The American novelist Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have said once to Ernest Hemingway, ‘You know, the rich are different from you and me.’ Hemingway replied, ‘Yes. They've got more money.’ Gregory Clark is of the Fitzgerald school. Most economic historians, among them his critics, follow Hemingway instead.

For many years, Greg Clark was mainly known amongst economic historians for two things – his devasting book reviews are as witty as they are insightful. He also invented a signature recipe for academic articles. Start with a fresh puzzle. Chop some theory and carefully knead into puzzle. Gently squeeze some data and mix well. Garnish with a racy dressing of Cambridge-honed essay-writing skills, while stirring the pot. Then, turn up the heat and watch how the puzzle slowly mushrooms into an ever larger paradox. Wrap into some mystery and serve as is.

The large-scale structure of world economic history exhibits three steady states punctuated by two phase transitions. The first transition arrived with the domestication of plants and animals; the second with the invention of engines capable of converting thermal to mechanical energy for applications in mining, manufacturing, and transportation. Yet, although both transitions led to increases in the absolute size of the economy, they affected the standard of living differently. Whereas the Industrial Revolution resulted in sustained growth in real per capita income for more than two centuries, over nine millennia the Agricultural Revolution spent itself in population growth that left per capita income insignificantly higher, and possibly lower than the level prevailing under hunting and gathering. This pattern raises three fundamental questions in economic history: why did the first great technological transition produce secular stasis in living standards? Why has the second yielded both steady growth in population and rising living standards? What triggered the transition from the stationary agricultural state to the progressive industrial state?

Greg Clark is a master of the art of using one-liners in telling stories and Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World is no exception. It offers the Malthusian hypothesis of population growth leading to misery as an all-purpose vehicle for all human history, except for the last 200 years. However, his Malthusianism is at times more evangelical than empirical and analytical. He dismisses Angus Maddison's painstaking efforts (e.g. Maddison 2001, 2003) at providing an empirical basis for long-run income estimates (p. 19) as inconsistent with the logic of the Malthusian economy. When the historical record contradicts Greg Clark it is not allowed to stand in the way of his noble aim and declared intention of writing big history. At least in one respect he has succeeded: this book is the widescreen version of the Postan Thesis, although M. M. Postan (1966, 1972) is remarkably missing in the credits. The book is also big in rhetorical gestures, starting with the title, and a reader must be forgiven for occasionally asking whether the author should be interpreted literally, or whether statements should simply be deflated by common sense. I have decided to go nominal on Clark.

The four reviews make the following major criticisms of the book:

1. (1) A Farewell to Alms assumes one important revolution in economic history, the Industrial Revolution. In reality there were two, with the Neolithic Revolution of equal importance (George Grantham).

2. (2) World income levels did rise between the Stone Age and 1800 (Gunnar Persson, Hans-Joachim Voth).

3. (3) The Malthusian model has been shown to be inapplicable to pre-industrial Europe (Grantham, Persson).

4. (4) The claim of ‘survival of the richest’ is just the revival of discredited and dangerous social Darwinism? (Deirdre McCloskey).

5. (5) There was no Darwinian selection for ‘bourgeois characteristics’ in the pre-industrial world of settled, institutionally stable agrarian societies (McCloskey).

6. (6) The recent growth of India and China, and the experience of immigrants to the USA, easily refute the view that survival of the richest had any impact (McCloskey).

7. (7) The ideas of A Farewell to Alms are not new, merely uncredited borrowings from others (McCloskey, Persson, Voth).

Germany's historical national accounts are controversially discussed in a series of recent papers by Fremdling and Stäglin (2004, 2005), Ritschl (2004) and Burhop and Wolff (2005). The growth of the German economy during the nineteenth century, the level of economic development reached in 1913 and the depth of the interwar slump are the major points of concern. This short article contributes to this debate by providing a benchmark estimate of labour productivity in mining, crafts and industry in 1913 using official input–output data. We confirm earlier results by Burhop and Wolff (2005) that the level of labour productivity in 1913 was much higher than the classical work by Hoffmann (1965) suggests.

This article briefly reviews the core literature on the Golden Age of economic growth and tests the explanatory power of alternative theories against one another, with particular emphasis on the reconstruction thesis as developed by Jánossy. While previous empirical work on the subject relied on cross-sectional analysis, I employ panel-data techniques, which produce more robust estimates. I demonstrate that, for the core western industrialised nations, the rapidity and variety of economic growth during the 1950s and 1960s can mostly be explained by post-war reconstruction, the completion of which marked the end of the Golden Age. Labour-force expansion also made a very strong positive contribution. In the more peripheral countries of the OECD, however, rapid catching-up from the late 1950s was largely brought about by structural modernisation. Finally, human-capital accumulation has had a determining impact on long-run growth potentials, modelled here as time-constant country-fixed effects.