Gregory Clark: belief

Transcript context

…If I go to North Dakota, which is full of Scandinavians, they’re doing fine. Their indicators are great. They look, feel, and act a bit like actual Nordics demographically. It doesn’t feel like negative selection. Again, in the book, The Son Also Rises, you can examine — just looking at surnames — different groups within US society. Basically, all European groups within the United States look very average. I think that there wasn’t really particularly strong selective pressures on migrations out of Europe. You do see that people who came from Quebec, French speakers from Quebec, are an underclass in the United States, that somehow there was some negative selection of people from that background. Basically, Europeans in the United States now — people of European descent — are very much average. Then the new elites in the United States are Chinese, particularly Indians, the Jewish population and stuff like that, where there is clearly some very strong positive selection going on. But it seems like the 19th-century migration was not so selective. My sense for Ireland would be, whatever the forces driving migration in Ireland were, maybe it actually was either neutral or even negatively selected, some of the immigration from Ireland. Do you have a sense for Latin America?…

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