Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
person / likes
“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.”
Claim ledger
17 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think one argument was the kinds of jobs that were available in the North of England favored people who were unskilled.”
02 / evaluation
“The problem with, as I say, this pluralistic, open humanities-type explanation is, it doesn’t work.”
03 / belief
“Out-migration — it tends to be people with more talent, ability, stuff like that, are the ones who are on the move. So, what you’re actually seeing, I think, is that a lot of this is selective migration of people.”
04 / belief
“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.”
05 / belief
“What I would say is, if it’s systematically carried out, it should lead to a reduction in the distribution of abilities within a society compared to the very assortative Northern European pattern or other patterns.”
06 / belief
“I think my earlier book, A Farewell to Alms — one of the actual innovative elements of that book was to say, “Let’s take apart these two different elements of Malthusianism.”
07 / belief
“The other thing, I think, that would limit immigration to Denmark is that people really do have this cultural identity.”
08 / belief
“I think that there wasn’t really particularly strong selective pressures on migrations out of Europe.”
09 / belief
“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.”
10 / belief
“My co-author, Neil Cummins, has a paper that just came out, I think, or is just coming out, about the Irish in England, which argues that there was significant negative selection to the Irish who actually moved to England, and that the Irish within England, even over the course of 150 years, have remained a lower class in English society, particularly those who moved to the North of England.”
11 / evaluation
“What I am impressed with is just how rapidly people can typically assimilate into other societies, except, I think, in cases where people aren’t succeeding economically and socially.”
12 / recommendation
“I think some modern Indian, a very rich entrepreneur, should have a prize that would be devoted to someone who could explain why India didn’t successfully industrialize under the British in the 19th century.”
13 / prediction
“One is, I think the processes that were operating in pre-industrial England reflect general processes operating in Northern Europe, where all of these societies show this phenomenon of survival of the richest, going on hundreds and hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution.”
14 / evaluation
“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.”
15 / prediction
“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.”
16 / evaluation
“There are societies like Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa where there is consistent economic progress, but that progress gets eaten up in terms of population growth. So, the living standards really have not managed to increase for 50 or 60 years in these societies because they still depend very heavily on agriculture.”
17 / commitment
“The next book has been, unfortunately, 10 years in production because it depends on assembling this very big database: detailed genealogy of people over 300 years in England.”