In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence

The Industrial Revolution may have been the result of an evolutionary change in human nature, argues Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis. His research shows that, generation after generation, the wealthy people of England had more surviving children than the poor, leading him to theorize that the behaviors that made for wealth – or the middle-class values of thrift, prudence, negotiation, literacy and hard work as recipe for success – became prevalent over the centuries. The resulting increase in productivity eventually brought much of humanity out of a vicious cycle of poverty. The same did not occur in much larger Asian populations, as their wealthy classes were unusually unfertile, failing to pass production-oriented values to successive generations. Even though his thesis may be "quite a speculative leap," his underlying data are indisputable. – YaleGlobal