Gregory Clark: belief

Transcript context

…Thanks a lot. Thank you. I have some related questions on how you’re measuring social persistence. The persistence of social status is the rank-rank correlation over time, which means that if there is error in measuring the status of somebody, it tends to increase social mobility because there’s less correlation. Are you concerned that the degree of error has changed over time, such that it’s higher in the 1800s, for example, than compared to today as some recent work on American inequality has demonstrated? Secondly, when people are added to the population through immigration, if they’re, for example, say, at the bottom, then it would tend to bias people’s social mobility upwards because now there’re different people in the mix. How do you account for that? And how do your methods avoid this? It turns out, a lot of the new book — there’s a whole section which says people have not thought about errors enough in terms of measuring social mobility. One classic thing is, people typically, if you go to Scandinavia, the income correlation between parents and children or the years-of-education correlation between parents and children is low, implying that these are very high-mobility societies. The problem is the errors involved in these measures. Measuring someone’s education level by years of education is a very crude approximation. It really tells you relatively little, particularly in a society like Denmark, where there’s enormous access to education and huge subsidies of education. So, a lot of the book is saying, how do we correct for these errors? It turns out, that’s what happens when you do correct for these errors. What you find is much, much lower rates of social mobility, and also that it doesn’t vary between Scandinavia and England now, or England in the 18th century. I think, in social mobility studies, that any report that isn’t taking into account that all of these are very partial and imperfect measures is just not telling you a lot about the true nature of social mobility. That was the first point. The second point was, what about admixtures within populations and how that would influence measures of social mobility. Fortunately, for most of these societies, these would tend to be relatively small changes because it’s a small share of the population in any generation that is now coming anew. But you do see now in England a dramatic transformation, where the white British now are the lower class of English society. There’s emerging very substantial new upper classes, which are Africans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and particularly Hindu Indians and Chinese. As I say, it’s an amazing transformation of a society by immigration. Because of fertility differences, where immigrants tend to have much higher rates of fertility, a very substantial fraction of 15-year-olds now in a society like England are from these other origins. Actually, it’s been an enormous benefit to English society, but it would have influenced things like trying to calculate social mobility rates when you have all of these new groups arriving in the society and actually being very successful. I agree. That’s actually really very much a phenomenon of post-1960, or something like that, in Britain. Thank you, Professor Clark. It was a lot of fun. What do you think are the practical implications of your work for finding a spouse in the modern world? [laughter]…

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