Gregory Clark: belief

Transcript context

…Why negative selection in this hypothesis? Because the ones who are about to starve? 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. 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.…

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