Gregory Clark: prediction

Transcript context

…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. 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. 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.…

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