Gregory Clark > Quotes

“the good society would have a low rate of inheritance of social status and correspondingly low variations in income and wealth.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“المداخيل اقوى على المدى الطويل من اي ايديولوجيا فى صياغة حياتنا. فلا يوجد قانون يفرض على المواطنين القيام بواجباتهم على نحو يفوق قدرة المداخيل على توجية بنية حياتنا بكل مهارة”
― Gregory Clark

“Underlying or overall social mobility rates are much lower than those typically estimated by sociologists or economists. The intergenerational correlation in all societies for which we construct surname estimates - medieval England, modern England, the United States, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Chile, and even egalitarian Sweden - is between 0.7 and 0.9, much higher than conventionally estimated. Social status is inherited as strongly as any biological trait, such as height.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“Reports in earlier working papers that the true persistence rate of social status is on the order of 0.75, even in the United States and Sweden, were greeted by many commentators with dismay. And indeed, even with the earlier reports of persistence rates of 0.5, many people already regarded U.S. society as mired in unfairness.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine.”
― Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

“The time and energy that innovators invested in new methods thus yielded a much higher social return than the meager private return they reaped.”
― Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

“But the generalized spillovers from innovation activities are not in practice measurable. Nor is the total amount of activity designed to improve production processes measurable. Investments in innovation occur in all economies. But unknown factors speed and retard this process across different epochs and different economies.”
― Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

“Interestingly, with respect to social mobility rates, the twenty-seven adult great-great grandchildren of Charles Darwin, born on average nearly 150 years after Darwin, are still a surprisingly distinguished cohort. Eleven are notable enough to have Wikipedia pages, or the like, such as Times obituaries, devoted to them. They include six university professors, four authors, a painter, three medical doctors, a well-known conservationist, and a film director.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“The proposition that elites and underclasses are not created by religion, culture, or race is supported by evidence from the United States on current elite and underclass populations. A quick confirmation of this proposition can be obtained by looking at surnames identified with particular ethnic or national groups and counting the numbers of registered physicians per thousand of each surname type in 2000. We can divide this number by the average number of physicians registered per person in the United States in 2000. For the population as a whole, this number will be one.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“The persistence of high and low status for some groups in various societies would seem to contradict the simple law of mobility for social status. However, in each of the anomalous cases discussed above, there are factors at play that can make even extreme persistence consistent with the same universal tendency for families to regress toward the mean over time. Elites and underclasses seem to be created by mechanisms that select them from the top or bottom of the established status distribution. They can also be created, as in the case of the Gypsy/Traveller community in England, by differential fertility between higher- and lower-status members of a group.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“Another irony is that the achievement of mass affluence in much of the world--the decline in child mortality, the extension of adult life spans, and the reduction in inequality--have not made us any happier than our hunter-gatherer forebears.”
― Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

“The argument is instead that it rewarded with economic and hence reproductive success a certain repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world, such as the ability to perform simple repetitive tasks hour after hour, day after day. There is nothing natural or harmonic, for example, in having a disposition to work even when all the basic needs of survival have been achieved.”
― Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

“A recent study of four generations of families in Malmö suggests that intergenerational earnings and education correlations in Sweden have been at the modern level for at least three to four generations. The initial generation in the Malmö study was born between 1865 and 1912.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility