Gregory Clark

Genetic inheritance and randomness determine social position; meritocracy was achieved by 1700.

• A truly meritocratic society is one where the only things determining social position are genetic inheritance and randomness; by this definition England already achieved meritocracy by around 1700, meaning meritocracy was reached hundreds of years before the modern era.

  “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.”

• A detailed genealogical study of 300 years of English families testing all predictions of a genetic model (birth order, gender, mother vs father, family size, parental death, grandparent and interaction effects) concludes we are mainly the product of our genetics and randomness, with randomness a huge component—implying England has largely been a meritocracy for 300 years and, half-jokingly, that spending lots of time with your children doesn't matter.

  “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”

• Pre-industrial Northern European societies, not just England, exhibited 'survival of the richest' for hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution, where genetic differences between those at the top and bottom of the social ladder gradually changed the underlying genetics of these societies.

  “all of these societies show this phenomenon of survival of the richest, going on hundreds and hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution”

• Recognizing that many outcomes are the product of immutable inheritance and randomness—accidents of family history we don't control—implies that a good society is one that does not magnify those differences but compresses them through redistribution; hereditarianism and a Denmark-style redistributive welfare state go together.

  “a good society is one that doesn't magnify those differences between people, but rather can seek to compress them”

Relative position persists across different regimes because it is determined in a physics-like way.

• In Hungary under Communism, surname analysis shows descendants of the previous elite preserved their status in spheres like medical school admission; in the political sphere the elite disappeared temporarily but re-emerged fully once the free market was restored, demonstrating that relative position is determined in a physics-like way regardless of regime.

  “in things like admission to medical school, it didn't change under the system of Communism. The same elites preserved themselves.”

• Although the North of England is much less successful on education, output, employment, health, and longevity, a comprehensive genealogical database controlling for parents' status shows very little independent cost to being born in the North; outcomes are overwhelmingly predicted by parental status, and the South simply contains more high-status people—bearing on the Heckman-Chetty debate over family versus neighborhood effects.

  “This new book says the growth of the South and the decline of the North is all attributable to self-selection within Britain.”

• While economics achieves little predictive power about economies, social mobility is stunningly deterministic at the group level: in English data you can predict what will happen to a surname group 300 years later from its current position, which Clark regards as the only path forward and a genuine scientific gain.

  “in the English data, you can predict what will happen to people 300 years later based on their position now”

Only mechanistic, empirically testable explanations count; humanities-based cultural theories do not qualify scientifically.

• Pluralistic, humanities-based cultural explanations for why nations succeed or fail (e.g., 'they got their act together') do not work because they are not empirically testable; the explanations ordinary people offer (too many people, corrupt politicians, education) are easily testable as false, so only mechanistic, closed-form, empirically testable explanations count as more than mere conversation.

  “We can only explain things if we have these mechanistic, closed-form, empirically testable explanations. Otherwise, it's just conversation.”

• Surname analysis shows nearly all European-descended groups in the US are very average, indicating 19th-century migration out of Europe was not strongly selected; the evidence even shows Scandinavian and possibly Irish emigration was negatively selected, while Quebec French-speakers became a US underclass—contrasting with the strong positive selection of Chinese, Indian, and Jewish immigrants who form the new American elite.

  “Basically, all European groups within the United States look very average.”

• Societies can be ranked by how old they are (China extremely old, much of Southeast Asia younger), and Chinese laborers exported to plantations across Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines became the entrepreneurial class everywhere—suggesting the deep history of a society, shaped by thousands of years of Malthusian selective pressure, predicts how its people perform in modern economic competition.

  “laborers exported from China to work on plantations elsewhere in Southeast Asia have become the entrepreneurial class in all of those societies”

• Scotland is doing relatively well economically only because of generous subsidies from the South of England paid to keep it in the UK—including free university education that forces Scottish universities to charge English (but not, under EU rules, German) students—so Scottish independence would be like a parasite detaching from its host.

  “when Scotland was considering independence, this would be like a parasite detaching itself from the host, because in order to keep Scotland within the UK, they have been paying out these very generous subsidies”

• Post-1960 immigration is dramatically transforming English society: white British are becoming the lower class while Africans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and particularly Hindu Indians and Chinese form substantial new upper classes; because immigrant fertility is higher, a large fraction of 15-year-olds now come from these origins, which complicates calculating social mobility rates but has been an enormous benefit to English society.

  “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.”

• People, particularly in Britain, have a deep fascination with relative position in society—who attends elite universities, who becomes members of parliament, and the backgrounds of such people—making relative social mobility an important feature of societies even if material living standards have risen fifteenfold since 1800.

  “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”

• The gain in material living standards is in some ways far less important than commonly believed; Clark says he would be perfectly happy to move into Dr. Johnson's early-18th-century London house today, with healthcare being the main genuine improvement.

  “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.”

• Successful immigrant groups assimilate culturally with surprising plasticity and speed—Huguenots driven from France in 1685 (about 1% of England's population) were completely assimilated within one or two generations as seen in naming and marriage patterns, yet their descendants remain four times more likely to attend Oxford or Cambridge—while groups that fail economically face barriers to assimilation.

  “You can see them within one or two generations completely culturally assimilated.”