------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------  
Published by EH.NET (January 2006)  
  
Frederic L. Pryor, _Economic Systems of Foraging, Agricultural, and   
Industrial Societies_. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005.   
xvi + 316 pp. $31.76 (paperback), ISBN: 0-521-61347-7.  
  
Reviewed for EH.NET by George Grantham, Department of Economics,   
McGill University.  
  
  
Certain books can be considered experiments. The extended essay is   
the most common form; Frederic Pryor's present attempt to empirically   
extract a taxonomy of economic systems from a set of social   
statistics is another. Not all experiments succeed, but the failures   
can often teach us as much as the successes. Pryor's experiment in   
economic phenomenology falls in the class of useful failures. Its use   
is to demonstrate why the phenomenological approach to economic and   
social modeling is unlikely to yield useful insights, an argument   
advanced long ago by Tjalling Koopmans. The question that motivates   
Pryor's attempt is nevertheless fundamental. Is there such a thing as   
an 'economic system,' and if so, do such systems arrange themselves   
into taxons defined by empirically verifiable traits? And if traits   
do cluster in ways suggesting organically coherent ensembles, can   
that coherence be explained by a generally accepted behavioral   
theory? These questions comprise the program of comparative economic   
systems, a field that despite the potentially large contribution of   
insights to be gleaned from game theory has fallen into neglect since   
the collapse of the Soviet Empire destroyed the major systemic   
alternative to western capitalism.  
  
Pryor adopts the statistical procedures of cluster analysis to   
empirically define 'systems.' The obstacles to successful prosecution   
of this program are legion. The first resides in the nature of the   
sample, which for the non-industrial societies was drawn from the   
Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) compiled by Murdock and White   
in the 1960s from ethnographical reports and accounts by   
missionaries, travelers and government officials. Its heterogeneity   
needs hardly to be mentioned. The industrial and post-industrial   
sample comes from the OECD, for which the problem is not so much   
heterogeneity as homogeneity begging the question, in what essential   
ways do the highly integrated economies of northwest Europe   
individually represent distinct 'observations' rather than   
manifestations of a single case characterized by internal regional   
variation? Another obstacle is the qualitative nature of the   
attributes, which for statistical purposes must be coded by   
unavoidably arbitrary criteria grouping them into analytical classes.   
Even making due allowance for Pryor's considerable skill and great   
erudition, one may question whether the boundaries represent real   
lines of division.  
  
In any event, the proof of experimental economics is in the pudding,   
and Pryor's pudding yields few plums. He finds six varieties of   
foraging societies based on such characteristics as level of economic   
development, degree of wealth-sharing, extent of private   
landownership, presence of taxation and the importance of taxes and   
tributes, but no obvious explanation for the observed differences.   
Among societies representing the transition from foraging to farming,   
he finds some (but not much) evidence for population pressure, but   
the direction of causation is unclear. Among agricultural societies,   
he finds four basic types based essentially on the intensity of land   
use; the clusters are loose and overlap. One may question the logic   
of farming societies from regions as distinct as Sub-Saharan Africa,   
South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. As to results, it   
is hardly surprising that societies that practice mixed farming use   
more capital per hectare than those who don't.  
  
In the analysis of societies transiting from agriculture to industry,   
we move from the small individual societies of the SCCS sample to   
nation-states. While the shifting focus is largely dictated by the   
nature of the data, Pryor's procedure begs the important question of   
what level of spatial aggregation is appropriate for analyzing the   
Industrial Revolution, which a century of intensive scholarship has   
yet to resolve. As to the correlations, Pryor finds that literacy   
mattered, at least in a statistical sense; agricultural productivity   
mattered some, but not much, and urbanization not at all, mainly   
because Italy and Spain were comparatively urbanized in the sixteenth   
century, but failed to initiate industrialization. It is hard to know   
what to make of this farrago of straw men. The degree of   
commercialization, or what he calls 'Marketization,' mattered, though   
it is a legitimate question whether the measure picks up anything   
more than the development of a dense commercial infrastructure   
capable of sustaining greater specialization, industrial or   
otherwise. In short, the 'findings' are what one expects, because   
they report what one already knew. The OECD sample of 'advanced   
post-industrial societies' clusters into three groupings: southern   
European, Northern European (including its English-speaking   
offshoots), and Nordic. One hardly needs to read the chapter to   
predict it. Whether the differences are meaningful in the sense of   
representing taxonomically different economic 'systems,' however, is   
open to question. They may represent different points in a process of   
convergence, or random fluctuations around a mean 'type.' Cluster   
analysis provides no basis for distinguishing these possibilities   
from the hypothesis that they represent true 'types.'  
  
The one distinct type of modern society was the totalitarian type   
represented in recent decades by the Soviet regimes of Eastern   
Europe. Here Pryor, as a specialist on East Germany (and at one time   
a hostage in an East-West spy exchange negotiation) is on ground he   
knows well. For the Soviet regimes did, indeed, constitute a   
self-consciously distinct system. Although it contains little that is   
new, the review is insightful and useful. In particular, Pryor   
refutes the hypothesis that the Marxist regimes fell because of   
absolutely poor economic performance. For several decades that   
performance, measured conventionally as growth in real GDP per capita   
was quite respectable, and in some instances outstanding. Measured   
against underdeveloped countries it was quite good; measured against   
the nations sharing a common cultural heritage, however, the level of   
per capita consumption achieved in the Marxist states was poor and   
worsening. As one expects, both static and dynamic efficiency were   
much lower than in the capitalist OECD economies.  
  
In the end this is a disappointing book. Perhaps its most useful   
feature is its extensive bibliography. Pryor reads widely and   
intelligently. On the whole, his judgments on the literature he   
surveys are accurate and sound. The fatal flaw of this book lies in   
the undemonstrated presumption that societies organize themselves   
into structural wholes. That this must in some sense be true is   
plausible: we do not observe a random assortment of economic forms.   
Whether empirical links between different attributes are necessary or   
contingent is a different matter altogether. The study of comparative   
economic systems originated in the late eighteenth century out of   
concerns that the growing commercialization of life was breaking down   
traditional social and political structures which (excepting   
conflicts over religion) had ensured relative peace for centuries.   
Though not brand new, the accelerating pace of commercial contact and   
industrialization suggested the onset of a new form of economy and   
society, which in turn encouraged the study of primitive and peasant   
societies as a source of generalizations from which alternative   
models of social organization might be constructed. The Bolshevik   
experiment provided an actual example of a society founded on   
alternative principles. None of this work, however, was supported by   
much in the way of theory; the stages theory of evolution was   
essentially a typological description of what was then supposed to be   
the story of Europe's economic development since the fall of the   
Roman Empire. The actual stages, like the ethnological   
reconstructions, were ideal types, maintained by a logic that was   
nowhere clearly articulated. As Teggart noted almost a century ago,   
that logic was essentially aesthetic.  
  
Pryor's effort to supply an empirical basis to this paradigm is   
admirable. But the original weaknesses of the taxonomical approach to   
large-scale economic forms are ever-present. As an abstract category,   
an economic system is too large and too complex to be characterized   
by a set of attributes. The distinction between the Soviet   
totalitarian economy and the western market economies was sui   
generis, and one hopes, permanently unique. This is an interesting   
book, but not a fundamental one.  
  
  
Grantham is currently working on, among other things, an intellectual   
history of the discipline of economic history.  
  
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