natural resource abundance, institutional adaptability and innovation, and growth-enhancing policy responses to major economic shocks, such as war, depression, and resource discoveries.
Natural resource abundance in Australia played a prominent role in some periods and faded during others, but overall, and contrary to the conventional view of economists, it was a blessing rather than a curse. McLean shows that Australia's location was not a hindrance when the international economy was centered in the North Atlantic, and became a positive influence following Asia's modernization. Participation in the world trading system, when it flourished, brought significant benefits, and during the interwar period when it did not, Australia's protection of domestic manufacturing did not significantly stall growth. McLean also considers how the country's notorious origins as a convict settlement positively influenced early productivity levels, and how British imperial policies enhanced prosperity during the colonial period. He looks at Australia's recent resource-based prosperity in historical perspective, and reveals striking elements of continuity that have underpinned the evolution of the country's economy since the nineteenth century.

This broad-ranging 1995 book provides a comprehensive account of the development of Australia's colonial economy before the gold rushes. Noel Butlin's analysis of the developing economy includes background discussion of eighteenth-century British social, economic, and military history and a detailed demographic analysis of the Australian population over a period of sixty years. He goes on to explore the role of private investment in the economy and the way in which dependence on the British public purse was replaced by dependence on private British capital inflow. A key focus of the book is the extent to which the Australian economy was independent or externally driven, that is, the level of synergism between Australia and Britain. Within this framework, Noel Butlin discusses the central issues of human capital and funding and their impact on the formation of the Australian economy. Forming a Colonial Economy does for the period to the 1840s what Noel Butlin's previous landmark economic histories have done for Australia from the 1860s to the 1890s. It is an ambitious and imaginative book that marks the culmination of a life's work.

Writing in the June 1965 issue of the "Economic Journal", Harry G. Johnson begins with a sentence seemingly calibrated to the scale of the book he set himself to review: 'The long-awaited "Monetary History of the United States" by Friedman and Schwartz is in every sense of the term a monumental scholarly achievement - monumental in its sheer bulk, monumental in the definitiveness of its treatment of innumerable issues, large and small ...monumental, above all, in the theoretical and statistical effort and ingenuity that have been brought to bear on the solution of complex and subtle economic issues'.Friedman and Schwartz marshaled massive historical data and sharp analytics to support the claim that monetary policy - steady control of the money supply - matters profoundly in the management of the nation's economy, especially in navigating serious economic fluctuations. In their influential chapter 7, "The Great Contraction" - which Princeton published in 1965 as a separate paperback - they address the central economic event of the century, the Depression. According to Hugh Rockoff, writing in January 1965: 'If Great Depressions could be prevented through timely actions by the monetary authority (or by a monetary rule), as Friedman and Schwartz had contended, then the case for market economies was measurably stronger.' Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2000 for work related to "A Monetary History " as well as to his other Princeton University Press book, "A Theory of the Consumption Function" (1957).

The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.
Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.
Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.

This wholly original reassessment of critical issues in modern Chinese history traces social, economic, and ecological change in inland North China during the late Qing dynasty and the Republic. Using many new sources, Kenneth Pomeranz argues that the development of certain regions entailed the systematic underdevelopment of other regions. He maps changes in local finance, farming, transportation, taxation, and popular protest, and analyzes the consequences for different classes, sub-regions, and genders.Pomeranz attributes these diverse developments to several causes: the growing but incomplete integration of North China into the world economy, the state's abandonment of many hinterland areas and traditional functions, and the effect of local social structures on these processes. He shows that hinterlands were made, not merely found, and were powerfully shaped by the strategies of local groups as well as outside forces. This wholly original reassessment of critical issues in modern Chinese history traces social, economic, and ecological change in inland North China during the late Qing dynasty and the Republic. Using many new sources, Kenneth Pomeranz argues that the development of certain regions entailed the systematic underdevelopment of other regions. He maps changes in local finance, farming, transportation, taxation, and popular protest, and analyzes the consequences for different classes, sub-regions, and genders.Pomeranz attributes these diverse developments to several causes: the growing but incomplete integration of North China into the world economy, the state's abandonment of many hinterland areas and traditional functions, and the effect of local social structures on these processes. He shows that hinterlands were made, not merely found, and were powerfully shaped by the strategies of local groups as well as outside forces.

The assumption still made in much social science research that Europe provides a universal model of development is fundamentally mistaken, according to R. Bin Wong. The solution is not, however, simply to reject Eurocentric norms but to build complementary perspectives, such as a Sinocentric one, to evaluate current understandings of European developments. A genuinely comparative perspective, he argues, will free China from wrong expectations and will allow those working on European problems to recognize the distinct character of Western development.