#728 - Gregory Clark - Is Social Status Determined By Your Genetics?

32:37That's correct, yeah. As men fall behind women in education, do you think that women will begin to pair with men who have fathers of similar status to themselves? Oh, so now this, yes, this is clearly happening that women are getting more years of education The difference in earnings is not great still. I think men are still ahead in terms of earnings. But I think what will happen is that there's a ranking of males as prospects in the marriage market, and there's a ranking of women. And so now women are actually going to typically marry men potentially who have less level of education. But I think the relative ranking is going to remain the same.

33:21So maybe women will be likely to evaluate the education of a date's father before deciding to commit to a date Right, does this man have the education genes even if he himself did not attend college right so one of the Interesting aspects of the data that I have is that It turns out if you want to predict For a given marriage how well the children are going to do in life There's a huge amount of information in the relatives of the people getting married. And so in fact, if you wanted to set up a new dating service, you could actually tell people, here's the optimal weighting of the uncles, the aunts, the grandparents, and stuff like that, that if you just want to maximize what your social prospects of your children are, this would constitute the ultimate match then, right?

34:16So you don't just genealogical dating. Yeah, that's right. And you could get these algorithms now that would actually tell you, you know, this will be a significantly, you know, better child in terms of social outcomes if you were to to match in this way. And so, yeah, so as I say, it is interesting because people, as I said, when they're matching, they look like they're trying maximize the prospects for their children, in terms of the choosing of me.

34:50That's an interesting social feature. I don't know why we would tend to do that because it's not true in all societies. For example, if you go to large parts of the Middle East now or even Native American communities in South America, cousin marriage is still very common, where you end up actually having very restricted choice as to who you can marry. And so that in that type of marriage, you're actually less able to assort, even though you're marrying your cousin, which is kind of ironic, that these cousins actually will be more different socially than the way people are actually marrying in somewhat like England.

35:33So they're actually actually... Wow. Wow. Wow, that is so insane. That if left to random chance, people will find on the street someone who is closer to their family's social status than someone who is actually a part of their own family. Yes, no, that's an amazing feature, yes, but it is actually true. That is bonkers. That is completely bonkers. So yeah, so, and the other thing that was amazing about this is that this pattern, as I say, The new source of marriage data starts in 1837. That pattern is there immediately in 1837, even though at that time, most women didn't formally have occupations.

36:22And so the way we're able to judge how well and matching is to look at the parents, to look at the fathers, and see how closely are they correlating in terms of this marriage pattern. And so as I say, this is a time when most of these women that men were marrying were going to be engaged mainly in raising children. But still, when they married, they wanted someone of kind of very similar social position to themselves. And so, as I said, so it is a surprising feature of the nature of marriage in this society. Yeah. Does this mean by the way one thing I should add is part of the reason I've taken up this position in Denmark is actually to get access Denmark has this amazing set of kind of register data where everyone here has an ID number and every action in your life is recorded under that ID number and the government then so this is true of Norway Sweden Finland Denmark social scientists come to these societies because, you know, to take just one example, I've seen a paper which looks at people's earnings and it's correlation and connection with the psychiatric medications that they were prescribed.

37:46This is the real surveillance state. Who knew that Scandinavia was the real surveillance state? Dear God. Now they don't reveal any individual information, but as I say they have this amazing set of data here And so one of the things we wanted to look at is, well, is this pattern you see in England? Is that just peculiar to England? Yeah, I mean, that was my first question. England, very class -ist system, very well established, we use words like posh. You know, it is still very ingrained. Accent denotes status and awful lot. School that you went to, grammar schools, the introduction of things like that.

38:27old boys clubs, gated communities, all that sort of stuff, very prevalent in England. What's the likelihood that this is a quirk exclusive to just the United Kingdom? Right. And yes, and so the reason I actually was interested here was to say, can we look at it, see modern Denmark, because everyone thinks of this as a very high mobility society. It's very egalitarian and very different. Now, there's a study that's been done in Sweden where they managed to assemble a kind of a similar kind of panel of relatives. But actually in this case, they're just looking also across people who married. So they're looking at who's what's the connection between you and your brother -in -law, you and your brother -in -law's wife's cousin, where they assemble 141 different types of relatives and some of them go across five marriages, right?

39:26And what does data they have? They can actually link you to people who you never are actually going to meet in social life, but you know, you're five marriages apart. And what is interesting is people maintain a correlation in outcomes like education, even across five marriages, right? That's how strongly social links are. And when we look at then how strong that correlation is in marriage in Sweden, it's the same strength as in England. People are matching up in the same way it in marriage in terms of their underlying status. And they have this very slow implied rate of social mobility also in a place like Sweden.

40:10And so I think this is a general kind of maybe North European or European, probably all of Europe kind of pattern. And I don't know what it's going to be like in some other societies. I suspect it's not going to be that different. When I read about places like China, the kind of things that people are looking for in terms of mates in China. And so I think the British have, as I grew up in Scotland, I was an undergraduate in England, and then I've spent a lot of time in America. The British actually keep beating themselves out that somehow they have a uniquely class -written and classist society, but there's actually no evidence of that, right?

40:56I mean, social models. We just like to abuse ourselves. And we find something to feel ashamed about. That puritan work ethic is I'm whipping myself with a cat of nine tails. So we're here for. So, you know, and it turns out, so I grew up in Glasgow in a fairly kind of gritty area. And so I had a good friend there who became an oil trader in London. It was being very successful. You know, and you went to university before he did that. He actually has married a woman who is from a very distinguished family in the English upper classes. and clambering out of the muck and the mire, one rung at a time, congratulations mate.

41:44So as I've even seen in kind of personal life that there is kind of, you know, quite a lot of social mobility and also from studying England in the past, there's this group, the hookahnotes, who arrived in in England in the 1680s, and they were Protestant refugees from France and relatively educated, but they had their own religion, they had spoke French. They, it's amazing how quickly they assimilated into the upper reaches of English society, and people with these Hoganot surnames, which are quite distinctive, by 1800, they were 30 times more likely to go to Oxford or Cambridge than the average person in England.

42:36And so, you know, so you think about these places as, you know, exclusive, old boys clubs, stuff like that. But the experience of English society is that there definitely is this upper class, there are these fancy schools, there's eaten, there's Harold, there's all the rest of that stuff. But my experience looking at this is that it's very open upper class. If you've got the money, the education, the connections, the doors actually open for people. Okay, so does this mean largely that people who are in the upper class are locked in across time? You mentioned that one of your friends has managed to clamber out of the blood and the feces and the hay and get up into the high -faluting upper troposphere, over time did these people like revert back to the mean, revert back to their mean?

43:30Well I mean the important thing about the as I say the upper classes that there's you know it's slow it takes about 300 years but there's a universal force of kind of regression into the meat. So we go back and take people 300 years ago who are the most elite, people in society. I mean, it's taken a long time for it to happen, but there is this universal tendency to move downwards if you are an elite and if you're at the bottom, there's an equal tendency to move up. And that's one of the astonishing features of social life looking at this genealogy is The people in the bottom 10 %, their ones whose kids have the most prospect of upward mobility.

44:17And you know, it's very hard to actually then kind of stop people falling into poverty because it's not that you can go and find the bottom 10 % of people and say, okay, they're the ones we need to treat. Because it turns out a lot of people who are falling into poverty are people who are coming from a bit higher in the social spectrum, who just have bad luck and kind of moved out. And so, so, you know, one thing that's actually interesting to me is, so I've spent a lot of time studying economics. And frankly, we've accomplished almost nothing. I don't know why there's a Nobel Prize in the economics because, you know, we can predict what the outcome of the economy is going to be next year.

45:00we can't predict which are going to be growing economies, which are declining, the macroeconomics is just a random effect. But when he comes to social mobility, there at the group level, societies actually, you see really almost a kind of physics of social mobility. So if I tell you, you know, here's a thousand people who have the top 1 % of social status, I can predict pretty much exactly where their children will be for the next 10 generations. That's just think about that sentence that you've just said there. That's like clairvoyance or divination or something. Right. No, I mean, what it is just saying that at least that you can predict for any individual, right?

45:48And for every individual family, there's different path. There's a lot of randomness, right? So that's the thing that we say to people is, look, the good news is your outcomes don't seem to be entirely determined by genetics. There's also complete randomness as well. Fantastic. Fantastic. Where's the agency in this? No, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. There's some dice being rolled somewhere by a god. Yeah, I mean, this is a plomans maxim, right? Genetics do not predetermine, but they do predispose. And when you smear that across enough of a populace, you end up with just like thermodynamics, right?

46:28It's like wins that blow in particular directions and they encourage particular outcomes. Right. No, I mean, so what is impressive actually? I mean, so this is why I'm actually, I'm always a little surprised by how how kind of exercise people are about class and social mobility, right? Because somehow there is this kind of feeling that there is this permanent advantage group that they're able to take advantage of the position of the time and you know get all of these un -earned benefits. If you look at people who are at the top 1 % of the society, what is more impressive is whatever wealth they have, they're not able to stop their children moving downwards on average.

47:17Because of regression to the mean. Yeah. And they're not there's nothing they can do that. Well, I mean, I can I can bro -bro science an explanation for why that is, which is that most people aren't able to look longitudinally at anything. They're able to look at things during their period of life. And when they came in, these people were at the top and when they go out, those people are at the top. You know, maybe there's some movement, but this regression to the mean happens over long, long, long periods of time. It's this generation, this generation, this idiot child that decides to gamble his money away, this, you know, drunk, this blah, blah, blah, blah, slowly just chips and chips and chips away.

47:55But anybody that's using this sees them and in us it's a tribal game and they've been at the top and they will always be at the top and this is exactly why the Rockefellers or the lizard alien people or whoever it is that's in charge of the world have always been there and will always be there. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean,

48:18the, as I say, it's hard for people to take that kind of long perspective and even modern economists or sociologists often are just looking at the current generation, the earlier generation. So one kind of nice thing about the field I'm in, which is looking at people 300 or 400 years, is that you really can see that dynamics play itself out. And the other thing that you can see is that all of these incredible social changes with political franchise, education, social services, all the rest of that stuff hasn't fundamentally changed British society. We could be living in the Victorian era. It's the same era.

49:04The obvious question is, what's the implication of this for a society that prays at the alter of meritocracy. What are the implications? You put all of this data together, you've realized this sort of a thing. What does this mean? What are the implications? One implication is that society is more meritocratic than people tend to believe. People with ability tend to be able to move up within the society. People without ability are pretending to move down no matter what their parentage was or what advantages they got from their parentage. And that there people tend to be over focused on this kind of absence of meritocracy or the importance of your kind of lineage or your class, stuff like that.

50:01And so one thing I actually draw is some kind of sense of we do live in a surprisingly the meritocratic world. Now, in other terms, in terms of social policy,

50:16one implication, one immediate implication, for example, is if you look at the experience of the Huguenots coming to England, their descendants are still five times as likely to go to Oxford and Cambridge than the average person in England 300 years later. So one interesting implication of this is that if you were concerned about the output of the society as a whole or the social function of the society as a whole, then in immigration policy, you should really seek out high status immigrants. Right. Because they would not would that would that not push down the social mobility of the native population.

50:58It would, but it would, you know, that group will eventually be assimilated into the society as a whole. And so if we look, you know, five generations from now, the society as a whole will be better off. You have a more productive populace. But it is true. You know, if you have elite immigrants, then they tend to displace the upper classes. Whereas if you have low status immigrants, they, that tends to favor the upper classes and society and it tends to compete with people at the lower end of the society. But it does say that you know immigrants are actually going to have a surprising kind of long -term impact on the society.

51:40They're not just going to be absorbed and leave the society otherwise unchanged. Right, because you've taken a kind of a hermetically sealed genetic bomb and you've deposited it And the aftershock, the after effect of that is going to continue down the road. Right. And now it turns out, so one of my co -authors, Neil Cummins, has done some study, you know, because I'm a Irish origins. He's years away. He was born in Ireland. Irish immigrants to Britain are still somewhat of an underclass in Britain. even though a lot of them have been in Britain for a hundred or 150 more years. So it was the Irish genetics.

52:30So yes, as I say, so it ends up with that is really because of the genetics of that population. It's kind of interesting that it actually has an impact for very long time. And so because there are some views that would say, look, everyone has exactly the same potential. So, when immigrants come in, it doesn't matter what their educational background is, what other things are. Because it's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. And it's, it'll make no long run impact on the society. But as I say, I think if you really do believe that there is this element, then it would say, well, in immigration policy.

53:18So some societies, for example, like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have these incredibly restrictive immigration policies, where basically they want you only if you're pretty highly educated. And what that would say is that will actually have kind of long lasting impacts on those societies in terms of average educational levels, average ability levels. and so that's, but other than that, look, people choose to have children, they choose not to have children, they will have the social consequences, it would have the social consequences if it's transmitted also just by social needs. Yeah, there's an interesting question, given that we've got declining birth rates at the moment for the first time in quite a while.

54:10And the particular cohorts that are choosing to reproduce are assorting as well. It seems like people who are more right -leaning are having proportionally less fewer children than people who are left -leaning. Downstream from that, that has to select in some ways for social status, educational achievements, and so on and so unless it's totally random, which it could be, but it seems unlikely that that would be the case. Have you got a prediction given the changing birthright of what this is going to do to the inheritance of social status? Well, it turns out there have been some studies in England because they've got this thing, the UK bio bank.

54:52And so the UK bio bank has metrics of what your educational potential is based on your genetics.

55:02And base Britain dear God. But then you can actually people can look at it and say, well, how many children do people have based on what their educational genetic educational potential is? And the answer is it's very slightly what's called this genic. That is there's a very slight tendency for people with lower potential, just genetic potential to have more children, but it's really not that significant. But what is actually interesting, again looking at this data in the past in England, is that these forces of relative fertility across different groups were really big in the past. And so in the period leading up to the industrial revolution, the upper classes in Britain were super -facund and were basically having 50 % more children than the lower classes in each generation.

55:57And so you do see this period where if you think, if it is the case that is all based on genetic potential, that the average abilities of England were rising, immediately after the industrial revolution, we moved to a completely different phase where the upper classes just gave up having children. And within one generation, they moved from having three or four on average to having one child. It's amazingly quick transformation. And so then actually you enter this other period. And this is the period where the eugenics are all running around because they were responding to what they saw as this incredible social problem.

56:40But then since I think the 1960s or something like that, there hasn't been that much change. But there are actually these periods in the past where you would actually get these significant changes in what average ability levels would be in Britain. Has there been any other unique step change in the last recent history that means that some of the rules and lessons that we've taken from 1600 to 2000 or whatever, may no longer apply. The introduction of hormonal birth control and reliable contraception, the introduction of homeschooling or of the internet, or, you know, like, is there anything that you think is a potential step change, a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree when it comes to the influences on this stuff?

57:34To be honest with you, no. I mean, I actually think that people look at all the new technologies we have and everything else and they think, oh, fundamentally, social life must have dramatically changed and the possibilities have dramatically changed. But other than the decline in the number of children, we're really not seeing a lot of change in the nature of social life in Britain. It hasn't changed that much since the pre -industrial era. And there's a surprising kind of constancy to the way people live family life, the way people produce children and stuff like that. I don't mean the fact they just have many fewer of them.

58:21And so yeah, I'm not expecting any great social revolutions. Things like, so things like assisted reproduction technology, that's become important. It favors upper class people because it's expensive. And so it's going to affect potentially relative fertility. But I think it's still the case that it's a kind of minority of all children of harm in that way. And so I don't see it as having dramatic impacts. Now, the one thing that is on the horizon that would be kind of, personally, I would find a little bit worrying. Are you going to talk about embryo selection? Yes. There it is. IBG, embryo selection.

59:05I knew it. So I have talked to some of the people who have got venture capital now and are trying to develop these technologies. Now the thing about embryo selection is, currently you've got to look among your own embryos, right? And so there isn't that much. It's not modification, it's selection. Yeah, yeah, there's not that much range. But I would be convinced that in some like China, they will go ahead with this, right? And we want illustration of this is, now in the United States, it's, you know, it's quite common for upper class parents to think, well, a kind of a nice pathway to a good college is if their kids are good at athletics.

59:48And so there are all, there used to be all these slots where you can be in the hockey team, you know, at Harvard. A whole bunch of those middle class parents were giving growth hormones to their perfectly normal size children in order to gain them. Creating some studs that would get into an Ivy League education. And you know, and costing a huge amount of money, I mean, this stuff is incredibly expensive. And, you know, if parents are willing to do that, right? If they're willing to take, you know, someone who's five foot 10 and say, we're going to take you to the special doctor and get you these growth hormones, then people will engage in embryos like children.

1:00:34So I don't disagree. I do think that it plays into, at least the use of growth hormone plays into the highly environmental, highly culturally influenced non -behavioral genetic, non -genetic determinism view of the world. I think that the upper classes are going to have to square the circle of accepting behavioral genetics as powerful of a force that it is because publicly the luxury belief that is often And put forward is, you know, we just need to do more welfare and we need to do so on and so forth. And it doesn't really matter. You know, you haven't got this determinism through genetics and stuff.

1:01:18That's perilously close to eugenics. That sounds an awful lot like something that Adolf Hitler would have spoken about. Meanwhile, they're mating assortatively, but they are going to have to ultimately put their money where their mouth is with regards to this because if certain families that decide to use embryo selection and then maybe even gene enhancement, embryo enhancement technology makes, they're going to fall behind. It's an arms race, ultimately, for offspring. And those people are going to fall behind. Yeah, I mean, at least the evidence in the US is, if you look at how much people are willing to spend for private schooling, which it's unclear how much advantage that has, but they're spending 50 or 60 ,000 a year and stuff like that.

1:02:00And so I'm confident in plays like the US, they would do this. But I'm even more confident in a plays like China that they would do this. I mean, because there are people are trying to have boys as opposed to girls and stuff like that and they're willing to abort a fetus if it's the wrong gender. And so I actually, I do fear that, you know, and they're definitely people who want to break down that barrier and push, you know, towards these technologies. The only thing is, I mean, things like educational outcome depend on like a thousand different loci on the genome. And so it's not going to be easy to...

1:02:40Does the education gene that we just need to tinker with? Yeah, right. Yeah. So there's no simple solution to that. But, you know, it seems for sure that stuff like that will come in future. And then I mean the other person will be will people just decide well maybe I don't need my partner's egg Get some other egg. I like I like you as a wife around the house, but you're genetics. Yeah What's this really smart girl at work? so So so there you know it will be interesting to see what people do. But I think I mean the advice for upper class parents now is you should just enjoy your children, right?

1:03:36If you really are upper class they're unlikely to exceed you in terms of their outcomes in life they're more likely to move towards the mean. And so if you're having children it should be with that realization that you know that's just the nature of social life. I can't resist when I'm teaching students, I should never do this, I'm sure they hate me. I actually point out to them that since they actually represent an upper class group, if there's 50 of them here in the class, it's predictable that their children will do less while in life than they will. But...

1:04:14All of this hard work to give your children the advantage so that they can slip down this snake and just end up a little bit behind where you were. Yeah. So I've got a future, that resolution to self, do not like this out. Did you see this new study on physical attractiveness and intergenerational social mobility that came out recently? Oh, I don't think I did. So Alexei Gushvili and Gregor's Bullshack, I've absolutely butchered that. Physical attractiveness matters both for males and females intergenerational social mobility outcomes, but it is more important for males even when childhood characteristics were accounted for.

1:04:56Using data of about 11 ,000 individuals from the United States National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we contributed the existing scholarship by investigating a physical attractiveness assessed when individuals around 15 years old is an important predictor of intergenerational social mobility measured after 20 years. Results, we found that physical attractiveness matters for both male and females intergenerational social mobility outcomes, but it is more important for males, even one child have characteristics, such as various aspects of parental socioeconomic position, individuals' health, a proxy for IQ, neighborhood conditions and interviewers' fixed effects are accounted for using imputed data for observations with missing information.

1:05:33Cross three measures of social mobility, education, occupation and income, physically attractive males are more likely to be socially mobile than males of average attractiveness. conclusion, physical attractiveness is an independent predictor of intergenerational social mobility outcomes regarding individuals, educational, occupational, and income attainment. So, couple of, I actually, I haven't seen that paper. I do need to actually go look at it now. But one thing that's interesting there again is you would expect from the conventional wisdom that it would be women who would actually be the one who's for physical attraction would match it more than men.

1:06:09But what I can tell you is that someone has just produced a working paper on economists where they've actually identified their physical attractiveness and found that more attractive economists have do better in terms of publication. And I don't know why they must have gone to the websites of universities or something like that and then scraped these things and then had someone rate them. And there, as I say, the puzzle is, journal editors not normally look at pictures of people, you know, when the paper comes in, say, well, how handsome or how tall is this person? And so I suspect for these things that probably physical attractiveness is just another part of social competence that basically highly competent people know to get the nice haircut, occasionally shave and stuff like that.

1:07:10And that it's really just another kind of imperfect indicator, basically, what people's kind of overall social abilities are. What was the response when you dropped this paper? Oh, the PNAS paper. Well, you'd probably have heard about that. I got canceled at Glasgow University. So, give us that story. But that was in some sense, that was my fault, because I had published two books each with a Hemingway pun. So my first book was a farewell to arms of brief economic history of the world. The second book was the Sun also rises, surnames and social mobility. And so there's a great pun that involves generic transmission.

1:07:58And so that is for whom the bell curve tolls IQ and social life, not IQ, sorry, genetics and social life. And so anyway, I was due to give a talk at the economist department at Glasgow and this was in the time of COVID. And so I call in and they say, well, just one problem, the dean that ordered the seminar RB cancel. There was a petition by a hundred members of the faculty saying that they this was pseudoscience that eugenics was to be opposed in all of its forms. And so it was astonishing because then the dean said, well, actually I've looked at the paper and I don't see any problem with the paper, but the title is a problem.

1:08:50So if you would just change the title, we'll reschedule the seminar. But then I felt unprinciple that I can't really have the, I don't care much about the title, but I can't have the dean tell me that. And so that as I say, it was an astonishing turn in universities that a bunch of people, and I'm sure most of those people are in, you know, humanities or sociology or other subjects like that, feel that they could actually call for cancellation of something else. I mean, so you could imagine they could come and be critical and stuff like that. But also, I mean, that we'd reach that stage. And effectively, when they did that, there was no cost to the university of doing that.

1:09:35Right? I thought the dean and the principal of the university played it very well because as administrators, because they said, we were not canceling anything. There's just so much interest in this talk that we think we need some kind of enhanced security. And so, we're just deferring things to get to a better place. But the funniest thing then was that someone put me in touch with a reporter from the Times. And I thought, well, you know, they should publicize that these guys do stuff like this. The Times now is the World's North, Workless, newspaper, the report of the Times had a story that was headlined.

1:10:14Eugenesis denied opportunity to speak at the University. Pucks like it. So as I say, it is. And they couldn't even get my age, right? Or there are various other things they couldn't get right in the story. And so, yes, so that is actually being a concern. And I also noticed, I mean, so what I'm doing this stuff, you know, there's every possibility that something is wrong, that you haven't done things correctly, you know, that's the nature of doing these kind of studies. But I do notice that the kind of Twitter climate that surrounds anything that has any hint about genetics is brutal and unforgiving, right?

1:11:11And people are just ready to go to the barricades. What do you think that is? I don't really understand why it's become so ingrained because, for example, hate is genetically determined, right? And no one seems to get very upset about that fact. And they do all of these studies, the same kind of studies they do for education, they can tell you for everyone, here's what their height potential is. We know how it's transmitted, we know it's equally transmitted from mothers and fathers. And so people, or eye color, or other stuff like that, people seem to find that's perfectly fine. So why people somehow think that because social characteristics are also genetically, potentially genetically transmitted, that it's time to kind of go to the barricades and to just, you know, think of some reason why this cannot be truly.

1:12:17You know, use your theory of mind. What do you think this is a threat to, to them? To evidently a threat to something? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, why? Because it's not just that people say, oh, I'm not interested in that, or don't tell me that, it's stuff like that. They actively want to exclude any such discussions from the academy, right? I mean, they want to close down those types of investigations

1:12:51and at a sea, I'm still a little bit mystified as to why, you know, why in particular this has become so controversial, right? Because I'd say I'm not just now read a bunch of stuff in behavioral genetics. And a lot of people who are practicing behavioral genetics are very busy Trying to find reasons for why behavioral genetics does not directly affect that much About people's lives, right? So where you know, so now there's this thing called genetic nurture. I don't know if you've read about that. No, what's this? So it sounds awful. It sounds it sounds like it's gonna We're knowing me and I'm gonna think about it for the rest of the day, right?

1:13:35So here's an interesting study that was done just a couple years ago you inherit half of your parents DNA on average. And so what they did was they can type that DNA and say, this is what your educational potential is. And so what they did in the study in Iceland was they took people's outcomes, they had their own DNA and then they had the DNA that didn't inherit from their parents. They had no influence on their body, right? Because this was the stuff that didn't get transmitted it to them. And then they looked at predicting how many years of education they would get as a function of the DNA you didn't inherit and the DNA you didn't inherit.

1:14:16And it turns out the DNA you didn't inherit is also predictive of what your outcome is going to be. And it has about half the weight of the DNA you actually inherited. And what they explanation then that they proposed for this is that basically maybe the way genetics is working is that your parents because of the kind of DNA they have set up a certain kind of environment and a certain kind of nurture for you and that's actually what's doing the work that's what's transmitting to the next generation what your social status is and then it's going to be correlated with your DNA because you inherited the DNA from the parents but it's not directly the DNA that's doing the work.

1:15:02It's the environment that's extra. So much acrobatics and fuckery going on. And we try and dance around. Oh my God. Wow, that's that's really impressive. I've got I've got a circus. I've actually got the image of a circus in my mind at the moment is someone doing like spirals through the air. Yeah, I don't know. I so I've had a couple of conversations, I had a conversation with Paige Hardin a few years ago that wrote the Lottery, page, very, very great researcher, Stuart Richie's been on the show, Ploman's been on the show. Stuart's fantastic. Page I found particularly interesting because she's somebody who is politically from the left, but scientifically from the behavioral genetics camp.

1:15:48A couple of things that I can think of anything that looks like gene -ish, like genetic type explanations are immediately lambasted as being right of center or far right or completely like bigoted. The academy at the moment is left -leaning and becoming increasingly feminized as well, like just literally in the proportions of women that you have that are attending as undergraduates. And this is going to grow into mostly female professors over the next few decades as well. Some great research by Corey Clark found that behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology explanations were most likely to be disliked by female professors because they are seen as being less empathetic, they're sort of less touchy, they're less egalitarian, whereas the male professors were more happy to have this come across.

1:16:46So I think generally you have this shift toward a people not things or a empathy, not reality approach. That could sway things in one way. And I guess in another, I come from a very working class background. The only thing that was remarkable about Stockton on Tees was that it had the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then after a while, it didn't even have that anymore. It had the widest high street in the UK as well, I think. The widest pedestrian high street in the UK. It's a really clutching at stores to try and come up with something. And, you know, I feel very proud. I think I'm the first person in my family to go to university.

1:17:28I ended up getting a master's as well. And I really love the things that I do. And I see in my side, I do feel sometimes like being told that my success is aren't mine to own quite so much. It feels disempowering in a way. It also feels reassuring in a way because you can kind of go hands off the wheel in some regards. But it does make you think, well, I thought I worked really hard at that thing and I did, right? I did, I had to do the thing and the thing was hard. But for someone to come along and say, well, yeah, but you didn't choose your conscientiousness level and you didn't choose your openness to experience and you didn't choose your autism and you didn't choose, you blah, blah, blah.

1:18:13And you're like, yeah, I get that. And it's a difficult circle to square. And I'm still yet to work out how to fully fold this into my world view. I'm currently in London about to do my live tour. And I've got these live shows that I'm doing and I'm standing on stage and I'm telling people on stage that they have way more control over their outcomes than they think because the bar is setting credibly low because most people have externalized their locus of control. And if you take a tiny little bit of work ethic and apply it, that you can make massive changes in your life because I've seen this myself.

1:18:46But for me to square that circle with this genetic predisposition thing is really, really difficult because I know that there are things that people can do that can give them better outcomes even later into life because it happened to me. And yet, over time, genetics is this, you know, this sort of gravitational force that that just sucks people towards whatever they were supposed to be in any case. I agree with you that I mean it is, you know, because the way we lead our life is by making all these conscious struggles and making these decisions and deciding to spend time on this as opposed to something else.

1:19:24And so it is very hard to square with saying, well, that's just, that was just the lottery to juice, that's the type of person you are. And yeah, no, and I read for motivational speakers, the news about genetic transmission is not right guys. I know that you were coming here to fill in power, but we're going to do an hour and a half on behavioral genetics, leave feeling despondent. Good night. Yeah, wow. I don't know. It's amazing. Everything interesting that happened in your life happened about 30 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, this was this was Plomans, Plomans, big piece of advice, like the single most important decision that you can make in your child's outcomes are who you have them with.

1:20:12And if you want to have, if you want to have a better child, you know, don't bother reading books about diet and neonatal care and optimal fucking bedroom temperature for neurological growth during the toddler years and all the rest of it, just spend more time finding a smart partner. Right. Like that's the big solution. And it's disempowering. And I think that it pushes against a meritocratic world that says, your success is a yours to bear. Alander Boton's got this beautiful, beautiful analogy. I wish that he'd had a conversation with Ploman or yourself or someone, because I think it would have been really great.

1:20:54He says, back in ancient Greece, the beggars on the street were referred to as unfortunate, that Lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them. And you'll remember Lady Fortuna, she's holding a set of scales. And the reason that she's holding a set of scales is that she gives and she takes away. And there is supposed to be this balance to the universe, which I think is a nice excuse for why some people have good things and other people don't. They'll get there, come up and eventually. But if you roll the clock forward by 2000 years, what is it that we call people who don't have anything going on? They're a loser.

1:21:27It's not that they're unfortunate. It's that if the people who succeed are worthy of bearing the fruits of their successes, the people who don't succeed are worthy of bearing the losses of there as well. And that's why this language that kind of centers the locus of control upon the individual has changed. And that is, you know, fundamentally what a meritocracy is. You are able to enact change in your life. Your merit is what will determine your outcomes. And there are relatively few barriers in the way. And it means that for the people, maybe this is a luxury belief as well in some regards. People that are at the top, they don't want to be told the only reason that they managed to get into this high -faluting institution was because of their mothers, mothers, mothers, fathers, mothers all the way back.

1:22:15Yeah, so I mean, maybe you could say, well, there is always this random element. And maybe it's openness to kind of experience or stuff like that can increase that randomness, right? That this would be the thing to say, look, like half of your outcomes, in some sense, to pen of just random shocks. And maybe there's a way of kind of choosing to take more gambles in life, right? And, and, right, because for example, as an academic, there's certain types of paper you can write that are just much more risky than others, where, you know, half the time it's gonna come to nothing, you know, more than half the time, 90 % of the time, but it might kind of pay off, it might, you know, go somewhere.

1:23:01or roll the dice. Yeah, so that would be a thing about what kind of attitude do you have to life? Are you gonna be conservatives or kind of afraid of these things? Or, you know, I suppose coming into it, well, what have you got? Are you trying to conserve? Are you trying to explore? Are you trying to hold on to what it is that you have? You know, if you've managed to come from a family that's from a wealthy background, maybe you do. You, you, like, let's just, don't be the generation that fucks it up for, you know, great grandpa who made a few million pounds doing whatever whatever. Like that's just not be, you know, optimized to not be an idiot as opposed to be a hero.

1:23:42Uh, where it's someone that's lower down the distribution, you would look to explore more than exploit, right? We need to, well, I've got very little to lose. My downside is limited. My upside is, is basically asymmetric. So yeah, fascinating, fascinating. Great. I think it's so interesting. I'm really excited for you to write this book. I think it's, I think it's, I don't know what the conclusion is. I think that what would be really important when you do finally sort of round all of this out, we'll be to try and put some sort of like, I don't know, how does someone ameliorate this into their life?

1:24:13I think it's fascinating all the way down, super interesting, really, really cool. The question that everyone's going to be left with is, all right, and now how am I supposed to see the world and myself? Right. It's very difficult. So the one very practical piece of advice I would say is that as a modern society we are obsessed with child rearing and with investing enormous quantities of time and effort in children. And we have a society where increasingly it's not clear that we're actually going to sustain ourselves as a society, right? And so one kind of interesting message I think would be to say, look, there's not a lot of evidence that all of that stuff matters much.

1:24:54Just have children and enjoy them, right? You don't have to go through this excruciating kind of thing called parenting. You can just relax, have a glass of boiling. They'll be fine. Not while you're pregnant. Not while you're pregnant. After that, right? But, you know, and that actually would be one kind of, I think, And an important lesson that actually people would need, because I know as a first parent myself, we went to ridiculous, extensive terms of what we did as parents. To try and determine and predispose your child's outcomes, despite the fact that they're on a set of train tracks that are heading to the same destination.

1:25:36Yeah. And if I could get all that time back, that's what I want. But, uh, energy. So there are some kind of, uh, upsides, uh, to this, uh, and, um, and then, you know, but, uh, as a person can intellectually, it's kind of nice to see that they're really, even in the complicated social world that we live in, this idea that there really is almost a kind of physics to social life. It's kind of attractive and, and, It's kind of powerful. So yeah, so I guess my big ambition though in life is not to write a how -to book for middle -class parents. Emileureating behavioral genetics. No, I understand. Greg Clark, ladies and gentlemen, Greg, I think your work's fantastic.

1:26:27It's really, really interesting. I can't wait to see what you do next. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your work or read more of the stuff that you've done? So the article that just came out in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is actually open access and it's actually not that hard for people to look at that and read that. And then, you know, I have, if you just Google my name, I have a website with a bunch of kind of working papers and various topics that they can do. And then hopefully in a year or so it will actually be a book finally. Thank you. My pleasure.

1:27:03Thank you, Gregory.