Gregory Clark: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. 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. 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.…

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