Modern Wisdom - #728 - Gregory Clark - Is Social Status Determined By Your Genetics?

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

Gregory Clark is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis, researcher and an author. Everyone has a dream of making a better life for their family. But fascinating new research suggests that your social status is heavily predetermined by your genetics, and that your descendants escaping the position they've always been in is very unlikely. Expect to learn if social status is actually heritable, how much genetics really plays a role in social hierarchy, how researchers can tell where the next 10 generations of children will fall on the social ladder, how higher and lower social status can impact the birthrate, why more attractive people have more social status, the difficulties of publishing research like this and much more... Sponsors: Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 5.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Gregory Clark. He's a professor of economics at the University of California Davis, a researcher, and an author. Everyone has a dream of making a better life for their family, but fascinating new research suggests that your social status is heavily predetermined by your genetics and that your descendants escaping the position

they've always been in, is actually very unlikely. Expect to learn if social status is actually heritable, how much genetics really plays a role in social hierarchy, how researchers can tell where the next 10 generations of children will fall on the social ladder, how higher and lower status can impact the birth rate, why more attractive people have more social status, the difficulties of publishing research like this, and much more.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Greg's work has been a little unpopular in certain circles, but it is fascinating. It is so, so interesting, and I really, really hope that you enjoy this one. Also, I'm back in Austin. Look at me. I've left the UK behind after my Christmas break and I'm back here ready to do some real damage to the next few months and we've got, I'm off to Vegas and LA next week. We can, we can a bit and the lineup is just so wild. I cannot wait to show you the episodes that we've got scheduled. Yeah, get ready for these ones. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps

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What's this new paper of yours about the inheritance of social status? So the paper looks at 425,000 people in England over the course of 400 years, who are all linked together by descent and marriage, and just asks what describes how you inherit social status. And it ends up that there are actually three very interesting aspects. One is that there's very strong inheritance of status, much stronger than people conventionally believe. And so there's an underlying correlation that's really strong. The second astonishing aspect is that that correlation hasn't changed

over the course of 400 years. There's no more social mobility now than there was in the 17th century, the 18th century, the 19th century. But the most surprising element of all is that if you want to predict how correlated people will be, then that prediction is based on what's their genetic correlation. And so the data is just very consistent with a really simple model of genetic transmission, where what just matters is how many genes do we have in common, that'll explain how much outcome will have in common. And that, as

I say, is for many people very surprising and also quite troubling for a lot of people. What is the methodology of you being able to track genetics across such a long period of time? How are you able to do that? Presumably ancestry.com wasn't tracking people 400 years ago. Right. So the lineage stuff is fine. And so basically I was using there. There are all these kind of interesting societies in Britain and one is the guild of one named studies. societies in Britain and one is the guild of one named studies. And these are two or three thousand people who've devoted themselves to following the history of particular surnames in England.

And they've done fantastic jobs kind of actually tracking people's genealogy over hundreds of years. And so that part is straightforward. But the only thing we can do here is we have no direct genetic evidence here. What we can look at though is what would be the predictions of a genetic model of transmission. And that has a distinctive and very clear set of predictions about how correlated fourth cousins, third cousins, second cousins, first cousins will be.

And it all depends on how much assortment there is in marriage, how strong these correlations will remain. And so there's also predictions about siblings, about grandparents, grandchildren. And as I say, the very surprising thing here is that the predictions of that model are very consistent with this data for England. And it really is, you know, so I say,

so there's nothing conclusive here, there's nothing direct, but there is just a very interesting empirical pattern. And then as part of the paper, I also can say, well, what about other features of inheritance of status that would be consistent with genetic transmission? Did they also hold? And so here's one example is, with genetic transmission, mothers should always have an equal influence as fathers in terms of outcomes for children.

Because you get half of their genetics from each parent. Now, if we go back to 19th century England, fathers play a very different social role than they do now. If you look now, mothers still actually spend much more time with children than do fathers. And so we would actually expect with social transmission that maybe sometimes fathers are more important and other times mothers are much more important. But the data for this lineage in England is very clear. If you want to predict children's outcomes, mothers and fathers play exactly the same way.

And so early on, we have evidence on the literacy of mothers and fathers. And so that's equally predictive of what the child literacy would be. And it doesn't matter if it's a boy or a girl. In those cases, it's again equally predictive of what the child literacy would be, and it doesn't matter if it's a boy or a girl. In those cases, it's again equally predictive. For other outcomes, like occupation, we don't have occupations for women in the 19th century, but we can proxy women's occupations by, for example, taking their brother and then taking their husband's brother. And that'll actually give us a good proxy for what their occupational status is.

And then we can say, which predicts child outcomes better? Is it the mother's proxy or the father's proxy? And the answer again is no, it's exactly the same weight. And so, and that's true, as I say, all the way through the last 300 years, that mothers and fathers play exactly the same role in terms of outcomes, except for one important outcome. And that outcome is wealth. For wealth, fathers are much, much more influential than mothers. And that's because wealth tended in England to flow on the patriline, that man inherited more family wealth and women did.

And so what matters is what your grandfather's wealth on the patriline is supposed to your grandfather on the matriline. So as I say, there's this one piece of interesting and silvery evidence. A second piece is what's the effect of birth order on outcome, right? And in the social world, I mean, I don't know if you have children, I had three, and the oldest child gets much, much more parental attention than the younger ones do. And talk to anyone who has children. This is true.

The parents are new things when the first kid comes along. The parents of all these ideas about how they're going to shape these kids. In particular, we know that older children get more attention than younger children. You might expect that older children will do much better in terms of social outcomes. It turns out in this data, no, it's in almost every case, birth order doesn't matter. Your chances in life are the same whether you first or the last. And a lot of the families in the 19th century, there are 10 children. And so you would think the 10th one is coming into this kind of crowded family. There's no more space.

My own parents were both from families of 12. And by the time, you know, my father and mother, I think both were number nine. By the time they came along, the housings incredibly tight, you're sharing a bed with three siblings and stuff like that. But it turns out it doesn't matter except, again, there's a slight exception, for the top 1% of families in the 19th century, the kind of elite, the oldest son is doing better than the younger sons, but that's the only thing that matters. So the oldest son inherits more, but is also more likely to be sent to university than the younger sons. So you do see slight deviations for this, but for 99% of the population, it doesn't matter what

birth order is. And then another thing you can look at is, what about family size? Isn't that going to influence your outcomes? Because the more children there are, the less resources there are, the less parental attention. Again, in the era, so there's an era up to marriages around about 1880, where in England family size was random.

People made no attempt to control fertility. And it is amazing. They just apparently got married, produced children. Sometimes there's only one child, you know, just the accidents of fertility. In the sample we have, there's one guy who has 27 children from two different wives. And so you get this enormous variation in family size. And again, it has no effect except for richer families for wealth. And then if you're from a larger family,

then your wealth actually declines. Right? Sorry, if you're from a wealthy family and it's larger, your wealth declines because the wealth has to get divided. Yeah, if inheritance is going to play a large role in determining your future level of wealth and there are more people taking from that pie, each sliver of the pie is smaller. Yeah, right. So as I say, so that's another aspect. Another thing we can look at is, do you ever need to meet your parents for them to influence your social outcomes? And so in a lot

of the period that we're looking at, parental death is occurring at relatively early ages for some people in their 50s and 60s. And so about 10% of the kids, their father dies before they're 10 years old. And we can then see how correlated are you with your father as a function of, you know, you knew them all the way up till you were 21 or they died before you were 10. It makes no difference to outcomes.

You don't do any worse in life. You're not any less correlated with your father. You, apparently, you never need to meet your parents for them to have exactly the same influence on your outcomes. So, so I just say this study then is based on this observational data, right? And so it doesn't prove anything directly, but I'm working as I say, it's a surprising amount of this says, it's not social transmission. It seems to actually be a genetic transmission that is the consistent pattern

that would explain people's outcomes. When you talk about outcomes, you're using words like social status, where they end up in life stuff like that. What is social status based on what you're talking about here? Right. So the specific measures we have are, did you go to higher education of some kind? What was your literacy earlier on?

The best one we have is what's your occupational status, right? And then we also know for everyone who's most people who are alive now, what's the value of your house that you're living in? And that's pretty good indicator of your income level. And then also what's the nature of the neighborhood you're living in? Is it one where there's a lot of educated people, there's low crime rates, stuff like that. So we have a kind of measure of, and that's, we got down to almost the street level. What's the quality of that?

And so as I say, so we have these kind of multiple measures. But what I've seen with the data here is that these things tend to move pretty closely together. That basically high status people have more education, more wealth, higher occupational status, they live in nicer neighborhoods, they tend to live longer, all of these things. And that's why I think of it inherently as there's just some underlying kind of social abilities that people have, and that's the thing that's being transmitted between the generations. It's interesting to think about how you've tried to tease apart social transmission and

genetic transmission or genetic inheritance, I suppose, because a lot of people would look and say, well, you know, if you come from a family that is well off, think about the culture that you have around the house, around the dinner table, think about the sorts of things that are being spoken about, think about the kind of friends that you're going to play with, your parents are going to have, you're going more likely to go to after school clubs,

you're more likely to maybe have a tutor or maybe be encouraged to play sports or to play a musical instrument or all of these different things. And yet, it seems like behavioral genetics wins out yet again. Yes, and so now it turns out that I didn't, you know, because I'm coming from an economics and kind of history background. And I just got interested in this, and I had this data, and I thought, well, let's try to fit a genetic model. What would happen?

In this field is very fractious, and very kind of ideal, kind of ideology is very important to people. And it turns out most of the people actually don't want to believe that simple genetic transmission plays an important role in social life. And so most of the people in this field actually seem to believe that cultural transmission of the type that you've described

is actually very significant and very important. But there is one kind of puzzling thing about that, which is people don't focus on this a lot, but there's a lot of variation within any family in terms of the outcomes for children. And children's outcomes are no more correlated than they have roughly the same correlation as between a parent and a child, what the correlation of child outcomes. Now if you really believe strongly in cultural transmission, you know when I look at by it was one of four children. If I look at the expectations my parents had of us, if I look at the dinner table conversations I sat around in,

if I look at the housing we lived in, the neighborhood we were in, it's all the same for all four of us. And so if you really believe cultural transmission, you would expect that siblings really would show very, very strong correlations. Right. Because you have, you have essentially the same environment for all siblings. Right. But the only thing that would have been, the only variable that you would have had would have been some sort of genetic one that you got this particular combination of sperm and egg and somebody else got the rest. Right. And so it turns out then that one, and people don't seem to focus on that a lot,

that there is this puzzle with cultural transmission, which is how do you explain why siblings are actually significantly different? And with genetic things, that is partly because you inherit different genes, from each parent. But a lot of it is just because you inherit different genes from each parent. But a lot of it is just because whatever genetic blueprint you have, there's a randomness about what body eventually gets assembled from that blueprint. And that means that even identical twins are not identical in terms of their phenotype, right? And, you know, people, there's this very famous investigator

of twins, Pohman. He had a whole project which sought to look in detail at families where you had identical twins and one was different from the other. You know, one went to college and one didn't. And he interviewed the twins, he interviewed all their relatives. I think they spent years during this in detail analysis. And it came up with inclusion in the end. They could find nothing that would actually explain

why these differences existed. And so I think they're actually something again where genetic explanation has this idea of well, there's this irregisable randomness about life and about how the genetic instructions get implemented and that explains why even identical twins will not turn out to be identical. And so, so I'd say, so cultural explanation is this interesting alternative. It's hard to test, right? Because someone could say, well, I believe in culture,

but I believe it has exactly the same form of transmission as we come through genetics. And then, you know, it's such a loose form of explanation, right? Because everyone has their own ideas about how culture operates. What matters is it that, you know, you have some figure in the family that you can look up to, is it the actual contact, the matters, is it the schooling that people go to? And so it's very hard to find stuff that would refute a kind of cultural explanation

because, inherently, unlike the genetic explanation, it's just not super well-specified. But as I say, I think the strongest thing is this fact of the way siblings vary within families. And the fact that it's very hard to then to understand why a sibling number one is doing great, sibling number two is struggling, when so much is common in terms of people's backgrounds

and as siblings when they're growing up. Why do you think it is that this genetic explanation of social inheritance and social status is so ideologically unpopular? Well, it absolutely seems to be because it's saying somehow mechanically at birth, your life chances are pretty much determined, right? And that the state or society is not going to be able to do very much to actually change outcomes, right? And so it implies a kind of relatively conservative

social policy because it would say all the expenditures on schools and other things like that are really not going to have that much effect in terms of social outcomes. And so I think it's that. And then also people are worried immediately about, what does that imply about the relative fertility of different groups in society and the implications of that? What do you mean about relative fertility? Oh, because once you say, look, what's happening is that one person is successful in life because they have this genetic material and another person that is unsuccessful because

they don't have the favorable genetic material, then the issue immediately comes up, well, you know, if this first group was to multiply and increase their share of society, there would be all of these potential social benefits, if the other group was not to do that, there would be an avoidance of social costs. And so people are, I think, rightly, very concerned about the potential social implications of this. But the only problem is, I mean, when we're thinking about how the world is, it's very important not to adopt certain positions just because it would make life easier. Right? I mean, when you're thinking about, you know, the way the the world is

actually operating, the important thing is is never to have the end view and sight in terms of what explanation do I favor or what explanation do I find plausible here? I mean, we'll just have to live, you know, whatever this actually explanation is, is if it turns out genetics really is important, we'll just have to live with those consequences. What is the consequence of ignoring the genetic implication? Well, there's several consequences. One is, for example, I think as a society,

and I should say, as a background point here, I've made my life working in education, but it's firmly my belief that we vastly exceeded the amount of education that people should just fully get in society, right? And we've done that in part because it's been regarded as the key to social mobility, social advancement, leveling the playing field. And now we're adding forever, now instead of just getting a BA, people now think that

they have to get a master's degree. There's actually, you know, the empirical evidence that education is actually improving people's lives is actually very weak. But didn't you say previously that one of the parameters that you'd used was education level, whether or not they did get to higher education. So you're saying that that as a useful indicator of someone's future life outcomes is becoming less and less effective at being predictive. Yes.

Here's an example of why this doesn't seem to be very predictive. So in the UK at various dates, we've extended the amount of compulsory schooling that people get. So I think like 1973, 46, 1919, and we moved from 12 years to 14 years, 15 years, 16 years, I think now it's supposed to be closer to 18 years. We can actually look at those

episodes and you get then two cohorts of people. You get the people from just before the change who get an average, you know, they only have to be there till 15. And then you suddenly get a new cohort who on average get a half a year of extra schooling. And then you can look empirically and say, well, what happened? Did that improve these people's life outcomes? And the answer for Britain is, no. None of these adjustments to education showed up in any way as an improvement in, you know, income or mortality, longevity, not of these things were actually changed. And we also have this house value evidence.

So you can say that the people who got an extra half year of education end up living in a slightly nicer house or in a nicer neighborhood, the answer is no. OK? And so as I say, the problem is that we're now spending about 10% of national income on education in various forms. And in part, as I say, this is really driven by this idea that path to universal social mobility is to get everyone educated. And I think that's an illusion. And that, you know, there are other things we could spend that income on. One of the things we could do is just

we could just redistribute more money to people at the lower end of the income spectrum, rather than thinking that everything has to go through something like education. And so, you know, I'm here in Denmark now. Denmark is, I think, one of the most equal societies in the world. And it's quite impressive what they've actually achieved in Denmark. There's not a lot of homeless people. There's will provide for you and the labor market seems to provide pretty well for people. The minimum wage is something like 20 or 25 pounds effectively in this society. And so, I think there's a lot of social policy that's actually very useful and very helpful. And that if we think that the things we have to spend on are stuff like education in order to

improve social mobility, I think that's just a lot of waste of resources in this society. Shouldn't associative mating nudge this stability? Isn't that kind of a little bit of a dice roll? What role does marriage play in this? Well, it turns out in the data that I'm looking at, that's the key element of the story, is that we can measure a sort of mating. It turns out Britain has fantastically good marriage records

because the marriage record in England and Wales at least, from 1837 onwards, it actually asks, what is the father of each party and what's the father's occupation, and what's the husband and wife's occupation and they also Early on it also effectively measures literacy and so it actually you know There's a lot of information on these marriage records and the government is sitting on something like 110 million of these and But it costs I think 11 pounds to order one of them. But there's a bunch of kind of freelance amateur anarchist genealogists who've said

about going to the record offices and recording this data and setting it up on a website. And so we were able to get about 1.5 million of these records from this site. And what's evident in that data is that people are matching very, very closely in marriage. And that that's consistent and not changing in England all the way from 1837 till now. And that when people somehow in marriage, what mattered to people was the underlying social

status of the person they were marrying. And that is something that has very big social consequences because A, it's going to mean that the inheritance of status is much stronger. And if what was happening is that men just married a random one, right? So suppose men, the only thing they cared about was the physical attractiveness of their spouse. And they married in that way, then the parents would not be very strongly correlated in status and consequently the children on up be very strongly correlated with any individual parent.

Because just to interject, a woman's attractiveness has a negligible or not at all relationship between her social status. Right. And so we could imagine that kind of model of marriage. And what that'll do then is also over time, it would result in less distribution of abilities in society. Because what's happening is very high status people marry only very high social abilities people. Then you get over time a widening of the distribution of abilities in society.

And so who decides to marry whom? Actually has these huge social consequences in terms of how strongly status is passed on, but also in terms of what's the overall distribution of abilities within society. And so, with the marriage pattern that you're observing in Britain, then this is what is actually driving this very slow social mobility and you could actually predict with genetic transmission that If you just force people to marry at random

You would actually almost double the rates of social mobility in British society That's the redistribution strategy that we should be pushing towards none of this education stuff Just get people to get people to mix the social status that they're marrying within more. That's right. If you just game on the random, here's someone's ID numbers. I guess we don't have an ID in Britain,

but here's your number. And this is actually very interesting. And so we've actually done some work on another aspect of marriage, which it was widely believed that the way marriage works is that somehow women tend to marry up. The women trade off physical attractiveness for status in males, and studies definitely show that when people report their kind of ideal marriage partner, that women report more about income or education and stuff like that, and men report more about physical appearance, right? And so we were expecting potentially in this data to find

that when we had this huge collection of marriages that women and average would be somehow moving upwards in this, you know, pattern, and men would be marrying women of somewhat lower status. Now the only way that can actually work in society, if everyone's marrying everyone, then you've got to have equality in terms of status. But what easily can happen is that it could be that high status women who are not physically attractive find it difficult to find mates and then low status man. Whatever their characteristics are also find it difficult to find mates. And the interesting thing for the English data all the way through is that there's absolutely no sign of this. On average, men and women

are marrying people of equal status. And that's, you know, and it's the same pattern for right at the top of the distribution right at the bottom of the distribution. And so, somehow the way marriage is operating in practice is that people are just matching up mainly on their social status. And that you are actually not getting this, as I say, marrying up by women or marrying down by men. And so that's a kind of interesting social aspect of our society, which is why do people choose to marry in that way? It's not obvious that that's going to be the happiest marriage or the ideal marriage. Why would it be that people seem to care so much about someone's kind of underlying status? But I think what this reflects is that when you're dating someone,

we have these very imperfect measures as social scientists about how many years have you been to school, what's your occupation, what's your income. People getting married actually have much, much more information. You can tell by talking to someone for not that long a time, what's their sense of humor, what's their knowledge, how smart are they, how clever are they, how imaginative are they, and that it's interesting that these things seem to matter a lot when people get married, and that they're leading to this kind of very tight assortment of people at very similar levels and the kind of social hierarchy. And as I say, they're underpinning this tendency to have just a lot of

persistence across generations. Yeah, so your research points out that historically men tended to pair with women who have fathers with similar social status to themselves. That's correct. Yeah. As men fall behind women in education, do you think that women will begin to pair with men who have fathers of similar status to themselves? Oh, so now this, yes, this is clearly happening that women are getting more years of education. The difference in earnings is not great still. I think men are still ahead in terms of earnings. I think what will happen is that there's a ranking of males as prospects in the marriage market and there's a ranking of women. Now, women are actually going to typically marry men potentially who have less level of education, but I think the relative ranking is going to remain

the same. Yes, maybe women will be likely to evaluate the education of a date's father before deciding to commit to a date. Right. Does this man have the education genes, even if he himself did not attend college? Right. So one of the interesting aspects of the data that I have is that it turns out if you want to predict for a given marriage how well the children are going to do in life, there's a huge amount of information in the relatives of the people getting married.

And so in fact if you wanted to set up a new dating service, you could actually tell people here's the optimal weighting of the uncles, the aunts, the grandparents, and stuff like that, that if you just want to maximize what your social prospects of your children are, this would constitute the ultimate match then, right? So you don't just... Genealogical dating. Yeah, that's right. And you could get these algorithms now that would actually tell you, you know, this will be a significantly, you know, better child in terms of social outcomes if you were to to match in this way. And so, yeah, so as to say, it is interesting because people, as they say, when they're

matching, they look like they're trying to maximize the prospects for their children, in terms of the choosing of mate, right? And as I say, that's an interesting social feature. I don't know why we would tend to do that because it's not true in all societies. So for example, if you go to large parts of the Middle East now or even native American communities in South America, cousin marriage is still very common, where you end up actually having very restricted choice as to who you can marry, and so that in that type of marriage you're actually less able to assort, even though you're marrying your cousin,

which is kind of ironic, that these cousins actually will be more different socially than the way people are actually marrying in someone like England. So they're actually actually Wow. That is so insane. If left to random chance, people will find on the street someone who is closer to their family's social status than someone who is actually a part of their own family. Yes. No, that's an amazing feature, yes, but it is actually true. That is bonkers. That is completely bonkers. So yes, so as, and the other thing that was amazing about this is that this pattern, as I

say, the new source of marriage data starts in 1837. That pattern is there immediately in 1837, even though at that time most women didn't formally have occupations. And so the way we're able to judge how well and matching is to look at the parents, to look at the fathers and see how closely are they correlating in terms of this marriage pattern. And so as I say, this is a time when most of these women that men were marrying were going to be engaged mainly in raising children. But still, when they married, they wanted someone of very similar social position to themselves. And so as I said, so it is a surprising feature of the nature of marriage in this society. Yeah.

Does that mean? By the way, one thing I should add is, part of the reason I've taken up this position in Denmark is actually to get access. Denmark has this amazing set of kind of register data, where everyone here has an ID number, and every action in your life is recorded under that ID number. And the government then, so this is true of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark. Social scientists come to these societies because, you know, to take just one example, I've seen a paper which looks at people's earnings and its correlation and connection with the psychiatric medications that they were prescribed.

This is the real surveillance state. Who knew that Scandinavia was the real surveillance state? Dear God. Now they don't reveal any individual information, but as I say, they have this amazing set of data here. And so one of the things we wanted to look at is, well, is this pattern you see in England? Is that just peculiar to England or? Yeah, I mean, that was my first question. England, very class-ist system, very well-established

we use words like posh, you know, it is still very ingrained, accent, denotes, status and awful lot. The school that you went to, grammar schools, the introduction of things like that, old boys, clubs, gated communities, all that sort of stuff, very prevalent in England. What's the likelihood that this is a quirk exclusive to just the United Kingdom? Right. And yes, and so the reason I actually was interested here was to say, can we look at modern Denmark because everyone thinks of this as a very high mobility society, it's very egalitarian

and very different. Now there's a study that's been done in Sweden where they managed to assemble a kind of a similar kind of panel of relatives. But actually in this case, they're just looking also across people who married. So they're looking at who's what's the connection between you and your brother-in-law, you and your brother-in-law's wife's cousin, where they assemble 141 different types of relatives and some of them go across five marriages, right? And when there's data they have, they can actually link you to people who you never are actually going to meet in social life, but you know, your five marriages apart. interesting is people maintain a correlation in outcomes like education even across five marriages, right? That's how strong these social links are. And when

we look at then how strong that correlation is in marriage in Sweden, it's the same strength as in England. People are matching up in the same weight-eating marriage in terms of their underlying status, and they have this very slow implied rate of social mobility also in a place like Sweden. And so I think this is a general kind of maybe North European or European, probably all of Europe kind of pattern, right? And I don't know what it's going to be like in some other societies. I suspect it's not going to be that different, right? And I don't know what it's going to be like in some other societies. I suspect it's not going to be that different, right? When I read about places like China, and the kind of

things that people are looking for in terms of mates in China. And so I think, you know, the British have, you know, and I've, you know, as I grew up in Scotland, and then spent, I was an undergraduate in England, and then I've spent a lot of time in America. The British actually keep beating themselves out that somehow they have a uniquely class-ridden and classist society, but there's actually no evidence of that, right? I mean, social more than- We just like to abuse ourselves. We find something to feel ashamed about. That Puritan work ethic is I'm whipping myself with a cat of nine tails. So we're here for.

You know, and it turns out, so I grew up in Glasgow in a fairly kind of gritty area. And so I had a good friend there who became an oil trader in London, it was being very successful. You know, when you went to university before he did that, he actually has married a woman who is from a very distinguished family in the English upper classes. And you know, and then clambering out of the muck and the Maya one rung at a time. Congratulations mate. So, so as I say, so I've even seen in kind of personal life that there is kind of, you know, quite a lot of social, and also from studying England in the past, there's this group, the hookonauts who arrived in England in the 1680s, and they were Protestant refugees from France and relatively educated, but they had their own religion,

they had spoke French. They, it's amazing how quickly they assimilated into the upper reaches of English society. And people with these Hoganot surnames, which are quite distinctive, by 1800, they were 30 times more likely to go to Oxford or Cambridge than the average person in England. And so you think about these places as exclusive, old boys clubs, stuff like that. But the experience of English society is that there definitely is this upper class, there are these fancy schools, there's eaten, there's Harold, there's all the rest of that stuff. But my experience looking at this is that it's very open upper class.

If you've got the money, the education, the connections, the door is actually open. Okay, so does this mean largely that people who are in the upper class are locked in across time? You mentioned that one of your friends has managed to clamber out of the blood and the feces and the hay and get up into the high-faluting upper troposphere. Over time did these people like revert back to the mean, revert back to their mean? Well, I mean, the important thing about the, as I say, the upper classes that there's,

you know, it's slow, it takes about 300 years, but there's a universal force of kind of regression into the meat. So we go back and take people 300 years ago who are the most elite, people in society. I mean, it's taken a long time for it to happen, but there is this universal tendency to move downwards if you're an elite, and if you're at the bottom, there's an equal tendency to move up. That's one of the astonishing features of social life looking at this genealogy is the people in the bottom 10 percent, they're the ones whose kids have the most prospect of

upward mobility. And it's very hard to actually then kind of stop people falling into poverty because it's not that you can go and find the bottom 10% of people and say, okay, they're the ones we need to treat. Because it turns out a lot of people who are falling into poverty are people who are coming from a bit higher in the social spectrum, who just have bad luck. And kind of moved out. Right? And so, one thing that's actually interesting to me is, so I've spent a lot of time studying economics. And frankly, we've accomplished almost nothing. I don't know why there's a Nobel Prize in the economics because we can predict what the outcome of the economy is going to be next year.

We can predict which are going to be growing economies, which are declining, the macroeconomics is just a random effect. But when he comes to social mobility, they're at the group level, societies actually, you see really almost a kind of physics of social mobility. Yeah. So if I tell you, you know, here's a thousand people

who have the top 1% of social status, I can predict pretty much exactly where their children will be for the next 10 generations. Just think about that sentence that you've just said there. That's like clairvoyance or divination or something. Right. No, I mean, what it is just saying that at least that you can't predict for any individual, right? And for every individual family, there's different path. There's a lot of randomness, right? So that's the thing that we say to people is, look, the good news is your outcomes don't seem to be entirely determined by genetics. There's also complete randomness as well.

Fantastic. Fantastic. Where's the agency in this? Oh, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. There's some dice being rolled somewhere by a god. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a plomans maxim, right?

Genetics, to do not predetermine, but they do predispose. And. And when you smear that across a lot of a populace, you end up with just like, like thermodynamics, right? It's like winds that blow in particular directions and they encourage particular outcomes. Right. No, I mean, what, so what's impressive actually? And so this is why I'm actually, I'm always a little surprised by how kind of exercise people are about class and social mobility, right? Because somehow there is this kind of feeling that there is this permanent advantage group that they're able to take advantage of the position of the time and you know get all of these

unearned benefits. If you look at people who are at the top one percent of the society, what is more impressive is whatever wealth they have, they're not able to stop their children moving downwards on average. Because of regression to the main. Yeah. And there's nothing they can do that way. I mean, I can, I can, I can grow, grow science and explanation for why that is, which is that most people aren't able to look longitudinally at anything. They're able to look at things during their period of life. And when they came in, these people were at the top. And when they go out, those people are at the top.

You know, maybe there's some movement, but this regression to the mean happens over long, long, long periods of time. It's this generation, this generation, this idiot child that decides to gamble his money away. This, you know, drunk, this blah, blah, blah, blah, slowly just chips and chips and chips away. But anybody that's using this sees them and in us, it's a tribal game and they've been at the top

and they will always be at the top, and this is exactly why the Rockefellers or the lizard alien people, or whoever it is that's in charge of the world, have always been there and will always be there. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, the, yes, as I say, it's hard for people to take that kind of long perspective. And even modern economists or sociologists often are just looking at the current generation, the earlier generation. So one kind of nice thing about the field I'm in, which is looking at people 300 or 400 years, is that you really can see that dynamics play itself out.

And the other thing that you can see is that all of these incredible social changes with political franchise, education, social services, all the rest of that stuff hasn't fundamentally changed British society. That we could be living in the Victorian era. It's the same era. Yeah, I mean, the obvious question is, what's the implication of this for a society that prays at the altar of meritocracy? Like, what are the implications?

You put all of this data together, you realize this sort of a thing. What does this mean? Like, what are the implications you put all of this data together you realize this sort of a thing What does this mean like what what what what are the implications? Well one implication is that I Is I think that society is more manner to critic than people tend to believe that people with ability tend to be able to move up within the society, right? And people without ability are tending to move down no matter what their parentage was or what advantages they got from their parentage.

And that people tend to be over-focused on this kind of absence of meritocracy or the importance of your lineage, your class, it's not that bad. And so one thing I actually draw is some kind of sense of, we do live in a surprisingly meritocratic world. Now, in other terms, in terms of social policy, one implication, one immediate implication, for example,

is if you look at the experience of the Huguenots coming to England Their descendants are still Five times as likely to go to Oxford and Cambridge than the average person in England 300 years later So one interesting implication of this is That if you're concerned about the output of the society as a whole or the social functioning of the society as a whole then in immigration policy You should really look seek out high status immigrants, right? Because they would not would that would that not push down the social mobility of the native population?

It would but but it would, you know, that group will eventually be assimilated into the society as a whole. And so if we look, you know, five generations from now, the society as a whole will be better off. You have a more productive populace. But it is true, you know, if you have elite immigrants, then they tend to displace the upper classes, whereas if you have low status immigrants, that tends to favor the upper classes in the society and it tends

to compete with people at the lower end of the society. But it does say that, you know, immigrants are actually going to have a surprising kind of long-term impact on the society. They're not just going to be absorbed and leave the society otherwise unchanged. Right, because you've taken a kind of a thematically sealed genetic bomb and you've deposited it and the aftershock, the after-effect of that is going to continue down the road. Right. And now it turns it turns out. So one of my co authors, Neil Cummins, has done some study, you know, because I'm a Irish origins. He's years of I, he was born in Ireland. Irish immigrants to Britain are still somewhat of an underclass in Britain.

and they're still somewhat of an underclass in Britain. Even though a lot of them have been in Britain for 100 or 150 more years. So the Irish genetics. So yes, as I say, so if it ends up, if that is really because of the genetics of that population, it's kind of interesting that it actually has an impact for a very long time. And so because there are some views that would say, look, everyone has exactly the same

potential. So when immigrants come in, it doesn't matter what their educational background is, what other things are because it's all in the primary school and a secondary school, and get them a sex form degree, and they're going to be just the same. And it'll make no long run impact on the society. But as I say, I think if you really do believe that there is this element, then it would say, well, in immigration policy, so some societies, for example, like Australia and New Zealand, Canada,

have these incredibly restrictive immigration policies, where basically they want you only if you're pretty highly educated. And what that would say is that will actually have kind of long lasting impacts on those societies in terms of average educational levels, average ability levels. And so that's, but other than that, you know, look, people choose to have children, they choose not to have children, they will have the social consequences. It would have these social consequences if it's transmitted also just by social means.

Yeah, there's an interesting question. Given that we've got declining birth rates at the moment for the first time in quite a while, and the particular cohorts that are choosing to reproduce are assorting as well. It seems like people who are more right-leaning and having proportionally less fewer children than people who are left-leaning downstream from that, that has to select in some ways for social status, educational achievement, so on and so on, unless it's totally random, which it could be, but it seems unlikely that that would be the case.

Have you got a prediction given the changing birth rate of what this is going to do to the inheritance of social status? Well, it turns out there have been some studies in England because they've got this thing, the UK Biobank. And based, Britain, dear God. But then you can actually, people can look at it and say, well, how many children do people have based on what their genetic, genetic, educational potential is. And the answer is it's very slightly what's called this genetic. That is, there's a very slight tendency for people with lower potential, just genetic potential to have more children, but it's really not

that significant. But what is actually interesting, again, looking at this data in the past in England, is that these forces of relative fertility across different groups were really big in the past. And so in the period leading up to the industrial revolution, the upper classes in Britain were super-facund, and we're basically having 50% more children than the lower classes in each generation. And so you do see this period where if you think, if it is the case that is all based on

genetic potential, that the average abilities of England were rising. Immediately after the Industrial Revolution, we moved to a completely different phase where the upper classes just gave up having children. And within like one generation, they moved from having three or four on average children to having one child. It's amazingly quick transformation. And so then actually you enter this other period. And this is the period where the eugenics are all running around because they were responding to what they saw as this incredible social problem. But then since I think the 1960s or something like that, there hasn't been that much change. But there are actually these periods in the past where you

would actually get these significant changes in what average ability levels would be in Britain. Has there been any other unique step change in the last recent history that means that some of the rules and lessons that we've taken from 1600 to 2000 or whatever may no longer apply. The introduction of hormonal birth control and reliable contraception, the introduction of homeschooling or of the internet, or, you know, like, is there anything that you think is a potential step change, a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree when it comes to the influences on this stuff? To be honest with you, no. I mean, I actually think that people look at all the new technologies we have and everything else and they think, oh, fundamentally, social life must have dramatically changed and the

possibilities have dramatically changed. But other than the decline and the number of children, we're really not seeing a lot of change in the nature of social life in Britain. It hasn't changed that much since the pre-industrial era. And there's a surprising kind of constancy to the way people live family life, the way people produce children and stuff like that. I don't know the fact they just have many fewer of them. And so, yeah, I'm not expecting any great social revolutions.

Things like, you know, so things like assisted reproduction technology, that's become important. It kind of favors upper class people because it's expensive. And, you know, so it's going to affect potentially relative fertility. But I think it's still the case that it's a kind of minority of all children of harm in that way. And so I don't see it as having dramatic impacts. Now, the one thing that is on the horizon that would be kind of, personally, I would find

a little bit worrying. Are you going to talk about embryo selection? Yes. There it is. I've been. Yes. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I've been. I about embryo selection is, currently you've got to look among your own embryos, right? And so there isn't that much. It's not modification, it's selection. Yeah.

There's not that much range. But I would be convinced that in some of like China, they will go ahead with this, right? And one illustration of this is, now in the United States, it's quite common for upperclass parents to think well, a kind of a nice pathway to a good college is if their kids are good at athletics. And so there are all, there used to be all these slots where you can be in the hockey team at Harvard. A whole bunch of those middle class parents were giving growth hormones to their perfectly normal-sized children, it harder to gain them.

Creating some studs that would get into an Ivy League education. Yeah. And costing a huge amount of money, I mean, this stuff is incredibly expensive. And if parents are willing to do that, if they're willing to take someone who's five foot ten and say, we're going to take you to the special doctor and get you these growth hormones, then people will engage in embryos like so. So I don't disagree. I do think that it plays into at least the use of growth hormone plays into the highly environmental, highly culturally influenced non-behavioral genetic, non-genetic determinism view of the world.

I think that the upper classes are going to have to square the circle of accepting behavioral genetics as powerful of a force that it is because publicly the luxury belief that is often put forward is, you know, we just need to do more welfare and we need to do so on and so forth. And it doesn't really matter, you know, you haven't got this determinism through genetics and stuff. That's perilously close to eugenics. That sounds an awful lot like something that Adolf Hitler would have spoken about. Meanwhile, they're mating assortatively, but they are gonna have to ultimately put their money

where their mouth is with regards to this. Because if certain families that decide to use embryo selection and then maybe even gene enhancement, embryo enhancement techniques, they're going to fall behind. It's an arms race ultimately for offspring and those they are going to fall behind. It's an arms race ultimately for offspring and those people are going to fall behind. Yeah, I mean, at least the evidence in the US is, if you look at how much people are willing to spend for private schooling, which it's unclear how much advantage that has,

but they're spending 50 or 60,000 a year and stuff like that. And so I'm confident in plays like the US, they would do this, but I'm even more confident in a place like China that they would do this. I mean, because there are people are trying to have boys, is supposed to girls and stuff like that and they're willing to abort a fetus if it's the wrong gender. And so I actually I do fear that, you know, and there are definitely people who want to break down that barrier and push, you know, towards these technologies. The only thing is, I mean, things like educational outcome depend on like a thousand different loci on the genome.

And so it's not going to be easy to... That's the education gene that we just need to tinker with. Right. So there's no simple solution to that. But it seems for sure that stuff like that will come in future. And then I mean the other puzzle will be will people just decide well maybe I don't need my partner's egg. I'll fuck it some other egg. I like I like you as a wife around the house but you're genetics. Yeah. What's this really smart girl at So, so there, you know, it will be interesting to see what people do. But I think, I mean, the advice for upper-class parents now is you should just enjoy your children, right?

If you really are upper-class, they're unlikely to exceed you in terms of their outcomes in life. They're more likely to move towards the mean. And so if you're having children, it should be with that realization that, you know, that's just the nature of social life. I can't resist when I'm teaching students, I should never do this. I'm sure they hate me. I actually point out to them that since they actually represent an upper class group, if there's 50 of them here in the class, it's predictable that their children will do less while in life than they will. But all of this hard work to give your children the advantage so that they can slip down this snake

and just end up a little bit behind where you were. Yeah. So I've got a future and that resolution to self do not point us out. Did you see this new study on physical attractiveness and intergenerational social mobility that came out recently? Oh, I don't think I did. So Alexey Gushvili and Gregor's Bullshack, I've absolutely butchered that.

Physical attractiveness matters both for males and females, intergenerational social mobility outcomes, but it is more important for males even when childhood characteristics are accounted for. Using data of about 11,000 individuals from the United States, National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent

Health, we contributed the existing scholarship by investigating a physical attractiveness assessed when individuals around 15 years old is an important predictor of intergenerational social mobility measured after 20 years. Results we found that physical attractiveness matters for both male and female intergenerational social mobility outcomes, but it is more important for males, even when childhood characteristics, such as various aspects of parental socioeconomic position, individuals' health, proxy for IQ, neighborhood conditions, and interviewers' fixed effects are accounted for using imputed data for observations with missing information.

Across three measures of social mobility, education, occupation, and income, physically attractive males are more likely to be socially mobile than males of average attractiveness. Conclusion, physical attractiveness is an independent predictor of intergenerational social mobility outcomes regarding individuals, educational, occupational and income attainment. So, so a couple of, I actually, I haven't seen that paper. I do need to actually go look at it now. But one thing that's interesting there again is you would expect from the conventional wisdom that it would be women who would actually be the ones for physical attraction would

match it more than men. But what I can tell you is that someone has just produced a working paper on economists where they've actually identified their physical attractiveness and found that more attractive economists do better in terms of publication. And I don't know why they must have gone to the websites of universities or something like that and then scraped these things and then had someone raid them. And there, as I say, the puzzle is journal editors not normally look at pictures of people, you know, when the paper comes in and say, well, how handsome or how tall is this person. And so I suspect for these things that probably physical attractiveness is just another part of social competence. That basically highly competent people know to get a nice haircut, occasionally shave

and stuff like that. And that it's really just another kind of imperfect indicator of basically what people's kind of overall social abilities are. What was the response when you dropped this paper? Oh, this, the PNAS paper. Well, you'd probably have heard about that. I got canceled at Glasgow University. Tell that, give us that story.

But that was in some sense. That was my fault because I had published two books each with a Hemingway pun. So my first book was a farewell to arms of brief economic history of the world. The second book was the Sun also rises, serenings and social mobility. And so there's a great pun that involves genetic transmission. And so that is for whom the bell curve tolls

IQ and social life, not IQ, sorry, genetics and social life. And so anyway, I was due to give a talk at the economist department at Glasgow, and this was in the time of COVID, and so I call in and they say, well, just one problem So I call in and they say, well, just one problem, the dean that ordered the seminar be canceled. There was a petition by a hundred members of the faculty saying that this was pseudoscience, that eugenics was to be opposed in all of its forms. And so it was astonishing because then the dean said, well, actually, I've looked at the paper, and I don't see any problem with the paper,

but the title is a problem. So if you would just change the title, we'll reschedule the seminar. But then I felt unprinciple that I can't really have the, I don't care much about the title, but I can't have the dean tell me that. And so that as I say, it was an astonishing turn in universities that a bunch of people, and I'm sure most of those people are in, you know, humanities or sociology or other subjects like that feel that they could actually call for cancellation of something else. I mean, so you could imagine

they could come and be critical and stuff like that, but also, I mean, that we'd reach that stage. And effectively, when they did that, there was no cost to the university of doing that. I thought the dean and the principal of the university played it very well, because as administrators, because they said, we were not canceling anything. There's just so much interest in this talk that we think we need some kind of enhanced security. And so we're just deferring things to get to a better place.

But the funniest thing then was that someone put me in touch with a reporter from the Times. And I thought, you know, they should publicize that these guys do stuff like this. The Times now is the world's most worthless newspaper. The reporter for the Times had a story that was headline, I asked when university pops like. So as I say, it is, and they couldn't even get my age, right? Or there are various other things they couldn't get right in the story. And so, yes, so that has actually been a concern. And I also noticed, I mean, so what I'm doing this stuff,

there's every possibility that something is wrong, that you haven't done things correctly. That's the nature of doing these kind of studies. But I do notice that the kind of Twitter climate that surrounds anything that has any hint about genetics is brutal and unforgiving, right? And people are just ready to go to the barricades. What do you think that is? I honestly don't really understand why it's become so ingrained because, for example, height is genetically determined, right? And no one seems to get very upset about that fact.

And they do all of these studies, the same kind of studies, they do for education, they can tell you for everyone, here's what their height potential is. We know how it's transmitted, we know it's equally transmitted from mothers and fathers, and so people, or eye color, or other stuff like that, people seem to find, that's perfectly fine. So why people somehow think that because social characteristics are also genetically, genetically transmitted, that it's time to kind of go to the barricades and to just you know, think of some reason why this cannot be totally... Well, you know, use your theory of mind. What do you think this is a threat to, to them? To evidently, a threat to something? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, why? Because it's not just that people say,

I'm not interested in that, or you know, don't tell me that, it's nothing like that. They actively want to exclude any such discussions from the academy, right? I mean, they want to close down those types of investigations and as I say, I'm still a little bit mystified as to why in particular, this has become so controversial, right? Because I say I'm not just now read a bunch of stuff in behavioral genetics. And a lot of people who are practicing behavioral genetics are very busy trying to find reasons for why behavioral genetics does not directly affect that much about people's lives.

Right? So now there's this thing called genetic nurture. I don't know if you've read about that. No, what's this? It sounds awful. It sounds like it's going to annoy me and I'm going to think about it for the rest of the day. Right. So here's the interesting study that was done just a couple of years ago. You inherit half of your parents DNA on average. And so what they did was they can type that DNA and say, this is what your educational potential is. And so what they did in the study in Iceland was they took people's outcomes, they had their own DNA, and then they had the DNA that didn't inherit from their parents. They had no influence on their body, right? Because this was the stuff that didn't inherit from their parents. There had no influence on their body, right?

Because this was the stuff that didn't get transmitted to them. And then they looked at predicting how many years of education they would get as a function of the DNA you didn't inherit, and the DNA you didn't inherit. And it turns out the DNA you didn't inherit is also predictive of what your outcome is gonna be. And it has got aft the weight of the DNA you didn't inherit is also predictive of what your outcome is going to be. And it has got aft the weight of the DNA you actually inherited.

And what the explanation then that they proposed for this is that basically maybe the way genetics is working is that your parents, because of the kind of DNA they have, set up a certain kind of environment and a certain kind of DNA they have, set up a certain kind of environment, and a certain kind of nurture for you. And that's actually what's doing the work. That's what's transmitting to the next generation, what your social status is, and then it's going to be correlated with your DNA

because you inherited the DNA from the parents, but it's not directly the DNA that's doing the work. It's the environment that's extra, so much acrobatics and fuckery going on. To try and dance around. Oh my God, wow, that's really impressive. I've got a circus, I've actually got the image of a circus in my mind at the moment,

is someone doing like, spirals through the air. Yeah, I don't know. I've had a couple of conversations, I had a conversation with Paige Hardin a few years ago that wrote the genetic lottery, very, very great researcher, Stuart Richie's been on the show, Ploman's been on the show.

Stuart's fantastic. Paige, I found particularly interesting, because she's somebody who is politically from the left, but scientifically from the behavioral genetics camp. A couple of things that I can think of, anything that looks like gene-ish, like genetic type explanations are immediately lambasted as being right of center or far right

or completely like bigoted. The academy at the moment is left-leaning and becoming increasingly feminized as well, like just literally in the proportions of women that you have that are attending as undergraduates. And this is going to grow into mostly female professors over the next few decades as well. Some great research by Corey Clark found that behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology explanations were most likely to be disliked by female professors because they are seen as being less empathetic,

they're sort of less touchy feeling, the lesser gallitarian, whereas the male professors were more happy to have this come across. So I think generally you have this shift toward a people not things or a empathy not reality approach. That could sway things in one way. And I guess in another,

I come from a very working class background. The only thing that was remarkable about Stockton on Tees was that it had the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then after a while, it didn't, it didn't even have that anymore. It had the widest high street in the UK as well, I think, the widest pedestrian high street in the UK. So really clutching its straws to try and come up with something. And, you know, I feel very proud. I think I'm the first person in my family to go to university. I ended up getting a master's as well.

And I really love the things that I do. And I see in my side, I do feel sometimes like being told that my successes aren't mine to own quite so much. It feels disempowering in a way. It also feels reassuring in a way because you can kind of go hands off the wheel in some regards. But it does make you think, well, I thought I worked really hard at that thing. And I did, right? I had to do the thing and the thing was hard, but for someone to come along and say, well, yeah, but you didn't choose your conscientiousness level and you didn't choose your openness to experience and you didn't choose your oticism and you didn't choose your blah, blah, blah.

You're like, yeah, I get that. And it's a difficult circle to square and I'm still yet to work out how to fully fold this into my world view. I'm currently in London about to do my live tour and I've got these live shows that I'm doing and I'm standing on stage and I'm telling people on stage that they have way more control over their outcomes than they think because the bar is setting credibly low because most people have externalised their locus of control. And if you take a tiny little bit of work ethic and apply it, that you can make massive changes in your life because I've seen this myself. But for me to square that circle

with this genetic predisposition thing is really, really difficult. Because I know that there are things that people can do that can give them better outcomes, even later into life because it happened to me. And yet, over time, genetics is this time, genetics is this sort of gravitational force that just sucks people toward whatever they were supposed to be in any case. I agree with you that I mean, it is, because the way we lead our life is by making all these

conscious struggles and making these decisions and deciding to spend time on this as opposed to something else. And so it is very hard to square with saying, well, that's just, that was just the lottery produced. That's the type of person you are. And yeah, no, and I read for motivational speakers, the news about genetic transmission is not great. Okay.

Right, guys, I know that you were coming here to fill in powered, but we're going to do an hour and a half on behavioral genetics, leaf-feeling despondent. Good night. Yeah, wow. I don't know. Everything interesting that happened in your life happened about 30 years ago.

Fuck it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, this was this was Plomans, Plomans, big piece of advice, like the single most important decision that you can make in your child's outcomes are who you have them with. And if you want to have, if you want to have a better child, you know, don't bother reading books about diet and neonatal care and optimal fucking bedroom temperature for neurological growth during the toddler years and all the rest of it, just spend more time finding a smart partner. Right. Like that's the big solution. And it's disempowering. And I think that it pushes against a meritocratic world that says, your success is a yours to bear.

Alander Boton's got this beautiful, beautiful analogy. I wish that he had a conversation with Plomano or yourself or someone, because I think it would have been really great. He says, back in ancient Greece, the beggars on the street were referred to as unfortunate, that Lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them. And you'll remember lady fortuna, she's holding a set of scales.

And the reason that she's holding a set of scales is that she gives and she takes away, right, and there is supposed to be this balanced to the universe, which I think is a nice excuse for why some people have good things and other people don't that they'll get that come up and eventually. But if you roll the clock forward by 2000 years, what is it that we call people who don't have anything going on? They're a loser, right? It's not that they're unfortunate. It's that if the people who succeed are worthy of bearing the fruits of their successes,

the people who don't succeed are worthy of bearing the losses of theirs as well. And that's why this language that kind of centers the locus of control upon the individual has changed. And that is, you know, fundamentally what a meritocracy is. You are able to enact change in your life. Your merit is what will determine your outcomes. And there are relatively few barriers in the way. And it means that for the people, maybe this is a luxury belief as well, in some regards. People that are at the top, they don't wanna be told the only reason that they managed to get into this high-faluting institution

was because of their mothers, mothers, mothers, fathers, mothers, all the way back. Yeah, so I mean, maybe you could say, well, there is always this random element. And maybe it's openness to kind of experience or stuff like that can increase that randomness, right? That this would be the thing to say, look, like half of your outcomes, in some sense, depend on just random shocks. And maybe there's a way of kind of choosing to take more gambles in life, right? And, and, right, because, for

example, as an academic, there's certain types of paper you can write that are just much more risky than others, where, you know, half the time it's going to come to nothing, you know, more than half the time, 90% of the time, but it might kind of pay off. It might, you know, go somewhere. Roll the dice. Yeah, so that would be a thing about what kind of attitude do you have to life? Are you going to be conservatives or afraid of these things? I suppose coming into it, what have you got? Are you trying to conserve? Are you trying to explore? Are you trying to hold on to what it is that you have?

If you've managed to come from a family that's from a wealthy background, maybe you do. Let's just, don't be the generation that fucks it up for great grandpa who made a few million pounds doing whatever, whatever. That's just not optimized to not be an idiot as opposed to be a hero. Whereas someone that's lower down the distribution, you would look to explore more than exploit, right? We need to, well, I've got very little to lose. My downside is limited. My upside

is basically asymmetric. So, yeah, fascinating, fascinating. Great. I think it's so interesting. I'm really excited for you to write this book. I think it's, I think it's, I don't know what the conclusion is. I think that what will be really important when you to write this book. I think it's, I think it's, I don't know what the conclusion is. I think that what would be really important when you do finally sort of round all of this out will be to try and put some sort of like, I don't know, how does someone ameliorate this into their life, I think, is what,

it's fascinating all the way down, super interesting, really, really cool. The question that everyone's going to be left with is, all right, and now how am I supposed to see the world and myself? Right. Very difficult. The one very practical piece of advice, I would say, is that as a modern society, we are obsessed with child rearing and with investing in enormous quantities of time and effort in

children. And we have a society where increasingly, it's not clear that we're actually going to sustain ourselves as a society, right? And so one kind of interesting message I think would be to say, look, there's not a lot of evidence that all of that stuff matters much. Just have children and enjoy them, right? You don't have to go through this excruciating kind of thing called parenting. You can just relax, have a glass of boiling. They'll be fine. Not while you're pregnant. Not while you're pregnant. After that, right?

But, but you know, and that actually would be one kind of I think in an important lesson that actually people would need because I know as a first parent myself, we went to ridiculous, extensive terms of what we did as parent. To try and determine and predispose your child's outcomes, despite the fact that they're on a set of train tracks that are heading to the same destination. Yeah, and I could get all that time back, that's what I want. But, so there are some kind of upsides to this. And then, as a person can intellectually, it's nice to see that even in the complicated social world that we live in, this idea that there really is almost

of kind of physics to social life. It's kind of attractive and powerful. So yeah, so I guess my big ambition though in life is not to not to write a how-to book for middle-class parents. A mealier-ating behavioral genetics. No, I understand. Greg Clark, ladies and gentlemen, Greg, I think your work's fantastic. It's really, really interesting. I can't wait to see what you do next. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your work or read more of

the stuff that you've done? So the article that just came out in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is actually open access. And it's actually not that hard for people to look at that and read that. And then, you know, if you just Google my name, I have a website with a bunch of kind of working papers and various topics that they can do. And then hopefully, in a year or so, I'll actually be a book finally. Thanks, Lauren. My pleasure. Thanks, my pleasure.

Thank you, Gregory.