Genetic Values

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution - the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 - occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.