Gregory Clark

Economic historian; Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, Danish National Research Foundation Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and Visiting Professor in the Economic History Department at the London School of Economics. Best known for two influential, contested books: A Farewell to Alms (2007), a new theory of the Industrial Revolution and long-run economic growth, and The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (2014), which uses rare-surname tracing to argue that social mobility rates are far lower and far more persistent across generations than conventional measures suggest.

Clark, who is Scottish and was born in a mining village near Glasgow, spent most of his career at UC Davis before relocating to Denmark, drawn by the country’s unusually rich population-register data. His research centres on using large-scale genealogical, marriage, and surname datasets — rather than short-run survey data — to measure social mobility, assortative mating, and the transmission of status across centuries. He describes himself as a ‘hereditarian’: someone who holds that a large share of social and economic outcomes is inherited rather than shaped by policy or environment, a position he pairs, apparently paradoxically, with support for strong redistribution. His forthcoming book, provisionally titled For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: Genetics and Social Life in England, 1600 to 2025, draws on a decade of genealogical data-building to test genetic and family-structure explanations of social outcomes directly.

Core positions

• Relative social mobility is strikingly constant. Across medieval England, modern Britain, and modern Denmark, Clark finds no evidence that the correlation between parents’ and children’s relative social position has weakened over roughly 500 years, despite vast changes in politics, wealth, and institutions.
• Migration changes absolute welfare, not relative rank. People who migrate across countries or across radically different political systems (e.g. Britain to Australia/Canada/the US, or pre- to post-Communist Hungary) see large material gains, but their descendants’ relative standing in the new society closely tracks their starting position.
• Assortative mating widens the ability distribution without changing its average. English marriage records since 1837 show status-based matching approaching sibling-level genetic similarity; sustained over generations, this raises inequality, creating a trade-off against social compression.
• Hereditarianism implies more redistribution, not less. Because outcomes are, in his view, substantially inherited and not readily changed by policy, Clark argues a good society compresses the resulting inequality rather than treating it as deserved.

In the wiki

• Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating — conversation with Tyler Cowen on relative versus absolute mobility, assortative mating, India’s industrialisation puzzle, Clarkian Malthusianism, hereditarianism, and migration selection
• The Son Also Rises — Clark’s surname-based study of social mobility, discussed at length in the episode
• A Farewell to Alms — Clark’s earlier book on the Industrial Revolution, cited repeatedly in the episode’s discussion of India and Clarkian Malthusianism