The Hemingway-besotted economic historian has published a paper outlining his coming book:
Gregory Clark, University of California, Davis and LSE (March 1, 2021)
Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are dominated by the belief that social outcomes depend mainly on parental investment and community socialization. Using a lineage of 402,000 English people 1750-2020 we test whether such mechanisms better predict outcomes than a simple additive genetics model. The genetics model predicts better in all cases except for the transmission of wealth. The high persistence of status over multiple generations, however, would require in a genetic mechanism strong genetic assortative in mating. This has been until recently believed impossible. There is however, also strong evidence consistent with just such sorting, all the way from 1837 to 2020. Thus the outcomes here are actually the product of an interesting genetics-culture combination.
I believe that Richard Herrnstein, the Bell Curve’s co-author, famously laid out his theory that assortative mating couldn’t have been all that high until the widespread use of standardized testing in the mid-20th Century in his 1971 article in the pre-woke Atlantic Monthly “I.Q.” But maybe Herrnstein didn’t really understand Anglo society before the 20th century?
