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.
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Recorded February 5th, 2025.
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TYLER 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 Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, among other things, argues that rates of 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.
GREGORY CLARK: Thank you very much. Great to be here.
COWEN: I have so many questions about your work. Let me start with mobility, a point where I think we don’t agree. 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 quintile — how well is that predicted by your parents’ quintile 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?
CLARK: 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. 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. People are just as divided in terms of the types of groups that they meet with as they would be 500 years ago. 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.
COWEN: That’s focusing solely on relative rankings. 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.
CLARK: 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 people are obsessed with.
COWEN: I’m not obsessed with it.
[laughter]
CLARK: But it turns out, most people are.
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 how the person in Mississippi compares to Bill Gates. I think it’s exactly what people are not obsessed with.
CLARK: Right. It’s legitimate to say I see your question, and I think it’s unimportant, [laughs] but I still think it’s a fascinating feature of societies, which is how are people between generations moving in relative position within societies?
The other thing I would say is that that gain in material living standards is actually, in some ways, a lot less important than you might think. I’ve gone to 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.
COWEN: With no penicillin, no good dental care.
CLARK: Yes, there have been definite improvements in healthcare and other things.
COWEN: Electricity.
CLARK: Right, but as I say, in some sense, you’re just saying, “Okay, I want to concentrate on growth. I think that that’s the crucial element of society. If all of that growth goes to 10 percent of the society and not to the rest of society, I wouldn’t care about that.” Whereas, as I say, it seems to me just in common observation, that certainly in Britain, where I come from, people do have this fascination with relative position in society, and people are obsessed about who’s going to the elite universities, who are the members of parliament, what are the backgrounds of these people.
COWEN: Isn’t that the problem with Britain? It’s an economy that has more or less falling productivity since the Great Financial Crisis. It’s far too stultified. It’s too status-conscious. What we need to do is distract people from relative rankings and just get them thinking about the absolute size of the pie.
CLARK: One of the reasons that I went to Denmark was because of the fantastic data that they have in the registered data on people’s social position in Denmark. 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.
COWEN: This, I believe.
CLARK: It’s not correct to think of Britain as an immobile society.
COWEN: Aren’t they 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. What you’re born into more or less determines how you, your kids, grandkids will do in Denmark.
CLARK: I think the Danes themselves would actually think of themselves as a very mobile society. It’s a very open society. That’s why, as someone who’s interested in societies, 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.
I actually draw from this a comforting fact, which is to say meritocracy was achieved much earlier than you might’ve 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.
That status seems to have been achieved in England already by 1700. I actually draw 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. 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. [laughs]
COWEN: Let me give you a different reading of your work that probably you’ll disagree with, but let me get your reaction. This I call Strauss plus Bryan Caplan. 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. 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. 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.
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?
CLARK: Absolutely. That also clearly says that there are cultural and social constraints in society that allow 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. 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.
The things that are holding back societies as a whole — it’s very interesting that it doesn’t seem to affect relative social position. As I say, that’s why I’m a relativist and you’re an absolutist. [laughs]
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?
CLARK: Yes. As I say —
COWEN: The environment really matters. It’s just hard to change it. In that sense, the weight you assign to genes is still up in the air because when we see the environment change a lot with migration, the effects matter a lot.
CLARK: Yes, but it seems to me that societies 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. I’ve actually done some work on Hungary under Communism, where again, using surnames, we can identify who were the descendants of the previous elite.
Interestingly, in things like admission to medical school, it didn’t change under the system of Communism. The same elites preserved themselves. In the political sphere, that elite disappeared from parliament for a while. When the free-market system was restored, that elite just emerged fully again into the political sphere. 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 determined in some very physics-like way within different societies.
COWEN: How do you think about the social returns to more or less assortative mating? Say in the United States — do we have too much of it, too little of it? 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 would call the epistemic quality of the median voter. There’s this trade-off. How do you think about that? What side of the margin are we at?
CLARK: 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 until now. What is astonishing in England is the degree to which people end up assorting in marriage so that basically, they’re matching with people that are as close to them, essentially genetically, as their siblings in marriage. It’s really interesting because people could mate in any way.
You could think I want the tallest person, the handsomest person, the youngest person, 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.
COWEN: Yes, and are we doing too much of that or too little of it in the United States?
CLARK: 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 percent or 5 percent of the ability distribution, then you would say the more assortative is mating, the more people will be in that extreme and the greater will be economic growth.
In the new book, I actually speculate about, was assortative mating in Northern Europe 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 assortativeness. So, in that sense, you can’t have too much if that’s your view about how society operates.
COWEN: At least we could have more of it. There might be some margin where you’d have too much.
CLARK: But it does produce more inequality, so if you’re worried about inequality in society, you don’t want assortative mating. The one way to correct a lot of inequality would just be to have much more random matching.
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. Nordic countries have not reduced the inequality of PISA measures compared to much more unequal societies like the United States. Again, it’s just interesting that a high degree of inequality is still found within these societies. It turns out that in Nordic societies, people are mating again very strongly assortatively even now. That is the thing that you would worry more about, that there is going to be this trade-off between assortative mating and the degree of inequality in a society.
COWEN: 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 state of mating, at least for a while, right?
CLARK: Yes. The implication would be you’ll get just a narrow distribution of abilities.
COWEN: But do we see that? It seems we see very high inequality in those societies.
CLARK: Remember, there’s potentially a difference between inequality based on things like wealth ownership and inequality in abilities or educational potential that you would see within a society. Definitely, there’s clearly going to be this association between how assortative marriage is and how much inequality you get.
By the way, Neil Cummins and I have a paper that just came out in PLOS One, which is about hypergamy, which is the very common idea that women tend to marry up because men value physical appearance more than women do, and there’s this trade-off that exists in the marriage market.
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. It seems to be that it’s just a complete dominance of social status in determining unions within this society.
COWEN: For England, I believe that. You think it’s true for most of the world?
CLARK: [laughs] The interesting question is, it’s definitely true for a bunch of earlier societies that the matching was much less tight. For example, there’s a whole bunch of earlier societies where cousin marriage was a very important form of marriage. The problem with cousin marriage for assortativeness is most people don’t have a lot of cousins at the right age and gender, so it ends up that you have to marry a random cousin.
It turns out that the modern British, or even the 19th century British, are matching much more tightly in terms of marriage than would be the case if you just matched to a random cousin.
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?
CLARK: What I would say is, if it’s systematically carried out, it should lead to a reduction in the distribution of abilities within a society compared to the very assortative 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. Potentially, yes, but it’s not something that I’ve actually studied yet.
COWEN: It at least seems that today, something about the caste system is finally paying off for India. From South India, you have these incredible chess players — 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? What has changed? What’s the environmental change? And doesn’t that mean environment really, really matters? It’s not all just genes.
CLARK: Oh, no. In terms of overall economic performance, in my earlier book, A 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. Then the second puzzle is the incredible divergence of society since the Industrial Revolution, where now you get these differences of about 50 or 60 to 1 in material living standards.
This is really illustrated when you look at a society like India where, because of this caste system, you had this super elite, the Brahmin caste, which preserved itself for more than a thousand 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 a super elite within this society.
Then the stunning puzzle is, why did all of that talent coexist with an incredibly stagnant Indian economy? Stagnant even once it was opened up to the forces of the modern market by the British, even once you had brought in British civil institutions, British legal institutions, free trade, free capital markets, low interest rates. This is one of the stunning puzzles of the modern world.
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.
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? 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. 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.
Rates of growth are pretty low. Even under Nehru’s 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?
CLARK: It might not seem that the British contributed much, but if you even look at the Anglo-Indian group that developed in India, that was massive. 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. The Bombay textile industry — something like 10 percent of it was owned by a Jewish family that had come from Iraq, the Sassoon family. The British, as I say, welcomed these entrepreneurs. They encouraged free trade.
I don’t think you could underplay how significant an intervention that was by the British in that society. Everyone is tending to judge India now by the results, but 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 overwhelm the British in turn. It is one of the great puzzles of history, why India never developed under the British. It just seemed that this was the path that had been set up.
COWEN: Could it have been too much assortative 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.
CLARK: Yes, except I’ve studied a lot in my earlier life on the cotton textile industry, and it turns out, 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, they were performed by 14- and 16-year-old girls with high competence, fantastic results.
Now, when we look at modern manufacturing processes, they can often involve high levels of performance by workers and huge costs if workers fail to perform. It looked like, in the 19th century, you had these failure-resistant techniques. Someone in a spinning mill — if they mess up, the thread breaks more often, but that can all be repaired, and it’s all observable. In modern high-tech manufacturing, you can see this problem, but not in 19th-century India. I still see —
COWEN: But there’s a whole supply chain. There’s the networks and the search of getting the right people for those jobs. Maybe it involves a lot of different moving parts and not just what’s under the roof of the factory.
CLARK: Right. I think some modern Indian, a very rich entrepreneur, should have a prize that would be devoted to someone who could explain why India didn’t successfully industrialize under the British in the 19th century. Because it’s one of those stunning mysteries of history. As I say, it’s easy for people just to say, “Oh, it’s the sclerotic English institutions. It’s the arrogance of the conquerors. It’s the caste system in India.” But if you look at the details, none of that successfully explains what happened in India.
COWEN: What about the hypothesis that there’s something akin to the Asian tiger mom? To enforce it, you need a network. It’s very hard to just do it on your own. 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’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?
CLARK: Except as I say, when the British arrived in India, 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. They were absorbing people coming from all different parts of the world. The Sassoon family, for example, ended up writing poetry against World War I, and also as the chief aid to the general fighting World War I. They had absorbed into British society, lots of foreigners many times before.
In India, they were actually absorbing a lot of upper-class Indians into British society. 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 lead India to modern economic growth. That’s what’s so puzzling. You might explain all of this stuff, but all you need is some deviance. Take an example of this. Indian mills underperformed British textile mills. 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 is that possible when you have this varied set of entrepreneurs, varied set of people, that you just cannot match the performance that’s going on in this other society? I remain puzzled by that.
COWEN: Say we look at some other extreme example: South Korea. 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. 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. Why resist that kind of explanation?
CLARK: See, I’m not resisting here. What I’m saying is, having now spent many years studying economic history, I’ve finally come to, I think, modesty, and to say, look, there are some problems that just defy any serious explanation, that we make no progress with, but then, it turns out, there are some other things where we can explain surprisingly well what’s happening.
Basically what I’m saying is, why I turned to studying social mobility 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 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?
COWEN: 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’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, there’s Ricardo, there’s Marx. Explanations are supposed to take a certain form. Maybe that’s just our disease.
CLARK: 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 — 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, lagging enormously behind. We traveled on train all the time, and we ended up talking to Indians. It was interesting to ask people, “Why is India so poor?”
It turns out that people have all kinds of answers, but they’re easily testable as false. They would say, “Oh, it’s the population. We have too many people.” We know now, of course, that that actually is not going to make any difference. “It’s the corrupt politicians.” Or “it’s the education system.” Stuff like that. The problem with, as I say, this 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.
COWEN: If we take England — when I read your book, A Farewell to Alms, I took you to be ambiguous, but when I reread that book through the lens of your later papers, it seems to me you’re saying there was an actual genetic change in English society because of who was marrying whom and having kids with whom, and thus, people saved more, became more conscientious, more forward-looking.
CLARK: Yes.
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? Really, quite a bit compared to, say, the rest of Europe. 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.
CLARK: The differences in output per person in England compared to the rest of Europe are actually relatively minor. If you look at other kinds of productions like scientific production, literary production, other things like that, there’s no vast difference.
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, never mind Denmark.
CLARK: Two things I want to emphasize here. 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. 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.
It seems to be, as I say, a general feature. That’s the first one. I don’t think of England as being that different from these other locations. The Industrial Revolution is 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 I’m able to do is track the reproductive success of people since 1750. There was a period from 1850 till the 1920s or ’30s when an astonishingly low fertility emerged amongst upper classes in Britain. That was also compounded by very heavy losses of the upper classes in World War I. Twenty percent of men of that generation in the upper classes died in World War I.
But reproduction rates were at one child per family or one and a half for 50 or 60 years in the late 19th century amongst this group. So, the relative size of the upper class in Britain actually shrank dramatically in the course of this period. That’s one potential explanation of, again, why British performance has been relatively lukewarm since about World War I, because as I say, it did go through this surprising and dramatic transformation socially where you’re really losing a lot of this upper class.
By the way, one interesting thing was how few of this upper class actually ended up marrying in this period. It was somehow a renunciation of marriage and of family at that time — and puzzling. It hasn’t persisted. Now in Britain, fertility is pretty neutral between upper class and lower class. But there was this 60-year period that’s associated with quite a dramatic decline of Britain’s entrepreneurship and leadership in the world economy. There is this intriguing possibility that this actually was an important historical event.
COWEN: 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 of whatever savings you have, and that that trait should evolve, but just casual empiricism doesn’t seem to show those societies as being more conscientious.
CLARK: But here’s one element of casual empiricism. If you look in modern economic competition, we can rank societies by how old they are. China is extremely old. If you go to other parts of Southeast Asia, these are much 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 somehow the history of different societies is still predictive of how people are going to do in modern economic competition.
The question would be, putting it back to you, what cultural explanation would there be for why that type of history would actually matter so much in terms of modern competition? One argument just would be that under the anvil of the Malthusian era, these societies were transformed more by these selective pressures applied for thousands of years, and that then emerges in terms of basic behavior of people in the society that makes them perform better even now.
COWEN: 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.
CLARK: 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. 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, it doesn’t mean to say that the Malthusian constraints are not still applying. There are relatively rich Malthusian societies, but they can still be societies where the conditions of reproduction are such that people are constrained, that they will only reproduce successfully if they’re above these living standards, and that can be because of various social constraints about when people get married, how fertile marriages are.
As I say, the fact that Europe was relatively rich — and we can even extend this back to the 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. One classic example of this is when people arrived in Tahiti. That was clearly a Malthusian society. There’s a bunch of people stuck in an island with limited resources.
You were going to reach some kind of population equilibrium, and you were clearly going to be under these Malthusian constraints. It was materially quite a 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.
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 seemed to have realized that better than almost anyone. The Europeans — when they went there, they didn’t feel so sorry for the Tahitians.
CLARK: Oh, no, they thought the Tahitians were living incredibly well.
COWEN: Yes, were doing okay, so it wasn’t Malthusian because of transportation and mobility.
CLARK: No, no, no, but they were isolated, and they had these very limited resources. It turns out, why were living standards so great? Two things: they had murderous internal warfare that disposed of a lot of people, and they practiced a very strong degree of infanticide. They were killing between a third and half of all children born in the society. So, it was a Malthusian society, but it turns out, there are lots of Malthusian societies where people live at relatively high living standards.
COWEN: In what sense is it Malthusian, then? That the regulating mechanism is not starvation seems almost by definition to make it not Malthusian.
CLARK: 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, and where there’s a limited supply of material.
COWEN: That’s a funny definition for Malthus.
CLARK: It’s my definition.
[laughter]
COWEN: Clarkian.
CLARK: No, no. This is a widespread misinterpretation of Malthus, that Malthus is about low living standards. I think my earlier book, A 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.” One is the element that you’re forced to an equilibrium where the birth rate equals the death rate. The second is that that equilibrium does not necessarily imply relatively low living standards.
The way this shows up is, after the Black Death in Europe, which increased mortality rates, living standards in somewhere like Britain in 1450 were not again equal till the end of the Industrial Revolution. 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. 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.
So, they really were living at high material living standards. We can go back and look at the houses they constructed in that period. People here in Arlington would be happy to move into some of these medieval houses. [laughs]
COWEN: Under your current view, is foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa counterproductive? 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? I think you used to believe that.
CLARK: 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. So, the living standards really have not managed to increase for 50 or 60 years in these societies because they still depend very heavily on agriculture. There’s a limited agricultural area, and better technology then induces more people.
How could you best help such societies? It would be somehow by breaking that link between resources and population. Industrialization, if it’s possible to achieve, would be fantastic in these societies. The second thing would be limits on population growth. It looks like those limits are coming, and that we are going to see such a transformation, but there’s —
COWEN: A lot of this aid is public health. More people survive, more people live longer. That all seems to me to give them better lives. It may not always show up in per capita GDP.
CLARK: Right, but even though, as I say, there still is this 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. If you care about the population in Africa and their living standards, then there’s nothing to say that aid isn’t a good thing in this case. All that you can say, though, is, look, a bunch of that aid will result in more population growth, and so it will undercut the ultimate effects of that aid, and it would be much more effective if somehow you could actually transform these societies so that they’re not heavily dependent on limited agricultural resources.
COWEN: You wrote a piece published in Quillette, and you used the word hereditarian, and you say, “I’m a hereditarian. That means a lot of redistribution of income is a good thing.” I’m oversimplifying your message, but insofar as one is a hereditarian, what are the policy implications of that?
CLARK: Oh, I think once you recognize that a lot of our outcomes are actually the product of inheritance and are not mutable, they’re not changeable, then that fits perfectly well with a society that I like living in — Denmark — where there’s a huge amount of redistribution, effectively, being done. I think these things go together.
You should recognize that a lot of things happen to us that we don’t control. There are accidents of our family history, and a good society is one that doesn’t magnify those differences between people, but rather can seek to compress them.
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. So, it’s proving that you can have a surprising amount of compression of income differences and redistribution and still have a perfectly functional society.
COWEN: 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.
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 to the technological frontier. We see this with GLP. It’s exactly an argument against this little closed, “We all went to high school together; going to have a welfare state with high taxes” approach.
CLARK: I must say, there is a problem then in Denmark, which is that it 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.
COWEN: 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.
CLARK: Right. Now, actually, in Danish politics, there is a strong argument about what type of immigrants you want to attract. Throughout Europe, in fact, this has become a huge issue.
COWEN: You’ve got to get rid of these high taxes to get the good ones.
CLARK: That’s a good question. Denmark offers a lot of other good things in life, though I must say the weather is not one of them. [laughs] It is actually interesting, yes, how limited emigration has been from places like, say, Vietnam or India or something like that to places like Denmark because these immigrants would be very successful within this society.
COWEN: 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. 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 — they come to America, they know they’ve got to make it on their own. That attracts, on average, the right immigrants.
CLARK: Yes, but you can see every day in Denmark the benefits of having . . . Unskilled workers earn much higher wages than they would in the United States. People can live at a decent living standard. I’m living in California part of the year, and it’s just shocking the number of homeless people there are everywhere. Within a mile of my house, there are people living homeless in California, and it just doesn’t exist, this, in Denmark. I understand perfectly the Danes’ desire to preserve this.
The other problem the Danes have is, there’s only five-and-a-half million of them. They cherish their culture, their history, and stuff like that. One of the things they would fear about immigration is that already, if you walk in the streets of Copenhagen, the majority of people are speaking English to each other. The other thing, I think, that would limit immigration to Denmark is that people really do have this cultural identity. One of the things that they wanted to insist was that immigrants actually have to assimilate. It’s actually —
COWEN: I’m all for that.
CLARK: It turns out, it’s perfectly possible for someone like me to not assimilate and speak English in Danish society. It is an intriguing issue, though, about whether we should become more free market so that then we could have a different attractiveness to different sets of immigrants.
COWEN: After you moved to southern Denmark, what was the biggest surprise for you?
CLARK: I was surprised at how communitarian Danes were. At the university I’m at, every Friday they gather in a lecture room to sing songs together. Also, there’s an annual Christmas party. They have 4,000 people eat dinner together at the university. I was actually surprised at that sense of community that Danes have.
COWEN: For you, is that fun or stifling?
CLARK: Oh, no, I like it. I appreciate it.
COWEN: So, you do it? Are you there singing?
CLARK: I don’t go to the singing.
[laughter]
COWEN: So it’s stifling. They sing in Danish, right?
CLARK: That was my first surprise. The second thing that surprised me was how committed Danes were as drinkers. [laughs]
COWEN: I’m shocked that these are the things that surprised you.
CLARK: In the town I’m in, there’s actually a pub that opens at 10:00 at night and stays open till 8:00 am in the morning. [laughs] Danes are not the most talkative people in the world. My thought is, “What are they doing all night at this pub?” As I say, I was just surprised at that. 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. I was surprised, though, at how much they drank.
Then secondly, at the residing sense of community. They have laws in Denmark, for example, to try to prevent Germans from actually buying seaside property in towns, where you actually have to live in the property all year. I come from Scotland, so I appreciate the problems of small societies trying to still remain culturally distinct in this modern world.
COWEN: How optimistic are you about Scotland today?
CLARK: Actually, I’ve seen the data. The North of England is in terrible shape. Interestingly, Scotland is doing much better.
What’s interesting about Scottish society is, when I go back there now, I seem to them completely like an American. I meet all kinds of people who are completely non-Scottish in origin, who have become culturally completely Scottish. 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. [laughs] It’s amazing that the culture continues in Scotland.
In economic terms, Scotland is actually doing pretty well. As I say, it’s not —
COWEN: But there’re big subsidies from the South of England. Without those subsidies, what’s per capita GDP there?
CLARK: I did say that when Scotland was considering independence, this would be like a parasite detaching itself from the host, [laughs] because in order to keep Scotland within the UK, they have been paying out these very generous subsidies.
For example, in Scotland, university education is free. In England, you have to pay for this. 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 against people within your own country.
My hope is that Scotland will remain part of the UK and will continue to draw subsidies from the UK treasury. As I say, it seems to be doing fine.
COWEN: Why are public health indicators so bad in and around Glasgow? They’re some of the worst in the developed world, maybe the very worst.
CLARK: 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. I thought, “Oh, that’s fine. I’ll go to Google Earth and I’ll get a picture of the squalor of Glasgow.” It turns out, it doesn’t exist.
COWEN: No, there is squalor in Glasgow.
CLARK: No.
COWEN: I’ve been to Glasgow.
CLARK: No. The subsidies and everything else are so generous that I couldn’t find genuine squalor in Glasgow, not compared to California.
COWEN: You need a New Jersey boy to take you on a tour.
[laughter]
CLARK: In the end, I had to actually use this slightly fake picture which showed squalor, but it was because it was a building that was going to be demolished. What is amazing is that within what is relatively decent material conditions, people live these lives which are ones of terrible health conditions, lots of people are unemployed, and again, it’s hard to understand.
COWEN: It can’t be genetic because it’s fairly recent. So, it’s cultural. The culture has this big, huge influence.
CLARK: But there’s been a lot of selective migration within the UK. This new book says the growth of the South and the decline of the North is all attributable to self-selection within Britain. Glasgow, where I come from, has had a huge amount of out-migration. Out-migration — it tends to be people with more talent, ability, stuff like that, are the ones who are on the move. So, what you’re actually seeing, I think, is that a lot of this is selective migration of people.
My sister trained as a doctor in Glasgow, and when they interviewed patients, they were actually trained to ask them, “How much do you drink per day? Ten pints?” People would say, “Oh, no, doctor, only six.” [laughs] In some sense, you might say that’s some cultural hangover in terms of people’s attitude to things like drinking and exercise and vegetables.
COWEN: What’s your take, then, on modern Ireland? There’re incredibly high rates of out-migration, and I don’t just mean the potato famine, just Irish going to Liverpool. America, Australia, all over. You look at Ireland today — 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. So, selection there hasn’t mattered? Or what should I infer?
CLARK: It turns out, even though I live in Scotland, all of my family is Irish.
COWEN: Ah, okay, now we’re talking. Same here.
[laughter]
CLARK: So, I’ve thought about the whole selection issue. My co-author, Neil Cummins, has a paper that just came out, I think, or is 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.
COWEN: Why negative selection in this hypothesis? Because the ones who are about to starve?
CLARK: I think one argument was the kinds of jobs that were available in the North of England favored people who were unskilled. Again, in Scotland, what were the Irish doing coming in? They were working in the steelworks, the coal mines, scrapyards, and stuff like that. It was this heavy industry that was attracting these migrants. One argument has been that migration out of Ireland has actually not been particularly positively selected.
In this new book, I do actually look at migration from England to other countries. Interestingly, English migrants to the United States are the least positively selected. 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. Basically, England is constantly being refreshed by migrants from Europe who are highly skilled.
The process of migration is quite complex. Again, the question I had in Scandinavia was, look, Sweden and Norway — not so much Denmark — lost a huge fraction of their population in the 19th century to migration. How can these countries be so highly performing now? It turns out, the evidence is that migration was actually negatively selected in Scandinavia.
COWEN: If I go to North Dakota, which is full of Scandinavians, they’re doing fine. Their indicators are great. They look, feel, and act a bit like actual Nordics demographically. It doesn’t feel like negative selection.
CLARK: Again, in the book, The Son Also Rises, you can examine — just looking at surnames — different groups within US society. Basically, all European groups within the United States look very average. I think 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, that somehow there was some negative selection of people from that background.
Basically, Europeans in the United States now — people of European descent — are very much average. Then the new elites in the United States are Chinese, particularly Indians, the Jewish population and stuff like that, where there is clearly some very strong positive selection going on.
But it seems like the 19th-century migration was not so selective. 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.
COWEN: Do you have a sense for Latin America?
CLARK: I unfortunately don’t know. I know —
COWEN: A different set of them go to Spain than to the US. I’m not sure how it all pans out.
CLARK: 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 they tend to be.
COWEN: The distance-from-equator growth hypothesis predicts that too, right?
CLARK: Oh, right, that would also be, yes. I think it tends to be, if you’re coming from places like Chile, coming to the United States, it tends to be quite strongly positively selected.
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 it 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.
CLARK: Yes. The next book has been, unfortunately, 10 years in production because it depends on assembling this very big database: detailed genealogy of people over 300 years in England. I was really motivated by this question of, to what extent does genetics actually determine social outcomes? This book does a detailed study of all the predictions of a genetic model. It looks at things like, does birth order matter? Does gender matter? Does your mother better predict your outcomes compared to your father? Does family size matter? If your parents die, does that influence your life course? What about your grandparents? Can they interact?
The conclusion in all of these studies is, we’re mainly the product of our genetics and randomness. Randomness is a huge component as well, and that’s why I say, amazingly, we seem to, in a society like England, for 300 years have largely lived in a meritocracy. What would be the characteristics of meritocracy? It would be a society where genetics and randomness would be the only forces that really mattered. That’s what the new book then is all about. One message to this is, don’t spend a lot of time with your children. It doesn’t matter. [laughs]
COWEN: Greg Clark, thank you very much.
[applause]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a number of questions, but I can constrict. 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: food, housing, clothing, and then that’s it. So, you have a very low estimate of living standards, but other, more expansive definitions, like Mokyr’s, come to very large increases in income from the time of Hastings to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Do you have a philosophical reason for taking a very narrow construction? And are you concerned that if you took that same very narrow construction into the present day, you would arrive at clearly absurd results, like we have barely improved in living standards over time?
CLARK: When you construct these living standards series, you just have to look at what people actually consumed. Consumption of things like books in Europe in 1400 would be 0.001 of a percent. 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.
But that series is actually constructed for the average person in England. What happens then is that you really don’t see much technological advance on these types of indices in Europe, because the advances that are occurring — and they’re quite significant — are about tiny shares of consumption. 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.
That’s one argument about, again, why the Industrial Revolution seems so abrupt, is that there had been a lot of earlier technological advance, but not in the commodities that the average person consumes. What was unique about the Industrial Revolution was that finally, something like clothing now gets this huge advance, and that then transforms the economy. That’s why that series was done that way.
COWEN: Next question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you very much for stopping by. I was struck by your example of the Chinese fiancé that was wearing the Scottish kilt alongside his Vietnamese — one of his best men.
CLARK: [laughs] Best man, yes.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It ties into the point you made about assimilation. In your work, what factors encourage assimilation into culture, into 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.
CLARK: As I say, I’ve studied a lot about the upper class in Britain. When you see the history and this genealogy of these families — you have Jewish families arriving in Britain in 1800, where their descendant becomes a bishop in the Church of England within three generations. You do see this, as I say, surprising plasticity, but other families remaining firmly Jewish, but in other ways, becoming highly English.
A nice example of that is in 1685. The Huguenots were driven out of France, and they arrived in Britain. They constituted about 1 percent of the English population at that stage. You can see them within one or two generations completely culturally assimilated. You can see that in the names they called their children and in the women that they married or the men that they married.
You actually see, as I say, this complete and rapid cultural assimilation and then a movement into the elites of British society, where, amazingly, the descendants of that group are still four times more likely to go to Oxford or Cambridge than the rest of the people in English society, even though, culturally, 200 years earlier, they lost any distinctiveness.
As I say, I’m impressed when something like Britain — how rapidly that assimilation occurs, even in my own family. 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. [laughs] We had all kinds of weird theories about Protestants and their joyless life. I have a brother who married a woman who’s Protestant. His children are functionally completely Protestant. You see, even in this period, that by moving into the upper class in Scotland, which is heavily Protestant, effectively, you see that assimilation.
What I am impressed with is just how rapidly people can typically assimilate into other societies, except, I think, in cases where people aren’t succeeding economically and socially. That then becomes this barrier to assimilation. But people who are successful within new societies — it’s just astonishing how plastic the culture of different societies is. As I say, I never thought I would go to a wedding in Scotland with people wearing kilts because that was completely not the culture that we came from.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello. Thank you so much for coming and giving the talk. It was an honor to listen in person. I learned a lot from your research. Having said that, I really liked the example in your research where you used the last name Smith — how long it took for somebody named Smith to get to places like Oxford. It was about 200 years. I loved that research method, but also the conclusion is a bit deterministic. It’s how do you manage that social mobility? I think on that, I’m a bit more on the side of Dr. Cowen, where international mobility might have a higher rate of results than the examples in your research.
As far as I know, the research is mostly from the Anglo world, mobility within the Anglo world or Europe to Anglo and other ways around. You used 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 — places like Bangladesh or Sri Lanka? Also, in recent research in immigration we see in the United States, immigrants from the MENA region are very successful.
Do you think if we change the directions of migration and basis of living standard from this donor country, will the results look more optimistic? 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. Maybe policy prescription–wise, do you see some benefits in this solution to get out of that deterministic trap? Thank you.
CLARK: Let me talk first about the determinism trap. There’s a fundamental philosophical issue here, which is, I’ve spent a lot of time in economics, and economics really is a dismal science in the sense of how little economics has achieved, and how little we can predict about economies or about the future of economies.
One of the stunning things about social mobility is how deterministic at the group level that this is, and how in the English data, you can predict what will happen to people 300 years later based on their position now. I think of that as a stunning gain, maybe unlike Tyler here. I think of that as the only path forward. As I say, what I was stunned by was, in terms of social mobility, how much mechanical deterministic structure you had in society.
Now, I secondly agree that people moving between societies is an enormous source of economic gains and economic mobility. The relative position, though, seems to very substantially move with people when they move across societies. 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.
A lot of substantial gains will be made by moving people around in the modern world, and that’s something we should think about in terms of thinking about policy in different countries. I agree that substantively, there’s not a lot you can do within a society to change people’s relative outcomes, but there is a lot you can do for people by moving them from one society to another, and that’s the area that we should think about in terms of economic policy.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks a lot. Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have some related questions on how you’re measuring social persistence. 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. 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 recent work on American inequality has demonstrated?
Secondly, when people are added to the population through immigration, if they’re, for example, say, at the bottom, then it would tend to bias people’s social mobility upwards because now there’re different people in the mix. How do you account for that? And how do your methods avoid this?
CLARK: 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. One classic thing is, people typically, if you go to Scandinavia, the income correlation between parents and children or the years-of-education correlation between parents and children is low, implying that these are very high-mobility societies.
The problem is the errors involved in these measures. Measuring someone’s education level by years of education is a very crude approximation. It really tells you relatively little, particularly in a society like Denmark, where there’s enormous access to education and huge subsidies of education.
So, a lot of the book is saying, how do we correct for these errors? 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. I think, in social mobility studies, that any report that isn’t taking into account that all of these are very partial and imperfect measures is just not telling you a lot about the true nature of social mobility.
That was the first point. The second point was, 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 a dramatic transformation, where the white British now are the lower class of English society. There’s emerging very substantial new upper classes, which are Africans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and particularly Hindu Indians and Chinese.
As I say, it’s an amazing transformation of a society by immigration. 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. Actually, it’s been an enormous benefit to English society, but it would have influenced things like trying to calculate social mobility rates when you have all of these new groups arriving in the society and actually being very successful. I agree. That’s actually really very much a phenomenon of post-1960, or something like that, in Britain.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: 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?
[laughter]
CLARK: 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, so maybe she wasn’t particularly selective. [laughs] What can you say? 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 romance or something else like that, they would be much better off, so I can’t give you any advice on marriage. All I can do is say I can predict the kind of person that you’re going to marry.
[laughter]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wanted to ask about an ongoing debate between James Heckman and Raj Chetty on the role of neighborhoods versus family composition. James Heckman believes, okay, family composition really matters. Listening to this talk, you’d say, maybe not. 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. What a coincidence this would be in social science. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on some of these technical recent matters. Thank you.
CLARK: 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? 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 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. It’s mostly still predicted — overwhelmingly predicted — from the status of your parents. It just turns out, there are many more high-status people in the South of England.
Now, one puzzle is that this movement to the South of England of higher-status people has been going on since the 18th century. 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? 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. So basically, the story for England is, there is this process of selection.
It turns out that that interestingly also occurs in other parts of Europe. It’s amazing now with modern markets and stuff like that that in almost every place in Europe, you’ll find high-income areas and low-income areas and endogenously developing. But as I say, as far as we can tell from this British data, there isn’t that much cost.
I was born in a mining village in Scotland. I like to think I escaped my background. Empirically, the average person born in that mining village is going to do pretty poorly. But there is this question, is it all just about family background, or is it about the opportunities that people get offered?
COWEN: Last question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I believe your chosen mechanism for it transmitting over time to be, in fact, genetics. How do you reconcile the very low estimates of heritability from genome-wide association studies with the much higher estimates that come from twin studies?
CLARK: These genome-wide studies, amazingly, even with something like, is it up to 4 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. In some sense, what it’s saying is, these studies — 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.
They’ve also studied whether it’s combinatoric effects that really matter, but I think they’ve largely been ruled out, that it’s mostly just the additive impact of what’s happening at each particular location.
So, all I can say is that it has this weird implication that you may need studies that are bigger than the whole of humanity [laughs] to actually finally figure out what are all these genetic influences because there are such rare permutations that are actually affecting outcomes. It also, actually surprisingly, means that if you have very small populations, say Native Americans, that you might not be able to do these kinds of studies because you wouldn’t have enough people to actually be able to say very much about, say, the genetic basis of illnesses or the genetic basis of height and other things like that.
But it is a puzzle in that literature, which is that even with this amount of data, and even though knowing that there is this genetic basis that is quite strong, they still cannot actually find mechanically what the location of that basis is.
COWEN: Greg Clark, thank you again. Big hand for Greg. Thank you.
[applause]
Photos by Chris Williams, Zoeica Images