First off, Wade states:
"For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence."
However, the vast majority of anthropological data accumulated during the 20th century clearly shows that hunters and gatherers lived anything but impoverished lives... their "abject poverty" is rooted in the ethnocentric and ahistorical imposition of advanced industrial norms and standards on people who's values and desires were radically different than our own.
Wade also finds Clark arguing that:
"The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history"
as if anyone with an historical sense believed otherwise. Making matters worse, of course, is the wrong-headed assumption that the middle class is 1. committed to non-violence (spousal abuse, corporal punishment and beating animals were common in the middle class until very recently -- if not through to the present), 2. didn't embrace the forty hour work week of the post-war era (much less the still-shorter one in Europe to this day) and 3. is centrally concerned with an interest in saving (has anyone heard of credit cards, second mortgages, etc?)
The argument is basically that:
the economy [from 1200 to 1800] was locked in a Malthusian trap — each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level.
As such, Wade argues that incomes, in 1790, were "pitifully low" in terms of the grain people could buy and that peasants lived on about the same number of calories as contemporary hunter-gatherers. Perhaps the measure of caloric intake is accurate, though the focus on purchased food is likely a problem when peasants, distinguishable from independent farmers (tenant and otherwise), produced much of their food outside of the market.
Equally important, however, is the technodeterminist line taken here that suggests productivity was primarily constrained by technological -- rather than sociocultural limits -- and that new technologies, rather than new ways of organizing production, were the key to the boom in productivity. Anyone who appeals to changes in the nature of humanity or the determinates of technology is almost surely hiding (or failing to take into account) changes in social relations.
What is most staggering, however, is the utterly uncritical appeal to Malthus' argument about population outstripping food production when Malthus' argument has been so thoroughly savaged on intellectual and empirical grounds -- starting with Marx. The idea that the English Industrial Revolution increased productivity faster than the English people could produce people of course misses the extraordinary flow of people out of England to the Americas, South Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand and beyond.
In rather extraordinay fashion, however, we don't learn until half way through the long article that Clark's argument is largely based on a comparative analysis of the wills of the rich and poor when it is all-but impossible to believe that the majority of peasants between 1200 and 1800 had wills, much less had wills that survived in comparative numbers to those of the mercantile and elite classes of England.
Clark apparently argues that:
Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.
This, too, is flabbergasting. On the one hand, I have no idea when Clark starts collecting his data. On the other, and again this may be Wade more than Clark, in 1200 the proportion of the English population who were wealthy would have been inordinately small and, from 1200 to 1800, the vast majority of peasants and independent producers didn't have professions for left over elite kids to take over! The church and marriage were quite specifically for taking up excess boys and networking with other elites for girls. In fact, one of the major problems for the manorial and royal populations was subdividing lands.
What really knocks my socks off, however, is that none of the Marxist, Weberian, Wallersteinian, Foucaldian or other arguments about changes associated with the enclosure of the commons and proletarianization of the peasantry, the rationalization of bureaucracies and production, the dynamics of interconnection between the colonial core and colonized periphery, or the disciplining of bodies and minds even begin to be addressed in this argument.
As I should have noted in my previous posting about Carl Zimmer's reporting on Martin Nowack's work, the problem in passages like this:
After the Industrial Revolution, the gap in living standards between the richest and the poorest countries started to accelerate, from a wealth disparity of about 4 to 1 in 1800 to more than 50 to 1 today. Just as there is no agreed explanation for the Industrial Revolution, economists cannot account well for the divergence between rich and poor nations or they would have better remedies to offer.
resides in the intellectual and disciplinary limits of economics far more than anything else. That Wade and Clark would rather appear to arguments about changes in human nature rather than changes in human behavior rooted in changes in the material and ideological conditions of social life speaks once-again to the spread of relatively uncritical sociobiology-positive reporting in the Times.
A few critics are presented at the end of the piece but they are straw men for utterly fallacious arguments about natural selection having something to do with lactose tolerance in Northern Europe and changes in the population genetics of the people of Puerto Rico which are used to undermine more sociological/institutionalist accounts. Natural selection is about the evolution of species, slight differences in the genetic composition of geographic sub-groups of individual species are all-but surely not about natural, but are about social, selection.
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