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

How much of your life's trajectory was set in motion centuries ago? Gregory Clark has spent decades studying social mobility, and his findings suggest that where you land in society is far more predictable than we like to think. Using historical data, surname analysis, and migration patterns, Clark argues that social mobility rates have remained largely unchanged for 300 years—even across radically different political and economic systems. He and Tyler discuss why we should care about relative mobility vs growing the size of the pie, how physical mobility does and doesn't matter, why England was a meritocracy by 1700, how assortative mating affects economic and social progress, why India industrialized so late, a new potential explanation why Britain's economic performance has been lukewarm since WWI, Malthusian societies then and now, whether a "hereditarian" stance favors large-scale redistribution or a free-market approach, the dynamics of assimilation within Europe and the role of negative selection in certain migrations, the challenge of accurately measuring living standards, the neighborhood-versus-family debate over what drives mobility, whether we need datasets larger than humanity itself to decode the genetics of social outcomes, and much more. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/gregory-clark/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/gwq_WKBpYJQ. Recorded February 5th, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by donating https://mercatus.donorsupport.co/page/podcastgift?utm_source=cwt+podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Follow Gregory https://x.com/GregoryClarkUCD on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Photo Credit: Chris Williams, Zoeica Images

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:26Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am chatting live with Greg Clark, the economic historian. I think it's fair to say that Greg is the most interesting and most influential economic historian of the last 20 years. His book from 2007, A Farewell to Alms, presented a new theory of economic growth, human progress, and the Industrial Revolution. I ended up as one of the blurbers, and I called it, as I wrote in The New York Times, "The Next Blockbuster in Economics." His book after that, The Son, S-O-N, also rises. Surnames in the History of Social Mobility, among other things, argues that rates of

• 1:08Tyler Cowen?

  social mobility have been much less, much more static, much harder to change than many people believe. Greg spent much of his career at UC Davis. He is now a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and he hails from Scotland. Greg, welcome.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Great to be here.

• 1:27Tyler Cowen?

  I have so many questions about your work. Let me start with mobility, a point where I think we don't agree. So I see mobility across freer societies as much higher than you do, and I worry that you're treating mobility too much in terms of relative ranking. Your kintile, how well is that predicted by your parents' kintile or decile of income? But if you just think of mobility as having a much better and different life, freer life, than your parents', aren't rates of social mobility just immense?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  No. The amazing thing is, if we even go back to medieval England, rates of social mobility were just as high as they are now. And I mean, if you want to take these other dimensions of freedom of expression or social neighborhood that people were in, again, there's no evidence that that has in any sense improved now, right? I mean, people are just as divided in terms of the types of groups that they meet with as they would be 500 years ago. And so I really want to stick with this idea that in a society like England, we have not in any way improved rates of social mobility in the last 300 years.

• 2:40Tyler Cowen?

  But that's focusing solely on relative rankings. So if I visit Liverpool and I look at Paul McCartney's home, I know that's an extreme case, but in Liverpool, living standards are just much higher than they were earlier. People have many more sources of freedom. It's true that where they fit into the deciles or other relative rankings, maybe that hasn't changed much. But why is that the relative concept of social mobility? That's what I don't get.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Well, it's absolutely the case that we're now 15 times better off than we were in 1800. But it's still, I think, a very important feature of society and one that, you know, people are obsessed with.

• 3:21Tyler Cowen?

  I'm not obsessed with it.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  But it turns out most people are, right?

• 3:26Tyler Cowen?

  I don't think they are in America. I think they're obsessed with the absolute living standards they enjoy, whether those go up or not, and not so much about, you know, how the person in Mississippi compares to Bill Gates. I think it's exactly what people are not obsessed with.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Right. It's legitimate to say, I see your question, and I think it's unimportant, right? But I but I still think it's a fascinating feature of societies, which is how are people between generations moving between in relative position within societies? And the other thing I would say is that, you know, that gain in material living standards is actually in some ways a lot less important than you might think. I mean, I've gone to, you know, Dr. Johnson's house in London from the early 18th century. I'd be perfectly happy to move in and live in that house now.

• 4:18Tyler Cowen?

  With no penicillin, no good dental care.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Yes, there have been definite improvements in healthcare and other things.

• 4:27Tyler Cowen?

  Electricity.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Right. But as I say, I mean, in some sense, you're just saying, okay, that I want to concentrate on growth, right? And I think that that's the crucial element of society. And if all of that growth goes to 10% of the society and not to the rest of society, I wouldn't care about that, right? Whereas, as I say, it seems to me, just in common observation, that certainly in Britain, where I come from, that people do have this fascination with relative position in society. And that people are obsessed about who's going to the elite universities, who are the members of parliament, what are the backgrounds of these people?

• 5:05Tyler Cowen?

  But isn't that the problem with Britain, right? It's an economy that is more or less falling productivity since the great financial crisis. It's far too stultified, it's too status conscious, and what we need to do is distract people from relative rankings and get, just get them thinking about the absolute size of the pie.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Well, one of the reasons that I went to Denmark was because of the fantastic data that they have in the register data on people's social position in Denmark. And in this new book that I just completed the draft of, one of the things that's pointed out is, social mobility rates in modern Denmark are no higher than in Britain. It's just

• 5:49Tyler Cowen?

  This I believe.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  It's not correct to think of Britain as an immobile society.

• 5:56Tyler Cowen?

  They're both immobile societies. Denmark, people, they go to the same high school, they hang out, they eat those weird fish sandwiches, and they help each other out. And you know, what you're born into more or less determines how you, your kids, grandkids will do in Denmark.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  But I think the Danes themselves would actually think of themselves as a very mobile society, and as a very open society. So that's why, as someone who's interested in societies, I mean, it is fascinating to me that you can change so much about social structure, say, between England and Denmark, but somehow not change one basic fact, which is just how connected are people to their parents in terms of their social outcomes? And also, how little influence social institutions seem to be able to have on that connection? And I actually draw from this.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  A comforting fact, which is to say, meritocracy was achieved much earlier than you might have expected. Because what you would find in a truly meritocratic society is that the only things that really determine social position are going to be people's genetic inheritance and randomness. And that status seems to have been achieved in England already by 1700. And so I actually draw kind of this different lesson, which is that not only have we achieved growth in the modern world, but we've also achieved meritocracy hundreds of years ago.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And I would think that a lot of people would regard that as a pretty radical claim about the nature of modern society, despite your skepticism.

• 7:40Tyler Cowen?

  Let me give you a different reading of your work that probably you'll disagree with, but let me get your reaction. And this I call Strauss plus Brian Kaplan. So one way of reading Greg Clark is that he shows that social mobility is quite high, but the only path to social mobility is geographically moving around. So a simple example, I think median household income for families from India that have come to America, it's $158,000 a year, which is remarkably high. And whatever it was in India, it was not close to that. So they moved, they're doing incredibly well. When people move from, say, the rural South to the Northeast during the Great Migration, they do much better. That physical mobility is what works, and it's what overturns these hierarchies.

• 8:25Tyler Cowen?

  And a lot of your data sets seem to be about times and places where not that many people are moving a lot. But mobility simply works, physical mobility. True or false?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I agree that, I mean, and so that also clearly says that there are cultural and social kind of constraints in society that allows some of them to be very high performing and some of them to be less well performing. But then what's interesting and remarkable is that in this new manuscript, we can actually trace people who move from Britain to Australia, Canada, and the United States. And what's interesting is that their material welfare increases very significantly, but their relative social position doesn't change. And somehow is preserved across these different societies. And so the things that are kind of holding back societies as a whole,

• 9:18Speaker 01

  it's very interesting that it doesn't seem to affect relative social position, right? And so, as I say, that's why I'm a relativist and you're an absolutist.

• 9:28Tyler Cowen?

  Let me tell you if this further inference would be justified. You're not a pessimist about the importance of environment. You're a pessimist about the ability to reshape an environment when most of the people are still around. True or false?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Yes, I, I, as I say, I.

• 9:45Tyler Cowen?

  The environment really matters. It's just hard to change it. So in that sense, the weight you assign to genes is still up in the air. Because when we see the environment change a lot, migration, the effects matter a lot.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it seems to me that societies, they come with different constraints. But what's very interesting is that people's ability to operate within those constraints seems undiminished across different societies. And the same factors seem to determine that. And so I've actually done some work on Hungary under communism, where we, again, using surnames, we can identify who were the descendants of the previous elite. And interestingly, in things like admission to medical school, it didn't change under the system of communism. The same elites preserved themselves.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  In the political sphere, that elite kind of disappeared from parliament for a while. When the free market system was restored, that elite just emerged fully again into the political sphere. And so what's interesting, as I say, is you can change the overall constraints on the society. But it still is interesting that relative position seems to be.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Determined in some very kind of physics-like way within different societies.

• 11:08Tyler Cowen?

  Now, how do you think about the social returns to more or less assertive mating? Say, in the United States, do we have too much of it, too little of it? So if we had more of it, you'd have, say, very smart or determined people marrying those like them, and you might end up with more innovation from their children and grandchildren. But you might also be messing with what you'd call the epistemic quality of the median voter, right? So there's a straight off. How do you think about that? What side of the margin are we at?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  So assortative mating turns out to be a fascinating phenomenon. And in this new book, we actually have records of 1.7 million marriages in England from 1837 till now. And what is astonishing in England is the degree to which people end up assorting in marriage. And so that basically, they're matching with people that are as close to them, essentially genetically, as their siblings in marriage. And it's really interesting because you could, people could mate in any kind of way, right? You could think, I want the tallest person, the handsomest person, the youngest person.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  But for some reason, consistently, people seem to want to match to people who are close in social status. Now, that doesn't affect anything about the average level of ability in a society. But if it's consistently followed over generations, it will widen the distribution of ability.

• 12:34Tyler Cowen?

  And are we doing too much of that or too little of it in the United States?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  It depends what your view is. If you think that the engine of high-tech society now, like the United States, is the top 1% or 5% of the ability distribution,

• 12:49Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  then you would say the more assortative is mating, the more people will be in that extreme.

• 12:55Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And the greater will be economic growth.

• 12:58Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  And so in the new book, I actually speculate about was assortative mating in Northern Europe?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  A discovery of the late Middle Ages that actually then helped propel things like the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution. Because as I say, it's a remarkably constant feature of British society. We can only trace it back to about 1750, the actual degree of assortitiveness. And so, so in that sense, you can't have too much. If that's your view about how society operates, right?

• 13:33Tyler Cowen?

  Or at least we could have more of it, right? There might be some margin where you'd have too much.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  But it does produce more inequality. And so if you're worried about inequality in society, you don't want assortative mating, right? I mean, the one way to correct a lot of inequality would just be to have much more random matching. But one of the remarkable things about Denmark is education is essentially free until you're age 24. They give you subsidies for your living expenses. For childcare provision, it's all available. They've compressed the income distribution quite sharply. There is this periodic survey of how well students do, the PISA measures.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Nordic countries have not reduced the inequality of PISA measures compared to much more unequal societies like the United States. And, and so again, it's just kind of interesting that high degree of inequality is still found within these societies. And it turns out that in Nordic societies, people are mating again very strongly assortatively even now. And so, so that is the thing that you would worry more about is that there is this going to be this trade off between assortative mating and the degree of inequality in a society.

• 14:51Tyler Cowen?

  So let's say the Spaniards and others, they come to the New World. There's a lot of pairing off. Some of it is violent and coercive, of course. But a lot of it seems more random than what you might expect from Jane Austen's British Victorian society. What's the implied prediction about what results from that? There's going to be less Assortative mating, at least for a while, right?

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yes, and, and you would, the implication would be you'll get just a narrow distribution.

• 15:18Tyler Cowen?

  But do we see that? It seems we see very high inequality in those societies.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Well, remember, there's potentially a difference between inequality based on things like wealth ownership and inequality in abilities or kind of educational potential that you would see within a society. But definitely, I mean, there's clearly going to be this association between how assortative marriage is and how much inequality you get. So, by the way, Neil Cummins and I have a paper that just came out in PLOS One, which is about hypergamy, which is the idea that, very common idea, that women tend to marry up because men value physical appearance more than women do and that there's this trade

• 16:05Speaker 01

  off that exists in the marriage market. And interestingly, for England, going back to 1837, we claim that there is no hypergamy, that essentially men and women end up matching in social status in marriage. And it seems to be that it's just a complete dominance of social status in determining unions within this society.

• 16:28Tyler Cowen?

  For England, I believe that. You think it's true for most of the world?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Well, the interesting question is, it's definitely true for a bunch of earlier societies that the matching was much less tight. And so, for example, there's a whole bunch of earlier societies where cousin marriage was a very important form of marriage. And the problem with cousin marriage for assortitiveness is most people don't have a lot of cousins at the right age and gender. And so, it ends up that you have to marry a random cousin. And it turns out that the modern British, or even the 19th century British, are matching much more tightly in terms of marriage than it would be the case if you just matched to a random cousin.

• 17:12Tyler Cowen?

  In your view, has cousin marriage been a big problem for the Arab Middle East? That you end up with something that's too clannish?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  What I would say is, if it's systematically carried out, it should lead to a kind of reduction in the distribution of abilities within a society compared to the very assortative kind of Northern European pattern or other patterns. I honestly don't know whether it actually leads to these other problems in terms of the clannishness of society, right? I mean, potentially, yes, but it's not something that I've actually studied yet.

• 17:50Tyler Cowen?

  It at least seems that today, something about the caste system is finally paying off for India. So from South India, you have these incredible chess players, right? That's G-loaded, CEOs in tech. Why is it that now the caste system, in this one particular way, is succeeding, but in earlier times, you don't see anything nearly as comparable? Like, what has changed? What's the environmental change? And doesn't that mean, like, environment really, really matters? It's not all just genes?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Oh, no. In terms of overall economic performance, I mean, in my earlier book, Farewell to Alms, it said there's essentially only two great problems in the economic history of the world. The first is the incredible long delay in the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, right? And then the second puzzle is the incredible divergence of societies since the Industrial Revolution, where now you get these differences of about 50 or 60 to 1 in material living standards. And this is really kind of illustrated when you look at a society like India, where because

• 19:01Speaker 01

  of this caste system, you had this super elite, the Brahman caste, which preserved itself for many, more than 1,000 years. Clearly, now, you see, when these people move to the United States, who are the new elite of the United States? These are Indian immigrants to the United States, who are kind of a super elite within this society. And then the stunning puzzle is, why did all of that talent...

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Coexist with an incredibly stagnant Indian economy. And stagnant even once it was opened up to the forces of the modern market by the British. And even once you had kind of brought in kind of British civil institutions, British legal institutions, free trade, free capital markets, low interest rates. I mean, this is one of the kind of stunning puzzles of the modern world. And even though I write about that in that earlier book, I have to confess, I have no idea why a society like that can remain so unchanged after the arrival of the British and not actually start transforming itself until the last 20 or 30 years.

• 20:16Tyler Cowen?

  I don't doubt the answer is complex, but isn't part of it pretty straightforward? And it has to do with state capacity. So the British only invested in a few kinds of public goods, ones that would help them either trade with the country or defend it. There was very little investment in human capital. So in some ways it was nominally somewhat free, but in terms of actual market size and scale and building up of high trust institutions, the British were arguably even a negative influence, right? Rates of growth are pretty low. Even under Nehru socialism, India has a higher rate of growth. Why isn't that, again, far from a complete resolution of the puzzle, but a pretty simple first order answer?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  It may not seem that the British contributed much, but if you even look at the kind of Anglo Indian group that developed in India, that was massive. I mean, think about how big India is relative to Britain. This was a massive potential entrepreneurial class in India. And the British also had a policy that allowed absolutely free migration of entrepreneurs into India. So the Bombay textile industry, something like 10% of it was owned by a Jewish family that had come from Iraq, the Sassoon family, that, you know, that the British, as I say, welcomed these entrepreneurs, they encouraged free trade.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  And so I think, I don't think you could underplay how significant an intervention that was by the British in that society. Everyone is tending to judge the result, the India now by the results. But you know, even Karl Marx writing in the mid 19th century confidently predicted that the British had created the next industrial colossus in India and that that would kind of overwhelm the British in turn. And it is one of the great puzzles of history is why India never developed under the British. It just seemed that this was the path.

• 22:17Tyler Cowen?

  But could it have been too much assertive mating? That there's something to an O-ring model where for a lot of production processes, it's the weakest link, the least well-educated link, the biggest source of social disorder that disrupts a town, a village, a firm for everyone else. And in terms of the O-ring model, India back then just wasn't doing well at all.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, except, you know, I've I've studied a lot in my earlier life on the cotton textile industry. And it turns out, I mean, that, as I say, that was one of the major industries of the 19th century. You could run an entire cotton mill with three skilled managers. And the tasks of people at the lower level there are extremely simple, don't require literacy. In Japan, we're performed by 14 and 16 year old girls with high competence, fantastic results. Now, when we look at modern manufacturing processes, they can often

• 23:19Speaker 01

  involve high levels of performance by workers and huge costs if workers fail to perform. But it looked like in the 19th century that you had these kind of failure resistant techniques. Someone in a spinning mill, if they mess up, the thread breaks more often, right? But that can all be repaired. And, you know, it's all observable. And so in modern high-tech manufacturing, you can see this problem, but not in 19th century India, right? And so I still say-

• 23:49Tyler Cowen?

  But there's a whole supply chain, there's the networks and the search of getting the right people to those jobs. So maybe it involves a lot of different moving parts and not just what's under the roof of the factory.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  So I think some modern Indian, you know, very rich entrepreneur should should have a prize that would be devoted to someone who could explain.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Why India didn't successfully industrialize under the British in the 19th century? Because it's one of those stunning mysteries of of history. And it's, as I say, it's easy for people just to say, oh, it's the the sclerotic English institutions, it's the arrogance of the conquerors, it's the caste system in India. But none of that actually, I mean, if you look at the details, none of that successfully explains what happened in India.

• 24:38Tyler Cowen?

  What about the hypothesis? There's something like akin to the Asian tiger mom. To enforce it, you need a network. It's very hard to just do it on your own. And for the network to be there, you need many, many moving parts, major social changes. India back then maybe didn't have it. Today, at least significant parts of India have their own version of the Indian tiger mom who kicks the kid's butt across the room if they don't finish at the top of their high school class. And that that's a social network. It's determined by culture. It's super hard to build up just by having a few British people arrive with ships. And finally, we have it. True or false?

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Well, except as I say, when the British arrived in India, they the British were open. The important thing that people maybe have difficulty understanding about British upper class was it is an incredibly open upper class. And they were absorbing people coming from all different parts of the world. The Sassoon family, for example, ended up writing poetry against World War One and also as the chief aide to the general fighting World War One. And and so they actually, and and they had absorbed into British society lots of foreigners many times before. And so in India, they were actually absorbing a lot of upper class Indians into British society.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And what I'm saying is, to make the kind of revolution that we would expect in India, you don't need 10 million people. You only need a couple of thousand, it would seem, to to lead India, you know, to modern economic growth. And and that's what's so puzzling is that, you know, it's not, you know, you might explain all of this stuff, but all you need is some deviance. And so take an example of this. Indian mills underperform British textile mills.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  In 1940, there were 450 Indian textile mills. There was not a single one that achieved the average level of productivity of the English mills. How's that possible? When you have this varied set of entrepreneurs, varied set of people, that you just cannot kind of match the performance that's going on in this other society. I remain puzzled by that.

• 26:54Tyler Cowen?

  Say we look at some other extreme example, you know, Korea, South Korea. So in 1960, it's maybe poorer than some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Today, it's a fully developed country. I don't know what happened there, but I know it's not a big genetic change. Something in the culture, they got their act together and then they did great. So what's wrong with just assigning these puzzles to culture? Doesn't mean we can explain them in the predictive sense. India somehow developed a better culture. South Korea certainly did. That we pretty much know, right? Why resist that kind of explanation?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  But see, I'm not resisting here, right? What I'm saying is, I'd like to, you know, having now spent many years studying economic history, I've finally come to, I think, modesty and to say that, look, there are some problems that just defy any serious explanation, that we make no progress with, right? But then say there, it turns out there are some other things where we can explain surprisingly well what's happening, right? And so basically what I'm saying is, here's the things that, you know, why I turned to studying social mobility

• 28:13Speaker 01

  is that here was something which actually showed this law-like characteristic and where you could actually understand the processes and the logic of this. And why I kind of turned away from studying things like, why isn't the whole world developed? Is that it just seemed impossible to actually make progress on that because once you just say, okay, it's some kind of cultural event, then what are you going to say after that, right?

• 28:40Tyler Cowen?

  But this is where I worry. You're a bit too much of an economist. If one insists on these very mono kinds of explanations, everything testable, measurable, then surely so many things in human history are hard to explain. But if we take a more humanities based view, more pluralistic, even just ask Korean people themselves, they're full of explanations and they're all, they'll often just say, well, we got our act together. It doesn't satisfy many economists, but maybe in some ways it is good enough if we just have a broader sense. In economics, you know, there's Ricardo, there's Marx, explanations are supposed to take a certain form. Maybe that's just our disease.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Well, in having written on the history of the Indian industrialization in 1999, I dragged my 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 ended up talking to Indians. And it was interesting to ask people, you know, why is India so poor? And but it turns out that people have all kinds of answers, but not, they're easily testable as as false. So we say, oh, it's the population.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  We have too many people, right? And we know now, of course, that that actually is not going to make any difference, or it's the corrupt politicians, or it's 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, empirically testable explanations. Otherwise, it's just conversation.

• 30:33Tyler Cowen?

  If we take England, when I read your book, Farewell to Arms.

• 30:39Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:58Tyler Cowen?

  Now, if that was genetic rather than cultural, why is it today, when I go to England, there's a lot I'm 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.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  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, other things like that, there's no vast difference, right?

• 31:38Tyler Cowen?

  But it's a slightly below average, mediocre performance, a bunch of stars in the South, star achievements. 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.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Well, one of the-

• 31:56Tyler Cowen?

  Never mind Denmark.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Right. 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 phenomenon 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? So that's the first point. So I don't think of England as being that different from these other locations, right?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  The Industrial Revolution has 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.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  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. So 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

• 33:46Speaker 01

  in the course of this period. And so that's one potential explanation of, again, why kind of British performance has been relatively lukewarm since about World War I, 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. And by the way, one interesting thing was how few of this upper class actually ended up marrying in this period. So it was somehow a 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.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  But there was this 60-year period, and that's 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.

• 34:48Tyler Cowen?

  But the genetic perspective, doesn't it imply that societies close to Malthusian margins should actually become more and more conscientious over time? Because just to survive, you've got to take care, you know, 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.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  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 would just would be that under the kind of the anvil of the Malthusian era, these societies were just transformed 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.

• 36:40Tyler Cowen?

  But the 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 are the conscientious peoples? It seems it's in the places the furthest from Malthusian equilibria, where selection pressures are the weakest.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  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?

• 37:23Tyler Cowen?

  Right.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  And 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 Malthusian constraints are not still applying, right? And so that there are relatively rich Malthusian societies, but they can still be societies

• 38:04Speaker 01

  where the conditions of reproduction are such that people are constrained, that they will only reproduce successfully if they're above these living standards. And 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, even, 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 earlier 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.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  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. But 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.

• 39:18Tyler Cowen?

  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. And the Europeans, when they went there, they didn't feel so sorry for the Tahitians, right?

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Oh, no, they thought the Tahitians were living incredibly well.

• 39:46Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, so it wasn't Malthusian because of transportation and mobility.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  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 it was a Malthusian society, but it turns out there are lots of Malthusian societies where people live at relatively high living standards.

• 40:21Tyler Cowen?

  Well, in what sense is it Malthusian then? That the regulating mechanism is not starvation seems almost by definition to make it not Malthusian.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:44Tyler Cowen?

  But that's a funny definition for Malthus, I mean.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  It's my definition.

• 40:50Tyler Cowen?

  Marky.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  No, no, and I see this is a widespread misinterpretation of Malthus. I think is that Malthus is about low living standards, right? And so I think my earlier book, Farewell to Alms, one of the actual innovative elements of that book was to say, let's take apart these two different elements of Malthusianism. And 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

• 41:30Speaker 01

  rates, living standards in somewhere like Britain in 1450 were not again equal till 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, there were 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. And, and so they really were living at high material living standards. We can go back and look at the houses they constructed in that period.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  People here in Arlington would be happy to move into some of these medieval houses.

• 42:16Tyler Cowen?

  So, 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 Clarkian mechanisms? Because I think you used to believe that.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  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. And so that 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 then 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.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:31Tyler Cowen?

  But there's A lot of the state is public health, right? So more people survive, more people live longer.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:37Tyler Cowen?

  That far, that all seems to me to give them better lives. It may not always show up in per capita GDP.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Right. But, but even though, as I say, there still is this kind of quasi-Malthusian 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, 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 could actually transform these societies so that they're not heavily dependent on limited agricultural resources.

• 44:28Tyler Cowen?

  Now, you wrote a piece published in Quillette, and you use the word hereditary, and you say, I'm a hereditary, and that means a lot of redistribution of income is a good thing. I'm oversimplifying your message. But insofar as one is a hereditary, what are the policy implications of that?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Oh, I think if, once you recognize that a lot of our outcomes are actually the product of inheritance, and they're 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. I 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.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  And one of the interesting things about Denmark, it's stunning to me when I go there, tax rates on people are so high, but it's still a highly productive, technologically innovative society. And so it's proving that you can have a surprising amount of kind of compression of income differences and redistribution, and still have a perfectly functional society.

• 45:49Tyler Cowen?

  But 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 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, we all went to high school together, we're going to have a welfare state with high taxes approach.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I must say that, so there is a problem then in Denmark, which is that it's relies 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.

• 46:46Tyler Cowen?

  Well, 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 going to do the best, unlike the United States, which gets all these Indian CEOs because you can get richer here and stay richer.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Right, and well, and now, 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.

• 47:11Tyler Cowen?

  But you've got to get rid of these high taxes to get the good ones.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  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 immigration has been from places like, say, Vietnam or India or stuff like that to places like Denmark, because these immigrants would be very successful within this society.

• 47:38Tyler Cowen?

  And the more the native Danes are below replacement fertility, the more urgent it is that you lower taxes and attract the best migrants, I would think.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  But one-

• 47:46Tyler Cowen?

  So 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.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you can see every day in Denmark, the benefits of having so unskilled workers earn much higher wages than they would in the United States. People 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 it just doesn't exist this in Denmark. And so I understand perfectly the Danes' desire to preserve this. But the other problem that Danes have is there's only five and a half million of them.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  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. And so the other thing I think is that would limit immigration to Denmark is that people 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. Yeah. And it turns out it's perfectly possible for someone like me to not assimilate and speak English in Danish society.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  It is a kind of an intriguing issue, though, about whether should we become more free market so that then we could have a different kind of attractiveness to different sets of immigrants, right? After you moved to Denmark, southern Denmark, what was the biggest surprise for you? I was surprised at how kind of communitarian Danes were. So at the university I'm at, 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.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  I was actually surprised at that kind of sense of community that Danes have- For you, is that fun or stifling? Oh, no, I like it. I mean, I appreciate it. But like, do you do it? Are you there singing? I don't go to the singing. No, it's stifling. But the other thing that- They sing in Danish, right? That was my first surprise. The second thing that surprised me was how committed Danes were as drinkers. I'm shocked that these are the things that surprised you. And so in the town I'm in, there's actually a pub that opens at 10 at night and stays open till 8:00 AM in the morning. And Danes are not the most talkative people in the world.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  My thought is, what are they doing all night at this pub? And so, 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. Their gyms are 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, at their, the kind of residing sense of community. And 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.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:40Tyler Cowen?

  How optimistic are you about Scotland today?

• 51:43Speaker 01

  I actually, I've seen the data and the north of England is in terrible shape. 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-Scottish in origin, who've become culturally completely Scottish. And so my niece got married there to a guy who's Chinese and his best man was Vietnamese and they were all dressed in kilts and they had bagpipes playing. And so culturally, it's amazing that the people, you know, that the culture kind of continues in Scotland.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  And in economic terms, Scotland is actually doing pretty well. And so as I say, it's not-

• 52:34Tyler Cowen?

  But there's big subsidies, right, from the south of England. Without those subsidies, what's per capita GDP there?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I did say that when Scotland was becoming, considering independence, this would be like a parasite detaching itself from the host.

• 52:48Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Because in order to keep Scotland within the UK, they have been paying out these very generous subsidies. So 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, or else 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

• 53:32Speaker 01

  and will continue to draw subsidies from the UK Treasury. And as I say, it seems to be doing fine.

• 53:39Tyler Cowen?

  Why are public health indicators so bad in and around Glasgow? Like, they're some of the worst in the developed world, maybe the very worst.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 54:13Tyler Cowen?

  No, there's squalor in Glasgow.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  No, no, no. No, no, the subsidies and everything else are so generous that I couldn't find genuine squalor in Glasgow.

• 54:22Tyler Cowen?

  You need a New Jersey boy to take you on a tour.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  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 is amazing is that within what is relatively decent material conditions.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  People live these lives, which, you know, are ones of where, you know, terrible health conditions, lots of people unemployed. And again, it's kind of hard to understand.

• 54:57Tyler Cowen?

  It can't be genetic, right? Because it's fairly recent. So it's cultural.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 55:03Tyler Cowen?

  Culture has this big, huge influence.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  But there's, 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 outmigration. And outmigration, I mean, it tends to be people with more talent, 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. Though I must say, so my, my sister trained as a doctor in Glasgow. And when they interviewed patients, they were actually trained to ask them, well,

• 55:50Speaker 01

  how much do you drink per day? 10 pints? And people would say, oh, no, doctor, only six.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it, it really, 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.

• 56:11Tyler Cowen?

  And what's your take then on modern Ireland? Because there's incredibly high rates of outmigration. And I don't just mean the potato famine, just Irish going to Liverpool, right? America, Australia, all over. You look at Ireland today, it, it doesn't seem selection is that important. Their education level is the highest in Western Europe. Health indicators, income, whatever test you want to run, they just seem like normal Ireland.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:37Tyler Cowen?

  So selection there hasn't mattered? Or what should I infer?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Well, so it turns out, even though I, I live in Scotland, all of my family is Irish.

• 56:45Tyler Cowen?

  Ah, okay. Now we're talking.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  So.

• 56:47Tyler Cowen?

  Same here.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  And so, so I've 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 it was 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, right?

• 57:20Tyler Cowen?

  And why negative selection in this hypothesis? Because the ones who are about to starve?

• 57:25Speaker 01

  I think one argument was the, 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, 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.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  But for other countries like Australia and New Zealand, they are being positively selected. But that's more than counterbalanced in England by immigration 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, the question I had in Scandinavia was, look, Sweden and Denmark and, 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, right? But again, it turns out, the evidence is that migration was actually negatively selected

• 58:53Speaker 01

  in Scandinavia.

• 58:54Tyler Cowen?

  If I go to North Dakota, which is full of Scandinavians, they're doing fine. Their indicators are great. They sort of. Look, feel and act a bit like actual Nordics demographically. It doesn't feel like negative selection.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  But basically, Europeans in the United States now are very much, people of European descent are very much average. Right? 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 driving migration in Ireland were, maybe it actually was either neutral or even negatively selected, some of the immigration from Ireland.

• 1:00:30Tyler Cowen?

  Do you have a sense for Latin America?

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  I unfortunately don't know. I know.

• 1:00:36Tyler Cowen?

  A different set of them go to Spain than to the US. I'm not sure how it all pans out, but.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  If you look at migrants from Latin America to the United States, the further away the country is from the US, the better they tend to do. And so the more positively selected.

• 1:00:50Tyler Cowen?

  But the distance from a Quater growth hypothesis predicts that too. Right?

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Oh, right. That would also be, yes. So I think it tends to be, if you're coming from places like Chile, something like that, coming to the United States, I think it tends to be quite strongly positively selected.

• 1:01:06Tyler Cowen?

  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, would you like to just say a few words about your next book? I know you've covered some parts of it already.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  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? Does your mother better predict your outcomes compared to your father?

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Does family size matter? If your parents die, does that influence your life course? What about your grandparents? Can they direct? 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 seem to, in slightly 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

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  about. And, and one message to this is, don't spend a lot of time with your children. It doesn't matter.

• 1:02:53Tyler Cowen?

  Greg Clark, thank you very much.

• 1:03:00Tyler Cowen?

  For questions, there is the mic. Please do not block the camera. And first question, yes, please.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  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 Mokier's come to very large increases in income from like time of Hastings to beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And 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

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  day, you would arrive at clearly absurd results like we have barely improved in living standards over time?

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  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 point 001 of a percent, right? And so if you were to take someone with our or Tyler's tastes, for example, and construct a 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.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  But that series is actually constructed for the average person in England. And, and what happens then is that you really don't see much kind of technological advance on these types of indices in, 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 tyranny of the majority, which is what do 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,

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  is that there had been a lot of earlier technological advance, but not in the commodities that the average person consumes. And 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.

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  Next question. Thank you very much for stopping by. I was struck by your example of the, it was the Chinese fiance that was wearing the Scottish kilt alongside his Vietnamese, one of his best men.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Best man, yes.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  Yes. It ties into the point you made about assimilation. In your work, what factors encourage assimilation into culture, into like norms of the home country versus the opposite? And do you think that's related to economic incentives? Or is it more about culture? Thank you.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  So I'm impressed. As I say, I've studied a lot about the upper 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 I say, surprising kind of plasticity, but other families remaining kind of firmly Jewish, but in other ways becoming highly English. And a nice example of that is in 1685, the Huguenots were driven out of France, and they arrived in Britain. They constituted about 1% of English population at that stage.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  You can see them within one or two generations completely culturally assimilating. And you can see that in the names they called their 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 and rapid 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. And so, so as I say, I'm impressed when you see someone like Britain, how rapidly that

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  assimilation occurs and even in my own family. So my grandfathers were 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.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  And 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, 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 kilts, right? Because that was completely not the culture that we came from.

• 1:09:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. Hello. Thank you so much for coming and giving the talk. It was an honor to listen in person. I learned a lot, lot from your research. Being said that, I, 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.

• 1:09:42Speaker 04

  And as far as I know, the research is mostly from the Anglo world, within mobility within Anglo world, or Europe to Anglo and the other ways around. And 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 in immigration, we see in the United States, immigrants from MENA region are very, very successful. So do you think if we change the directions of migration and basis of living standard from these donor countries, will the results look more optimistic?

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  And the second part of the question is, there is research done by Johannes Haushofer, 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? Thank you.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  So, so let me talk first about the determinism trap. And so this is a, there's a fundamental kind of philosophical issue here, which is, I, you know, 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.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  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, right? And I think of that as a kind of stunning kind of gain, right? Maybe 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.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  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? And so that, 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.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  Thanks a lot. Thank you.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  I have some related questions on how you're measuring the social persistence. So the persistence of social status is the rank-rank correlation over time, which means that if there is error 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 error has changed over time, such that it's higher in the 1800s, for example, than compared to today? As some like 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

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  because now it's a, there's different people in the mix. So how do you account for that? And how do your methods avoid this?

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  And 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

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  is just not telling you a lot about the true nature of social mobility. And 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, for 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,

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and particularly Hindu Indians and Chinese. And as I say, it's an amazing kind of 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. But it would influence things like trying to calculate social mobility rates when you have all of these new groups kind of arriving in the society and actually being very successful.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  But I agree, but that's actually really very much a phenomena of post 1960 or something like that in Britain.

• 1:16:46Speaker 05

  Thank 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?

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  I'm not sure what to advise you. I could tell you that I met my wife when we were both graduate students at Harvard. I was the first man she met at Harvard.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  She wasn't particularly selective in terms of.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  I mean, what can you say? I mean, you see a general pattern. Do we know that that pattern makes people happy? Maybe everyone with highly assortative marriage is actually unhappy. And if instead they had chosen a spouse on grounds of, you know, romance or something else like that, they would be much better off. All I can say, 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.

• 1:17:46Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:17:49Speaker 06

  I wanted to ask about a, 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 at the national level, it all balances out. So there's no variation over time. I mean, what a coincidence this would be in social science. So I just wanted to hear your thoughts on some of these technical recent matters. Thank you.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there is a chapter in the new manuscript, which examines exactly this issue about, does it 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? It's mostly still predicted, overwhelmingly predicted, from the status of your parents. And it just turns out, there are many more high status people in the south of England.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Now, one puzzle is, it's this movement to the south of England of higher status people has been going 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 be much less skilled. And so basically, the story for England is, there is this kind of process of selection. And it turns out that that,

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  interestingly, also occurs in other parts of Europe. And it's amazing now with, you know, modern markets and stuff. Like that, that in almost every place in Europe, you'll find high income areas and low income areas and 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 you know, empirically, the the average person born in that mining village is going to do pretty poorly. But there is this question, is is it all just about family background? Or is it about the opportunities that people get offered? Yep.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  How do you, if I believe your chosen mechanism for transmitting over 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?

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Well, these genome wide studies amazingly, even with the, you know, something like, now is it up to four million people that they have genotyped, 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. And 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 it's combinatoric effects that really matter. But I think they've largely been ruled out that it's mostly just the additive

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  impact of what's happening at each particular location. And so all I can say is that, I mean, it 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. And 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.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  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 is quite strong, they still cannot actually find mechanically what the location of that basis is.

• 1:22:36Tyler Cowen?

  Greg Clark, thank you again. Big can for Greg. Thank you.

• 1:22:44Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks 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 show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.