Gregory Clark: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. 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. 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.…

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