I'm happy to believe that the standard of living in Malawi is deplorable (have I plugged the ONE Campaign recently?) but Gregory Clark's argument that living standards are actually worse than they were for stone age hunter-gatherers seems a bit hard to believe. This comes to me via Brad DeLong who seems to agree. Either way, I keep meaning to read Clark's book and it certainly does seem interesting.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/10/malawi-vs-the-stone-age/43474/
