Is Social Status Determined By Your Genetics? - Gregory Clark

Gregory Clark is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis, researcher and an author. Everyone has a dream of making a better life for their family. But fascinating new research suggests that your social status is heavily predetermined by your genetics, and that your descendants escaping the position they've always been in is very unlikely. Expect to learn if social status is actually heritable, how much genetics really plays a role in social hierarchy, how researchers can tell where the next 10 generations of children will fall on the social ladder, how higher and lower social status can impact the birthrate, why more attractive people have more social status, the difficulties of publishing research like this and much more... - 00:00 Studying Social Status Inheritance 10:56 How Gregory Defines Social Status 18:16 Why Ideologues Hate Social Status Inheritance 25:20 The Role of Marriage in Status 32:31 How a Man’s Father May Be Considered By a Mate 43:06 Do People Who Ascended Eventually Regress? 49:08 Implications of Genetic Social Status 53:59 How Declining Birth Rates Impacts Social Hierarchies 1:04:29 Importance of Attractiveness to Social Mobility 1:07:22 When Gregory Got Cancelled 1:17:01 Do Our Successes Actually Belong To Us? 1:23:58 Integrating Genetic Knowledge Into Our Lives 1:26:29 Where to Find Gregory - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What's this new paper of yours about the inheritance of social status?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  So the paper looks at four hundred and twenty five thousand people in England over the course of four hundred years, who are all linked together by descent and marriage, and just asks, what describes how you inherit social status? And it ends up that there are actually three very interesting aspects. One is that there's a very strong inheritance of status, much stronger than people conventionally believe. And so there's an underlying correlation that's really strong. The second astonishing aspect is that that correlation hasn't changed over the course

• 0:49Speaker 01

  of four hundred years. There's no more social mobility now than there was in the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century. But the most surprising element of all is that if you want to predict how correlated people will be, then that prediction is based on what's their genetic correlation. And so the data is just very consistent with a really simple model of genetic transmission, where what just matters is how many genes do we have in common? That'll explain how much outcome we'll have in common.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  And that, as I say, is for many people very surprising and also quite troubling for a lot of people.

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

  What is the methodology of you being able to track genetics across such a long period of time? How are you able to do that? Presumably ancestry.com wasn't tracking people four hundred years ago.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Right. So the lineage stuff is fine. And so basically, I was using there, there are all these kind of interesting societies in Britain, and one is the Guild of One Name Studies. And these are two or three thousand people who've devoted themselves to following the history of particular surnames in England. And they've done fantastic jobs, kind of actually tracking people's genealogy over hundreds of years. And so that part is straightforward. But the only thing we can do here is, we don't have, we have no direct genetic evidence here. What we can look at, though, is what would be the predictions of a genetic model of transmission?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  And that has a distinctive and very clear set of predictions about how correlated fourth cousins, third cousins, second cousins, first cousins will be. And it all depends on how much assortment there is in marriage, how strong these correlations will remain. And so there's also, you know, predictions about siblings, about grandparents, grandchildren. And as I say, the very surprising thing here is that the predictions of that model are very consistent with this data for England. And it really is, you know, so as I say, so there's nothing conclusive here, there's nothing direct.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  But there is just a very interesting empirical pattern. And then as part of the paper, I also can say, well, what about other features of inheritance of status that would be consistent with genetic transmission, do they also hold? And so here's one example is with genetic transmission, mothers should always have an equal influence as fathers in terms of outcomes for children, because you get half of your genetics from each parent. Now, if we go back to 19th century England, fathers play a very different social role than they do now.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  If you look now, mothers still actually spend much more time with children than do fathers. And so we would actually expect with social transmission that maybe sometimes fathers are more important and other times mothers are much more important. But the data for this lineage in England is very clear. If you want to predict children's outcomes, mothers and fathers play exactly the same way.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And, you know, so early on, we have evidence on the literacy of mothers and fathers. And so that's equally predictive of what the child literacy would be. And it doesn't matter if it's a boy or a girl. In those cases, it's again equally predictive. For other outcomes like occupation, we don't have occupations for women in the 19th century. But we can proxy women's occupations by, for example, taking their brother and then taking their husband's brother. And that'll actually give us a good proxy for what their occupational status is. And then we can say, which predicts child outcomes better? Is it the mother's proxy or the father's proxy?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  And the answer again is no, it's exactly the same weight. And so, and that's true, as I say, all the way through the last 300 years, that mothers and fathers play exactly the same role in terms of outcomes, except for one important outcome. And that outcome is wealth. For wealth, fathers are much, much more influential than mothers. And that's because wealth tended in England to flow on the patriline. That men inherited more family wealth than women did. And so what matters is what your grandfather's wealth on the patriline as opposed to your grandfather on the matriline.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  So as I say, this is one piece of interesting ancillary evidence. A second piece is what's the effect of birth order on outcome? Right? And in the social world, I mean, I don't know if you have children. I had three. And the oldest child gets much, much more parental attention than the younger ones do. Right? And talk to anyone who has children, this is true. I mean, the parent's a new thing when the first kid comes along. The parents have all these ideas about how they're going to shape these kids. And so, and empirically, we know that older children get more attention than younger children. So you might expect that older children will do much better in terms of social outcomes.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Uh, it turns out in this data, no, it it's in in almost every case, birth order doesn't matter. Your chances in life are the same, whether you're first or the last. And a lot of the families in the nineteenth century, there are ten children. And so you would think the tenth one is coming into this kind of crowded family. There's no more space. My own parents were both from families of twelve. And by the time, you know, my father and mother, I think both were number nine. By the time they came along, the housing's incredibly tight. You're sharing a bed with three siblings and stuff like that.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  And but it turns out it it it it doesn't matter, except, again, there's a slight exception. For the top one percent of families in the nineteenth century, the kind of elite, the oldest son is doing better than the younger sons. But that's the only thing that matters. So the old and the oldest son inherits more, but is also more likely to be sent to university than the younger sons. So you do see slight deviations for this, but for ninety nine percent of the population, it doesn't matter what birth order is. And then another thing you can look at is, well, what about family size? Isn't that going to influence your outcomes?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Because the more children there are, the less resources there are, the less parental attention. Again, uh, in the era, uh, so there's an era up to marriages of around about eighteen eighty, where in England, family size was random. People made no attempt to control fertility. And it it is amazing that they just apparently got married, produced children. Sometimes there's only one child, you know, just the accidents of fertility. In the sample we have, there's one guy who has twenty seven children from two different wives.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  And so you get this enormous variation in family size. And again, It has no effect except for richer families for wealth. And then if you're from a larger family, then your wealth actually declines. Right? It's like if you're from a wealthy family and it's larger, your wealth declines because the wealth has to get divided.

• 9:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the if inheritance is going to play a large role in determining your future level of wealth and there are more people taking from that pie. Each sliver of the pie is smaller.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. So so as I say, so that's another aspect. Uh, another thing we can look at is. Do you ever need to meet your parents for them to influence your social outcomes? And so in a lot of the period that we're looking at, uh, you know, parental death is occurring at relatively early ages for some people in their fifties and sixties. And so about 10% of the kids, their father dies before they're 10 years old. And we can then say, how correlated are you with your father? As a function of. You know, you you knew them all the way up till you were 21.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Or they died before or they died before you were 10. It makes no difference to outcomes. You you don't do any worse in life, you're not any less correlated with your father. You you apparently you never need to meet your parents for them to have exactly the same influence on your outcomes. So so as I say, uh, this study then is based on this observational data, right? And so it doesn't prove anything directly. But I'm working on a book, which is going to have all of this kind of ancillary evidence. About the nature of social life and as I say, a surprising amount of this says. It's not social transmission.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  It seems to actually be genetic transmission that is the consistent pattern that would explain people's outcomes.

• 10:55Chris Williamson?

  When you talk about outcomes, you're using words like social status, where they end up in life, stuff like that. What what what is social status based on what you're talking about here?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Right. So the specific measures we have are, did you go to higher education of some kind?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  What was your literacy earlier on? Uh, the best one we have is what's your occupational status, right? And then we also know for everyone who's, most people who are alive now, what's the value of your house that you're living in? And that's a pretty good indicator of your income level. And then also, what's the nature of the neighborhood you're living in? Is it one where there's a lot of educated people, there's low crime rates, stuff like that? So we have a kind of measure of, and, and that's, we got down to the, almost the street level. Uh, what's the quality of, of that? And so as I say, so we have these kind of multiple measures.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  But what I've seen with the data here is that these things tend to move pretty closely together. That basically, high status people have more education, more wealth, higher occupational status, they live in nicer neighborhoods, uh, they tend to live longer. Uh, all of these things, and that's why I, I think of it inherently as there's, there's just some underlying kind of social abilities that people have. And that, that's the thing that's being transmitted that between the generations.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think about how you've tried to tease apart social transmission and genetic transmission or genetic inheritance, I suppose. Because a lot of people would look and say, well, you know, if you come from a family that is well off, think about the culture that you have around the house, around the dinner table. Think about the sorts of things that are being spoken about. Think about the kind of friends that you're going to play with, that your parents are going to have. You're going more likely to go to after school clubs. You're more likely to maybe have a tutor or maybe be encouraged to play sports or to play a musical instrument or all of these different things. And yet, it seems like behavioral genetics wins out yet again.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yes, uh, and so, uh, now, it turns out, uh, that I didn't, you know, because I'm coming from an economics and kind of history background. And I just got interested in this and I had this data and I thought, well, let's try to fit a genetic model, what would happen? Uh, in this field is very fractious and very kind of ideal, kind of ideology is very important to people. And it it turns out, most of the people actually don't want to believe that simple genetic transmission plays an important role in social life. And so most of the people in this field actually seem to believe that cultural transmission of the type that you've described

• 13:59Speaker 01

  is actually very significant and very important. But there is one kind of puzzling thing about that, which is people don't focus on this a lot, but there's a lot of variation within any family in terms of the outcomes for children.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  And children's outcomes are no more correlated than, and they have roughly the same correlation as between a parent and a child. What what they, you know, the correlation of child outcomes. Now, if you really believe strongly in cultural transmission, I, you know, when I look at, I was one of four children. If I look at the expectations my parents had of us, if I look at the dinner table conversations I sat around in, if I look at the housing we lived in, the neighborhood we were in, it's all the same for all four of us. And so if you really believe cultural transmission, you would expect that siblings really would show very, very strong correlations.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  Right, because you have, you have essentially the same environment for all siblings.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  But the only thing that would have been, the only variable that you would have had would have been some sort of uh, genetic one that you got this particular combination of sperm and egg and somebody else got the rest.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Right. And and so it turns out then that the one, and people don't seem to focus on that a lot, that there is this puzzle with cultural uh, transmission, which is how do you explain why siblings are actually significantly different? And and with genetic things, that is partly because you inherit different genes from each parent. But a lot of it is just because whatever genetic blueprint you have, there's a randomness about what body eventually gets assembled from that blueprint.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  And that means that even identical twins are not identical in terms of their phenotype, right? And, you know, people, there's this very famous investigator of twins, Ploman. He had a whole project which sought to look in detail at families where you had identical twins and one was different from the other. You know, like, one went to college and one didn't. And he interviewed the twins, he interviewed all their relatives. I think they spent years doing this in detail analysis. And it came up with inclusion in the end. They could find nothing that would actually explain why these differences existed.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  And so I say, I, I think there actually it's something again where genetic explanation has this idea, well, there's, there's this irreducible randomness about life and, and about how the genetic instructions get implemented. And that explains why even identical twins will not turn out to be identical. And so, uh, uh, so, so I'd say, so, so cultural explanation is this interesting alternative. The, i- i- it's hard to test, right? Because someone could say, well, I believe in culture, but I believe it has exactly the same form of transmission as would come through genetics.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  And then, you know, it's such a loose form of explanation, right? Because everyone has their own ideas about how culture operates. What matters? Is it that, you know, you have some figure in the family that you can look up to? Is it the actual contact that matters? Is it the schooling that people go to? And so it's very hard to, um, to find, you know, the stuff that would refute a kind of cultural explanation because inherently, unlike the genetic explanation, it's just not super well specified. But as I say, I think the strongest thing is this fact of the way siblings vary within families.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And the fact that it's very hard to then to, to understand why sibling number one is doing great, sibling number two is struggling, when so much is common in terms of people's backgrounds and a- as siblings when they're growing up.

• 18:16Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think it is that this genetic explanation of social inheritance and social status is so ideologically unpopular?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Um, well, it absolutely seems to be because it's saying somehow mechanically at birth, your life chances are pretty much determined, right? And that the state or society is not going to be able to do very much to actually change outcomes, right? And so it implies a kind of relatively conservative social policy because it would say all the expenditures on schools and other things like that are really not going to have that much effect in terms of of social outcomes. And so I think it's that.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  And then also people are worried immediately about what does that imply about the relative fertility of different groups in society and the implications of that?

• 19:21Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean about relative fertility?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Oh, because once you say, look, what's happening is that one person is successful in life because they have this genetic material and another person is unsuccessful because they don't have the favorable genetic material, then the issue immediately comes up, well, you know, if this first group was to multiply and increase their share of society, there would be all of these potential social benefits. If the other group was not to do that, there would be an avoidance of social costs. And so people are, I think rightly, very concerned about the potential social implications of this.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  But the only problem is, I mean, when we're thinking about how the world is, it's very, it's very important not to adopt certain positions just because it would make life easier, right? I mean, when you're thinking about, you know, the way the world is actually operating. The important thing is never to have the end view in sight in terms of what explanation do I favor, what explanation do I find plausible here? I mean, we'll just have to live, you know, whatever the explanation is, if it turns out genetics really is important, we'll just have to live with those consequences.

• 20:45Chris Williamson?

  What is, sorry, what is the consequence of ignoring the genetic implication?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Um, well, there's several consequences. One is, for example, I think as a society, we've, you know, and I should say, as a background point here, I've made my life working in education. But it's firmly my belief that we've vastly exceeded the amount of education that people should usefully get in this society, right? That, and we've done that in part because it's been regarded as the key to social mobility, social advancement, leveling the playing field. And now we're adding forever now, instead of just getting a BA, people now think that they have to get a master's degree.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  There's, there's actually, you know, the empirical evidence that education is actually improving people's lives is actually very weak.

• 21:55Chris Williamson?

  But didn't you say, didn't you say previously that one of the parameters that you'd used was education level, whether or not they did get to higher education? So you're saying that that as a useful indicator of someone's future life outcomes is becoming less and less effective at being predictive?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  I, I, I, yes. Here's an example of, of why this doesn't seem to be very predictive. So in the UK, at various dates, we've extended the amount of compulsory schooling that people get. So I think like 1973, 46, 1919, we've, and we moved from 12 years to 14 years, 15 years, 16 years. I think now it's supposed to be closer to 18 years. We can actually look at those episodes and you get then two cohorts of people. You get the people from just before the change who get on average, you know, they only have to be there till fifteen.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  And then you suddenly get a new cohort who on average get a half a year of extra schooling. And then you can look empirically and say, well, what happened? Did that improve these people's life outcomes? And the answer for Britain is no. None of these adjustments to education showed up in any way as an improvement in, you know, income or mortality, longevity. None of these things were actually changed. And we also have this house value evidence. So you could say, did the people who got an extra half year of education end up living in a slightly nicer house or in a nicer neighborhood? The answer is no. Okay.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  And so, so, so as I say, the, I mean, the problem is that we've, we're now spending about 10% of national income on education in various forms. And in part, as I say, this is really driven by this idea that path to kind of universal social mobility is to get everyone educated. And I think that's an illusion. And that, you know, there, there are other things we could spend that income on. One of the things we could do is just, we could just redistribute more money to people at the lower end of the income spectrum.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Rather than thinking that everything has to go through something like education. And so, you know, I'm here in Denmark now. Denmark is, I think, one of the most equal societies in the world. And it's quite impressive what they've actually achieved in Denmark. There's, there's not a lot of homeless people. There's, um, you know, this, the state will provide for you and, you know, the, the labor market seems to provide pretty well for people. The minimum wage is something like 20 or 25 pounds effectively in this society. And so, you know, I, I think there's a lot of social policy that's actually very useful and very helpful.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  And that if we think that the things we have to spend on are stuff like education in order to improve social mobility, I think that's can end up just a lot of waste of resources in this society.

• 25:19Chris Williamson?

  Shouldn't assortative mating nudge this stability? Isn't that kind of a little bit of a dice roll? What role does marriage play in this?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Well, it turns out in the data that I'm looking at, that's the key element of the story is that we can measure assortative mating. It turns out Britain has fantastically good marriage records because the marriage record in England and Wales at least, from eighteen thirty seven onwards, it actually asks what is the father of each party and what's the father's occupation? And what's the husband and wife's occupation? And then also, earlier on, it also effectively measures literacy. And so it actually, you know, there's a lot of information on these marriage records

• 26:11Speaker 01

  and the government is sitting on something like one hundred and ten million of these. And but it costs, I think, eleven pounds to order one of them. But there's a bunch of kind of freelance amateur anarchist genealogists who've set about going to the record offices and recording this data and setting it up on a website. And so we were able to get about one point five million of these records from this site. And what's evident in that data is that people are matching very, very closely in marriage and that that's consistent and not changing in England all the way from eighteen thirty seven until now.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  And that when people somehow in marriage, what mattered to people was the underlying social status of the person they were marrying. And that is something that has very big social consequences because.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  A, it's going to mean that the inheritance of status is much stronger. And if what was happening is that men just married a random woman, right? So suppose men, the only thing they cared about was the physical attractiveness of their spouse. And they married in that way, then the parents would not be very strongly correlated in status. And consequently, the children will not be very strongly correlated with any individual parent.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  Because, just to interject there, a woman's attractiveness has a negligible or not at all relationship between her social status.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Right. And, and, and, and so, so we could imagine that kind of model of marriage. And what that'll do then is also, over time, it will result in less distribution of abilities in society. Right? Because what's happening is very high status people marry only very high social abilities people. Then you get over time a widening of the distribution of abilities in society. And so who decides to marry whom actually has these huge social consequences in terms of how strongly status is passed on. But also in terms of what's the overall distribution of abilities within society.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  And so with the marriage pattern that you're observing in Britain, then this is what is actually driving this very slow social mobility. And you could actually predict with genetic transmission that if you just force people to marry at random, you would actually almost double the rates of social mobility in British society.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's the redistribution strategy that we should be pushing toward. None of this education stuff is get people to, get people to mix the social status that they're marrying within more.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  That's right. If you just gave them a random, here's someone's ID number. And I guess we don't have an ID in Britain, but here's, here's your number.

• 29:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Uh, and, and, and this is actually very interesting. And so, so we've actually done some work on another aspect of marriage, which it was widely believed that the way marriage works is that somehow women tend to marry up.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  The women trade off physical attractiveness for status in males. And studies definitely show that when people report their kind of ideal marriage partner, that women report more about income or education and stuff like that. And men report more about physical appearance, right? And so, so we were expecting potentially in this data to find that when we had this huge collection of marriages, that women on average would be somehow moving upwards in this, you know, pattern. And, and men would be marrying women of somewhat lower status. Now, the only way that can actually work in society, if everyone's marrying everyone, then you've got to have equality in terms of status.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  But what easily can happen is that it could be that high status women, who are not physically attractive, find it difficult to find mates. And then low status men, whatever their characteristics are, also find it difficult to find mates. And the interesting thing for the English data all the way through is that there's absolutely no sign of this. On average, men and women are marrying people of equal status. And that's, you know, and it's the same pattern for right at the top of the distribution and right at the bottom of the distribution. And so somehow the way marriage is operating in practice is

• 30:58Speaker 01

  that people are just matching up mainly on their kind of social status. And that you, you're actually not getting this, as I say, marrying up by women or marrying down by men. And so, so that's a kind of interesting social aspect of our society, which is why do people choose to marry in that way, right? It's not obvious that that's going to be the happiest marriage or the ideal marriage. Why would it be that people seem to care so much about someone's kind of underlying status? But I think what this reflects is that when you're dating someone.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Uh. We have these very imperfect measures as social scientists about how many years have you been to school, what's your occupation, what's your income? People getting married actually have much, much more information. You can tell by talking to someone for not that long a time, what's their sense of humor? What's their knowledge? How smart are they? How clever are they? How imaginative are they? And that it's interesting that these things seem to matter a lot when people get married. And that they're leading to this kind of very tight assortment of people at very similar levels in the kind of social hierarchy.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Uh. And as I say, they're underpinning this tendency to have just a lot of persistence across generations.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so your research points out that historically, men tended to pair with women who have fathers with similar social status to themselves.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  That's correct, yeah.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Um. Oh, so now this, yes, this is clearly happening, that that women are getting more years of education. Uh. The difference in earnings is not great still. I think men are still ahead in terms of earnings. Um. But yeah, but I think what's just 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.

• 33:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so maybe women will be likely to evaluate the education of a date's father before deciding to commit to a date. Like, does this man have the education genes, even if he himself did not attend college?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Right. So one of the um interesting aspects of the data that I have is that uh 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 waiting 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? So you don't just.

• 34:16Chris Williamson?

  Genealogical dating.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And then 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. Uh, and so, um, yeah, so, so as I say, i- i- it is interesting because people, uh, as I say, when they're matching, they they look like they're trying to maximize the prospects for their children.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Right, in terms of the choosing a mate, right? Uh, and, uh, and I, as I say, that's an interesting social feature. I don't know why we would tend to do that because it's it's not true in all societies. So, for example, if you go to large parts of the Middle East now, or even, uh, 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. Uh, that you're that these cousins actually will be more different socially

• 35:29Speaker 01

  than the way people are actually marrying in somewhere like England. So they're actually.

• 35:36Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that is so insane that if 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.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yes, no, that's an amazing feature, yes, but it is actually true.

• 35:55Chris Williamson?

  That is bonkers. That is completely bonkers.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Um, so, yeah, so, so as, and and the other thing that was amazing about this is that this pattern, as I say, the the the new source of marriage data starts in eighteen thirty seven. That um pattern is there immediately in eighteen thirty seven, even though at that time, most women didn't formally have occupations. And and so the way we're able to judge how well they're 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 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.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  But still, when they married, they wanted someone of kind of very similar social position to themselves. Um, and and so, as I say, so it's it is a surprising feature of the nature of marriage in this society, yeah.

• 37:00Chris Williamson?

  Does this mean?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  By the way, one thing I should add is that 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 registered 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, uh, social scientists come to these societies because, you know, they to take just one example, I've seen a paper which looks at people's earnings and its correlation and connection with the psychiatric medications that they were prescribed.

• 37:46Chris Williamson?

  This is the real surveillance state. Who knew that Scandinavia was the real surveillance state? Dear God.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Now, they don't reveal any individual information, but as I say, they 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 or?

• 38:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, that was my first my first question. England, uh, very classist system, uh, very well established. We use words like posh, you know, it is still very ingrained. Uh, accent denotes status an awful lot, the school that you went to, grammar schools, the introduction of things like that, old 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?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Right, and uh, yes, and so the reason I actually was interested here was to say, to we look at say, modern Denmark, because everyone thinks of this as a very high mobility society, it's very egalitarian and very different. Now, uh, there's a study that's been done in Sweden, where they've 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 a hundred and forty-one different types of relatives.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And some of them go across five marriages, right? And with this data they have, they can actually link you to people who you're never 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 strong these 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 in marriage in terms of their underlying status.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  And they have this very slow implied rate of social mobility also in a place like Sweden. And so I think this is, this is a general kind of maybe North European or European, probably all of Europe kind of pattern, right? And I don't know what it's going to be like in, in some other societies. I suspect it's not going to be that different, right? When I read about places like China and the kind of things that people are looking for in terms of mates in China. And so I think, you know, the British have, you know, and, and I've, you know, I, I say, I grew up in Scotland. I then spent, I was an undergraduate in England, and then I've spent a lot of time in America.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  The British actually keep beating themselves up that somehow they have a uniquely class ridden and classist society, but there's actually no evidence of that, right? I mean, social mobility.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  We just like to abuse ourselves. We will find something to feel ashamed about.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:03Chris Williamson?

  That Puritan, that Puritan work ethic is I'm whipping myself with a cat of nine tails.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:08Chris Williamson?

  That's what we're here for.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it turns out, so I, 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 and was being very successful, you know, and he 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, you know, and then.

• 41:37Chris Williamson?

  Clambering out of the muck and the mire, one rung at a time. Congratulations, mate.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  So, so as I say, so 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,

• 41:59Speaker 01

  there's this group, the Huguenots, who arrived in England in the 1680s and they were Protestant refugees from France and relatively educated, but they, you know, 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 Huguenot 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, right? And so, you know, so you think about these places as, you know,

• 42:39Speaker 01

  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 Eton, there's Harold, there's all the rest of that stuff. But my experience looking at this is that it's a very open upper class. If you've got the money, the education, the connections, the doors, the doors actually open for people.

• 43:05Chris Williamson?

  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 highfaluting upper troposphere. Over time, did these people revert back to the mean, revert back to their mean?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the important thing about the, as I say, the upper class is 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 mean. 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're 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%,

• 44:11Speaker 01

  they're the ones whose kids have the most prospect of upwards mobility. And, 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, right? And so, you know, the 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 economics, because, you

• 44:54Speaker 01

  know, we can't predict what the outcome of the economy is going to be next year. We can't predict which are going to be growing economies, which are declining. Macroeconomics is just a random effect.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  But when it comes to social mobility, there at the group level, societies actually are, you see really almost a kind of physics of social mobility.

• 45:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  So if I tell you, you know, here's a, 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.

• 45:33Chris Williamson?

  That's insane. Just think about that sentence that you've just said there. That's like clairvoyance or divination or something.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Right. No, I mean, what it's just saying that at least at the, you can't predict for any individual, right? And for every individual family, there's a different path. There's a lot of randomness, right? So that's the thing that we say to people is, look, the, the, the good news is your outcomes don't seem to be entirely determined by genetics. There's also complete randomness as well.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Fantastic. Where's the, where's the agency in this? Oh, 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, this is a, a Plomons maxim, right? Genetics to do not predetermine, but they do predispose.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  And when you smear that across enough of a populace, you end up with just like, like thermodynamics, right? It's like winds that blow in particular directions and they encourage particular outcomes.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Right. No, I mean, what, so what's impressive actually, I mean, so this is why I'm actually, I'm always a little surprised by how, how kind of exercised people are about class and social mobility, right? Because somehow there is this kind of feeling that, that, that there is this permanent advantage group, that they're able to take advantage of their position all the time and, you know, get all of these unearned benefits. Um, 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.

• 47:18Chris Williamson?

  Because of regression to the mean.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they're not, there's nothing they can do.

• 47:22Chris Williamson?

  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, blah. Slowly just chips and chips and chips away. But anybody that's using this sees a them and an us. It's a tribal game and they've been at the top and they will always be at the top.

• 48:02Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, the, uh, yes, as I say, it's hard for people to take that kind of long perspective. And, and even, you know, 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, you know, people 300 or 400 years, is that you really can see that dynamics play itself out. And you can, and, 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.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  That, that we, we could be living in the Victorian era. It's the same era.

• 49:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the obvious, the obvious question is, what's the implication of this for a, a society that preys at the altar of meritocracy? Like what, what, what are the implications? You've put all of this data together, you've realized this sort of a thing. What does this mean? Like what, what, what are the implications?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Well, one implication is that I, is I think that society is more meritocratic than people tend to believe. That people with ability tend to be able to move up within the society, right? And, and people without ability are tending to move down, no matter what their parentage was or what advantages they got from their parentage. And that, that people tend to be. Overfocused on this kind of absence of meritocracy or the importance of your kind of lineage, your class, stuff like that. And so one thing I actually draw is some kind of sense of, we do live in a surprisingly meritocratic world. Now, in other terms, in

• 50:11Speaker 01

  terms of social policy, um, one 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 three hundred years later. So one kind of interesting implication of this is that if you're concerned about the output of the society as a whole, or the social functioning of the society as a whole, then in immigration policy, you should really look, seek out high status immigrants, right? Uh, because they-

• 50:52Chris Williamson?

  Would that not, would that, would that not push down the social mobility of the native population?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  It would, but, 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.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  You have a more productive populace.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Right. 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 in the society and it tends to compete with people at the lower end of the society. But it does say that, uh, you know, immigrants are actually going to have a surprising kind of long-term impact on the society. They're not just going to be absorbed and leave the society otherwise unchanged.

• 51:44Chris Williamson?

  Right, because you've taken a, a kind of a hermetically sealed genetic bomb, and you've deposited it, and the aftershock, the aftereffect of that is going to continue down the road.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Right. And and and now it it turns out, so one of my co-authors, Neil Cummins, has done some study, you know, because I'm of Irish origins, he's years of Irish, 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 a hundred and fifty or more years.

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't bode well for the Irish genetics.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  So, so, yes, as I say, so if it ends up with that is really because of the the genetics of that population, it's kind of interesting that it's it it actually has an impact for for a very long time. And so, so be- because there are some views that would say, look, everyone has exactly the same potential. You know, so when immigrants come in, it doesn't matter what their educational background is, what other things are, because.

• 53:01Chris Williamson?

  Throw them in the primary school and a secondary school and get them a sixth form degree and they're going to be just the same.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  And it's 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. So so some societies, for example, like Australia, New Zealand, 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, you know, look, people choose to have children, they choose not to have children.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  They will have the social consequences, it would have these social consequences if it's transmitted also just by social media.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that does that's an interesting, that's an interesting question, given that we've got declining birth rates at the moment for the first time in quite a while. And the particular cohorts that are choosing to reproduce are assorting as well. It seems like people who are more right leaning are having proportionally.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  Less fewer children than people who are left leaning. Downstream from that, that has to select in some ways for social status, educational achievement, so on and so on, 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 birth rate of what this is going to do to the inheritance of social status?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Well, it turns out there have been some studies in England because they've got this thing, the UK Biobank. And so the UK Biobank has metrics of what your educational potential is based on your genetics. And.

• 55:03Chris Williamson?

  Base Britain, dear God.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  But then you can, they 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 dysgenic. 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

• 55:48Speaker 01

  super fecund and were basically having 50% more children than the lower classes in each generation. And so you do see this period where if you think, if it is the case that this 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 like one generation, they moved from having three or four on average children to having one child. It's amazingly quick transformation. And so then actually you enter this other period where you are, and this is the period

• 56:31Speaker 01

  where the eugenicists are all running around because they were responding. To what they saw as this incredible social problem. But then, since I think the nineteen sixties 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.

• 56:56Chris Williamson?

  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 sixteen hundred to two thousand 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?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Um, to 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, you know, social life must have dramatically changed and the possibilities have dramatically changed. But, you know, the, 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, you know, the pre-industrial era. And, you know, there's a surprising kind of constancy to the way people live family life, the way people produce children and stuff like that, other than the fact they

• 58:17Speaker 01

  just have many fewer of them. And so, so, yeah, I'm not expecting any great social revolutions from things like, you know, so things like assisted reproduction technology, that's become important. It kind of favors upper class people because it's expensive and, you know, 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 are born in that way. And so I don't see it as having dramatic impacts. Now, the one thing that is on the horizon.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  That would be kind of, personally, I would find a little bit worrying.

• 58:58Chris Williamson?

  Are you going to talk about embryo selection?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:02Chris Williamson?

  There it is. IVG, embryo selection. I knew it.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  So I have talked to some of the people who are, who are, 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, among your own embryos, right? And so there isn't that much.

• 59:24Chris Williamson?

  It's not modification, it's selection.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there's not that much range. But I would be convinced that in somewhere like China, they will go ahead with this, right? And, and when one 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. And so there are all, there used to be all these slots where you can be in the hockey team, you know, at Harvard.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  A whole bunch of those middle class parents were giving growth hormones to their perfectly normal sized children in order to gain them.

• 1:00:06Chris Williamson?

  Create some stud that would go, get into an Ivy League education.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, 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, 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,

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  then people will engage in embryo selection.

• 1:00:33Chris Williamson?

  So I don't, I don't disagree. I, I do think that it plays into, at least the, 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 as powerful of a force that it is because publicly, the luxury belief that is often 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

• 1:01:18Chris Williamson?

  stuff. That's perilously close to eugenics. That just 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 techniques, they're going to fall behind. It's an arms race ultimately for offspring and those people are going to fall behind.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  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 on stuff like that. And so I'm confident in places like the US, they would do this. But I'm even more confident in a place like China that they would do this. I mean, because there, 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, us towards these technologies.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  There's the education gene that we just need to tinker with.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Yeah. So there's no simple solution to that. But, but it, you know, it seems for sure that that stuff like that will will come in future. And then, I mean, the other puzzle will be, will people just decide, well, maybe I don't need my partner's egg. I'll get some other egg.

• 1:03:08Chris Williamson?

  I like, I like you as a wife around the house, but your genetics.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  Does this really smart girl at work?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  So, uh, so, so, so there, you know, it, it, it will be interesting to see, uh, what people do. But I think, I mean, the advice for upper class parents now is you should just enjoy your children, right? If 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, 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,

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  if there's 50 of them here in the class, it's predictable that their children will do less well in life than they will.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  All 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.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I should, I've got a future, a resolution to self, do not point this out.

• 1:04:29Chris Williamson?

  Did you see this new study on physical attractiveness and intergenerational social mobility that came out recently?

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't think I did. So.

• 1:04:39Chris Williamson?

  Alexei Gushvili and Gregor Zbuljak, 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 are accounted for. Using data of about 11,000 individuals from the United States National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we contributed to the existing scholarship by investigating if physical attractiveness assessed when individuals are 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 when childhood characteristics,

• 1:05:21Chris Williamson?

  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. Across 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.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  So, Kapla, I actually, I haven't seen that paper. I do need to actually go and 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 ones for physical attraction would matter more than men. But 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 do better in terms of publication.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  And, and I don't know what, they must have gone to the websites of universities or something like that and then scraped these things and then had someone read 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 and say, well, how handsome or how tall is this person? And so I suspect for these things that probably

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  physical attractiveness is just another part of social competence. That basically highly competent people know to get a nice haircut, you know, and occasionally shave and stuff like that. And that, that, that it's really just another kind of imperfect indicator of basically what people's kind of overall social abilities are.

• 1:07:20Chris Williamson?

  What was the response when you dropped this paper?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Oh, this, the, the PNAS paper. Well, well, you'd probably have heard about that. I got cancelled at Glasgow University.

• 1:07:33Chris Williamson?

  Tell that, give us, give us that story.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  But, 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: A 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 genetic transmission. And so that is For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  IQ and social life, not IQ, sorry, genetics and social life. And so anyway, I was due to give a talk at the Economics 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 had ordered that the can't, the seminar be cancelled. 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

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  and I don't see any problem with the paper, but the title is a problem. So if you would just change the title, we'll reschedule the seminar. But then I felt on principle 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, of something else. I mean, so you, you could imagine they could come and be critical and stuff like that.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  But, but also, I mean, that, that we'd reached that stage and, and effectively when they did that, there was no cost to the university of doing that, right? I thought the, the dean and the principal of the university played it very well because as administrators, because they said, well, we're not cancelling 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 to get to a better place. Um, 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. And the Times now is the world's most workless newspaper.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  The reporter for the Times had a story that was headlined Eugenesis Denied Opportunity to Speak at Pastoral University. For God's sake.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  So, so as I say, it's, it is.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  And and they couldn't even get my age right, or, you know, there are various other things they couldn't get right in the story. And so, so, yes, so that has actually been a a concern. Uh, and and I also noticed, I mean, so.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  When I'm doing this stuff, you know. It's, 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. Uh, but I do notice that the the kind of Twitter climate that surrounds anything that has any hint about genetics is brutal and unforgiving, right? And people are just ready to go to the barricades. Why do you think that is? I I honestly, I don't really understand why it's become kind of so ingrained, because, for example, height is genetically determined, right?

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  And no one seems to get very upset about that fact. Uh, 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. Uh, we know how it's transmitted, we know it's equally transmitted from mothers and fathers and and, you know, and 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 to go to the barricades

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  and to just, you know, think of some reason why this cannot be true?

• 1:12:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, you know, use your theory of mind. What do you think this is a threat to to them? It's evidently a threat to something.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it's an interesting question. I mean, why? Because it's not just that people say, oh, I'm not interested in that, or, you know, don't tell me that, and stuff like that. They actively want to exclude any such discussions from the academy, right? I mean, they they want to close down those types of investigations. Uh, and, uh, you know, and and as I say, I I I'm still a little bit mystified as to uh, why, you know, why the, in particular, this has become so controversial, right?

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Because I'd say I've noticed now I've 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 I don't know if you've read about that.

• 1:13:28Chris Williamson?

  No, what's this?

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:13:30Chris Williamson?

  Sounds awful. It sounds it sounds like it's going to annoy me and I'm going to think about it for the rest of the day.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Right. So here's an interesting study that was done just a couple of 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 to them. And then they looked at predicting how many years of education they would get as a function of the DNA you did inherit and the DNA you didn't inherit.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  And 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 an 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.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  But it's not directly the DNA that's doing the work. It's the environment that's actually.

• 1:15:05Chris Williamson?

  So much acrobatics and fuckery going on.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 1:15:11Chris Williamson?

  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 as someone doing like spirals through the air. Yeah, I don't know. So I've had a couple of conversations, had a conversation with Paige Harden a few years ago that wrote the genetic lottery. Paige, very, very great researcher. Stuart Ritchie's been on the show, Plom has been on the show. Stuart's fantastic. Paige, I found particularly interesting because, you know, she's somebody who is politically from the left, but scientifically from the behavioral genetics camp. A couple of things that I can think of.

• 1:15:51Chris Williamson?

  Anything that looks like gene-ish, like genetic type explanations are immediately lambasted as being right of center or far right or, you know, 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, you know, this is going to grow into mostly female professors over the next few decades as well.

• 1:16:24Chris Williamson?

  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 feely, they're less egalitarian, whereas the male professors were more happy to have this come across. So I think generally you have this shift toward a people not things or a empathy not reality approach. That that could sway things in in one way. And I guess in another, you know, 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

• 1:17:09Chris Williamson?

  after a while, it didn't, 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. So really clutching at straws to try and come up with something. And, you know, I feel very proud. I think I think I'm the first person in my family to go to university. I ended up getting a masters as well. And I really love the things that I do. And I see in myself, I do feel sometimes like being told that my successes aren't mine to own quite so much feels, it feels disempowering in in a way. It also feels reassuring in a way because

• 1:17:51Chris Williamson?

  you can kind of go hands off the wheel in some regards. But it does make you think, well, fucking hell, like, 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 neuroticism and you didn't choose your blah, blah, blah. And you're like, yeah, I get that. And it's a difficult circle to square and I'm I'm I'm still yet to work out how to fully fold this into my worldview. You know, 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

• 1:18:34Chris Williamson?

  than they think because the bar is set incredibly 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. But 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 just sucks people toward whatever they were supposed to be in any case.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  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. And so it is very hard to square with saying, well, that's just, that was just your, the lottery produced, that's the type of person you are. And yeah, no, and I agree for motivational speakers, the news about genetic transmission is not great.

• 1:19:42Chris Williamson?

  Right, guys. I know that you were coming here to feel empowered, but we're going to do an hour and a half on behavioral genetics. Leave feeling despondent. Good night. Yeah, well, I don't know.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  Everything interesting that happened in your life happened about 30 years ago.

• 1:20:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yep, yep. Well, I mean, you know, this was, this was Plomin's, Plomin's 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. And 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, 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, that's this, that's the big solution. And it's disempowering. And I think that it pushes

• 1:20:40Chris Williamson?

  against a meritocratic world that says, your successes are yours to bear. Alain de Botton's got this beautiful, beautiful analogy. I wish that he'd had a conversation with Plomet or yourself or someone, because I think it would have been really great. He says, um, back in ancient Greece, the beggars on the street were referred to as unfortunates, that Lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them, right? 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, right? That 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, that they'll get their comeuppance eventually. But if you roll the clock forward

• 1:21:22Chris Williamson?

  by 2000 years, what is it that we call people who don't have anything going on? They're a loser, right? It'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 theirs as well. And that's why this language that kind of centers the locus of control upon the individual has, has changed. And that is, you know, fundamentally what a meritocracy is. Uh, 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 that the only

• 1:22:06Chris Williamson?

  reason that they managed to get into this highfalutin institution was because of their mothers, mothers, mothers, fathers, mothers, da, da, da, da, da, da, all the way back?

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, maybe you could say, well, there is this, always this random element. And maybe it's openness to kind of experience or stuff like that can, can increase that randomness, right? That, that this would be the thing to say, look, like half of your outcomes in some sense depend of just random shocks. And so maybe there's a way of kind of choosing to take more gambles in life, right? And, and, uh, 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 going to come to nothing, you know, more than half the

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  time, ninety percent of the time, but it might kind of pay off. It might, you know, go somewhere.

• 1:23:02Chris Williamson?

  Roll the dice.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so, and that would be a, a thing about what kind of attitude you have to life, right? Are you going to be conservative or kind of afraid of, of these things or, you know?

• 1:23:16Chris Williamson?

  But I suppose, you know, coming into it, well, what have you got? Are you trying to conserve or 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, so, so 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, let's just not be, you know, optimized to not be an idiot as opposed to be a hero. Whereas 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, I think it's so interesting. I'm really excited for you to write this book. I think it's a, I think it's, I, I don't

• 1:24:01Chris Williamson?

  know what the conclusion is. I think that what will be really important when you do finally sort of round all of this out will be to try and put some sort of like, I don't know, how does someone ameliorate this into their life? I think is what, it's fascinating all the way down. Super interesting. Really, 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?

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:23Chris Williamson?

  It's very difficult.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  The, 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, 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. Just have children and enjoy them, right? You don't have to go through this excruciating kind of thing called parenting. You could just relax, have a glass of wine.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  They'll be fine.

• 1:25:08Chris Williamson?

  Not while you're pregnant, not while you're pregnant.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  After that, right? But, but you know, and, and that actually would be one kind of, I think, in, an important lesson that actually people would, would need. Cause I know as a first parent myself, we went to ridiculous extent in terms of what we did, you know, as parents.

• 1:25:29Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and you know, if I could get all that time back, that's what I want.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  But anyway, so, so there are some kind of upsides to this. And, and then, you know, but as a person kind of 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 kind of powerful. So, yeah, so I guess my big ambition though in life is not to, not to write a how to book for, for middle class parents.

• 1:26:21Chris Williamson?

  Ameliorating behavioral genetics. No, I understand. Greg Clark, ladies and gentlemen. Greg, I think your work's fantastic. It'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?

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  So, 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 on various topics that they, they can do. And then hopefully in a year or so, there might actually be a book finally.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:27:02Chris Williamson?

  My pleasure. Thank you, Gregory.