Gregory Clark: belief

Transcript context

…Hello. Thank you so much for coming and giving the talk. It was an honor to listen in person. I learned a lot from your research. Having said that, I really liked the example in your research where you used the last name Smith — how long it took for somebody named Smith to get to places like Oxford. It was about 200 years. I loved that research method, but also the conclusion is a bit deterministic. It’s how do you manage that social mobility? I think on that, I’m a bit more on the side of Dr. Cowen, where international mobility might have a higher rate of results than the examples in your research. As far as I know, the research is mostly from the Anglo world, mobility within the Anglo world or Europe to Anglo and other ways around. You used the example of India, and I think the caste system is unique to there, but what about the countries that are similar in terms of base of living standard — I’m from Bangladesh — places like Bangladesh or Sri Lanka? Also, in recent research in immigration we see in the United States, immigrants from the MENA region are very successful. Do you think if we change the directions of migration and basis of living standard from this donor country, will the results look more optimistic? The second part of the question is, there is research done by Johannes Haushofer, also a Nordic economist, and he has a project where he takes students from Uganda — so we can get around the pre-selection problem — and he funds them to come to Germany to study. Maybe policy prescription–wise, do you see some benefits in this solution to get out of that deterministic trap? Thank you. Let me talk first about the determinism trap. There’s a fundamental philosophical issue here, which is, I’ve spent a lot of time in economics, and economics really is a dismal science in the sense of how little economics has achieved, and how little we can predict about economies or about the future of economies. One of the stunning things about social mobility is how deterministic at the group level that this is, and how in the English data, you can predict what will happen to people 300 years later based on their position now. I think of that as a stunning gain, maybe unlike Tyler here. I think of that as the only path forward. As I say, what I was stunned by was, in terms of social mobility, how much mechanical deterministic structure you had in society. Now, I secondly agree that people moving between societies is an enormous source of economic gains and economic mobility. The relative position, though, seems to very substantially move with people when they move across societies. I agree that it also has these very important policy things that we have to think of, which is, if America takes in more immigrants, it will benefit the world at no cost. A lot of substantial gains will be made by moving people around in the modern world, and that’s something we should think about in terms of thinking about policy in different countries. I agree that substantively, there’s not a lot you can do within a society to change people’s relative outcomes, but there is a lot you can do for people by moving them from one society to another, and that’s the area that we should think about in terms of economic policy. 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?…

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