YouSaid · the spoken record

Gregory Clark

lines on the record: 93
first: 2025-02-19
most recent: 2025-02-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That is quite strong, they still cannot actually find mechanically what the location of that basis is. Greg. Thank you again. We can for Greg. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the podcast.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have largely been ruled out that it's mostly just the additive impact of what's happening at each particular location. And so all I can say is that, I mean, it has this weird implication that you may need studies that are bigger than the whole of humanity to actually finally figure out what are all these genetic influences because there are such rare kind of permutations that are actually affecting outcomes. And it also actually surprisingly means that if you have very small populations, say Native Americans, that you might not be able to do these kind of studies because you wouldn't have enough people to actually be able to say very much about, say, the genetic basis of illnesses or the genetic basis of height and other things like that. But it is a puzzle in that literature, which is that even with this amount of data, and even though knowing that there is this genetic basis,”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For it transmitting over time to be in fact genetics, how do you reconcile the very low estimates of heritability from genome-wide association studies with the much higher estimates that come from twin studies? Well, these genome-wide studies amazingly, even with something like, now is it up to 4 million people that they have genotyped where they have measures of their educational outcomes still don't identify that well what the genetic basis of this is that we know exists from these twin studies. And in some sense, what it's saying is these studies are still have very imperfect measures, even though they're identifying a thousand different loci on the genome that are affecting educational outcomes, we're still somehow not capturing everything that's happening here. And they've also studied whether it's combinatoric effects that really matter. But I think they...”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Scotland. I like to think I escaped my background, but empirically the average person born in that mining village is going to do pretty poorly. But there is this question, is it all just about family background? Or is it about the opportunities that people get offered? I believe you're... Chosen mechanism.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand why did everyone want to move to the areas around London and the south of England from such an early date in Britain? So even in the Industrial Revolution period, the balance of migration is of skilled people out of the north and to the south, and the migrants from the south to the north tended to be much less skilled, and so basically the story for England is there is this kind of process of selection, and it turns out that that interestingly also occurs in other parts of Europe. And it's amazing though with modern markets and stuff like that, that in almost every place in Europe, you'll find high income areas and low income areas and kind of endogenously developing. But as I say, as far as we can tell from this British data, there isn't that much cost. So I was born in a mining village.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there is a chapter in the new manuscript which examines exactly this issue about does it matter what place you're born to in England? Because as I say, the North is much less successful on every dimension, education, output, whether people are employed or not, health, longevity, it's bad somehow to be born in the north. But with this kind of comprehensive genealogical database, we know all about everyone's parents. And I can tell you that there's actually very little cost to being born in the north, right? It's mostly still predicted, overwhelmingly predicted from the status of your parents, and it just turns out there are many more high status people in the south of England. Now, one puzzle is this movement to the south of England of higher status people has been gone on since the 18th century. And I don't actually understand.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure what to advise you. I could tell you that I met my wife when we were both graduate students at Harvard. I was the first man she met at Harvard. So maybe she wasn't particularly selective in terms of I mean, what can you say? I mean, you see a general pattern. Do we know that that pattern makes people happy? Maybe everyone with highly assortative marriage is actually unhappy. And if instead they had chosen a spouse on grounds of romance or something else like that, they would be much better off. All I can say, so I can't give you any advice on marriage. All I can do is say I can predict the kind of person that you're going to marry. I wanted to ask about Ongoing deb”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's emerging and very substantial new upper classes, which are Africans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and particularly Hindu Indians and Chinese. And as I say, it's an amazing kind of transformation of a society by immigration. And 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, but 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 kind of arriving the society and actually being very successful. But I agree, but that's actually really very much a phenomena of post-1960 or something like that in Britain.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 kind of dramatic transformation where the white British now are the lower class of English society.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For these errors, and 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. And I think in social mobility studies that any kind of 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. And so that was the first point. The second point was, well, what about admixtures within populations and how that would influence measures of social mobility? Fortunately,”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So 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. And so one classic thing is people typically, if you go to Scandinavia, the income correlation between parents and children or the education years of education correlation between parents and children is low, implying that these are very high mobility societies. And the problem is that the errors involved in these measures, so measuring someone's education level by years of education is a very crude approximation, right? And it really tells you relatively little, particularly in a society like Denmark, where there's enormous access to education and huge subsidies of education. And so a lot of the book is saying, how do we correct”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 then that we should think about in terms of economic policy.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forward, and as I say, what I was stunned by was in terms of social mobility, how much mechanical deterministic structure you had in societies, right? 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. And so, and 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, right? And so that, you know, a lot of substantial gains will be made by moving people around in the modern world, and that that's something we should think about in terms of thinking about policy in different countries. So I agree there that substantively.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me talk first about the determinism trap. And so this is a, there's a fundamental kind of 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, right? And how little we can predict about economies or about the future of economies. And so 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, right? And I think of that as a kind of a stunning kind of gain, right? Maybe unlike Tyler here. And I think of that as the only path.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the kind of joyless life. I have a brother who married a woman whose Protestant his children are functionally completely Protestant, right? And so you see this kind of even in this period that by moving into kind of the upper class in Scotland, which is heavily Protestant, effectively you see that assimilation. And so what I am impressed is just how rapidly people can typically assimilate into other societies, except I think in cases where people aren't succeeding economically and socially. And that then becomes this barrier to assimilation. But people who are successful within new societies, it's just astonishing how plastic, as I say, the culture of different societies is. And as I say, I never thought I would go to a wedding in Scotland where people wearing kilts, right? Because that was completely not the culture of the week.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can see them within one or two generations completely culturally assimilating. And you can see that in the names they call the children and in the women that they married or the men that they married, right? And so you can actually see, as I say, this complete kind of and rapid kind of cultural assimilation and then a movement into the elites of British society where amazingly the descendants of that group are still four times more likely to go to Oxford or Cambridge than the rest of people in English society, even though culturally 200 years earlier they lost any kind of distinctiveness. And so as I say, I'm impressed when you see something like Britain how rapidly that assimilation occurs. And even in my own family, so my grandfathers were both born in Ireland. We were in Scotland as Irish Catholics. We didn't mix with Protestants.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm impressed. As I say, I've studied a lot about the upper class in Britain. And when you see the history in this genealogy of these families, you have Jewish families arriving in Britain 1800, where their descendant becomes a bishop in the Church of England within three generations. And so you do see this as a surprising kind of placity, but other families remaining kind of firmly Jewish, but in other ways becoming highly English. And a nice example of that is in 1685, the Huguenots were driven out of France, and they arrived in Britain. They constituted about 1% of English population at that stage.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this tyranny of the majority, which is what are the majority want to consume, that's determining what the measured rate of technological advance would be. And so that's one argument about, again, why the Industrial Revolution seems so abrupt is that there had been a lot of earlier technological advance, but not in the commodities that the average person consumes. And what was unique about the Industrial Revolution was that finally something like clothing now gets this huge advance, and that then kind of transforms the economy. So that's why that series was done that way.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, it consumed, right? And so consumption of things like books in Europe in 1400 would be 0.001 of a percent, right? And so if you were to take someone with or Tyler's tastes, for example, and construct a cost of living index for him, it would show radical transformation occurring actually in the 15th century when books became one twentieth of their price and books would be an important component of his living expenses. But that series is actually constructed for the average person in England. And what happens then is that you really don't see much kind of technological advance on these types of indices in Europe because the advances that are occurring and they're quite significant are about Tiny shares of consumption. And that's just a general problem that if we wait technological change in economic terms,”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a number of questions, but I can constrict the, I'll start with the most important ones. Your wage price series in a farewell to Alms takes a very bare bones view of what should be in the consumption basket, you know, so food, you know, housing, clothing. And then that's it, right? And so you have a very low estimate of living standards. But other more expansive definitions like Mokier's come to very large increases in income from like Time of Hastings to beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And so I guess like, do you have a philosophical reason for taking a very narrow construction? And are you concerned that if you took that same very narrow construction into the present day, you would arrive at clearly absurd results like we have barely improved in living standards over time? Yeah. So this is, you know, when you construct these living standards series, you just have to look at what people”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're mainly the product of our genetics and randomness. And randomness is a huge component as well. And that's why I say amazingly we seem to, in sightly like England for three hundred years, have largely lived in a meritocracy. Because what would be the characteristics of meritocracy? It would be a society where genetics and randomness would be the only forces that really mattered. And so that's what the new book then is all about. And one message to this is, don't spend a lot of time with your children. It doesn't matter.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the next book has been, unfortunately, 10 years in production because it depends on assembling this very big database, a detailed genealogy of people over 300 years in England. And I was really kind of motivated by this question of to what extent does genetics actually determine social outcomes? And this book does a detailed study of all the predictions of a genetic model, right? And so it looks at things like does birth order matter? Does gender matter, does your mother better predict your outcomes compared to your father? Does family size matter? If your parents die, does that influence your life, of course? What about your grandparents? Can they and the conclusion in all of these studies is”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Oh, right. That would also be, yes. So I think it tends to be if you're coming from places like Chile or something like that, coming to the United States, I think it tends to be quite strongly positively selected.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at migrants from Latin America to the United States, the further away the country is from the US, the better they tend to do. And so the more positively selected they tend to be.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And stuff like that, where there is clearly some kind of very strong positive selection going on. But it seems like the 19th century migration was not so selective. And so 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.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns out so again in the book The Sun also Rises, you can examine just looking at surnames different groups within US society and basically all kind of European groups within the United States look very average right and so I think what was happening was 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 and that somehow there was some kind of negative selection of people from that background but basically Europeans in the United States now are very much people of European descent are very much average right and then the new elites in the United States are Chinese particularly Indians the Jewish population”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so basically, England is constantly being refreshed by migrants from Europe who are highly skilled. The process of migration is quite complex. And so again, the question I had in Scandinavia was, look, Sweden and Denmark and Norway, not so much Denmark Lost huge fraction of the population in the 19th century to migration, how can these countries be so highly performing now, right? But again, it turns out the evidence is that migration was actually negatively selected in Scandinavia. If I go to North America,”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one argument was the kinds of jobs that were available in the north of England favored people who were unskilled, right? And so again, in Scotland, what were the Irish doing coming in? They were working in the steelworks, the coal mines, scrapyards and stuff like that. I mean, it was this kind of heavy industry that was attracting these migrants. And so one argument has been actually that migration out of Ireland has actually not been particularly positively selected. Now in this new book, I do actually look at migration from England to other countries. And interestingly, so English migrants to the United States are the least positively selected. But for other countries like Australia and New Zealand, they are being positively selected. But that's more than counterbalanced in England by emigration of skilled people into England, right?”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I've thought about the whole selection issue, but the interesting thing is so 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, right?”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that, in some sense, you might say, well, that's some kind of cultural hangover in terms of people's attitude to things like drinking and exercise and vegetables.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's been a lot of selective migration within the UK. And so this new book says the growth of the South and the decline of the North is all attributable to self-selection within Britain. And so Glasgow, where I come from, has had a huge amount of out-migration. And out-migration, I mean, it tends to be people with more talent, ability, stuff like that are the ones who are on the move. And so, you know, what you're actually seeing, I think a lot of that is this kind of selective migration of people. Though I must say, so my sister trained as a doctor in Glasgow, and when they interviewed patients, they were actually trained to ask them, well, how much do you drink per day ten pints? And people would say, oh, no, doctor, only six. And so, you know,”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not compared to California, right? And so in the end, I had to actually use this kind of slightly fake picture, which was short squalor, but it was because it was a building that was going to be demolished. But what was amazing is that within what is relatively decent material conditions, People live these lives which, you know, are ones where terrible health conditions lots of people unemployed. And again, it's kind of hard to understand.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very worst. So, this actually was interesting when I was writing my second book, I wanted to illustrate this with a picture because Glasgow has some of the lowest life expectancy of anywhere in Western Europe, some parts of Glasgow, within a few miles of where I lived in Glasgow. And so I thought, oh, that's fine. I'll go to Google Earth and I'll get a picture of the squalor of Glasgow. And it turns out it doesn't exist. No.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In England, you have to pay for this. And Scottish universities then actually have to charge English students for their education, or else the English would be flooding across the borders into Scotland. But it turns out under the EU, the Germans could go for free because the EU treaties actually said you can't discriminate against people from other countries, but you can discriminate from people within your own country. But my hope is that Scotland will remain part of the UK and will continue to draw subsidies from the UK Treasury. And as it seems to be doing fine”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I did say that when Scotland was becoming considering independence, this would be like a parasite detaching itself from the host. Because in order to keep Scotland within the UK, they have been paying out these very generous subsidies. So, for example, in Scotland, university education is free.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually have seen the data and the north of England is in terrible shape. But interestingly, Scotland is doing much better. And one of the things, what's interesting about Scottish society is when I go back there now, I seem to them completely like an American, but I meet all kinds of people who are completely non-Scottish in origin who have become culturally Scottish. And so my niece got married there to a guy who's Chinese, and his best man was Vietnamese, and they were all dressed in kilts, and they had bagpipes playing. And so culturally it's amazing that people, you know, that the culture kind of continues in Scotland. And in economic terms, Scotland is actually doing pretty well. And so as I say, it's not...”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so in the town I'm in, there's actually a pub that opens at 10 at night and stays open till 8 a.m. in the morning. And Dane's are not the most talkative people in the world. My thought is, what are they doing all night in this pub? And so as I say, I was just surprised at that because I think of, you know, in other respects, by the way, Danes are super healthy. Their gyms are open all hours. There are people in there exercising all the time, and they do very well. So I was surprised, though, at how much they drank. And then secondly, at the kind of residing sense of community. And so they have laws in Denmark, for example, tried to prevent Germans from actually buying seaside property in towns where you actually have to live in the property all year. And so I appreciate, you know, I come from Scotland. And so I appreciate the...”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was surprised at how kind of communitarian Danes were. So at the university I'm at every Friday they gather in a lecture room to sing songs together right and also you know there's an annual Christmas party and the university they have 4,000 people eat dinner together at the university I was actually surprised at that kind of sense of community that was that fun”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And it turns out it's perfectly possible for someone like me to not assimilate and speak English in Danish society. It is a kind of an intriguing issue, though, about whether should we become more free market so that then we could have a different kind of attractiveness to different sets of immigrants”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The majority of people are speaking English to each other. And so the other thing I think is that would limit immigration to Denmark is that people really do have this cultural identity. And one of the things that they wanted to insist was that immigrants actually have to assimilate. And it's actually...”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but you could see every day in Denmark the benefits of having so unskilled workers earn much higher wages than they would in the United States. People can live at a decent living standard. I mean, I'm living in California part of the year, and it's just shocking the number of homeless people there are everywhere, right? Within a mile of my house, there are people living homeless in California, and it just doesn't exist this in Denmark. And so I understand perfectly the Danes' desire to preserve this, but the other problem the Danes have is there's only five and a half million of them. They cherish their culture, their history and stuff like that. And one of the things they would fear about emigration is that already, if you walk in the streets of Copenhagen,”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a good question. I mean, Denmark offers a lot of other good things in life, though. I must say the weather is not one of them. But it is actually interesting to guess how limited emigration has been from places like, say, Vietnam or India or something like that to places like Denmark because these immigrants would be very successful within this society”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stay richer, right? And well, and that actually in Danish politics there is a strong argument about what type of immigrants you want to attract. And so throughout Europe, in fact, this has become a huge issue.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Axis approach. Right. Well, I must say that so there is a problem then in Denmark, which is that it relies on people not taking huge advantage of this welfare system, which is very generous. Immigrants coming to Denmark have not responded in the same way. Well, you may be...”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tax rates and people are so high? But it's still a highly productive, technologically innovative society, and so it's proving that you can have a surprising amount of kind of compression of income differences and redistribution and still have a perfectly functional society.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if 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. And so I think these things go together. I mean, you should recognize that, you know, a lot of things happen to us that we don't control. There are accidents of our history, our family history, and that a good society is one that doesn't magnify those differences between people, but rather can seek to compress them. And one of the things interesting is about Denmark. It's stunning.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital GDP. Right. But even though, as I say, there still is this kind of quasi-Malfusian link between population and living standards in these societies, that doesn't mean to say that people wouldn't be better off if you give people more resources. And so if you care about the population in Africa and their living standards, then there's nothing to say that aid isn't a good thing in this case. All that you can say, though, is, look, a bunch of that aid will result in more population growth. And so it will undercut the ultimate effects of that aid. And it would be much more effective if somehow you can actually transform these societies so that they're not heavily dependent on limited agricultural resources.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And so that living standards really have not managed to increase for 50 or 60 years in these societies because they still depend very heavily on agriculture. There's a limited agricultural area and better technology then induces more people. How could you best help such societies? It would be somehow by breaking that link between resources and population. So industrialization, if it's possible to achieve, would be fantastic in these societies. And a second thing would be limits on population growth. And it looks like those limits are coming and that we are going to see such a transformation.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the second is that that equilibrium does not necessarily imply relatively low living standards. And the way this shows up is after the Black Death in Europe, which increased mortality rates, living standards in somewhat like Britain in 1450 were not again equal till the end of the Industrial Revolution, right? But you could tell this was a static population in England at that period. There were tiny numbers of people that were less than 2 million people in England by 1450, but it was consequently a Malthusian economy, but an incredibly rich Malthusian economy, where people, when they talked about their diet, they talked about the daily meat that they would eat. And so they really were living at high material living standards. We can go back and look at the houses they constructed in that period. People here in Arlington would be happy to move into some of these.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's my definition. No, no, I see this is a widespread misinterpretation of Malthus, I think, is that Malthus is about low living standards, right? And so 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. And one is the element that you're forced to an equilibrium where the birth rate equals the death rate.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source