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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, no, to be Malthusian, it just has to be a society where there's going to be a positive association between fertility rates and living standards, right? And where there's a limited supply of fertility.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, but they were isolated and they had these very limited resources. And it turns out why were living standards so great? Two things. They had murderous internal warfare that disposed of a lot of people. And the second thing is that they practiced very strong degree of infanticide. And they were killing between a third and a half of all children born in the society. And so it was a Malthusian society. But it turns out there are lots of Malthusian societies where people live at relatively high living standards.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was clearly a Malthusian society. There's a bunch of people stuck in an island. And, you know, with limited resources, and you were going to reach some kind of population equilibrium, and you were clearly going to be under these Malthusian constraints, but it was materially quite well-resourced society. But you still have these constraints. And as long as you have these constraints, it's possible then for people who are doing better economically to produce more children and doing worse economically to produce fewer children.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the conditions of reproduction are such that people are constrained that they will only reproduce successfully if they're above these living standards. And that can be because various social constraints about when people get married, how fertile marriages are. And so as I say, the fact that Europe was relatively rich, and we can even extend this back to the Stone Age in Northern Europe, where again skeletons from that period are very robust compared to somewhere like Japan in the earlier period, that doesn't mean that these Malthusian constraints didn't operate. And one classic example of this is when people arrived in Tahiti,”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's true in northwest Europe that living standards in the pre-industrial period, material living standards were significantly higher than it seems in Asia, right? And that shows up in a whole bunch of ways. For example, People at higher living standards consume alcohol. It's an expensive form of calories. In Asia, there's very little consumption of alcohol, and that actually shows up now in terms of people's tolerance for alcohol. Again, dairy products in Europe, they're widely consumed. In Asia, no, again, they're too expensive. And that shows up again in people's ability to absorb milk. But because you're at this higher material standard doesn't mean to say that the Malthusian constraints are not still applying, right? And so that there are relative...”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Laborers exported from China to work on plantations elsewhere in Southeast Asia have become the entrepreneurial class in all of those societies, Indonesia and Malaysia, in the Philippines, and that somehow the history of different societies is still predictive of how people are going to do in modern economic competition. And the question would be, you know, putting it back to you, what kind of cultural explanation would there be for why that type of history would actually matter so much in terms of modern competition? But one argument just would be that under the kind of the anvil of the Malthusian era, these societies were just transformed more by these selective pressures applied for thousands of years, and that that then... Emerges in terms of kind of basic behavior of people in the society that makes them perform better even now.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But here's one element of casual empiricism so If you look in modern economic competition, we can kind of rank societies by how old they are. So China is extremely old. If you go to other parts of Southeast Asia, these are much kind of younger societies in terms of settled agriculture. And what you observe in Asia is that”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because, as I say, it did go through this surprising and dramatic kind of transformation socially where you're really losing a lot of this upper class. And by the way, one interesting thing was how few of this upper class actually ended up marrying in this period. So it was somehow a kind of renunciation of marriage and of family at that time and kind of puzzling, right? And it hasn't persisted. I mean, now in Britain, fertility is pretty neutral between upper class and lower class. But there was this 60-year period, and that's associated with quite a dramatic decline of Britain's kind of entrepreneurship and leadership in the world economy. And so there is this kind of intriguing possibility that this actually was an important kind of historical event.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manuscript What we're actually able to do is track the reproductive success of people since 1750. And there was a period from 1850 till the 1920s or 30s when an astonishingly low fertility emerged amongst upper classes in Britain. And that was also compounded by very heavy losses of the upper classes in World War I. So 20% of men of that generation in the upper classes died in World War I. Reproduction rates were at like one child per family or one and a half for 50 or 60 years in the late 19th century amongst this group. And so the relative size of the upper class in Britain actually shrank dramatically in the course of this period. And so that's one potential explanation of, again, why kind of British performance has been relatively lukewarm since about World War II.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, two things I want to emphasize here. So, one is I think the processes that we're 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. We know very clearly that there are genetic differences between people at the top of the social ladder and people at the bottom and that that was going to change the underlying genetics of these societies. And it seems to be, as I say, a general feature, right? So the first one, so I don't think of England as being that different from these other locations, right? The Industrial Revolution is spread out much more across Europe than you might think. There were accidental factors that propelled it to prominence in England. In the new...”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the differences in output per person in England compared to the rest of Europe are actually relatively minor. And if you look at other kind of productions like scientific production, literary production, other things like that, there's no vast difference, right? But it's a slight...”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff like that. And so the problem with, as I say, this kind of pluralistic, open humanities type explanation is it doesn't work. It's time to get on board with the scientific revolution. We can only explain things if we have these mechanistic, closed form, empirically testable explanations. It's just conversat”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in having written on the history of the Indian industrialization in 1999, I dragged my spouse and three children on a five-month tour of India seeking to try and just by being on the ground there to see if you could understand anything more about why this economy, which was still at that stage, you know, lagging enormously behind. And I would actually, we traveled on train all the time and we end up talking to Indians. And it was interesting to ask people, you know, why is India so poor? But it turns out that people have all kinds of answers. But they're easily testable as false. They would say, oh, it's the population. We have too many people, right? And we know now, of course, that that actually is not going to make any difference or it's the corrupt politicians or it's the education system.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that here was something which actually showed this law like characteristic and where you could actually understand the processes and the logic of this and why I kind of turned away from studying things like why isn't the whole world developed is that it just seemed impossible to actually make progress on that because once you just say, okay, it's some kind of cultural event, then what are you going to say after that, right?”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But see, I'm not resisting here, right? What I'm saying is I'd like to, you know, having now spent many years studying economic history, I've finally come to, I think, modesty and to say that, look, there are some problems that just defy any serious explanation, that we make no progress with, right? But then say it turns out there are some other things where we can explain surprisingly well what's happening, right? And so basically what I'm saying is here's the things that, you know, why I turn to studying social mobility.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would seem to lead India to modern economic growth. And that's what's so puzzling is that it's not, you know, you might explain all of this stuff, but all you need is some deviance. And so take an example of this. Indian mills underperform British textile mills. In 1940, there were 450 Indian textile mills. There was not a single one that achieved the average level of productivity of the English mills. How's that possible when you have this varied set of entrepreneurs, varied set of people, that you just cannot kind of match the performance that's going on in this other society? I remain puzzled by that.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, except as I see when the British arrived in India, they the British were open the important thing that people maybe have difficulty understanding about British upper class was it is an incredibly open upper class and they were absorbing people coming from all different parts of the world. The Sassoon family for example ended up writing poetry against World War I and also as the chief aide to the general fighting World War I. And so they actually and they had absorbed into British society lots of foreigners many times before and so in India they were actually absorbing a lot of upper class Indians into British society and what I'm saying is to make the kind of revolution that we would expect in India you don't need 10 million people you only need a couple of thousand”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Factory. So I think some modern Indian, 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. Because it's one of those stunning mysteries of history. And as I say, it's easy for people just to say, oh, it's the sclerotic English institutions, it's the arrogance of the conquerors, it's the caste system in India. But none of that actually, I mean, if you look at the details, none of that successfully explains what happened in India.”
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 tasks of people at the lower level there are extremely simple, don't require literacy. In Japan were performed by fourteen and sixteen year old girls with high competence, fantastic results. Now when we look at modern manufacturing processes, they can often involve high levels of performance by workers and huge costs if workers fail to perform. But it looked like in the 19th century that you had these kind of failure resistant techniques. Someone in a spinning mill, if they mess up the thread breaks more often, right? But that can all be repaired and, you know, it's all observable. And so in modern high-tech manufacturing, you can see this problem, but not in 19th century India, right? And so I still think there's a whole...”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, except I've studied a lot in my earlier life on the cotton textile industry. And it turns out, I mean, that, as I say, that was one of the major industries of the 19th century. You could run an entire cotton mill with three skilled managers.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the British had created the next industrial colossus in India, and that that would kind of overwhelm the British in turn. And it is one of the great puzzles of history is why India never developed under the British. It just seemed that this was the path.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might not seem that the British contributed much, but if you even look at the kind of Anglo-Indian group that developed in India, That was massive. I mean, think about how big India is relative to Britain. This was a massive potential entrepreneurial class in India. And the British also had a policy that allowed absolutely free migration of entrepreneurs into India. So the Bombay textile industry, something like 10% of it was owned by a Jewish family that had come from Iraq, the Sassoon family, that the British, as I say, welcome these entrepreneurs. They encouraged free trade. And so I think I don't think you could underplay how significant an intervention that was by the British in that society. Everyone is tending to judge the India now by the results. But even Karl Marx writing in the mid-19th century confidently predicted”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even once you had kind of brought in kind of British civil institutions, British legal institutions, free trade, free capital markets, low interest rates, I mean, this was one of the kind of stunning puzzles of the modern world. And even though I write about that in that earlier book, I have to confess. I have no idea why a society like that can remain so unchanged after the arrival of the British and not actually start transforming itself until the last 20 or 30 years.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the second puzzle is the incredible divergence of society since the Industrial Revolution, where now you get these differences of about 50 or 60 to 1 in material living standards. And this is really kind of illustrated when you look at a society like India, where because of this caste system, you had this super elite, the Brahmin caste, which preserved itself for many more than a thousand years. Clearly now you see when these people moved to the United States, who are the new elite of the United States? These are Indian immigrants in the United States who are kind of a super elite within this society. And then the stunning puzzle is... Why could none of that, why did all of that talent? Coexist with an incredibly stagnant Indian economy, and stagnant even once it was opened up to the forces of the modern market by the British”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, in terms of overall economic performance, I mean, in my earlier book, right, farewell to alms, it said there's essentially only two great problems in the economic history of the world. The first is the incredible long delay in the arrival of the industrial revolution. Right.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I would say is if it's systematically carried out, it should lead to a kind of reduction in the distribution of abilities within a society compared to the various assortative kind of northern European pattern or other patterns. I honestly don't know whether it actually leads to these other problems in terms of the clannishness of society, right? I mean, potentially, yes, but it's not something that I've actually studied.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True Well, the interesting question is it's definitely true for a bunch of earlier societies that the matching was much less tight. And so, for example, there's a whole bunch of earlier societies where cousin marriage was a very important form of marriage. And the problem with cousin marriage for assortativeness is most people don't have a lot of cousins at the right age and gender. And so it ends up that you have to marry a random cousin. And it turns out that the modern British or even the 19th century British are matching much more tightly in terms of marriage than it would be the case if you just match to a random cousin.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Matching in social status in marriage, and it seems to be that it's just a complete dominance of social status in determining unions 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
“Well, remember, there's potentially a difference between inequality based on things like wealth ownership and inequality in abilities or kind of educational potential that you would see within a society. But definitely, I mean, there's clearly going to be this association between how assortative marriages and how much inequality you get. So by the way, Neil Cummins and I have a paper that just came out in plus one, which is about hypergamy, which is the idea that very common idea that women tend to marry up because men value physical appearance more than women do, and that there's this trade-off that exists in the marriage market. And interestingly, for England, going back to 1837, we claim that there is no hypergamy, that essentially men and women end up”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nordic countries have not reduced the inequality of PISA measures compared to much more unequal societies like the United States. And so again, it's just kind of interesting that high degree of inequality is still found within these societies. And it turns out that Nordic societies, people are mating again very strongly assortatively even now. And so that is the thing that you would worry more about is that there is this going to be this trade-off between assortative mating and the degree of inequality in a society.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be some margin where you but it does produce more inequality and so if you're worried about inequality in society you don't want disorder of mating right I mean the one way to correct a lot of inequality would just be to have much more random matching but one of the remarkable things about Denmark is Education is essentially free until you're age 24. They give you subsidies for your living expenses, for childcare provision it's all available. They've compressed the income distribution quite sharply. There is this periodic survey of how well students do the PISA measures and”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends what your view is. If you think that the engine of high-tech society now like the United States is the top one or 5% of the ability distribution? Yeah. Then you would say the Morris Artative is mating, the more people will be in that extreme. And the greater will be economic growth. And so in the new book, I actually speculate about was a sortative mating in Northern Europe a discovery of the late Middle Ages that actually then helped propel things like the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, because as I say, it's a remarkably constant feature of British society. We can only trace it back to about 1750, the actual degree of assortativeness. So in that sense, you can't have too much. If that's your view about how society operates, 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 started mating turns out to be a fascinating phenomenon. And in this new book, we actually have records of 1.7 million marriages in England from 1837 till now. And what is astonishing in England is the degree to which people end up assorting in marriage. And so that basically they're matching with people that are as close to them, essentially genetically as their siblings in marriage. And it's really interesting because people could mate in any kind of way, right? You could think, I want the tallest person, the handsomest person, the youngest person. But for some reason, consistently, people seem to want to match to people who are close in social status. Now doesn't affect anything about the average level of ability in a society. But if it's consistently followed over generations, it will widen the distribution.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the free market system was restored, that elite just emerged fully again into the political sphere. And so what's interesting, as I say, is you can change the overall constraints on the society, but it still is interesting that relative position seems to be determined in some very kind of physics-like way within different societies.”
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 it seems to me that societies come with different constraints, but what's very interesting is that people's ability to operate within those constraints seems undiminished across different societies. And the same factors seem to determine that. And so I've actually done some work on Hungary under communism, where we again, using surnames, we can identify who were the descendants of the previous elite. And interestingly, in things like admission to medical school, it didn't change under the system of communism. The same elites preserved themselves in the political sphere, that elite kind of disappeared from parliament for a while.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I agree that, I mean, and so that also clearly says that there are cultural and social kind of constraints in society that allow some of them to be very high performing and some of them to be less well performing. But then what's interesting and remarkable is that in this new manuscript, we can actually trace people who move from Britain to Australia, Canada, and United States. And what's interesting is that their material welfare increases very significantly, but their relative social position doesn't change and somehow is preserved across these different societies. And so the things that are kind of holding back societies as a whole, it's very interesting that it doesn't seem to affect relative social position, right? And so as I say, that's why I'm a relativist and you're an absolutist.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really determined social position are going to be people's genetic inheritance and randomness. And that status seems to have been achieved in England already by 1700. And so I actually draw kind of 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. And 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.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think the Danes themselves would actually think of themselves as a very mobile society and as very open society. So that's why someone who's interested in societies, I mean, 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. And I actually draw from this a comforting fact, which is to say meritocracy was achieved much earlier than you might have expected. Because what you would find in a truly meritocratic society is that the only things that we”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well one of the reasons that I went to Denmark was because of the fantastic data that they have in the register data on people's social position in Denmark. And in this new book that I just completed the draft of, one of the things that's pointed out is social mobility rates in modern Denmark are no higher than in Britain. It's just Cisco. It's not correct to think of Britain as an immobile society.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as I say, I mean, in some sense, you're just saying, okay, I want to concentrate on growth, right? And I think that that's the crucial element of society. And if all of that growth goes to 10% of the society and not to the rest of society, I wouldn't care about that, right? Whereas, as I say, it seems to me just in common observation that certainly in Britain where I come from, that people do have this fascination with relative position in society. And that people are obsessed about who's going to the elite universities, who are the members of parliament, what are the backgrounds of these people.”
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 legitimate to say, I see your question, and I think it's unimportant. But I still think it's a fascinating feature of societies, which is how are people between generations moving in relative position within societies? And the other thing I would say is that gain in material living standards is actually in some ways a lot less important than you might think. I mean, I've gone to Dr. Johnson's house in London from the early 18th century, I'd be perfectly happy to move in and live in that house now.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's absolutely the case that we're now fifteen times better off than we were in 1800. But it's still, I think, a very important feature of society and one that people are obsessed with is not.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No the amazing thing is if we even go back to medieval England, rates of social mobility were just as high as they are now. And I mean, if you want to take these other dimensions of freedom of expression or social neighborhood that people were in, again, there's no evidence that that hasn't any sense improved now, right? I mean, people are just as divided in terms of the types of groups that they meet with as they would be 500 years ago. And so I really want to stick with this idea that in a society like England, we have not in any way improved rates of social mobility in the last 300 years.”
2025-02-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source