Clark's response to McCluskey over on CATO

Clark's response to McCluskey over on CATO is in the mainstream and really illuminates the North thesis of the centrality of informal institutions in the process of economic change.

I believe modern growth is associated with a deeper, more basic shift in values and capacities than McCloskey identifies for a number of reasons. First, the behavioral shifts that took place in societies like England before the Industrial Revolution were much longer in development than some brief intellectual fashion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. England already in 1300 was a fundamentally different type of society than that of our hunter-gatherer forbears. We are talking in some cases about at least 3,000 years of change.

Second, behaviors changed that people were not even aware of, or subjecting to public discussion. These fundamental changes include changes in how impatient people were, changes in how hard they liked to work, and changes in how much interpersonal violence they displayed. [3]

Third, the drive toward innovation, improvement, and consumption that moves capitalism ever forward is remarkably resistant to attempts at reformation. Mao could re-educate a whole generation of Chinese on the virtues of communism, yet they have turned en masse to a fervent pursuit of material goods and personal interest within two decades of his death.