Gregory Clark: prediction

Transcript context

…Aren’t they both immobile societies? Denmark people — they go to the same high school, they hang out, they eat those weird fish sandwiches, and they help each other out. What you’re born into more or less determines how you, your kids, grandkids will do in Denmark. I think the Danes themselves would actually think of themselves as a very mobile society. It’s a very open society. That’s why, as someone who’s interested in societies, it is fascinating to me that you can change so much about social structure, say, between England and Denmark, but somehow not change one basic fact, which is just how connected are people to their parents in terms of their social outcomes, and also how little influence social institutions seem to be able to have on that connection. I actually draw from this a comforting fact, which is to say meritocracy was achieved much earlier than you might’ve expected because what you would find in a truly meritocratic society is that the only things that really determine social position are going to be people’s genetic inheritance and randomness. That status seems to have been achieved in England already by 1700. I actually draw this different lesson, which is that not only have we achieved growth in the modern world, but we’ve also achieved meritocracy hundreds of years ago. I would think that a lot of people would regard that as a pretty radical claim about the nature of modern society despite your skepticism. [laughs] Let me give you a different reading of your work that probably you’ll disagree with, but let me get your reaction. This I call Strauss plus Bryan Caplan. One way of reading Greg Clark is that he shows that social mobility is quite high, but the only path to social mobility is geographically moving around. A simple example: I think median household income for families from India that have come to America — it’s $158,000 a year, which is remarkably high. Whatever it was in India, it was not close to that. So, they moved; they’re doing incredibly well. When people move from, say, the rural South to the Northeast during the Great Migration, they do much better. That physical mobility is what works, and it’s what overturns these hierarchies. A lot of your data sets seem to be about times and places where not that many people are moving a lot, but mobility simply works. Physical mobility. True or false?…

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