Figure 3-7

The answer, he suggested, was that the nature of Englishmen had changed. Starting around 1250, when England began to shift from knightly society to “a nation of shopkeepers” (as Napoleon would sneeringly call it), the wealthier commoners had more surviving children than the poorer ones, presumably because they married younger and could afford better food and cleaner living conditions. Clark calls it “the survival of the richest”: the rich got richer and they got children. This upper middle class was also outreproducing the aristocrats, who were splitting heads and chopping off body parts in their tournaments and private wars, as we say in figure 3-7, also taken from Clark’s data. Since the economy as a whole would not begin to expand until the 19th century, the extra surviving children of the wealthier merchants and tradesmen had nowhere to go on the economic ladder but downward. They continuously replaced the poorer commoners, bringing with them their bourgeois traits of thrift, hard work, self-control, patient future discounting, and avoidance of violence. The population of England literally evolved middle-class values. That in turn positioned them to take advantage of the commercial opportunities opened up by the innovations of the Industrial Revolution. Though Clark occasionally dodges the political correctness police by noting that nonviolence and self-control and be passed from parent to child as cultural habits, in a précis of his book entitled “Genetically Capitalist?” he offers the full-strength vision o his theses:

“The highly capitalistic nature of English society by 1800 – individualism, low time preference rates, long work hours, high level of human capital – may thus stem from the nature of the Darwinian struggle in a very stable agrarian society in the long run up to the Industrial Revolution. The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus my lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.” ~ Pages 620-621