Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus)

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2025

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How much of your life’s trajectory was set in motion centuries ago? Gregory Clark has spent decades studying social mobility, and his findings suggest that where you land in society is far more predictable than we like to think. Using historical data, surname analysis, and migration patterns, Clark argues that social mobility rates have remained largely unchanged for 300 years—even across radically different political and economic systems.

He and Tyler discuss why we should care about relative mobility vs growing the size of the pie, how physical mobility does and doesn’t matter, why England was a meritocracy by 1700, how assortative mating affects economic and social progress, why India industrialized so late, a new potential explanation why Britain’s economic performance has been lukewarm since WWI, Malthusian societies then and now, whether a “hereditarian” stance favors large-scale redistribution or a free-market approach, the dynamics of assimilation within Europe and the role of negative selection in certain migrations, the challenge of accurately measuring living standards, the neighborhood-versus-family debate over what drives mobility, whether we need datasets larger than humanity itself to decode the genetics of social outcomes, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded February 5th, 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.4	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
0:13.5	Learn more at Mercadis.org.
0:15.7	For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.4	visit Conversationswithtyler.com.
0:26.4	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
0:30.5	Today I am chatting live with Greg Clark, the economic historian.
0:35.1	I think it's fair to say that Greg is the most interesting and most
0:38.8	influential economic historian of the last 20 years. His book from 2007, A Farewell to Alms,
0:46.8	presented a new theory of economic growth, human progress, and the Industrial Revolution.
0:51.9	I ended up as one of the blurbers, and I called it, as I wrote in the New York Times, the next blockbuster in economics.
0:59.4	His book after that, The Sun, S.O.N. also rises. Surnames and the history of social mobility, among other things, argues that rates of social mobility have been much less, much more static,
1:12.2	much harder to change than many people believe. Greg spent much of his career at UC Davis.
1:17.9	He is now a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and he hails from Scotland. Greg,
1:24.4	welcome. Thank you very much. Great to be here. I have so many questions about your work.
1:29.4	Let me start with mobility, a point where I think we don't agree. So I see mobility across freer societies as much higher than you do.
1:38.3	And I worry that you're treating mobility too much in terms of relative ranking. Your kintile, how well is that predicted by your
1:45.3	parent's kintile or desal of income? But if you just think of mobility as having a much better
1:50.4	in different life, freer life than your parents, aren't rates of social mobility just immense?
1:55.4	No. The amazing thing is, if we even go back to medieval England, rates of social mobility
2:04.3	were just as high as they are now.
2:07.9	And, I mean, if you want to take these other dimensions of freedom of expression or social
	...

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