Gregory Clark: evaluation

Transcript context

…You wrote a piece published in Quillette, and you used the word hereditarian, and you say, “I’m a hereditarian. That means a lot of redistribution of income is a good thing.” I’m oversimplifying your message, but insofar as one is a hereditarian, what are the policy implications of that? Oh, I think once you recognize that a lot of our outcomes are actually the product of inheritance and are not mutable, they’re not changeable, then that fits perfectly well with a society that I like living in — Denmark — where there’s a huge amount of redistribution, effectively, being done. I think these things go together. You should recognize that a lot of things happen to us that we don’t control. There are accidents of our family history, and a good society is one that doesn’t magnify those differences between people, but rather can seek to compress them. One of the interesting things about Denmark — it’s stunning to me when I go there — tax rates on people are so high, but it’s still a highly productive, technologically innovative society. So, it’s proving that you can have a surprising amount of compression of income differences and redistribution and still have a perfectly functional society. Isn’t the implication in a way the exact opposite of that? That if the way people can advance is by moving, Denmark is pretty stingy with its migration policy. Denmark should have lower taxes, lower welfare to attract the higher-quality immigrants, say, from South India and other places, and they should be more open. That would make them much more productive, make the people coming from South India way, way, way more productive, be good for the whole world, because Denmark is closer to the technological frontier. We see this with GLP. It’s exactly an argument against this little closed, “We all went to high school together; going to have a welfare state with high taxes” approach.…

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