Thinking Class

#131 - Gregory Clark - Why Everything The West Believes About Social Mobility Is Wrong

• John Gillam

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Professor Gregory Clark is a British-born economic historian at the University of California, Davis and holds a DNRF Chair at the Danish National Research Foundation and a professor at the Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG) at the Department of Economics, SDU. Furthermore, he is a Visiting Professor at London School of Economics (LSE) and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Davis. He is the author of A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World and The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility.

In this conversation Greg and I think out loud about:

  • Why some societies became rich while others remained poor — and why it has little to do with institutions
  • Why Indian cotton mills in the 1920s could not match Lancashire despite identical technology
  • What Clark discovered from studying more than 422,000 English people across four centuries
  • Why social mobility appears largely unchanged since the Middle Ages
  • Why Denmark and Britain have almost identical mobility rates despite radically different welfare states
  • Why family size, birth order, and the death of a father have no measurable effect on life outcomes
  • Why the upper classes decline at the same rate the lower classes rise — and what that symmetry means
  • Whether England has been a meritocracy since 1300
  • Why governments may be attempting to solve problems that are largely resistant to policy
  • Clark's forthcoming book — and why it is proving difficult to publish

Find Professor Clark's work:

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Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast on the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam.

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SPEAKER_02

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Professor Gregory Clark. Greg is one of the world's leading economic historians on questions of social mobility, inequality, economic development, and the origins of the Industrial Revolution. He is currently Danish National Research Foundation Chair and a professor at the Historical Economics and Development Group at the Department of Economics of the SDU. Furthermore, he is a visiting professor at London School of Economics and a distinguished professor emeritus at University California Davis. He is the author of A Farewell to Arms, a brief economic history of the world, and The Sun Also Rises, Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. In this conversation, Professor Clark and I think out loud about why some societies are rich and others are poor, why the Industrial Revolution happened in England and not elsewhere, what he learned from studying from 422,000 English people across four centuries, why social mobility appears to change far less than governments assume, whether education, welfare, healthcare, and other social interventions meaningfully alter life outcomes, what family size, birth order, parental investment, and even the death of a parent appear to tell us about human development, why elite families fall at roughly the same rate that poorer families rise, what his research suggests about meritocracy, inheritance, and the limits of politics, and what, if anything, is to be done. If you find this conversation valuable, subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack. Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Professor Greg Clark. It's a noble endeavour. And Britain, uh the country of your birth and where I live, has spent a century and a half, perhaps longer, trying to do that, uh, whether that's through universal education, the welfare state, the NHS, expanding university education. And abroad, uh technological developments from the Industrial Revolution have been made available to everyone. There have been foreign aid programs. But the question is, how successful are any of these measures? And you're joining us to tell us why social mobility in England, perhaps in Britain, and perhaps beyond hasn't meaningfully changed in centuries. And if that is true, then it changes everything that we think about how and what policy can do. But let's begin with some of your work about the divergence between the West and the rest. So the Industrial Revolution began in England, it spread to Western Europe and then the Anglosphere, and it didn't spread equally in the rest of the world. And there's still a divergence, I suppose, between richest and poorest countries, even if some of that has narrowed. Why did the Industrial Revolution and what it uncorked not make the whole world equally rich?

SPEAKER_00

So uh when you get into this problem, I mean the standard thought about this is that it must simply be an issue of incentives, and that people or cultures are basically equivalent and given the right incentives, you get the right outcomes. And so actually, in spending time in economics, that's what I came into economics interested in. And but what is puzzling is that while you can find some societies where the incentives are just terrible. So if you look at Mexico in the 19th century, if you look at uh Haiti in the 19th century, you can see terrible sets of incentives. You can find other societies such as India under British rule, where the institutional framework is not perfect, but it's actually pretty good. Or actually, even more surprisingly, if you go back to medieval England around 1300, again the institutional framework has a lot of peculiarities, but it's actually a pretty stable, low-tax environment uh which offers a lot of security to investors. And so then the puzzle comes up about well, well, if you compare England and India in the 19th or 20th century, why has one society got incomes that are five to six times higher than the other one? And the surprising thing there is if you go inside the firms and look at what's actually happening within firms, is that what you find is that somehow the performance of workers in somewhere like India is just significantly below the performance of English workers. That there really are these kind of huge differences in how much labor you can extract from people uh per day. Uh and uh we actually have a paper with a co-author Susan Walcott where we look at Bombay in the 1920s, and the title of the paper actually was stolen later by Asamoglum and Robinson. It's actually called uh Why Nations Fail. And it actually says, Well, look, if the Indian cotton textile mills could have just achieved the efficiency of a British mill, the whole history of India would be completely different. It would have taken over this world cotton textile market, and we would have seen development. Uh but what you actually see in these mills is they knew that they were in trouble, they knew they were losing money, they knew Japanese competition was about to sweep them away, but they could not extract more labor from the workers. And the difference between there and Britain is in the order of three or four to one in terms of how much a worker was doing per day. And it's it turns out to be the puzzle then though is why was that the case? And actually Susan and I ended up kind of with somewhat different views of this, uh, which is kind of interesting with the two authors of the same paper. Uh but her view was that the workers were perfectly capable of delivering kind of British levels of labor input, but they collectively chose not to. And they wanted to maximize employment, even if that meant, you know, less income for each of them. Uh I actually thought this explanation couldn't work because that would just give the mill owners in Bombay an incentive to move their mills to areas which hadn't previously had textile mills, where the workers had no idea about what conventional standards of manning were, and then just set up and tell the workers, no, we're starting at British levels here, and we'll proceed in that way. But it turns out actually workers outside Bombay in India were less efficient even than the workers inside Bombay, who were relatively higher paid. Uh, and so I actually think that it's it's something to do with kind of local culture, local aspirations, the local environment. And it it really is a kind of a puzzling feature of the world that it's it's that outcomes are just kind of substantially lower in some societies than they are in others, that people can be perfectly aware of what the possibilities are of production, but that somehow you you can't achieve this, right? But the one puzzle about this is that you observe even this phenomena initially in places like Japan, but then Japan actually quite quickly transforms itself into a very high labor input country with kind of very high levels of efficiency. And so again, the the thought that it's something kind of innate or intrinsic to these societies, that there's somehow some permanent difference in capacity, that doesn't seem to be the case. And so it it, as I say, it ended up in this investigation that you just end up kind of puzzled about, you know, how do areas end up with this kind of we think of it as some kind of work kind of contamination where it's not possible to productively uh employ people. Uh and again, we see, for example, in the United States that in the textiles mills, they were some of the highest productivity workers in the world, say around about 1910 in textiles. A lot of them were recruited from places like Italy or Poland where labor productivity is actually pretty low in this period. And so uh but I am convinced though that this is a kind of a vital component in the relative development of these various countries around the world. But as I say, since we we really have difficulty understanding what is this that's going on, then it's very hard to diagnose. Well, how do you change this, right? How do you transform India and make it a very high productivity uh country? Uh and and and so as I say, it it's it's interesting, it it turns out to have very little to do with the institutions of the society. It's much, much more about the individuals, the workers in the society, and the attitudes of these workers. Uh, but it's very hard to figure out. And I actually ended up going to India on sabbatical in 1999 to try and get some insight into because the same issue actually applied to India as late as 1999, in terms of how much labor was employed for ordinary production processes. But it turns out it's it's very hard to get any kind of real insight uh when you go to Indian uh society in terms of, you know, well, well, why is uh output I mean, you do see when you go to India this tremendous surplus of labor in all kinds of occupations and surprising numbers of workers employed or people employed in ways that seem incredibly wasteful of labor. But again, it's very hard to diagnose, well, why is things turning out that way? You know, is it is it purely a cultural phenomena? Uh is it to do with the history of the place? Uh uh and and so I ended up actually just puzzled by you know what are these differences and and how do they how do they operate? And one of the things I should say is that since then I've devoted much more of my time to studying kind of social mobility. And one of the kind of surprising things about social mobility is that there you can find very law-like and almost physics-like behavior of societies that seem to apply across all societies. Right. And is actually kind of very different from this situation when we look across these societies in terms of who's performing well and who's not, where it's just very hard to find any kind of clear kind of logic to what's happening.

SPEAKER_02

As you're speaking there, it made me think of a few of your colleagues uh within uh the Academy's uh work. Uh and the first one, I suppose, is the distinctively English traits and cultural practices, which actually have been shown by the anthropologist Alan McFarland that this idea that capitalism and the so uh only really came about through the Industrial Revolution is not right, that the Industrial Revolution only came about through what had already developed in English society over a long period of time, that even right back to the Anglo-Saxon period you could find elements of private property, uh a more egalitarian way of um of uh sex relations, uh there being uh uh a particular relationship to the law and contract, uh, and all of those distinctive developments which ended up becoming part of you know the Anglo-Celtic uh inheritance. And then uh through the Industrial Revolution, which was not necessarily like a revolution insofar as there were lots of things that led up to it, and then it appeared like it was like that, and a very fecund nation that could settle the world and uh and and govern parts of it. And that culture then migrated over to these places. So, in some of the places with not many, not as many people around or without such a society to compete with, they sprung up, you know, uh thinking of Australia and the states and what have you. But in India, um, as I think you've done some work with LSC before, but there's an LSE professor called Professor Titanka Roy, um who's Indian, and he um he's written a history of the East India Company and showed that it was through the British um uh attitudes towards private property and contract uh in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta that were simply fishing villages before the British arrived, that drew in all of those people who wanted to leave behind their own cultural backgrounds that were uh dictated by caste and clan, and wanted actually a uh a kind of strong um uh uh ruling uh caste, I suppose, uh made up of various different people, that would allow them to do business. Um and and I it just made me think, as you were saying, you know, inside those cities, those people are all incredibly productive and um rub along in the capitalist system very well, but those people out in the the rural society doesn't. And it just it just makes me wonder whether then whilst these things are the products, the flowerings of cultural traits, that um clearly other people can have alignments to them as well, a subset of other peoples, and maybe they get drawn into them and it starts feeding back into that work you talk about with class being continuous over the centuries, that those people who could benefit from it often do. Um I don't know what you think about any of that, uh whether it's uh the the reason why some of this divergence has happened is because ultimately what happened was an exporting of something which is very Anglo-Celtic, um, but it doesn't necessarily map on to the cultural practices and backgrounds of the places that this um economic system has found itself.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Well, what's interesting though, for example, the divergence of India with uh England, uh a lot of that is occurring after the British have essentially taken over India and imported a lot of uh English institutions. And so if you look at something like the cotton textile industry, it's very competitive. It's uh very much free market, it's very much grounded in secure property rights. Uh the rates of return on these textile mills in India are actually quite low. And so there's an abundance of capital. They're not earning anything more than British entrepreneurs in their textile mills. And and so so I agree that you know the the British early on, already by the Middle Ages, have a commercial society. It's an open society. It's uh we can actually measure the degree of openness even going back till 1200 or 1300, and it's as open as it is now. Uh, and so so there's a lot of good things about that. People with talent actually are going to rise and succeed in the society. Um and but they brought that to India, but somehow that that importation of this, and and if you think about cities like, say, Bombay, uh there people are leaving behind their villages, their local environment, and coming to this giant city uh to work in these new industries, to work in with different groups of people, with Muslim groups, Hindu groups, uh and and yet that city could not achieve the levels of efficiency or productivity of Lancashire. Uh uh and and so you you really end up with this uh surprising kind of uh equilibrium, uh where India is growing cotton and then shipping it past the mills in Bombay to Lancashire to be made into cloth, which is then being sent back to India. Uh and uh and and as I say, it's it's it's an astonishing feature uh of of kind of world history, just what is happening inside production enterprises and what makes production enterprises actually uh operate.

SPEAKER_02

Um it is fascinating. Well, that's that's a picture of abroad uh and some of the uh some of the explanations as to why this divergence occurs even with the same access in theory to the institutional developments or technological developments. Let's think about uh interventions at home. Because I think probably this topic that we're about to discuss perhaps might be a bit heretical, because there is a widespread belief, I think, within the social sciences, within the political classes, uh that social interventions significantly influence rates of social mobility. And you say that's false, and you say that's false for various reasons. Uh that even when there was there were few social interventions in England before 1870, there have been many since then, and that none of them have meaningfully improved the social mobility of the poor. What why is that?

SPEAKER_00

So um it is true that people have a widespread uh kind of belief and in uh social intervention, social causation of outcomes. Uh one of the things I think, though, that we have to worry about here is there's a tremendous consumer market for studies that find this. There are all of these uh charitable foundations, these uh educational institutions and everything else that want to justify their programs, that want to kind of find reason in what they're doing. Uh and I've actually encountered, where I've actually applied for grant money, people that just explicitly say, why should we fund this project if it's going to show that we can't improve social outcomes? We should only fund projects which show us ways of changing social outcomes. And so I think, you know, whether you have to worry about the background here, which is that a lot of social science research, unlike, say, physics, there's just tremendous uh demand for certain types of outcome. And people want to know how do we make better schools, how do we produce better outcomes, how do we change people's lives? And those are the papers that are going to tend to get published, and those are the papers that are going to tend to get funded. And so, in the research that I've done, uh one of the problems you have with kind of measuring social mobility is that uh the measures we have of social status actually change a lot over time and incorporate a lot of errors. And if we try and measure social mobility using such measures, which are not constant over time, which have lots of different error components, then sometimes we'll measure faster rates of social mobility and sometimes we'll measure slower, but just as a product of the problem with our measurement instruments. And so a lot of the work I've done has been trying to find kind of measurement invariant checks on social mobility. And it turns out surprisingly that one of those actually comes from just looking at not the status of individual, but the status of surnames. And by averaging across surnames, we can get rid of a lot of that kind of measurement error and then more correctly assess uh what is actually happening in terms of social mobility. So if we go to 1800, we can find looking at say attendance at Oxford and Cambridge, what are high status surnames then, and measure how quickly they're becoming average. And we can do that same measurement for 1900, and we can do the same measurement for 2000. And so then we can have kind of a nice kind of constant measure about well, how much, how quickly are things turning over? How quickly are the elite becoming average? And we could also do a measurement of what about people who are not at the universities? How quickly are they actually moving in? And so, for example, if you go to 1200 or 1300, there's no one at Oxford and Cambridge who has an artisanal surname like Smith or Carpenter or Baker. Uh they're all excluded. By 1600, the name Smith is as represented at Oxford and Cambridge as it is in the general population. It's become just like the population as a whole in terms of its distribution of status. And we can actually use that then as a measurement of well, how much social mobility is there in this society? And when you use measures like that, the interesting implication you find for England is that from 1300 till now, there's been no fundamental change in the rate of social mobility. And then the second interesting implication is that social mobility rates are actually very low. That basically there's almost a kind of a 0.8 correlation from generation to generation in terms of how strong status persists. Whereas conventional measures often suggest correlations that are on the order of 0.3 or 0.5. And so you d and what you find then is uh the but the nice thing is the evidence also suggests that even since 1300 there's always been kind of universal social mobility. There's no persistent upper class and there's no persistent lower class. But the problem is, or for some people, the problem is it takes about ten generations to go from being upper class to being average, and it takes about ten generations to go from being the the bottom of the social hierarchy to being average again. And so so the interesting, nice thing is there seems to be already in even in medieval England complete social mobility, but it's a very slow process. People inherit very strongly the characteristics of their parents. And then the other interesting feature is that if we're looking just at the period from 1800 till now, huge numbers of social interventions have come in. Education up until university level at least has become free. Uh healthcare has essentially become free. Uh there's lots of other social supports for people. There's much more taxation of the incomes of upper class people than there used to be. But interestingly, it has had no effect in terms of these underlying rates of social mobility. And uh now, as I say, uh some people are going to look at that as that's terrible. You know, what an indictment of British society, you know. How can this happen? Right? I actually look at it as this is uh an endorsement of English society because what it's suggesting is that essentially, even since the Middle Ages, we've lived in a meritocracy. And it's a meritocracy where people of ability kind of find the highest status positions in the society, and people lacking those abilities end up in kind of low status positions. And it's just the case that these types of social abilities are actually kind of weakly inherited. Um, and that the social interventions don't seem to be able to do much to change that, right? And that's actually saying that we'll don't live in an incredibly unfair world. If it really was unfair, and then we made these social interventions, then it would radically change what people's outcomes are. But they're actually, it it seems pretty resistant to these interventions. And so so I read it not as kind of an indictment of English society, but as in some sense as saying we we live in a surprisingly kind of functional social world.

SPEAKER_02

Well, these findings must make you incredibly popular amongst uh your academic colleagues because uh there are a great many departments that are uh that position themselves as those who uh ought to lead the policy charge on fixing social ills. Um I I wonder how far this um this goes then. So where do you think your findings leave social interventions?

SPEAKER_00

Well, uh one thing I I I think is uh I believe you know people people have abilities and they express those abilities. And and you can in a country like I am now in now Denmark, you can tax people a surprising amount, and it doesn't change social outcomes very much, right? And doesn't seem to change the incentives very much. And so I'm actually in favor of lots of redistributive taxation. And in a place like Denmark, the minimum wage is somewhere around 20, effective minimum wage in the labor market is somewhere around 25 pounds an hour. And and so, you know, the poorest people in Denmark are living well. And and this is shocking coming from California. In within, you know, a mile of my house in California, there are people living homeless on the streets. Uh, you know, and I hadn't, you know, uh you can go to Bombay and you find a similar situation, but it is astonishing in a society as rich as California that that's the case. Uh you don't find that in a place like Denmark. Everyone gets provided housing, food, uh, the basics of life. And so I actually think that, you know, that is fine. And that is perfectly good. Now, what I do think though is, for example, we have vastly overexpanded education in the name of social mobility. And we've expanded university education to a point where it just doesn't make any sense that no one is gaining from this. We've delayed people's entry into the labor force by five or six years. Uh, and I I effectively I think there's very little actual gain in people's capacities uh from this extended education. And even now, I think, in somewhere like Britain, there's an attempt to force everyone to remain in education until at least age 18. And so, uh, you know, as part of the work we were doing was to look about did expansions of education in Britain that occurred at various dates actually improve the outcomes for the poorest group in the population? And the answer for these studies is that these that there is no effect. That when you expand education, you just create increased costs for everyone before they can get into the labor market. Uh, and it doesn't seem to actually produce any gain in uh outcomes. And so I yeah, you know, I think that is the case. Uh there's all kinds of other programs that we've kind of uh adopted. For example, in America now, they seem to want to expand education to three-year-olds and four-year-olds. And again, I think there's very, very little evidence that such interventions actually are going to change uh people's outcomes. And so I think, you know, yes, giving people more income is good. But a lot of these kind of directed social programs, there seems to be very little evidence that they're actually going to uh change outcomes. Uh and for example, uh, you know, Denmark, which is this very egalitarian society with very compressed uh income distribution, when we measure rates of social mobility, it's not any better than in England. Once we measure the kind of getting rid of these measurement error problems. And so Denmark's achieved a lot. It hasn't changed rates of social mobility. And as I say, this would be an argument for saying we've got to examine those kind of social programs where we're spending a lot uh supposedly to enrich people's lives or to guide them better into the labor force. And it's just not obvious that any of that work has done anything for people's prospects.

SPEAKER_02

Looking back to the period when universal education started to gain traction in in Britain, so the 19th century, though not everyone could continue going, even if offered, because family circumstances had to go out into the workforce. Wasn't necessarily compulsory to be there. People would go and be factory hands or tailors or what have you. Frequent listeners of this podcast may be bored to death of me raising a book and a set of work uh by Jonathan Rose, who's over in the States, on the intellectual life of the British working classes. But he does a great job of documenting from 2000 diary entries across Britain, those people who engaged in an organic autodidact culture. They created Mutual Improvement Society's freedom of expression on politics and religion. They clubbed in to uh own and distribute amongst the community uh the classics. That information diet puts all of us to shame, even the most educated. Uh, and there were some great success stories of social mobility within that, you know, people becoming published authors when they were working in the factories. Or for instance, Ramsey Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, he uh from your neck of the woods in Glasgow, he was from an illiterate family and through a mutual improvement society, he learned how to debate, uh, learned how to reason, um, great orator, uh, good thinker, and was the first first Labour Prime Minister, came from nothing. So it seems that when some of these self-improvement activities are directed through your own agency, perhaps. Maybe that's a difference to the top-down interventions where things are bottom-up, people are agentic, they're purposeful, um, they are applying it to their lives, which then leads to them achieving perhaps better occupation or or or living standards. Perhaps that is always going to be a more successful um way of achieving mobility than a top-down bureaucratic approach. Is there anything in the data that you've looked at? Because I know you have researched widely across Britain over a long period of time that shows a difference between top-down and bottom-up?

SPEAKER_00

Uh no, I mean, one of the interesting features of British society is that uh social mobility is very symmetrical. The top families are moving down systematically, right? And what's interesting about that is if you believe in social causation, upper, the very upper class families, they can have tutors, they can have private education, they have the best nutrition, the best access to health. Uh what's interesting, though, is upper status groups cannot defend themselves in this society. They are all destined, on average, to move downwards. And and people have actually surprisingly little focused on this kind of the almost the euthanasia of the upper classes in the sense that they're not able to hold these positions. They're eventually going to be replaced. And as I say, if you really believe in kind of social causation, in in America, there are people who are for grade school education are spending 60,000 pounds, 80,000 pounds a year. But it turns out that these types of expenditures don't seem to help that much, right? These people do well from the upper classes. They're just not doing as well as their parents, right? And what's interesting, though, in this society is the rate of downward mobility is the same as the rate of upward mobility at the bottom of society, where in some sense the social conditions are just so completely different for this upper group and the bottom group. And as I say, when I talk about kind of the there's a kind of physics of social mobility, what is amazing is that it actually shows the symmetry, that the rate of rise at the bottom is the same as the rate of decline at the top. And again, it seems to say that, you know, um various social interventions that people have thought of, or various things that people are exposed to are having relatively little uh impact. Now, this actually may reflect the fact that Britain always in this period was a relatively open society, and that there were mechanisms of social mobility available to people all through the scale, right? And so in the 19th century, education may be harder to acquire, though there's lots of ability in various places to get access to charity schools and other forms of education. Uh apprenticeships were important as a way of moving up. Uh people would would you would actually see them from coming from very poor families, somehow now acquiring craft skills or other skills. And somehow they're able, even though their parents are laborers, to actually make this move up to the next rung in the social ladder. And and so as I say, um it's um i i i i you know what my own uh uh experience of of this data is that there is social mobility, that there are kind of surprising moves by people at the lower levels upwards. There's surprising moves also by people at the upper levels downwards. Um but that you know uh various social interventions just don't seem to affect this process very much. That is a kind of timeless social process that's going on. And as I say, I think that reflects the fact that we're live in a more meritocratic society than most people assume.

SPEAKER_02

What where does some very interesting data which you found fit into this? So this is with regards to classes marrying amongst each other. So you that it's quite common now to find people talking about how, with the decline of an aristocratic society following the rise of the managerial profession from the 1930s onwards, uh, that you find that the gr the graduate classes, the professional graduate classes, professional managerial classes end up almost like their own caste. They are they they marry amongst each other, they they go to these elite universities and and what have you. But it's your work suggests this isn't a new thing because data seems to go as far back as you can imagine. That shows that there is this um uh similarity in the social stratum that, say, my father and my father-in-law would would occupy, and this is consistent across the centuries, and and and even beyond that is that the social outcomes of even my fourth cousin, if I knew who the heck they were, would be quite similar, similar to mine. So what does that what does that actually tell us about just how consistent this is?

SPEAKER_00

Well, uh it it turns out that the rate of social mobility in in any society is actually going to be very heavily influenced by how people become parents and who they match up with in this process. And that, in some sense, is a completely social variable, right? And it reflects, you know, what is it that people are valuing in partners, right? And there could be a world when people just value physical appearance, and physical appearance is distributed uniformly across the population, and then we'd get a very little matching in terms of people's social status in marriage, and we'd actually end up with a society with significantly higher rates of social mobility, right? And and so it turns out that that how people actually form matches is going to be a crucial parameter in this society. And it turns out that in England, amazingly, since 1837, for every wedding, it's recorded what the occupation is of the groom, the bride, the father of the groom, and the father of the bride. And so you have a little kind of social census done for every one of these weddings. The government, I think, is sitting on about like 120 million of these wedding certificates. But I think it costs something like 15 pounds to get to see an individual copy of one of these. And it's an amazing trove of data. And it's only in the last year or so, I think, have they actually included information about the bride's mother and the and the groom's mother as well. But it's this amazing set of data. And using that data, at the family level, we can say how strong is that matching back in 1837 compared to what it is now. And in fact, we can go even earlier all the way back to 1754, because for earlier marriages, they did record if the bride or groom was literate. And you could actually, when you can match brides and grooms to their parents, you can actually use that literacy information again to infer just how closely were people matching up in terms of educational status. And as I say, the the surprising finding is that that matching is very, very strong in terms of status. And as I say, it's a it's a measure here of kind of family status, of how people are matching. Uh, and also that that matching has not changed. Uh, and when we move from a world where very few women had formal education and very few women had formal occupations, to this modern world where women often have now have more education than men, and also have access to a lot of professions, um it hasn't changed the nature of that matching. And it seems to be that people forming marital unions cared a lot about the social status of their partner, uh, and that that's what underlays the very slow rates of social mobility, right? Uh and and and actually we have another uh uh along with Neil Cummins at LSE, who's a frequent co-author, we actually have some speculation about, well, you know, the Industrial Revolution, there's always this puzzle about explaining the Industrial Revolution. In recent years, there's been a lot of focus. So, for example, Young Mukir, the recent Nobel Prize winner in economic history, there's been a lot of focus on the elites in society as creators of new knowledge. And, you know, the role of knowledge and the role of these elites in generating the Industrial Revolution. And one of the interesting features is that a marital system like this carried out by the whole society, will actually widen the distribution of abilities within a society and will create ever higher numbers of people at the kind of intellectual elite of the society. But also that process will actually take a long time to play out. And so one kind of interesting issue would be: could it be that the adoption in Europe of a kind of very individualistic type of marriage, where people really prized finding a partner that had these qualities, was actually a precursor then to kind of a later industrial revolution by actually kind of widening the distribution of abilities in society. And that would be kind of an interesting link then between kind of social mobility, rates of economic growth, but just this basic issue about who do you decide to marry, right? And and and but and as I say, with this interesting feature that that there seems to be very constant kind of cultural element to how people decide, well, this is the right person as a as a life partner.

SPEAKER_02

Reading your work, particularly The Sun Also Rises, about the history of surnames. Uh so uh sharing a brief biographical note on me. My surname Gillam is an Anglo-Norman name, came over with William the Conqueror, uh, was Guillaume before that, but I'm biologically not Gillam. I actually uh have a grandfather whose surname was McKeever, and it was just through who my dad was raised by. And I I've often wondered since I come across your word, because there is all of that talk in the literature that those of the Norman yoke uh have typically done much better in English society over time. Uh, though you can find examples where as you've described, social mobility can go downwards. I think about Paul Gascoin, for instance. I know he was a very famous footballer, but he was from a council of state engadeshead. And um and his his surname is about as Norman as they get. And indeed, the the um Frank Lampard, whilst his he himself had a privileged upbringing because his dad was a professional footballer. I believe his dad was from the East End of London, um, living in rather modest circumstances. So it's not foolproof. But I did I have wondered that whilst I had a much slower start to my adult life because of decisions I'd made and I didn't get my head screwed on until later, whether perhaps I might have been afforded opportunities in higher social status jobs because of my surname in a way that perhaps I wouldn't if McKeever was my surname, though perhaps in from a Scottish perspective, that was also potentially high status. I'm not sure. But regardless of taking my personal point as an example, is this something that you think does influence the decisions with people? So if I had one of those occupational surnames you mentioned, like Baker or whatever, uh, does having a certain surname reflect on the decisions made by people for you and your your future and the kind of status they uh afford you?

SPEAKER_00

So uh yes, in these surname studies that I've done, then you have to be assuming that people are not being driven to you know choose people because of their surname, because of the eliteness of the surname. Now it is a puzzle, the survival of Norman surnames as relatively elite surnames through all of this time, because that's a survival at a rate that you don't observe for other elite groups. So, for example, if you go back to medieval England, any name that referred to a place was a relatively elite name. So if you were called Jack London, that typically meant that you were living outside London and that was a relatively elite group of people who ended up, you know, if I'm a priest now in Cambridge and I'm known as Jack London, Jack from London. Uh and and so it turns out that you can actually then trace these locative surnames in England, and they have become completely average, right? And so it's a little surprising that the Norman names survive. But one of the things you see there is that people in that case are sometimes now choosing to retain the surname. So you actually see in elite families that they leave money to a nephew when they have no children, but say the condition of getting the money is that you adopt my name. And and then also you you actually see people just choosing these names. So in the records I have, the 500,000 people, you see people changing their name. And the interesting thing though is it's relatively rare, but it will be towards these somewhat more elite names. And so I think the explanation of kind of Norman persistence is that, though, though it is interesting that we have the records of English armies from the 15th century, and that's a long time after the Norman conquest. I mean, this is 500 years, and um it's still the case that the more elite you are in the army, the more Norman your name is, and that Normans are heavily overrepresented, even among soldiers in the army. And so, as I say, there is this interesting kind of Norman uh history. Uh so what I would say though is that we can find a set of names which are elite, but which no one knows they're elite because they're so rare. Uh and so if I say, well, you know, the Boscoin family, you would have no idea. Is that an elite name, non-elite name? It turns out it was in the 19th century, but there's only 30 of these people. And so then we can actually trace social mobility rates looking at these rare elite names where no one really knows the status, and we find the same picture, right? And so that allows us to say, okay, that's what's actually driving this process. Now, if you went to somewhere like India, which is some of the lowest measured social mobility rates in the world, there there's a set of Brahmin surnames that everyone identifies with Brahmins and which very clearly signal that. And there you would worry a little bit more about what's going to happen in that case, right? Though it turns out when these Brahmin surnames move to places like the United States, they show again tremendous persistence among elites. And and in a world where people, maybe the average American, doesn't know, oh, this is an elite set of Indian surnames, as opposed to average Indian surnames. And so you have to be aware of that in doing these kind of uh surname uh studies. Uh but the interesting thing is that even with names that no one knows whether they're elite or not, you tend to find very similar results.

SPEAKER_02

Hmm. Yes, it's fascinating. I suppose the average the average um Anglo is is not to know that they might be faced uh with someone with a Gujarat name that means Empress or something. No, yeah, but but and if that is the case, do not be lectured on social mobility in the United States because uh they come from a very privileged class, so don't be lectured. Um before I let you go, penultimate question, uh Greg, and it's linked to what you found, which is social interventions not meaningfully improving mob social mobility. So we've made the argument that actually that doesn't mean you should stop the redistribution. There is a a function that served to dignity minif.

SPEAKER_00

Can I actually illustrate the sense of saying why don't social interventions matter that much? What I can we can do with this data, with this ample data, is we can look at, for example, family size before 1880 was essentially random. So you could have families of one, families of 15. It has no effect on people's outcomes, except in the case of wealthy families where you inherit less wealth, in that case, if you're from a big family. We can look at birth order. Oldest children get much more attention from their parents than younger children. But does that have an effect on your life? And the answer in this data is no, absolutely no effect. We can look at what happens if your father dies before you reach age 14. Does that diminish your life outcomes? The amazing thing with this data, again, is the answer is no. It has no effect. So people are as strongly connected to fathers that died when they were born as to fathers that they lived their whole lives with up till age 21. And so we can actually do, you know, uh another one is uh uh yes, so we look with birth order. Uh another interesting thing is um uh mothers spend much more time with children than fathers do. Does the status of mothers better predict children's outcomes than that of the fathers? And the answer is it doesn't make any difference. And again, the father doesn't even have to ever be around the kid to have the same predictive effect on status. So that's so as I say, there is this kind of rich set of data that says, you know, surprisingly, social interventions really don't seem to do very much. But I cut you off, sorry. You should continue with your point.

SPEAKER_02

Well, no, it was a good serve-up of the question, is then people always like to know what is to be done. Well, what should the the average person concerned with raising themselves do? Is the answer uh agency rather than looking to policy?

SPEAKER_00

Um I th I I think it's it it's an interesting feature of the modern world that uh now we've become tremendously concerned about the lack of children in this world. Uh but we've actually created, and I see this in my own nieces and nephews and family, we've created a world where people think of parenthood as this impossibly imposing task, where you know, every, you know, and and I have a young colleague who's just had a baby here in Denmark, and you know, the the midwife is is going on about how you've got to wake every hour and a half at night to ensure the maximum ingestion of milk by the infant, you know. And if you wait two hours, it's just not good enough. And and so one thing I think is we'll we we've ended up in a society where we have, for some reason, this incredible belief that the outcomes of our children are incredibly dependent on parental input, that nothing is possible without maximum parental input. And I think the interesting evidence that we get from the data we can see is that parents after conception are much less important than the children's life than people actually believe. The children are going to inherit attitudes and abilities which are really resistant to parental influences, uh, and that everyone should relax much more and you know, have children and let them be free. And, you know, uh it's not crucial that they go to kindergarten at age four, keep them to age six. It's not crucial what they learn in the early years of education. Uh I have a colleague who uh grew up in Berkeley where he abandoned school. His parents were kind of hippies. He abandoned school for about five years, and he said, when I came back, it wasn't clear to me what I'd miss. Uh and and and and so I think you know that's it that is an important uh lesson about people's individual lives that in some sense would be helpful is to have much more humility and to realize that you know, really the the outcomes are not in your hands anymore. Uh you should love your children, you should accept your children, and and you should realize that you know you are not the crucial, you know, determinant of their life outcomes.

SPEAKER_02

Well, as a man expecting my first child later in the year, I will tear up my list of rules that I was going to instantiate from the very beginning. Uh Greg, you've been very, very generous with your time. Before I let you go, the final question that I ask all of my guests is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life? And what was it that made you think differently?

SPEAKER_00

Well, I I I I have changed my mind on a whole bunch of things. And and one is, for example, I used to believe uh as a parent, you know, in just how crucial parental inputs were to the outcomes of children. But the good thing is that we had three children, and when you see the differences between those children and how resistant they are to kind of parental inputs or parental suggestions, uh, I think that's one of the most fundamental things I learned was just how uh unique people's personalities are, how they have that when they come from the womb. Uh, and that you when you have this relationship with the children, you can't make them into little versions of yourself. And you should just enjoy them as individuals and hope that they'll look after you in your feeble older age. Uh and I think that's a kind of fundamental uh change in terms of uh how I think about the connection between parents and children is in the modern world, you know, in any world.

SPEAKER_02

Well, we inadvertently ended up giving tips to the soon-to-be first-time parents. So I'm very glad we got onto that topic. Uh I can I can put that book down I was reading about how to be a good dad now. Uh before I let you go, uh, what are you working on? You've you've got a whole host of papers that you've published and several very popular books. Is there anything else we can expect from you? And what where do people find you online?

SPEAKER_00

Uh so uh uh i if you just type in my name, it'll it'll lead you. There's an area uh there are a number of other Gregory Clarks, but you'll see I'm you know on Google, uh it'll lead you to where I am. Uh the uh I am working on a book which is uh proving difficult to get uh published uh because it makes one step further than we talked about in the conversation here to say the evidence seems to be that the reason we get this set of social outcomes is because social status is mainly genetically transmitted. And that, it turns out, is a conclusion that people are very averse to, but of which I think there is actually quite convincing uh evidence in this data that that is the case. Uh and so, as I see, my big uh task now is to actually uh get this book uh published. And like my earlier two books, it's uh currently uh going to have a Hemingway pun, and it's going to be to have and have not uh the determinants of social status in England from 1600 till 2026.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I I I look forward to that once you find a publisher that's not so lily livered. I'm sure you will. I'm sure you will find a heterodox publisher. There are a few out there. Yes, I'm hopeful.

SPEAKER_00

I'm still hopeful, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Greg, it's been an absolute pleasure. Uh I would like to stay in touch so we can speak about that book when it comes out. And I wish you all the best in your endeavours. Enjoy the rest of your time in Denmark before you go back to the States and keep fighting the good fight. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Greg.

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John Gillam

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