Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus)

29:15Maybe that's just our disease. Well, having written on the history of the Indian industrialization in 1999, I dragged by spouse and three children on a five -month tour of India, seeking to try and just by being on the ground there to see if you could understand anything more about why this economy, which was still at that stage, you know, lagging enormously behind. And I would actually, we traveled on train all the time and we'd end up talking to Indians and it was interesting to ask people, you know, why is India so poor? But it turns out that people have all kinds of answers, but they're easily testable as false.

29:59They say, oh, it's the population. We have too many people, right? And we know now that, of course, that that actually is not going to make any difference or it's the corrupt politicians or the education system, stuff like that. And so the problem with, as I say, this kind of pluralistic open humanities type explanation is it doesn't work. It's time to get on board with the scientific revolution. We can only explain things if we have these mechanistic closed -form impertically testable explanations, otherwise, it's just conversation. If we take England, when I read your book Farewell to Alms, I Took you to be ambiguous, but when I reread that book through the lens of your later papers It seems to me you're saying there was an actual genetic change in English society because of who was marrying whom and having kids with whom and Thus people you know saved more became more conscientious more forward looking yes Now if that was genetic rather than cultural Why is it today when I go to England?

31:03There's a lot of them disappointed by when it comes to conscientiousness I mean, really quite a bit compared to say the rest of Europe. And that to me suggests it was much more cultural than genetic. The genetic change was probably small, the cultural one huge, because it hasn't persisted. I mean, the differences in output per person in England compared to the rest of Europe are actually relatively minor. And if you look at other kinds of productions like scientific production, literary production, and other things like that, there's no vast difference, right? But it's just slightly below average mediocre performance.

31:41A bunch of stars in the South star achievement. But if it were this general trend through the population as a whole, North England should be highly conscientious. It doesn't seem to be that much compared to say the Netherlands at all. Well, what never mind Denmark, right? Well, well, two things I want to emphasize here. So one is I think the processes that were operating in pre -industrial England reflect general processes operating in northern Europe where all of these societies show this phenomena of survival of the richest going on hundreds and hundreds of years before the industrial revolution We now we know very clearly that there are genetic differences between people at the top of the social ladder and people at the bottom and that that was going to change the underlying genetics of these societies and it seems to be, as I say, a general feature, right?

32:35So that's the first point. So I don't think of England as being that different from these other locations, right? The industrial revolution spread out much more across Europe than you might think. There were accidental factors that propelled it to prominence in England. in the new manuscript, what we're actually able, I'm able to do, is track the reproductive success of people since 1750. And there was a period from 1850 till the 1920s or 30s when an astonishingly low fertility emerged amongst upper classes in Britain. And that was also compounded by very heavy losses of the upper classes in World War I.

33:23So 20 % of men of that generation in the upper classes died in World War I, but reproduction rates were at like one child per family or one and a half for 50 or 60 years in the late 19th century amongst this group. And so the relative size of the upper class in Britain actually shrank dramatically in the course of this period. And so that's one potential explanation of again why kind of British performance has been relatively look warm since about World War One, right? Because as I say it did go through this surprising and dramatic kind of transformation socially where you're really losing a lot of this upper class.

34:09And by the way one interesting thing was how few of this upper class actually ended up marrying in this period. So it was somehow kind of renunciation of marriage and of family at that time and kind of puzzling, right? And it doesn't, it hasn't persisted. I mean, now in Britain fertility is pretty neutral between upper class and lower class, but there was this 60 year period and that associated with quite a dramatic decline of Britain's kind of entrepreneurship and leadership in the world economy. And so there is this kind of intriguing possibility that this actually was an important kind of historical event.

34:48But the genetic perspective doesn't imply that society is close to Malthusian margins should actually become more and more conscientious over time because just to survive, you've got to take care of whatever savings you have and that that trade should evolve, but just casual empiricism doesn't seem to show those societies as being more conscientious. But here's one element of casual empiricism. So if you look in modern economic competition, we can kind of rank societies by how old they are. So China is extremely old. If you go to other parts of Southeast Asia, these are much kind of younger societies in terms of settled agriculture.

35:34And what you observe in Asia is that laborers exported from China to work on plantations elsewhere in Southeast Asia have become the entrepreneurial class in all of those societies, in Indonesia, in Malaysia, in the Philippines, and that somehow the history of different societies is still predictive of how people are going to do in modern economic competition. And the question would be, you know, putting it back to you, what kind of cultural explanation would there be for why that type of history would actually matter so much in terms of modern competition, but one argument just would be that under the kind of the anvil of the Malthusian era, these societies would just transform more by these selective pressures applied for thousands of years, and that that then emerges in terms of kind of basic behavior of people in the society that makes them perform better even now.

36:40The most conscientious places, Denmark being one example, as you now live with, they've been above subsistence for quite a while. The Danes had a somewhat mature nation -state, quite early, as did England, some relative form of stability, markets with food supply and transportation networks. Again, you could make a point about China, but if you just test that point out of sample, where were the conscientious peoples? It seems it's in the places, the furthest from Malthusian equilibria, where selection pressures are the weakest. Now it's true in Northwest Europe that living standards in the pre -industrial period, material living standards were significantly higher than it seems in Asia, right?

37:23And that shows up in a whole bunch of ways. For example, people at higher living standards consume alcohol. it's an expensive form of calories. In Asia, there's very little consumption of alcohol, and that actually shows up now in terms of people's tolerance for alcohol. Again, dairy products in Europe, they're widely consumed in Asia, no, again, they're too expensive, and that shows up again in people's ability to absorb milk. But because you're at this higher material standard, doesn't mean to say that the musluzian constraints are not still applied. And so there are relatively rich, maltheucian societies, but they can still be societies where the conditions of reproduction are such that people are constrained, that they will only reproduce successfully if they're above these living standards.

38:14And that can be because of various social constraints about when people get married, how fertile marriages are. And so as I say, the fact that Europe was relatively rich, And we can even extend this back to this Stone Age in northern Europe, where again, skeletons from that period are very robust compared to somewhere like Japan in the early period. That doesn't mean that these Malthusian constraints didn't operate. And one classic example of this is when people arrived in Tahiti, that was clearly a Malthusian society. There's a bunch of people stuck in an island and you know with limited resources and you were going to reach some kind of population equilibrium and you were clearly going to be under these Malthusian constraints.

39:00But it was materially quite well -resourced society. But you still have these constraints and as long as you have these constraints, it's possible then for people who are doing better economically to produce more children and doing worse economically to produce fewer children. This is maybe a side point, but it seems odd to me to think of them as Malthusian, when they have the greatest ability to transport themselves over long distances of almost any society, and they settle much of the South Pacific, and the idea that mobility gets you free land, free supply of fish, whatever, they seem to have realized that better than almost anyone.

39:37And the Europeans, when they went there, they didn't feel so sorry for the dehesions, right? Oh no, they thought the dehesions were letting you know terribly well. Yeah, so it wasn't an Althusian because of transportation and mobility. No, no, no, but they were isolated and they had these very limited resources and it turns out Why were living standards so great two things? They had murderous internal warfare that disposed of a lot of people and the second thing is that they practiced very strong degree of Infanticide and they were killing between a third and a half of all children born in the society and so So it was a Malthusian society, but it turns out there are lots of Malthusian societies where people live at relatively high living standards.

40:21Well, in what sense is it Malthusian, then, that the regulating mechanism is not starvation seems almost by definition to make it not Malthusian? No, no. To be Malthusian, it just has to be a society where there's going to be a positive association between fertility rates and living standards, right? And where there's a limited supply of... That's a funny definition from Althus. I mean, it's my definition. Marke, no, no. I say this is a widespread misinterpretation of Althus. I think is that Althus is about low living standards, right? And so I think my earlier book, A Fairwalter Arms, One of the actual innovative elements of that book was to say, let's take apart these two different elements of mouthhousianism.

41:13And one is the element that you're forced to an equilibrium, where the birth rate equals the death rate. But the second is that that equilibrium does not necessarily imply relatively low living standards. And the way this shows up is, after the Black Death in Europe, which increased mortality rates, Living standards in somewhat like Britain in 1450 were not again equal to the end of the industrial revolution, right? But you could tell this was a static population in England at that period. There were tiny numbers of people that were made less than 2 million people in England by 1450, but it was consequently a Malthusian economy, but an incredibly rich Malthusian economy, where people, when they talked about their diet, they talked about the daily meat that they would eat.

42:03And so they really were living at high material living standards. We can go back and look at the houses they constructed in that period. People here in Arlington would be happy to move into some of these medieval houses. The under your current view is foreign aid to sub -Saharan Africa counterproductive. And I'm not talking about corruption or siphoning it off. those are clearly problems, but just aid as a brute abstract concept. Does it counteract itself through Malthusian or what I would call clarky and mechanisms? Because I think you used to believe that. There are societies like Malawi in Sub -Saharan Africa where there is consistent economic progress, but that progress gets eaten up in terms of population growth.

42:51And so the living standards really have not managed to increase for 50 or 60 years in these societies because they still depend very heavily on agriculture. There's a limited agricultural area and better technology than induces more people. How could you best help such societies? It would be somehow by breaking that link between resources and population. So industrialization, if it's possible to achieve, would be fantastic in these societies. And the second thing would be limits on population growth. And it looks like those limits are coming. And that we are going to see such a transformation.

43:31But there's a lot of the say this public health, right? So more people survive, more people live longer. Right. Oh no, that all seems to me to give them better lives. It may not always show up in the capital GDP. Right. But even though as I say, there still is this kind of quasi -malfusion link between population and living standards in these societies, that doesn't mean to say that people wouldn't be better off if you give people more resources. And so if you care about the population in Africa and their living standards, then there's nothing to say that aid isn't a good thing in this case. All that you can say though is look, a bunch of that aid will result in more population growth, and so it will undercut the ultimate effects of that aid, and it would be much more effective if somehow you can actually transform these societies so that they're not heavily dependent on limited agricultural resources.

44:28You wrote a piece published in Quillette, and you use the word hereditaryan, and you say, I'm a hereditaryan, and that means a lot of redistribution of income is a good thing. I'm oversimplifying your message. But in so far as one is a hereditary, and what are the policy implications of that? Oh, I think if once you recognize that a lot of our outcomes are actually the product of inheritance and are not mutable, they're not changeable, then that fits perfectly well with a society like that I like living in Denmark, where there's a huge amount of redistribution effectively being done. And so I think these things go together.

45:09I mean, you should recognize that, you know, a lot of things happen to us that we don't control. There are accidents of our history, our family history. And that a good society is one that doesn't magnify those differences between people, but rather can seek to compress them. And one of the things interesting is about Denmark. It's stunning to me when I go there. Tax rates and people are so high. But it's still a highly productive, technologically innovative society, and so it's proving that you could have a surprising amount of kind of compression of income differences and redistribution and still have a perfectly functional society.

45:50But isn't the implication in a way the exact opposite of that, that if the way people can advance is by moving, Denmark is pretty stingy with its migration policy, and Denmark Mark should have lower taxes, lower welfare, to attract the higher quality immigrants, say from South India and other places, and they should be more open. That would make them much more productive, make the people coming from South India way, way, way more productive, be good for the whole world because Denmark is closer at to the technological frontier. We see this with GLP, and it's exactly an argument against this kind of little closed.

46:24We all went to high school together. We're going to have a welfare state with high taxes approved. Well, I have I say that so there is a problem then in Denmark, which is that It's replies on people Not taking huge advantage of this welfare system, which is very generous Immigrants coming to Denmark Have not responded in the same way And so you maybe you're taking in the wrong immigrants because if there's a welfare system and high taxes You're not selecting for the people who are gonna do the best unlike the United States which gets all these Indian CEOs because you can get richer here and stay richer.

47:00Right, and now it actually in Danish politics there is a strong argument about what type of immigrants you want to attract. And so throughout Europe in fact this has become a huge issue, but you've got to get rid of these high taxes to get the good ones. Well, that's a good question. I mean, Denmark offers a lot of other good things in life though I must say the weather is not one of them. But it is actually interesting, yes, how limited emigration has been from places like, say, Vietnam or India or something like that, two places like Denmark, because these immigrants would do would be very successful within this society.

47:38And the more the native Danes are below replacement fertility, right, more urgent it is that you allow attacks and attract the best migrants, I would think. But one thing, you should just be like a full -scale classical liberal, low -tax regime. Yes, you need a safety net, but not too much because that will attract the wrong immigrants. People that come to America, they know they've got to make it on their own, right? And that attracts, on average, the right immigrants. Yeah, but you could see every day in Denmark, the benefits of having so unskilled workers earn much higher wages than they would in the United States.

48:13People can live at a decent living standard. I mean, I'm living in California part of the year, and it's just shocking the number of homeless people there are everywhere, right? Within a mile of my house, there are people living homeless in California, and that just doesn't exist this in Denmark. And so I understand perfectly the Danes desire to preserve this, But the other problem that they have is there's only five and a half million of them. They cherish their culture, their history and stuff like that. And they, you know, one of the things they would fear about immigration is that already, you know, if you walk in the streets of Copenhagen, the majority of people are speaking English to each other.

49:02And so the other thing I think is that would limit immigration to Denmark is that people who really do have this cultural identity. And one of the things that they wanted to insist was that immigrants actually have to assimilate. And it's actually, I'm all for that, right? And it turns out it's perfectly possible for someone like me to not assimilate and speak English in Danish society. It isn't an intriguing issue though, about whether it should be become more free market, so that then we could have a different attractiveness to different sets of immigrants, right? After you moved to Denmark, Southern Denmark, what was the biggest surprise for you?

49:41I was surprised at how kind of communitarian Danes were. So at the University of Hamat, every Friday, they gather in a lecture room to sing songs together, right? And also, you know, there's an annual Christmas party and the university. they have 4 ,000 people eat dinner together at the university, I was actually surprised at that kind of sense of community that they have. Free was that fun or stifling? Oh no, I like it. I mean, I appreciate it. But like you do it. Are you there singing? I don't go to the singing. But the other thing, that was my first surprise. The second thing that surprised me was how committed Daneswara's drinkers.

50:34I talked to these are the things that surprised you. In the town I'm in, there's actually a pub that opens at 10 at night and stays open till 8 a .m. in the morning. Danes are not the most targeted people in the world. My thought is, what are they doing all night at this pub? As I say, I was just surprised at that because I think of, you know, in other respects, by the way, Danes are super healthy. They're gyms open all hours. There are people in there exercising all the time, and they do very well. So I was surprised, though, at how much they drank. And then, secondly, they're kind of residing sense of community.

51:17And so they have laws in Denmark, for example, try to prevent Germans from actually buying seaside property in towns, where you actually have to live in the property all year. And so I appreciate, you know, I come from Scotland, and so I appreciate the kind of the problems of kind of small societies trying to still remain kind of culturally distinct in this modern world. How optimistic are you about Scotland today? I actually, I've seen the data, and the north of England is a terrible shade. But interestingly, Scotland is doing much better. And one of the things is what's interesting about Scottish society is when I go back there now, I seem to them completely like an American, but I meet all kinds of people who are completely non -Skottish and origin who have become culturally completely Scottish.

52:10And so my niece got married there to a guy who's Chinese and his best man was Vietnamese, and they were all dressed and killed, and they had bagpipes playing. And so culturally, it's amazing that people, the culture kind of continues in Scotland. And in economic terms, Scotland is actually doing pretty well. And so as I say, it's not as big subsidies, right? From South of England. Without those subsidies, what's per capita GDP there? Well, I mean, I did say that when Scotland was becoming considering independence, this would be like a parasite detaching itself from the host. Yeah. Because in order to keep Scotland within the UK, they have been paying out these very generous subsidies.

52:56So for example, in Scotland, University education is free. In England, you have to pay for this. And Scottish universities then actually have to charge English students for their education around. The English would be flooding across the borders into Scotland. But it turns out under the EU, the Germans could go for free because the EU treaties actually said you can't discriminate against people from other countries, but you can discriminate from people within your own country. But my hope is that Scotland will remain part of the UK and will continue to draw subsidies from the UK treasury. And as it seems to be doing fine.

53:39Why are public health indicators so bad in and around Glasgow? Like there's some of the worst in the developed world, maybe the very worst. So this actually was interesting when I was writing my second book. I Wanted to illustrate this with a picture because Glasgow has some of the lowest life expectancy of Of anywhere in Western Europe some parts of Glasgow within a few miles of where I lived in Glasgow And so I thought oh, that's fine. I'll go to Google Earth and I'll get a picture of the squalor of Glasgow and it turns out it doesn't exist That the very last go No, no, no. No, no. The subsidies that ever they have, the show generous, I couldn't find genuine squalor in Glasgow.

54:22You mean in New Jersey boy? Not compared to you on a tour. Not compared to California, right? And so, in the end, I had to actually use this kind of slightly fake picture, which was showed squalor, but it was because it was a building that was going to be demolished. But what it was amazing is that within what is relatively decent material conditions, people live these lives which are ones of, you know, terrible health conditions, lots of people unemployed, and again, it's kind of hard to understand. It can't be genetic, right? Because it's fairly recent. So it's cultural. No, alter has this big huge influence.

55:06But there's been a lot of selective migration in within the UK. And so this new book says, the growth of the South and the decline of the North is all attributable to self -selection within Britain. And so Glasgow, where I come from, has had a huge amount of out migration. And out migration, I mean, it tends to be people with more talent, and the ability, stuff like that, are the ones who are on the move. And so, you know, what you're actually seeing, I think a lot of that is this kind of selective migration of people. I must say, so my sister trained as a doctor in Glasgow, and when they interviewed patients, they were actually trained to ask them, well, how much do you drink per day, ten pints?

55:54And people would say, oh no doctor, only six. And so, you know, so that in some sense you might say, well, that's some kind of cultural hangover in terms of people's attitude to things like drinking and exercise and vegetables. What's your take then on modern Ireland? Because there's incredibly high rates of out migration and I don't just mean the potato famine, just Irish going to Liverpool, right? America, Australia, all over. or you look at Ireland today, it doesn't seem selection as that important, their education level as the highest in Western Europe, health indicators, income, whatever test you want to run, they just seem like normal Ireland.

56:37Yeah, so selection there hasn't had it or what should I infer? Well, so it turns out even though I live in Scotland, all of my family is Irish. Ah, okay, we're talking. So you need it. And so I thought about the whole selection issue, but the interesting thing is, so my co -author Neil Cummins has a paper that just came out, I think, just coming out, about the Irish in England, which argues that there was significant negative selection to the Irish who actually moved to England. And that the Irish within England, even over the course of 150 years, have remained a lower class in English society, particularly those who moved to the north of England.

57:20Right? And why negative selection and this hypothesis? Because the ones who were about to starve? I think one argument was the kinds of jobs that were available in the north of England favored people who were unskilled. Right? And so again, in Scotland, what were the Irish doing coming in? They were working in the steelworks, the coal mines, scrap yards, and stuff like that, I mean, it was kind of heavy industry that was attracting these migrants. And so one argument has been actually that migration out of Ireland has actually not been particularly positively selected. Now in this new book, I do actually look at migration from England to other countries and interestingly, so English migrants to the United States are the least positively selected, but for other countries like Australia and New Zealand, they are being positively selected.

58:14But that's more than counterbalanced in England by emigration of skilled people into England, right? And so basically England has constantly been refreshed by migrants from Europe who are highly skilled. The process of migration is quite complex. And so again, the question I had in Scandinavia was, look Sweden and Denmark and Sweden and Norway, not so much Denmark, lost huge fraction of their population in the 19th century to migration. How can these countries be so highly performing now? But again, it turns out the evidence is that migration was actually negatively selected in Scandinavia. If I go to North Dakota, which is full of Scandinavians, they're doing fine.

58:59Their indicators are great. They sort of look feel an act a bit like actual Nordics demographically. It doesn't feel like negative selection. It turns out so again in the book the Sun also rises you can examine just looking at surnames different groups within US society and basically all kind of European groups within the United States look very average right and so I think what was happening was that there wasn't really particularly strong selective pressures on migrations out of Europe. You do see that people who came from Quebec, French speakers from Quebec, are an underclass in the United States, and that somehow there was some kind of negative selection of people from that background.

59:49But basically, Europeans in the United and then the new elites in the United States are Chinese, particularly Indians, the Jewish population, and stuff like that, where there is clearly some kind of very strong positive selection going on. But it seems like the 19th century migration was not so selective. And so my sense for Ireland would be whatever the forces of driving migration in Ireland were, are maybe it actually was was either neutral or even negatively selected some of the immigration from Ireland. Do you have a sense for Latin America? I unfortunately don't know. I know a different set of them go to Spain than to the US.

1:00:38I'm not sure how it all pans out. But if you look at migrants from Latin America to the United States, the further way the country is from the US, the better they tend to do. And so the more positively selected they tend to do. from a quater growth hypothesis predicts that too, right? Oh right, that would also be yes. So I think it tends to be, if you're coming from places like Chile, some of that coming to the United States, I think it tends to be quite strongly positively selected, yeah. Before we move to questions, I'll just note Greg is in the process of producing a new book, I believe the title is, For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls, Genetics and Social Life in England, 1600 to 2025 before I turn over to the crowd.

1:01:20Would you like to just say a few words about your next book? I know you've covered some parts of it already. Yeah, so the next book has been unfortunately 10 years in production because it depends on assembling this very big database, a detailed genealogy of people over 300 years in England. and I was really kind of motivated by this question of to what extent does genetics actually determine social outcomes? And this book does a detailed study of all the predictions of a genetic model, right? And so it looks at things like does birth order matter? Does gender matter?

1:02:08Does If your parents die, does that influence your life course? What about your grandparents? Can they, and the conclusion in all of these studies is, we're mainly the product of our genetics and randomness. And randomness is a huge component as well. But and that's why I say, amazingly, we seemed in decided like England for 300 years, have largely lived in a meritocracy. Because what would be the characteristics of meritocracy? It would be a society where genetics and randomness would be the only forces that really mattered. And so that's what the new book then is all about. And one message to this is, don't spend a lot of time with your children.

1:02:52It doesn't matter. Greg Clark, thank you very much.

1:03:00For questions, there is the mic. Please do not block the camera. And first question, yes, please. I have a number of questions, but I can constrict the, I'll start with the most important ones. Your wage price series in a farewell to Alms takes a very bare bones view of what should be in the consumption basket, you know, so food, you know, housing, clothing, and then that's it, right? And so you have a very low estimate of living standards. But other more expansive, like definitions, like mock years come to very large increases in income from like time of hastings to beginning of the industrial revolution.

1:03:40And so I guess like do you have a philosophical reason for taking a very narrow construction? and are you concerned that if you took that same very narrow construction into the present day, you would arrive at clearly observed results like we have barely improved in living standards over time. Yeah, so this is, you know, when you construct these living standards series, you just have to look at what people actually consumed, right? And so, consumption of things like books in Europe in 1400 would be 0 .001 of a percent. right? And so if you were to take someone with our or Tyler's tastes, for example, and construct cost of living index for him, it would show radical transformation occurring actually in the 15th century when books became one -twentieth of their price, and books would be an important component of his living expenses.

1:04:41But that series is actually constructed for the average person in England. And what happens then is that you really don't see much kind of technological advance on these types of indices in Europe because the advances that are occurring and they're quite significant are about tiny shares of consumption. And that's just a general problem that if we weight technological change in economic terms, there's this turning of the majority, which is what are the majority want to consume? That's determining what the measured rate of technological advance would be. And so that's one argument about again, why the industrial revolution seems so abrupt is that there had been a lot of earlier technological advance, but not in the commodities that the average person consumes.

1:05:33And what was unique about the industrial revolution was that finally something like clothing now gets this huge advance and that then kind of transforms the economy. So that's why that series was done that way. Next question. Thank you very much for stopping by. I was struck by your example of the, it was the Chinese Beyonce that was wearing the Scottish guilt alongside his Vietnamese one of his best men. Yes, it ties into the point you made about assimilation in your work, what factors encourage assimilation into culture into like norms at the home country versus the opposite. And do you think that's related to economic incentives or is it more about culture?

1:06:18Thank you. So I'm impressed. As I say, I've studied a lot about the opera class in Britain. And when you see the history in this genealogy of these families, you have like Jewish families arriving in Britain 1800, where their descendant becomes a bishop in the Church of England within three generations. And so you do see this as a surprising kind of placicity, but other families remaining kind of firmly Jewish, but in other ways becoming highly English. And a nice example of that is in 1685, their Huguenots were driven out of France and they arrived in Britain, they constituted about 1 % of English population at that stage.

1:07:02You can see them within one or two generations completely culturally assimilating. You can see that in the names they called the children and in the women that they married or the men that they married. right? And so you can actually see as I say this complete kind of unrappered kind of cultural assimilation and then a movement into the elites of British society where they amazingly the descendants of that group are still four times more likely to go to Oxford or Cambridge than the rest of people in English society even though culturally 200 years earlier they lost any kind of distinctiveness.

1:07:41And so as I say, I'm impressed when you see something like Britain, how rapidly that assimilation occurs, and even in my own family. So my grandfather's both born in Ireland. We were in Scotland as Irish Catholics. We didn't mix with Protestants. We didn't talk to Protestants. We had all kinds of weird theories about Protestants and their kind of joyless life. I have a brother who married a woman who's Protestant, his children are functionally completely Protestant, right? And so you see this kind of even in this period that by moving into kind of the upper class in Scotland, which is heavily Protestant, effectively you see that assimilation.

1:08:26And so what I am impressed is just how rapidly people can typically assimilate into other societies, except I think in cases where people aren't succeeding economically and socially. And that then becomes this barrier to assimilation. But people who are successful within new societies, it's just astonishing how plastic, as I say, the culture of different societies is. And as I say, I never thought I would go to a wedding in Scotland with people wearing kilt, right? Because that was completely not the culture that we came from. Yeah. Hello, thank you so much for coming and giving the talk. It was an honor to listen in person.

1:09:05I learned a lot from your research. I think I said that I really liked the example in one of your research where you used the last name Smith and how long it took for somebody named Smith to get to like places like Oxford. It was about 200 years. And I loved that research method, but also the conclusion is a bit deterministic. It's kind of how do you manage that social mobility. So I think on that, I'm a bit more on the side of Dr. Cowan, where international mobility might have a higher rate of results than the examples in your research. And as far as I know, the research is mostly from the Anglo world within mobility with an Anglo world or Europe to Anglo and the other ways around.

1:09:51And we use the example of India. And I think the caste system is unique to there. but what about the countries that are similar in terms of base of living standard? I'm from Bangladesh, like places like Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, also in recent research and in immigration we see in the United States. Immigrants from Menorigen are very successful. So do you think if we change the directions of migration and basis of living standard from this donor countries, will the results look more optimistic? And the second part of the question is there is research done by Johannes Haushoffer also a Nordic economist And he has a project where he takes students from Uganda so we can get around the pre -selection problem And he funds them to come to Germany to study so maybe Policy prescription wise do you see some benefits in this kind of solution to get out of that deterministic trap?

1:10:49Thank you So, let me talk first about the determinism trap. And so, there's a fundamental philosophical issue here, which is, I've spent a lot of time in economics, and economics really is a dismal science in the sense of how little economics has achieved, right? And how little we can predict about economies or about the future of economies. And so one of the stunning things about social mobility is how deterministic at the group level that this is. And how in the English data you can predict what will happen to people 300 years later based on their position now. And I think of that as a kind of a stunning kind of gain.

1:11:40Maybe unlike Tyler here, and I think of that as the only path forward. And as I say, what I was stunned by was in terms of social mobility, how much mechanical deterministic structure you had in societies, right? Now I secondly agree that people moving between societies is an enormous source of economic gains and economic mobility. the relative position, though, seems to very substantially move with people when they move across societies. And so, and I agree that it also has these very important policy things that we have to think of, which is if America takes in more immigrants, it will benefit the world at no cost, right?

1:12:27And so, you know, a lot of substantial gains will be made by moving people around in the modern world and that that's something we should think about in terms of thinking about policy in different countries. And so I agree there that, you know, that substantively there's not a lot you can do within a society to change people's relative outcomes. But there is a lot you can do for people by moving them from one society to another and that that's the area then that we should think about in terms of economic policy. Thanks a lot. Thank you. I have some related questions on how you're measuring the social persistence.

1:13:05So the persistence of social status is the rank rank correlation over time, which means that if there is air in measuring the status of somebody, it tends to increase social mobility because there's less correlation. So are you concerned that the degree of air has changed over time such that it's higher in the 1800s, for example, than compared to today, as some recent work on American inequality as demonstrated. And secondly, when people are added to the population through immigration, if they're, for example, say at the bottom, then it would tend to bias people's social mobility upwards because now it's a, there's different people in the mix.

1:13:47So how do you account for that and how do your methods avoid this? Right. So it turns out, a lot of the new book, there's a whole section which says people have not thought about errors enough in terms of measuring social mobility. And so one classic thing is people typically if you go to Scandinavia the income correlation between parents and children or the education years of education correlation between parents and children is low implying that these are very high mobility societies. And the problem is that the errors involved in these measures, so measuring someone's education level by years of education is a very crude approximation, right?

1:14:31And it really tells you relatively little, particularly in a society like Denmark, where there's enormous access to education and huge subsidies of education. And so a lot of the book is saying, how do we correct for these errors? and it turns out that's what happens when you do correct for these errors. What you find is much, much lower rates of social mobility and also that it doesn't vary between Scandinavia and England now or England in the 18th century. Okay? And I think, you know, in social mobility studies that any kind of report that isn't taking into account that all of these are very partial and imperfect measures is just not telling you a lot about the true nature of social mobility.

1:15:20And so that was the first point. The second point was, well, what about admixtures within populations and how that would influence measures of social mobility? Fortunately, most of these societies, these would tend to be relatively small changes because it's a small share of the population in any generation that is now coming anew. But you do see now in England kind of dramatic transformation where the white British now are the lower class of English society. There's emerging and very substantial new upper classes which are Africans, Bangladeshes, Pakistanis and particularly Hindu Indians and Chinese.

1:16:04And as I say it's an an amazing transformation of a society by immigration. And because of fertility differences, where immigrants tend to have much higher rates of fertility, a very substantial fraction of 15 -year -olds now in a society like England are from these other origins, but actually it's been an enormous benefit to English society. And but it would have influenced things like trying to calculate social mobility rates when you have all of these new groups kind of arriving the society and actually being very successful. But that's actually really a very much a phenomena of post -1960 or something like that in Britain.

1:16:46Thank you, Professor Clark. It was a lot of fun. What do you think are the practical implications of your work for finding a spouse in the modern world?

1:16:59I'm not sure what to advise you. I could tell you that I met my wife when we were worth graduate students at Harvard. I was the first man she met at Harvard. So maybe she wasn't particularly selective in terms of... I mean, what's going to say? I mean, you see a general pattern. Do we know that that pattern makes people happy? Maybe everyone with highly assertive marriage is actually unhappy. And if instead they had chosen a spouse on grounds of romance or something else like that, they would be much better off. So I can't give you any advice on marriage. All I can do is say I can predict the kind of person that you're going to marry.

1:17:46Thank you. I wanted to ask about an ongoing debate between James Heckman and Raj Chetty on the role of neighborhoods versus family composition. So James Heckman believes, okay, family composition really matters. Listening to this talk, you'd say, maybe not. And then Chetty says that neighborhoods really matter. And I'm wondering if you take stands on these things since it seems that there is considerable variation at the neighborhood level, but then I'm told that the national level at all balances out so there's no variation over time. I mean, what a coincidence this would be in social science.

1:18:21So I just wanted to hear your thoughts on some of these technical recent matters. Thank you. Yeah. So there is a chapter in the new manuscript, which examines exactly this issue about doesn't matter what place you're born to in England. Because as I say, the north is much less successful on every dimension, education, output, whether people are employed or not, health, longevity, it's bad somehow to be born in the North. But with this kind of comprehensive, genealogical database, we know all about everyone's parents and stuff like that. And I can tell you that there's actually very little cost to being born in the North, right?

1:19:00It's mostly still predicted, overwhelmingly predicted, from the status of your parents, and it just turns out there are many more high -states people in the south of England. Now, one puzzle is, it's this movement to the south of England of higher -states people has been gone on since the 18th century. And I don't actually understand why did everyone want to move to the areas around London and the south of England from such an early date in Britain. So even in the industrial revolution period, the balance of migration is of skilled people out of the north and to the south, and the migrants from the south to the north tended to me much less skilled.

1:19:42And so basically the story for England is there is this kind of process of selection, and it turns out that that interestingly also occurs in other parts of Europe. Europe. And it's amazing now with modern markets and stuff like that, that in almost every place in Europe, you'll find high income areas and low income areas and kind of endogenously developing. But as I say, as far as we can tell from this British data, there isn't that much cost. So I was born in a mining village in Scotland. I like to think I escaped my background. But empirically, the average person born in that mining village is going to do pretty poorly.

1:20:26But there is this question, is it all just about family background? Or is it about the opportunities that people get offered? How do you, if I believe you're chosen mechanism for transmitting over time to be in fact genetics? How do you reconcile the very low estimates of heritability from genome -wide association studies with the much higher estimates that come from twin studies. Well, these genome -wide studies, amazingly even with the, you know, something like, I know I said, up to four million people that they have genotype, where they have measures of their educational outcomes, still don't identify that, well, what the genetic basis of this is, that we know exists from these twin studies.

1:21:12And in some sense, what it's saying is, these studies are still, we still have very imperfect measures, even though they're identifying a thousand different loci on the genome that are affecting educational outcomes, we're still somehow not capturing everything that's happening here. And they've also studied whether it's combinatoric effects that really matter, but I think they've largely been ruled out that it's mostly just the additive impact of what's happening at each particular location. And so all I can say is that, I mean, it has this weird implication that you may need studies that are bigger than the whole of humanity to actually finally figure out what are all these genetic influences because there are such rare kind of permutations that are actually affecting outcomes.

1:22:00And it also actually surprisingly means that if you have very small populations say Native Americans that you might not be able to do these kind of studies because you wouldn't have enough people to actually be able to say very much about say the genetic basis of illnesses or the genetic basis of height and other things like that. But it is a puzzle in that literature which is that even with this amount of data and even though knowing that there is this genetic basis that that is quite strong, they still cannot actually find mechanically what the location of that basis is. Greg Clark, thank you again for Greg.

1:22:38Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the on Twitter, I'm Attyler Cowan and the show is At Cowan Convuse. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.