Podcast appearances and mentions of Gregory Clark

02:00 Is The Gaza War About To Turn Into The West Bank War? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIxYgmz2uCk 15:00 What were [Gonzalo Lira aka] Coach Red Pill's contributions from Ukraine that made it worth risking his life? 20:00 How can Taiwan defend itself against China, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPMgzm_9K50 23:00 Jesse Waters 35:00 Is DT our first pessimist president? https://www.ft.com/content/a3b6e6c1-831f-45bc-8565-81193ce07f5a 1:09:30 Hugh Hewitt: President Trump's EO “Ensuring Accountability For All Agencies” is a very big deal 1:14:00 Charles Lipson: Democrats built America's over-mighty presidency. Now Trump is bending it to his will, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/02/20/democrats-america-over-mighty-presidency-trump-bend-it/ 1:26:00 Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwq_WKBpYJQ 1:32:00 Charles Lipson: Trump's presidency is an ink-blot test for America - Democrats see a dictator. Republicans see a strong leader fulfilling his promises. https://thespectator.com/topic/trumps-presidency-is-an-ink-blot-test-for-america/ https://odysee.com/@LukeFordLive, https://rumble.com/lukeford, https://dlive.tv/lukefordlivestreams Superchat: https://entropystream.live/app/lukefordlive Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/lukeford/ Soundcloud MP3s: https://soundcloud.com/luke-ford-666431593 Code of Conduct: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=125692 http://lukeford.net Email me: lukeisback@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter.com/lukeford, Best videos: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=143746 Support the show | https://www.streamlabs.com/lukeford, https://patreon.com/lukeford, https://PayPal.Me/lukeisback Facebook: http://facebook.com/lukecford Book an online Alexander Technique lesson with Luke: https://alexander90210.com Feel free to clip my videos. It's nice when you link back to the original.

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. Help keep the show ad free by donating today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Gregory on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. Photo Credit: Chris Williams, Zoeica Images

Providing answers to the question: How do we increase HBCU athletic revenue? Guest panel includes: Col. (retired) Gregory Clark, former Athletic Director Wheeler Brown, former SIAC Commissioner Robert Vowels and former CIAA Commissioner Leon Kerry. Hosted by: Roy M. Eavins, II and Dr. Kenyatta Cavil

This week (ok not really this week), we are locked in and sounding out Niall Farrell ahead of his much anticipated BBC documentary ‘The Four Rules Of The Poker Kings' directed by BAFTA-winning filmmaker Greg Clark! The film was pushed back from its original April release date, as was this episode, hence a few anachronistic references to the Irish Open! In what is nonetheless a belter of an episode, the lads preview the documentary with exclusive clips from Niall's poker adventures in 2021/2022. Before they all get to that though, there is some talk about the Irish Open Leaderboard (AKA the Firaldo Cup) which was coincidentally won by our host David Lappin and another Niall Farrell idea ~ a Hendon Mob flag inspired ‘Amazing Race'. The conversation then moves onto the documentary and how it captures both sides of the poker life. Niall on the felt wins are shown alongside his losses and, maybe most importantly, against the backdrop of family life. There is also footage from the life of fellow Scottish poker pro David Docherty as he navigates his way in the game. The film ‘The Four Rules Of The Poker Kings' airs on BBC Scotland at 9pm on August 16th. It will also be available to watch on the iPlayer.

Gregory Clark teaches about the relationship between faith and fear. They oppose each other and cannot be present in the same moment. Click here to access the speech page. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Friend-of-the-show Rob Henderson returns to discuss his powerful, moving and important debut book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (published TODAY). We discuss Rob's experience of the American foster care and adoption system, the life-changing impact of the military, the rise of Luxury Beliefs, the benefits of standardized testing, and MUCH more. Important Links: Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (Amazon) The SAT is a pathway to more college diversity, not less; by Rob Henderson (The Boston Globe) Rob Henderson: Lessons I Learned the Hard Way; by Rob Henderson (The Free Press) Rob's Substack Rob's Twitter Show Notes: Foster Care, Adoption & Social Mobility Structural Origins of the Foster System Why Early-Life Stability is Underrated How Ideas Can Change Outcomes The Life-Changing Impact of the Military Young Male Syndrome The Role of Intelligence in Governing Outcomes The Benefits of Standardized Testing Yale, Luxury Beliefs & the Rise of Identity Politics Are Luxury Beliefs a Political or Class Phenomenon? Trickle-Down Meritocracy Technology, Assortive Mating & Social Mobility Is the Overton Window Shifting on Campus? Rob as Emperor of the World Books and Articles Mentioned: Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class; by Rob Henderson The SAT is a pathway to more college diversity, not less; by Rob Henderson (The Boston Globe) Rob Henderson: Lessons I Learned the Hard Way; by Rob Henderson (The Free Press) Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society; by Nicholas A. Christakis Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010; by Charles Murray Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross A Suitable Boy; by Vikram Seth The Son Also Rises; by Gregory Clark

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

To kick off the new year we thought it would be fun to take a little stroll down memory lane and look back at some of our favorite Nordy Pod moments from 2023. We've had a lot of fun making this thing and chatting with all the fascinating people that have agreed to come on the show. Fashion icons like Domenico De Sole, Anna Wintour and Will Welch, incredible fashion designers like Simone Rocha and Erdem, successful brand partners like Gucci Westman and David Neville of Westman Atelier, Caspar Coppetti of On running shoes, Anastasia Soare of Anastasia Beverly Hills and Ben Gorham of BYREDO. We've also had the great pleasure of chatting with a slew of really amazing athletes and entertainers like former NFL wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks Doug Baldwin, former NBA All Star of the Chicago Bulls Bob Love, Grammy award-winning hip-hop artist Macklemore and TV and film star Joel McHale. We're proud to highlight some of our employees that have used Nordstrom as a platform to build really impressive careers. For example, three of our very best salespeople: Jesse James Barnholdt, Gregory Clark and Jeffrey Ola. This year has also taken us out of the studio and into some really interesting places, like our distribution and fulfillment centers and to the very end of our merchandise food chain, to our Last Chance stores. We've also shared several really great customer experiences on The Nordy Pod, including a bit of negative feedback. Overall, it's been a really fun year and we're really proud of what we've been able to put together, so we hope you enjoy this special look back at The Nordy Pod in 2023. Thanks for tuning in to episode 51. We hope you enjoy it! Did you know that YOU can be on The Nordy Pod? This show isn't just a one-way conversation. We want to hear about what Nordstrom looks like through your eyes. Share your Nordstrom experience, good or bad, by giving us a call and leaving a voicemail at: 206.594.0526, or send an email to nordypodcast@nordstrom.com to be a part of the conversation!

Gregory Clark teaches about the relationship between faith and fear. They oppose each other and cannot be present in the same moment. Click here to access the speech page. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Michael Saylor has read Murray Rothbard's magnificent history of the USA: Conceived in Liberty, and he is joined by Patrick Newman, Mises Institute Fellow and editor of the fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty, to discuss American colonial history, the American revolution, and economic freedom!References:Conceived in Liberty, Murray Rothbard - https://mises.org/library/conceived-liberty-2Murray Rothbard's books - https://mises.org/profile/murray-n-rothbard The State in Third Millenium, Prince Hans Adam  - https://www.amazon.com/State-Third-Millennium-Prince-Hans-Adam/dp/3905881047 Conquests and Cultures, Thomas Sowell - https://www.amazon.com/Conquests-Cultures-International-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465014003 Essays on Colonies, Adam Smith - https://www.amazon.com/Essay-Colonies-Adam-Smith/dp/0898757843Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849, Patrick Newman - https://mises.org/library/cronyism-liberty-versus-power-early-america-1607-1849Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark - https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/FTA2006-1.pdf The Transatlantic Persuasion: Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone, Robert Kelley - https://www.amazon.com/Transatlantic-Persuasion-Liberal-Democratic-Mind-Gladstone/dp/0887386350 Enjoyed this episode? Join Saifedean's online learning platform to take part in weekly podcast seminars, access Saifedean's five online economics courses, and read his writing, including his new book, Principles of Economics! Find out more on saifedean.com!

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Alex Young of UCLA and James Lee of the University of Minnesota about quantitative genetics and its relationship to complex traits and the genomic revolution. Young, trained as a mathematician, and Lee, trained as a psychologist, have both converged upon research programs exploring the role of genetics in generating variation in human behavior and disease. First, the trio reviews quantitative genetics' modern basis in R. A. Fisher's 1918 paper The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance, and how the field emerged from the same intellectual root as population genetics in the first decades of the 20th century. They then discuss phenomena closely associated with quantitative characteristics: polygenicity, heritability and the central limit theorem. Razib also outlines the role of population genetic parameters like mutation, selection and drift in shaping the distribution of any given trait, particularly the characteristic's variation and median values. After a deep dive into major concerns like the difference between heritability in the “broad sense” and “narrow sense,” what additive genetic variance is and why it's so important to evolution and applied breeding and contemporary heritability estimates of traits like height and intelligence using twin studies and family-based genomic analyses, the conversation concludes with a discussion of Gregory Clark's new PNAS paper, The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. What are its implications? Why did it ignite a firestorm on social media? Lee in fact contributed a comment on the paper to PNAS, while Young has tackled its methods and conclusions on social media. In a conversation that stretches on for over two hours, Razib, Lee and Young touch upon many aspects of a discipline that combines the statistical insights of the 20th century with the genomic technologies of the 21st. Lee also expounds on a result from one of his papers that didn't make it into the final publication due to reviewer skepticism: what he calls a “beer-chugging phenotype” reported from the study of twins.

Join me on stage at the Footwear News CEO Summit as I sit down with three of our very best stylists, Jesse James Barnholdt, Gregory Clark and Jeffrey Ola. We do our best to make it abundantly clear to our employees that their success at Nordstrom is in their hands. We give them the leeway to use their best judgment in running their business, and let me tell you, these three men have taken that freedom and run with it. Each of them has raised the bar for what's possible on the sales floor and done it in their own unique and personal way, adding credibility to our reputation and building immensely successful careers for themselves. We are super proud of the heights that they've reached and want to lift them up as examples to the rest of our company. Before that, listen in on my conversation with the cofounder of On, Caspar Coppetti. The story of this brand is particularly interesting because it's so authentically rooted in the entrepreneurial spirit. Innocently enough, Caspar and cofounder Olivier Bernhard only started making shoes to fulfill their own personal running needs. And being based in the relatively small market of Switzerland, they had no idea that it would evolve into the global phenomenon that it is today. But what they did know was that if they could only get runners to try on their shoes, the business would take care of itself—which it did. Professional runners wearing On running shoes began breaking records and speaking out about the incredible benefits they felt, including examples of runners with previous injuries getting back up to speed faster than ever before. But despite On's amazing growth and success, money has never been what drives them. Their motivation remains the same as it was in the beginning. Caspar talks about running as an incredibly emotional experience, with each different environment and circumstance inspiring a new type of product. That's what makes this brand so unique, and why I'm excited to share his story with you today. Thanks for tuning in to episode 36. We hope you enjoy it! Did you know that YOU can be on The Nordy Pod? This show isn't just a one-way conversation. We want to hear about what Nordstrom looks like through your eyes. Share your Nordstrom experience, good or bad, by giving us a call and leaving a voicemail at: 206.594.0526, or send an email to nordypodcast@nordstrom.com to be a part of the conversation!

France has the highest fertility in Europe. It owes this privilege to its culture and history. The French woman, and even more, the idealized French woman, is the reason for this exception. Beyond France, this episode travels through Europe, North, South, and East and then North America and tells of a world that is being emptied of humans but is being filled... with wolves.   Un podcast de David Duhamel produit par MaisonK Prod Musique originale : Ben Molinaro Graphisme : Anna Toussaint Sources George Alter et Gregory Clark, 2010, The Demographic Transition and Human Capiltal, in Stephen Broadberry, and Kevin O'Rourke, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe: Volume 1, 1700-1870. Cambridge University Press. Jordan Nickerson and David H. Solomon, 2020, Car Seats as Contraception, SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3665046  https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Avec 1.83 enfants par femme, la France a la fertilité la plus haute d'Europe. Elle doit ce privilège à sa culture et à son histoire. La femme française, et plus encore, l'image de la femme française, est la raison de cette exception.  Au delà de la France, cet épisode voyage en Europe du Nord, du Sud et de l'Est puis en Amérique du Nord et raconte un monde qui se vide d'humains mais se remplit… de loups. SVP adhérez à notre newsletter, pour nous aider et suivre les aventures du podcast  : https://podcast.ausha.co/un-monde-sans-enfants?s=1 Un podcast de David Duhamel produit par MaisonK Prod Musique originale : Ben Molinaro Graphisme : Anna Toussaint Sources George Alter et Gregory Clark, 2010, The Demographic Transition and Human Capiltal, in Stephen Broadberry, and Kevin O'Rourke, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe: Volume 1, 1700-1870. Cambridge University Press. Ron J. Lesthaeghe, 1992, Beyond Economic Reductionism: The Transformation of the Reproductive regimes in France and Belgium in the 18th and 19th Centuries. In C. Goldscheider, ed., Fertility Transitions, Family Structure, and Population Policy. Boulder: Westview Press. Jordan Nickerson and David H. Solomon, 2020, Car Seats as Contraception, SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3665046  https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate Alain Parant, 2022, Les Perspectives démographiques de la France, une révision à la baisse., Futuribles, n°450

So just what was that miracle that happened that one time?A difficult question to answer, we'll take the approach of looking at it through many different facets.  We are using the analogy of a multi faceted gemstone.We start with the lives of the lowest classes, a strange choice?  Well, Gregory Clark says these were the main beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution.   We make heavy use of Emma Griffin's Liberty's Dawn, a brilliant work which approach of looking at what lower class people had to say about their own lives.  

Steve Hsu is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University and cofounder of the company Genomic Prediction.We go deep into the weeds on how embryo selection can make babies healthier and smarter. Steve also explains the advice Richard Feynman gave him to pick up girls, the genetics of aging and intelligence, & the psychometric differences between shape rotators and wordcels.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Subscribe to find out about future episodes!Read the full transcript here.Follow Steve on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Please share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton!Timestamps(0:00:14) - Feynman’s advice on picking up women(0:11:46) - Embryo selection(0:24:19) - Why hasn't natural selection already optimized humans?(0:34:13) - Aging(0:43:18) - First Mover Advantage(0:53:49) - Genomics in dating(1:00:31) - Ancestral populations(1:07:58) - Is this eugenics?(1:15:59) - Tradeoffs to intelligence(1:25:01) - Consumer preferences(1:30:14) - Gwern(1:34:35) - Will parents matter?(1:45:25) - Word cells and shape rotators(1:57:29) - Bezos and brilliant physicists(2:10:23) - Elite educationTranscriptDwarkesh Patel  0:00  Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Steve Hsu. Steve, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm excited about this.Steve Hsu  0:04  Hey, it's my pleasure! I'm excited too and I just want to say I've listened to some of your earlier interviews and thought you were very insightful, which is why I was excited to have a conversation with you.Dwarkesh Patel 0:14That means a lot for me to hear you say because I'm a big fan of your podcast.Feynman’s advice on picking up womenDwarkesh Patel  0:17  So my first question is: “What advice did Richard Feynman give you about picking up girls?”Steve Hsu  0:24   Haha, wow! So one day in the spring of my senior year, I was walking across campus and saw Feynman coming toward me. We knew each other from various things—it's a small campus, I was a physics major and he was my hero–– so I'd known him since my first year. He sees me, and he's got this Long Island or New York borough accent and says, "Hey, Hsu!"  I'm like, "Hi, Professor Feynman." We start talking. And he says to me, "Wow, you're a big guy." Of course, I was much bigger back then because I was a linebacker on the Caltech football team. So I was about 200 pounds and slightly over 6 feet tall. I was a gym rat at the time and I was much bigger than him. He said, "Steve, I got to ask you something." Feynman was born in 1918, so he's not from the modern era. He was going through graduate school when the Second World War started. So, he couldn't understand the concept of a health club or a gym. This was the 80s and was when Gold's Gym was becoming a world national franchise. There were gyms all over the place like 24-Hour Fitness. But, Feynman didn't know what it was. He's a fascinating guy. He says to me, "What do you guys do there? Is it just a thing to meet girls? Or is it really for training? Do you guys go there to get buff?" So, I started explaining to him that people are there to get big, but people are also checking out the girls. A lot of stuff is happening at the health club or the weight room. Feynman grills me on this for a long time. And one of the famous things about Feynman is that he has a laser focus. So if there's something he doesn't understand and wants to get to the bottom of it, he will focus on you and start questioning you and get to the bottom of it. That's the way his brain worked. So he did that to me for a while because he didn't understand lifting weights and everything. In the end, he says to me, "Wow, Steve, I appreciate that. Let me give you some good advice."Then, he starts telling me how to pick up girls—which he's an expert on. He says to me, "I don't know how much girls like guys that are as big as you." He thought it might be a turn-off. "But you know what, you have a nice smile." So that was the one compliment he gave me. Then, he starts to tell me that it's a numbers game. You have to be rational about it. You're at an airport lounge, or you're at a bar. It's Saturday night in Pasadena or Westwood, and you're talking to some girl. He says, "You're never going to see her again. This is your five-minute interaction. Do what you have to do. If she doesn't like you, go to the next one." He also shares some colorful details. But, the point is that you should not care what they think of you. You're trying to do your thing. He did have a reputation at Caltech as a womanizer, and I could go into that too but I heard all this from the secretaries.Dwarkesh Patel  4:30  With the students or only the secretaries? Steve Hsu  4:35  Secretaries! Well mostly secretaries. They were almost all female at that time. He had thought about this a lot, and thought of it as a numbers game. The PUA guys (pick-up artists) will say, “Follow the algorithm, and whatever happens, it's not a reflection on your self-esteem. It's just what happened. And you go on to the next one.” That was the advice he was giving me, and he said other things that were pretty standard: Be funny, be confident—just basic stuff. Steve Hu: But the main thing I remember was the operationalization of it as an algorithm. You shouldn’t internalize whatever happens if you get rejected, because that hurts. When we had to go across the bar to talk to that girl (maybe it doesn’t happen in your generation), it was terrifying. We had to go across the bar and talk to some lady! It’s loud and you’ve got a few minutes to make your case. Nothing is scarier than walking up to the girl and her friends. Feynman was telling me to train yourself out of that. You're never going to see them again, the face space of humanity is so big that you'll probably never re-encounter them again. It doesn't matter. So, do your best. Dwarkesh Patel  6:06  Yeah, that's interesting because.. I wonder whether he was doing this in the 40’–– like when he was at that age, was he doing this? I don't know what the cultural conventions were at the time. Were there bars in the 40s where you could just go ahead and hit on girls or? Steve Hsu  6:19  Oh yeah absolutely. If you read literature from that time, or even a little bit earlier like Hemingway or John O'Hara, they talk about how men and women interacted in bars and stuff in New York City. So, that was much more of a thing back than when compared to your generation. That's what I can’t figure out with my kids! What is going on? How do boys and girls meet these days? Back in the day, the guy had to do all the work. It was the most terrifying thing you could do, and you had  to train yourself out of that.Dwarkesh Patel  6:57  By the way, for the context for the audience, when Feynman says you were a big guy, you were a football player at Caltech, right? There's a picture of you on your website, maybe after college or something, but you look pretty ripped. Today, it seems more common because of the gym culture. But I don’t know about back then. I don't know how common that body physique was.Steve Hsu  7:24  It’s amazing that you asked this question. I'll tell you a funny story. One of the reasons Feynman found this so weird was because of the way body-building entered the United States.  They  were regarded as freaks and homosexuals at first. I remember swimming and football in high school (swimming is different because it's international) and in swimming, I picked up a lot of advanced training techniques from the Russians and East Germans. But football was more American and not very international. So our football coach used to tell us not to lift weights when we were in junior high school because it made you slow. “You’re no good if you’re bulky.” “You gotta be fast in football.” Then, something changed around the time I was in high school–the coaches figured it out. I began lifting weights since I was an age group swimmer, like maybe age 12 or 14. Then, the football coaches got into it mainly because the University of Nebraska had a famous strength program that popularized it.At the time, there just weren't a lot of big guys. The people who knew how to train were using what would be considered “advanced knowledge” back in the 80s. For example, they’d know how to do a split routine or squat on one day and do upper body on the next day–– that was considered advanced knowledge at that time. I remember once.. I had an injury, and I was in the trainer's room at the Caltech athletic facility. The lady was looking at my quadriceps. I’d pulled a muscle, and she was looking at the quadriceps right above your kneecap. If you have well-developed quads, you'd have a bulge, a bump right above your cap. And she was looking at it from this angle where she was in front of me, and she was looking at my leg from the front. She's like, “Wow, it's swollen.” And I was like, “That's not the injury. That's my quadricep!” And she was a trainer! So, at that time, I could probably squat 400 pounds. So I was pretty strong and had big legs. The fact that the trainer didn't really understand what well-developed anatomy was supposed to look like blew my mind!So anyway, we've come a long way. This isn't one of these things where you have to be old to have any understanding of how this stuff evolved over the last 30-40 years.Dwarkesh Patel  10:13  But, I wonder if that was a phenomenon of that particular time or if people were not that muscular throughout human history. You hear stories of  Roman soldiers who are carrying 80 pounds for 10 or 20 miles a day. I mean, there's a lot of sculptures in the ancient world, or not that ancient, but the people look like they have a well-developed musculature.Steve Hsu  10:34  So the Greeks were very special because they were the first to think about the word gymnasium. It was a thing called the Palaestra, where they were trained in wrestling and boxing. They were the first people who were seriously into physical culture specific training for athletic competition.Even in the 70s, when I was a little kid, I look back at the guys from old photos and they were skinny. So skinny! The guys who went off and fought World War Two, whether they were on the German side, or the American side, were like 5’8-5’9 weighing around 130 pounds - 140 pounds. They were much different from what modern US Marines would look like. So yeah, physical culture was a new thing. Of course, the Romans and the Greeks had it to some degree, but it was lost for a long time. And, it was just coming back to the US when I was growing up. So if you were reasonably lean (around 200 pounds) and you could bench over 300.. that was pretty rare back in those days.Embryo selectionDwarkesh Patel  11:46  Okay, so let's talk about your company Genomic Prediction. Do you want to talk about this company and give an intro about what it is?Steve Hsu  11:55  Yeah. So there are two ways to introduce it. One is the scientific view. The other is the IVF view. I can do a little of both. So scientifically, the issue is that we have more and more genomic data. If you give me the genomes of a bunch of people and then give me some information about each person, ex. Do they have diabetes? How tall are they? What's their IQ score?  It’s a natural AI machine learning problem to figure out which features in the DNA variation between people are predictive of whatever variable you're trying to predict.This is the ancient scientific question of how you relate the genotype of the organism (the specific DNA pattern), to the phenotype (the expressed characteristics of the organism). If you think about it, this is what biology is! We had the molecular revolution and figured out that it’s people's DNA that stores the information which is passed along. Evolution selects on the basis of the variation in the DNA that’s expressed as phenotype, as that phenotype affects fitness/reproductive success. That's the whole ballgame for biology. As a physicist who's trained in mathematics and computation, I'm lucky that I arrived on the scene at a time when we're going to solve this basic fundamental problem of biology through brute force, AI, and machine learning. So that's how I got into this. Now you ask as an entrepreneur, “Okay, fine Steve, you're doing this in your office with your postdocs and collaborators on your computers. What use is it?” The most direct application of this is in the following setting: Every year around the world, millions of families go through IVF—typically because they're having some fertility issues, and also mainly because the mother is in her 30s or maybe 40s. In the process of IVF, they use hormone stimulation to produce more eggs. Instead of one per cycle, depending on the age of the woman, they might produce anywhere between five to twenty, or even sixty to a hundred eggs for young women who are hormonally stimulated (egg donors).From there, it’s trivial because men produce sperm all the time. You can fertilize eggs pretty easily in a little dish, and get a bunch of embryos that grow. They start growing once they're fertilized. The problem is that if you're a family and produce more embryos than you’re going to use, you have the embryo choice problem. You have to figure out which embryo to choose out of  say, 20 viable embryos. The most direct application of the science that I described is that we can now genotype those embryos from a small biopsy. I can tell you things about the embryos. I could tell you things like your fourth embryo being an outlier. For breast cancer risk, I would think carefully about using number four. Number ten is an outlier for cardiovascular disease risk. You might want to think about not using that one. The other ones are okay. So, that’s what genomic prediction does. We work with 200 or 300 different IVF clinics in six continents.Dwarkesh Patel  15:46  Yeah, so the super fascinating thing about this is that the diseases you talked about—or at least their risk profiles—are polygenic. You can have thousands of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) determining whether you will get a disease. So, I'm curious to learn how you were able to transition to this space and how your knowledge of mathematics and physics was able to help you figure out how to make sense of all this data.Steve Hsu  16:16  Yeah, that's a great question. So again, I was stressing the fundamental scientific importance of all this stuff. If you go into a slightly higher level of detail—which you were getting at with the individual SNPs, or polymorphisms—there are individual locations in the genome, where I might differ from you, and you might differ from another person. Typically, each pair of individuals will differ at a few million places in the genome—and that controls why I look a little different than youA lot of times, theoretical physicists have a little spare energy and they get tired of thinking about quarks or something. They want to maybe dabble in biology, or they want to dabble in computer science, or some other field. As theoretical physicists, we always feel, “Oh, I have a lot of horsepower, I can figure a lot out.” (For example, Feynman helped design the first parallel processors for thinking machines.) I have to figure out which problems I can make an impact on because I can waste a lot of time. Some people spend their whole lives studying one problem, one molecule or something, or one biological system. I don't have time for that, I'm just going to jump in and jump out. I'm a physicist. That's a typical attitude among theoretical physicists. So, I had to confront sequencing costs about ten years ago because I knew the rate at which they were going down. I could anticipate that we’d get to the day (today) when millions of genomes with good phenotype data became available for analysis. A typical training run might involve almost a million genomes, or half a million genomes. The mathematical question then was: What is the most effective algorithm given a set of genomes and phenotype information to build the best predictor?  This can be  boiled down to a very well-defined machine learning problem. It turns out, for some subset of algorithms, there are theorems— performance guarantees that give you a bound on how much data you need to capture almost all of the variation in the features. I spent a fair amount of time, probably a year or two, studying these very famous results, some of which were proved by a guy named Terence Tao, a Fields medalist. These are results on something called compressed sensing: a penalized form of high dimensional regression that tries to build sparse predictors. Machine learning people might notice L1-penalized optimization. The very first paper we wrote on this was to prove that using accurate genomic data and these very abstract theorems in combination could predict how much data you need to “solve” individual human traits. We showed that you would need at least a few hundred thousand individuals and their genomes and their heights to solve for height as a phenotype. We proved that in a paper using all this fancy math in 2012. Then around 2017, when we got a hold of half a million genomes, we were able to implement it in practical terms and show that our mathematical result from some years ago was correct. The transition from the low performance of the predictor to high performance (which is what we call a “phase transition boundary” between those two domains) occurred just where we said it was going to occur. Some of these technical details are not understood even by practitioners in computational genomics who are not quite mathematical. They don't understand these results in our earlier papers and don't know why we can do stuff that other people can't, or why we can predict how much data we'll need to do stuff. It's not well-appreciated, even in the field. But when the big AI in our future in the singularity looks back and says, “Hey, who gets the most credit for this genomics revolution that happened in the early 21st century?”, they're going to find these papers on the archive where we proved this was possible, and how five years later, we actually did it. Right now it's under-appreciated, but the future AI––that Roko's Basilisk AI–will look back and will give me a little credit for it. Dwarkesh Patel  21:03  Yeah, I was a little interested in this a few years ago. At that time, I looked into how these polygenic risk scores were calculated. Basically, you find the correlation between the phenotype and the alleles that correlate with it. You add up how many copies of these alleles you have, what the correlations are, and you do a weighted sum of that. So that seemed very simple, especially in an era where we have all this machine learning, but it seems like they're getting good predictive results out of this concept. So, what is the delta between how good you can go with all this fancy mathematics versus a simple sum of correlations?Steve Hsu  21:43  You're right that the ultimate models that are used when you've done all the training, and when the dust settles, are straightforward. They’re pretty simple and have an additive structure. Basically, I either assign a nonzero weight to this particular region in the genome, or I don't. Then, I need to know what the weighting is, but then the function is a linear function or additive function of the state of your genome at some subset of positions. The ultimate model that you get is straightforward. Now, if you go back ten years, when we were doing this, there were lots of claims that it was going to be super nonlinear—that it wasn't going to be additive the way I just described it. There were going to be lots of interaction terms between regions. Some biologists are still convinced that's true, even though we already know we have predictors that don't have interactions.The other question, which is more technical, is whether in any small region of your genome, the state of the individual variants is highly correlated because you inherit them in chunks. You need to figure out which one you want to use. You don't want to activate all of them because you might be overcounting. So that's where these L-1 penalization sparse methods force the predictor to be sparse. That is a key step. Otherwise, you might overcount. If you do some simple regression math, you might have 10-10 different variants close by that have roughly the same statistical significance.But, you don't know which one of those tends to be used, and you might be overcounting effects or undercounting effects. So, you end up doing a high-dimensional optimization, where you grudgingly activate a SNP when the signal is strong enough. Once you activate that one, the algorithm has to be smart enough to penalize the other ones nearby and not activate them because you're over counting effects if you do that. There's a little bit of subtlety in it. But, the main point you made is that the ultimate predictors, which are very simple and addictive—sum over effect sizes and time states—work well. That’s related to a deep statement about the additive structure of the genetic architecture of individual differences. In other words, it's weird that the ways that I differ from you are merely just because I have more of something or you have less of something. It’s not like these things are interacting in some incredibly understandable way. That's a deep thing—which is not appreciated that much by biologists yet. But over time, they'll figure out something interesting here.Why hasn’t natural selection already optimized humans?Dwarkesh Patel  24:19  Right. I thought that was super fascinating, and I commented on that on Twitter. What is interesting about that is two things. One is that you have this fascinating evolutionary argument about why that would be the case that you might want to explain. The second is that it makes you wonder if becoming more intelligent is just a matter of turning on certain SNPs. It's not a matter of all this incredible optimization being like solving a sudoku puzzle or anything. If that's the case, then why hasn't the human population already been selected to be maxed out on all these traits if it's just a matter of a bit flip?Steve Hsu  25:00  Okay, so the first issue is why is this genetic architecture so surprisingly simple? Again, we didn't know it would be simple ten years ago. So when I was checking to see whether this was a field that I should go into depending on our capabilities to make progress, we had to study the more general problem of the nonlinear possibilities. But eventually, we realized that most of the variance would probably be captured in an additive way. So, we could narrow down the problem quite a bit. There are evolutionary reasons for this. There’s a famous theorem by Fisher, the father of population genetics (aka. frequentist statistics). Fisher proved something called Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection, which says that if you impose some selection pressure on a population, the rate at which that population responds to the selection pressure (lets say it’s the bigger rats that out-compete the smaller rats) then at what rate does the rat population start getting bigger? He showed that it's the additive variants that dominate the rate of evolution. It's easy to understand why if it's a nonlinear mechanism, you need to make the rat bigger. When you sexually reproduce, and that gets chopped apart, you might break the mechanism. Whereas, if each short allele has its own independent effect, you can inherit them without worrying about breaking the mechanisms. It was well known among a tiny theoretical population of biologists that adding variants was the dominant way that populations would respond to selection. That was already known. The other thing is that humans have been through a pretty tight bottleneck, and we're not that different from each other. It's very plausible that if I wanted to edit a human embryo, and make it into a frog, then there are all kinds of subtle nonlinear things I’d have to do. But all those identical nonlinear complicated subsystems are fixed in humans. You have the same system as I do. You have the not human, not frog or ape, version of that region of DNA, and so do I. But the small ways we differ are mostly little additive switches. That's this deep scientific discovery from over the last 5-10 years of work in this area. Now, you were asking about why evolution hasn't completely “optimized” all traits in humans already. I don't know if you’ve ever done deep learning or high-dimensional optimization, but in that high-dimensional space, you're often moving on a slightly-tilted surface. So, you're getting gains, but it's also flat. Even though you scale up your compute or data size by order of magnitude, you don't move that much farther. You get some gains, but you're never really at the global max of anything in these high dimensional spaces. I don't know if that makes sense to you. But it's pretty plausible to me that two things are important here. One is that evolution has not had that much time to optimize humans. The environment that humans live in changed radically in the last 10,000 years. For a while, we didn't have agriculture, and now we have agriculture. Now, we have a swipe left if you want to have sex tonight. The environment didn't stay fixed. So, when you say fully optimized for the environment, what do you mean? The ability to diagonalize matrices might not have been very adaptive 10,000 years ago. It might not even be adaptive now. But anyway, it's a complicated question that one can't reason naively about. “If God wanted us to be 10 feet tall, we'd be 10 feet tall.” Or “if it's better to be smart, my brain would be *this* big or something.” You can't reason naively about stuff like that.Dwarkesh Patel  29:04  I see. Yeah.. Okay. So I guess it would make sense then that for example, with certain health risks, the thing that makes you more likely to get diabetes or heart disease today might be… I don't know what the pleiotropic effect of that could be. But maybe that's not that important one year from now.Steve Hsu  29:17  Let me point out that most of the diseases we care about now—not the rare ones, but the common ones—manifest when you're 50-60 years old. So there was never any evolutionary advantage of being super long-lived. There's even a debate about whether the grandparents being around to help raise the kids lifts the fitness of the family unit.But, most of the time in our evolutionary past, humans just died fairly early. So, many of these diseases would never have been optimized against evolution. But, we see them now because we live under such good conditions, we can regulate people over 80 or 90 years.Dwarkesh Patel  29:57  Regarding the linearity and additivity point, I was going to make the analogy that– and I'm curious if this is valid– but when you're programming, one thing that's good practice is to have all the implementation details in separate function calls or separate programs or something, and then have your main loop of operation just be called different functions like, “Do this, do that”, so that you can easily comment stuff away or change arguments. This seemed very similar to that where by turning these names on and off, you can change what the next offering will be. And, you don't have to worry about actually implementing whatever the underlying mechanism is. Steve Hsu  30:41  Well, what you said is related to what Fisher proved in his theorems. Which is that, if suddenly, it becomes advantageous to have X, (like white fur instead of black fur) or something, it would be best if there were little levers that you could move somebody from black fur to white fur continuously by modifying those switches in an additive way. It turns out that for sexually reproducing species where the DNA gets scrambled up in every generation, it's better to have switches of that kind. The other point related to your software analogy is that there seem to be modular, fairly modular things going on in the genome. When we looked at it, we were the first group to have, initially, 20 primary disease conditions we had decent predictors for. We started looking carefully at just something as trivial as the overlap of my sparsely trained predictor. It turns on and uses *these* features for diabetes, but it uses *these* features for schizophrenia. It’s the stupidest metric, it’s literally just how much overlap or variance accounted for overlap is there between pairs of disease conditions. It's very modest. It's the opposite of what naive biologists would say when they talk about pleiotropy.They're just disjoint! Disjoint regions of your genome that govern certain things. And why not? You have 3 billion base pairs—there's a lot you can do in there. There's a lot of information there. If you need 1000 to control diabetes risk, I estimated you could easily have 1000 roughly independent traits that are just disjoint in their genetic dependencies. So, if you think about D&D,  your strength, decks, wisdom, intelligence, and charisma—those are all disjoint. They're all just independent variables. So it's like a seven-dimensional space that your character lives in. Well, there's enough information in the few million differences between you and me. There's enough for 1000-dimensional space of variation.“Oh, how considerable is your spleen?” My spleen is a little bit smaller, yours is a little bit bigger - that can vary independently of your IQ. Oh, it's a big surprise. The size of your spleen can vary independently of the size of your big toe. If you do information theory, there are about 1000 different parameters, and I can vary independently with the number of variants I have between you and me. Because you understand some information theory, it’s trivial to explain, but try explaining to a biologist, you won't get very far.Dwarkesh Patel  33:27  Yeah, yeah, do the log two of the number of.. is that basically how you do it? Yeah.Steve Hsu  33:33  Okay. That's all it is. I mean, it's in our paper. We look at how many variants typically account for most of the variation for any of these major traits, and then imagine that they're mostly disjoint. Then it’s just all about: how many variants you need to independently vary 1000 traits? Well, a few million differences between you and me are enough. It's very trivial math. Once you understand the base and how to reason about information theory, then it's very trivial. But, it ain’t trivial for theoretical biologists, as far as I can tell.AgingDwarkesh Patel  34:13  But the result is so interesting because I remember reading in The Selfish Gene that, as he (Dawkins) hypothesizes that the reason we could be aging is an antagonistic clash. There's something that makes you healthier when you're young and fertile that makes you unhealthy when you're old. Evolution would have selected for such a trade-off because when you're young and fertile, evolution and your genes care about you. But, if there's enough space in the genome —where these trade-offs are not necessarily necessary—then this could be a bad explanation for aging, or do you think I'm straining the analogy?Steve Hsu  34:49  I love your interviews because the point you're making here is really good. So Dawkins, who is an evolutionary theorist from the old school when they had almost no data—you can imagine how much data they had compared to today—he would tell you a story about a particular gene that maybe has a positive effect when you're young, but it makes you age faster. So, there's a trade-off. We know about things like sickle cell anemia. We know stories about that. No doubt, some stories are true about specific variants in your genome. But that's not the general story. The general story you only discovered in the last five years is that thousands of variants control almost every trait and those variants tend to be disjoint from the ones that control the other trait. They weren't wrong, but they didn't have the big picture.Dwarkesh Patel  35:44  Yeah, I see. So, you had this paper, it had polygenic, health index, general health, and disease risk.. You showed that with ten embryos, you could increase disability-adjusted life years by four, which is a massive increase if you think about it. Like what if you could live four years longer and in a healthy state? Steve Hsu  36:05  Yeah, what's the value of that? What would you pay to buy that for your kid?Dwarkesh Patel  36:08  Yeah. But, going back to the earlier question about the trade-offs and why this hasn't already been selected for,  if you're right and there's no trade-off to do this, just living four years older (even if that's beyond your fertility) just being a grandpa or something seems like an unmitigated good. So why hasn’t this kind of assurance hasn't already been selected for? Steve Hsu  36:35  I’m glad you're asking about these questions because these are things that people are very confused about, even in the field. First of all, let me say that when you have a trait that's controlled by  10,000 variants (eg. height is controlled by order 10,000 variants and probably cognitive ability a little bit more), the square root of 10,000 is 100.  So, if I could come to this little embryo, and I want to give it one extra standard deviation of height, I only need to edit 100. I only need to flip 100 minus variance to plus variance. These are very rough numbers. But, one standard deviation is the square root of “n”. If I flip a coin “n” times, I want a better outcome in terms of the number of ratio heads to tails. I want to increase it by one standard deviation. I only need to flip the square root of “n” heads because if you flip a lot, you will get a narrow distribution that peaks around half, and the width of that distribution is the square root of “n”. Once I tell you, “Hey, your height is controlled by 10,000 variants, and I only need to flip 100 genetic variants to make you one standard deviation for a male,” (that would be three inches tall, two and a half or three inches taller), you suddenly realize, “Wait a minute, there are a lot of variants up for grabs there. If I could flip 500 variants in your genome, I would make you five standard deviations taller, you'd be seven feet tall.”  I didn't even have to do that much work, and there's a lot more variation where that came from. I could have flipped even more because I only flipped 500 out of 10,000, right? So, there's this  quasi-infinite well of variation that evolution or genetic engineers could act on. Again, the early population geneticists who bred corn and animals know this. This is something they explicitly know about because they've done calculations. Interestingly, the human geneticists who are mainly concerned with diseases and stuff, are often unfamiliar with the math that the animal breeders already know. You might be interested to know that the milk you drink comes from heavily genetically-optimized cows bred artificially using almost exactly the same technologies that we use at genomic prediction. But, they're doing it to optimize milk production and stuff like this. So there is a big well of variance. It's a consequence of the trait's poly genicity. On the longevity side of things, it does look like people could “be engineered” to live much longer by flipping the variants that make the risk for diseases that shorten your life. The question is then “Why didn't evolution give us life spans of thousands of years?” People in the Bible used to live for thousands of years. Why don't we? I mean, *chuckles* that probably didn’t happen. But the question is, you have this very high dimensional space, and you have a fitness function. How big is the slope in a particular direction of that fitness function? How much more successful reproductively would Joe caveman have been if he lived to be 150 instead of only, 100 or something? There just hasn't been enough time to explore this super high dimensional space. That's the actual answer. But now, we have the technology, and we're going to f*****g explore it fast. That's the point that the big lightbulb should go off. We’re mapping this space out now. Pretty confident in 10 years or so, with the CRISPR gene editing technologies will be ready for massively multiplexed edits. We'll start navigating in this high-dimensional space as much as we like. So that's the more long-term consequence of the scientific insights.Dwarkesh Patel  40:53  Yeah, that's super interesting. What do you think will be the plateau for a trait of how long you’ll live? With the current data and techniques, you think it could be significantly greater than that?Steve Hsu  41:05  We did a simple calculation—which amazingly gives the correct result. This polygenic predictor that we built (which isn't perfect yet but will improve as we gather more data) is used in selecting embryos today. If you asked, out of a billion people, “What's the best person typically, what would their score be on this index and then how long would they be predicted to live?”’ It's about 120 years. So it's spot on. One in a billion types of person lives to be 120 years old. How much better can you do? Probably a lot better. I don't want to speculate, but other nonlinear effects, things that we're not taking into account will start to play a role at some point. So, it's a little bit hard to estimate what the true limiting factors will be. But one super robust statement, and I'll stand by it, debate any Nobel Laureate in biology who wants to discuss it even,  is that there are many variants available to be selected or edited. There's no question about that. That's been established in animal breeding in plant breeding for a long time now. If you want a chicken that grows to be *this* big, instead of *this* big, you can do it. You can do it if you want a cow that produces 10 times or 100 times more milk than a regular cow. The egg you ate for breakfast this morning, those bio-engineered chickens that lay almost an egg a day… A chicken in the wild lays an egg a month. How the hell did we do that? By genetic engineering. That's how we did it. Dwarkesh Patel  42:51  Yeah. That was through brute artificial selection. No fancy machine learning there.Steve Hsu  42:58  Last ten years, it's gotten sophisticated machine learning genotyping of chickens. Artificial insemination, modeling of the traits using ML last ten years. For cow breeding, it's done by ML. First Mover AdvantageDwarkesh Patel  43:18  I had no idea. That's super interesting. So, you mentioned that you're accumulating data and improving your techniques over time, is there a first mover advantage to a genomic prediction company like this? Or is it whoever has the newest best algorithm for going through the biobank data? Steve Hsu  44:16  That's another super question. For the entrepreneurs in your audience, I would say in the short run, if you ask what the valuation of GPB should be? That's how the venture guys would want me to answer the question. There is a huge first mover advantage because they're important in the channel relationships between us and the clinics. Nobody will be able to get in there very easily when they come later because we're developing trust and an extensive track record with clinics worldwide—and we're well-known. So could 23andme or some company with a huge amount of data—if they were to get better AI/ML people working on this—blow us away a little bit and build better predictors because they have much more data than we do? Possibly, yes. Now, we have had core expertise in doing this work for years that we're just good at it. Even though we don't have as much data as 23andme, our predictors might still be better than theirs. I'm out there all the time, working with biobanks all around the world. I don't want to say all the names, but other countries are trying to get my hands on as much data as possible.But, there may not be a lasting advantage beyond the actual business channel connections to that particular market. It may not be a defensible, purely scientific moat around the company. We have patents on specific technologies about how to do the genotyping or error correction on the embryo, DNA, and stuff like this. We do have patents on stuff like that. But this general idea of who will best predict human traits from DNA? It's unclear who's going to be the winner in that race. Maybe it'll be the Chinese government in 50 years? Who knows?Dwarkesh Patel  46:13  Yeah, that's interesting. If you think about a company Google, theoretically, it's possible that you could come up with a better algorithm than PageRank and beat them. But it seems like the engineer at Google is going to come up with whatever edge case or whatever improvement is possible.Steve Hsu  46:28  That's exactly what I would say. PageRank is deprecated by now. But, even if somebody else comes up with a somewhat better algorithm if they have a little bit more data, if you have a team doing this for a long time and you're focused and good, it's still tough to beat you, especially if you have a lead in the market.Dwarkesh Patel  46:50  So, are you guys doing the actual biopsy? Or is it just that they upload the genome, and you're the one processing just giving recommendations? Is it an API call, basically?Steve Hsu  47:03  It's great, I love your question. It is totally standard. Every good IVF clinic in the world regularly takes embryo biopsies. So that's standard. There’s a lab tech doing that. Okay. Then, they take the little sample, put it on ice, and ship it. The DNA as a molecule is exceptionally robust and stable. My other startup solves crimes that are 100 years old from DNA that we get from some semen stain on some rape victim, serial killer victims bra strap, we've done stuff that.Dwarkesh Patel  47:41  Jack the Ripper, when are we going to solve that mystery?Steve Hsu  47:44  If they can give me samples, we can get into that. For example, we just learned that you could recover DNA pretty well if someone licks a stamp and puts on their correspondence. If you can do Neanderthals, you can do a lot to solve crimes. In the IVF workflow, our lab, which is in New Jersey, can service every clinic in the world because they take the biopsy, put it in a standard shipping container, and send it to us. We’re actually genotyping DNA in our lab, but we've trained a few of the bigger  clinics to do the genotyping on their site. At that point, they upload some data into the cloud and then they get back some stuff from our platform. And at that point it's going to be the whole world, every human who wants their kid to be healthy and get the best they can– that data is going to come up to us, and the report is going to come back down to their IVF physician. Dwarkesh Patel  48:46  Which is great if you think that there's a potential that this technology might get regulated in some way, you could go to Mexico or something, have them upload the genome (you don't care what they upload it from), and then get the recommendations there. Steve Hsu  49:05  I think we’re going to evolve to a point where we are going to be out of the wet part of this business, and only in the cloud and bit part of this business. No matter where it is, the clinics are going to have a sequencer, which is *this* big, and their tech is going to quickly upload and retrieve the report for the physician three seconds later. Then, the parents are going to look at it on their phones or whatever. We’re basically there with some clinics. It’s going to be tough to regulate because it’s just this. You have the bits and you’re in some repressive, terrible country that doesn’t allow you to select for some special traits that people are nervous about, but you can upload it to some vendor that’s in Singapore or some free country, and they give you the report back. Doesn’t have to be us, we don’t do the edgy stuff. We only do the health-related stuff right now. But, if you want to know how tall this embryo is going to be…I’ll tell you a mind-blower! When you do face recognition in AI, you're mapping someone's face into a parameter space on the order of hundreds of parameters, each of those parameters is super heritable. In other words, if I take two twins and photograph them, and the algorithm gives me the value of that parameter for twin one and two, they're very close. That's why I can't tell the two twins apart, and face recognition can ultimately tell them apart if it’s really good system. But you can conclude that almost all these parameters are identical for those twins. So it's highly heritable. We're going to get to a point soon where I can do the inverse problem where I have your DNA  and I predict each of those parameters in the face recognition algorithm and then reconstruct the face. If I say that when this embryo will be 16, that is what she will look like. When she's 32, this is what she's going to look like. I'll be able to do that, for sure. It's only an AI/ML problem right now. But basic biology is clearly going to work. So then you're going to be able to say, “Here's a report. Embryo four is so cute.” Before, we didn't know we wouldn't do that, but it will be possible. Dwarkesh Patel  51:37  Before we get married, you'll want to see what their genotype implies about their faces' longevity. It's interesting that you hear stories about these cartel leaders who will get plastic surgery or something to evade the law, you could have a check where you look at a lab and see if it matches the face you would have had five years ago when they caught you on tape.Steve Hsu  52:02  This is a little bit back to old-school Gattaca, but you don't even need the face! You can just take a few molecules of skin cells and phenotype them and know exactly who they are. I've had conversations with these spooky Intel folks. They're very interested in, “Oh, if some Russian diplomat comes in, and we think he's a spy, but he's with the embassy, and he has a coffee with me, and I save the cup and send it to my buddy at Langley, can we figure out who this guy is? And that he has a daughter who's going to Chote? Can do all that now.Dwarkesh Patel  52:49  If that's true, then in the future, world leaders will not want to eat anything or drink. They'll be wearing a hazmat suit to make sure they don't lose a hair follicle.Steve Hsu  53:04  The next time Pelosi goes, she will be in a spacesuit if she cares. Or the other thing is, they're going to give it. They're just going to be, “Yeah, my DNA is everywhere. If I'm a public figure, I can't track my DNA. It's all over.”Dwarkesh Patel  53:17  But the thing is, there's so much speculation that Putin might have cancer or something. If we have his DNA, we can see his probability of having cancer at age 70, or whatever he is, is 85%. So yeah, that’d be a very verified rumor. That would be interesting. Steve Hsu  53:33  I don't think that would be very definitive. I don't think we'll reach that point where you can say that Putin has cancer because of his DNA—which I could have known when he was an embryo. I don't think it's going to reach that level. But, we could say he is at high risk for a type of cancer. Genomics in datingDwarkesh Patel  53:49  In 50 or 100 years, if the majority of the population is doing this, and if the highly heritable diseases get pruned out of the population, does that mean we'll only be left with lifestyle diseases? So, you won't get breast cancer anymore, but you will still get fat or lung cancer from smoking?Steve Hsu  54:18  It's hard to discuss the asymptotic limit of what will happen here. I'm not very confident about making predictions like that. It could get to the point where everybody who's rich or has been through this stuff for a while, (especially if we get the editing working) is super low risk for all the top 20 killer diseases that have the most life expectancy impact. Maybe those people live to be 300 years old naturally. I don't think that's excluded at all. So, that's within the realm of possibility. But it's going to happen for a few lucky people like Elon Musk before it happens for shlubs like you and me. There are going to be very angry inequality protesters about the Trump grandchildren, who, models predict will live to be 200 years old. People are not going to be happy about that.Dwarkesh Patel  55:23  So interesting. So, one way to think about these different embryos is if you're producing multiple embryos, and you get to select from one of them, each of them has a call option, right? Therefore, you probably want to optimize for volatility as much, or if not more than just the expected value of the trait. So, I'm wondering if there are mechanisms where you can  increase the volatility in meiosis or some other process. You just got a higher variance, and you can select from the tail better.Steve Hsu  55:55  Well, I'll tell you something related, which is quite amusing. So I talked with some pretty senior people at the company that owns all the dating apps. So you can look up what company this is, but they own Tinder and Match. They’re kind of interested in perhaps including a special feature where you upload your genome instead of Tinder Gold / Premium.  And when you match- you can talk about how well you match the other person based on your genome. One person told me something shocking. Guys lie about their height on these apps. Dwarkesh Patel  56:41  I’m shocked, truly shocked hahaha. Steve Hsu  56:45  Suppose you could have a DNA-verified height. It would prevent gross distortions if someone claims they're 6’2 and they’re 5’9. The DNA could say that's unlikely. But no, the application to what you were discussing is more like, “Let's suppose that we're selecting on intelligence or something. Let's suppose that the regions where your girlfriend has all the plus stuff are complementary to the regions where you have your plus stuff. So, we could model that and say,  because of the complementarity structure of your genome in the regions that affect intelligence, you're very likely to have some super intelligent kids way above your, the mean of your you and your girlfriend's values. So, you could say things like it being better for you to marry that girl than another. As long as you go through embryo selection, we can throw out the bad outliers. That's all that's technically feasible. It's true that one of the earliest patent applications, they'll deny it now. What's her name? Gosh, the CEO of 23andme…Wojcicki, yeah. She'll deny it now. But, if you look in the patent database, one of the very earliest patents that 23andme filed when they were still a tiny startup was about precisely this: Advising parents about mating and how their kids would turn out and stuff like this. We don't even go that far in GP, we don't even talk about stuff like that, but they were thinking about it when they founded 23andme.Dwarkesh Patel  58:38  That is unbelievably interesting. By the way, this just occurred to me—it's supposed to be highly heritable, especially people in Asian countries, who have the experience of having grandparents that are much shorter than us, and then parents that are shorter than us, which suggests that  the environment has a big part to play in it malnutrition or something. So how do you square that our parents are often shorter than us with the idea that height is supposed to be super heritable.Steve Hsu  59:09  Another great observation. So the correct scientific statement is that we can predict height for people who will be born and raised in a favorable environment. In other words, if you live close to a McDonald's and you're able to afford all the food you want, then the height phenotype becomes super heritable because the environmental variation doesn't matter very much. But, you and I both know that people are much smaller if we return to where our ancestors came from, and also, if you look at how much food, calories, protein, and calcium they eat, it's different from what I ate and what you ate growing up. So we're never saying the environmental effects are zero. We're saying that for people raised in a particularly favorable environment, maybe the genes are capped on what can be achieved, and we can predict that. In fact, we have data from Asia, where you can see much bigger environmental effects. Age affects older people, for fixed polygenic scores on the trait are much shorter than younger people.Ancestral populationsDwarkesh Patel  1:00:31  Oh, okay. Interesting. That raises that next question I was about to ask: how applicable are these scores across different ancestral populations?Steve Hsu  1:00:44  Huge problem is that most of the data is from Europeans. What happens is that if you train a predictor in this ancestry group and go to a more distant ancestry group, there's a fall-off in the prediction quality. Again, this is a frontier question, so we don't know the answer for sure. But many people believe that there's a particular correlational structure in each population, where if I know the state of this SNP, I can predict the state of these neighboring SNPs. That is a product of that group's mating patterns and ancestry. Sometimes, the predictor, which is just using statistical power to figure things out, will grab one of these SNPs as a tag for the truly causal SNP in there. It doesn't know which one is genuinely causal, it is just grabbing a tag, but the tagging quality falls off if you go to another population (eg. This was a very good tag for the truly causal SNP in the British population. But it's not so good a tag in the South Asian population for the truly causal SNP, which we hypothesize is the same). It's the same underlying genetic architecture in these different ancestry groups. We don't know if that's a hypothesis. But even so, the tagging quality falls off. So my group spent a lot of our time looking at the performance of predictor training population A, and on distant population B, and modeling it trying to figure out trying to test hypotheses as to whether it's just the tagging decay that’s responsible for most of the faults. So all of this is an area of active investigation. It'll probably be solved in five years. The first big biobanks that are non-European are coming online. We're going to solve it in a number of years.Dwarkesh Patel  1:02:38  Oh, what does the solution look like?  Unless you can identify the causal mechanism by which each SNP is having an effect, how can you know that something is a tag or whether it's the actual underlying switch?Steve Hsu  1:02:54  The nature of reality will determine how this is going to go. So we don't truly  know if the  innate underlying biology is true. This is an amazing thing. People argue about human biodiversity and all this stuff, and we don't even know whether these specific mechanisms that predispose you to be tall or having heart disease are the same  in these different ancestry groups. We assume that it is, but we don't know that. As we get further away to Neanderthals or Homo Erectus, you might see that they have a slightly different architecture than we do. But let's assume that the causal structure is the same for South Asians and British people. Then it's a matter of improving the tags. How do I know if I don't know which one is causal? What do I mean by improving the tags? This is a machine learning problem. If there's a SNP, which is always coming up as very significant when I use it across multiple ancestry groups, maybe that one's casual. As I vary the tagging correlations in the neighborhood of that SNP, I always find that that one is the intersection of all these different sets, making me think that one's going to be causal. That's a process we're engaged in now—trying to do that. Again, it's just a machine learning problem. But we need data. That's the main issue.Dwarkesh Patel  1:04:32  I was hoping that wouldn't be possible, because one way we might go about this research is that it itself becomes taboo or causes other sorts of bad social consequences if you can definitively show that on certain traits, there are differences between ancestral populations, right? So, I was hoping that maybe there was an evasion button where we can't say because they're just tags and the tags might be different between different ancestral populations. But with machine learning, we’ll know.Steve Hsu  1:04:59  That's the situation we're in now, where you have to do some fancy analysis if you want to claim that Italians have lower height potential than Nordics—which is possible. There's been a ton of research about this because there are signals of selection. The alleles, which are activated in height predictors, look like they've been under some selection between North and South Europe over the last 5000 years for whatever reason. But, this is a thing debated by people who study molecular evolution. But suppose it's true, okay? That would mean that when we finally get to the bottom of it, we find all the causal loci for height, and the average value for the Italians is lower than that for those living in Stockholm. That might be true. People don't get that excited? They get a little bit excited about height. But they would get really excited if this were true for some other traits, right?Suppose the causal variants affecting your level of extraversion are systematic, that the average value of those weighed the weighted average of those states is different in Japan versus Sicily. People might freak out over that. I'm supposed to say that's obviously not true. How could it possibly be true? There hasn't been enough evolutionary time for those differences to arise. After all, it's not possible that despite what looks to be the case for height over the last 5000 years in Europe, no other traits could have been differentially selected for over the last 5000 years. That's the dangerous thing. Few people understand this field well enough to understand what you and I just discussed and are so alarmed by it that they're just trying to suppress everything. Most of them don't follow it at this technical level that you and I are just discussing. So, they're somewhat instinctively negative about it, but they don't understand it very well.Dwarkesh Patel  1:07:19  That's good to hear. You see this pattern that by the time that somebody might want to regulate or in some way interfere with some technology or some information, it already has achieved wide adoption. You could argue that that's the case with crypto today. But if it's true that a bunch of IVF clinics worldwide are using these scores to do selection and other things, by the time people realize the implications of this data for other kinds of social questions, this has already been an existing consumer technology.Is this eugenics?Steve Hsu  1:07:58  That's true, and the main outcry will be if it turns out that there are massive gains to be had, and only the billionaires are getting them. But that might have the consequence of causing countries to make this free part of their national health care system. So Denmark and Israel pay for IVF. For infertile couples, it's part of their national health care system. They're pretty aggressive about genetic testing. In Denmark, one in 10 babies are born through IVF. It's not clear how it will go. But we're in for some fun times. There's no doubt about that.Dwarkesh Patel  1:08:45  Well, one way you could go is that some countries decided to ban it altogether. And another way it could go is if countries decided to give everybody free access to it. If you had to choose between the two,  you would want to go for the second one. Which would be the hope. Maybe only those two are compatible with people's moral intuitions about this stuff. Steve Hsu  1:09:10  It’s very funny because most wokist people today hate this stuff. But, most progressives like Margaret Sanger, or anybody who was the progressive intellectual forebears of today's wokist, in the early 20th century, were all that we would call today in Genesis because they were like, “Thanks to Darwin, we now know how this all works. We should take steps to keep society healthy and (not in a negative way where we kill people we don't like, but we should help society do healthy things when they reproduce, and have healthy kids).” Now, this whole thing has just been flipped over among progressives. Dwarkesh Patel  1:09:52  Even in India, less than 50 years ago, Indira Gandhi, she's on the left side of India's political spectrum. She was infamous for putting on these forced sterilization programs. Somebody made an interesting comment about this where they were asked, “Oh, is it true that history always tilts towards progressives? And if so, isn't everybody else doomed? Aren't their views doomed?”The person made a fascinating point: whatever we consider left at the time tends to be winning. But what is left has changed a lot over time, right? In the early 20th century, prohibition was a left cause. It was a progressive cause, and that changed, and now the opposite is the left cause. But now, legalizing pot is progressive. Exactly. So, if Conquest’s second law is true, and everything tilts leftover time, just change what is left is, right? That's the solution. Steve Hsu  1:10:59  No one can demand that any of these woke guys be intellectually self-consistent, or even say the same things from one year to another? But one could wonder what they think about these literally Communist Chinese. They’re recycling huge parts of their GDP to help the poor and the southern stuff. Medicine is free, education is free, right? They're clearly socialists, and literally communists. But in Chinese, the Chinese characters for eugenics is a positive thing. It means healthy production. But more or less, the whole viewpoint on all this stuff is 180 degrees off in East Asia compared to here, and even among the literal communists—so go figure.Dwarkesh Patel  1:11:55  Yeah, very based. So let's talk about one of the traits that people might be interested in potentially selecting for: intelligence. What is the potential for us to acquire the data to correlate the genotype with intelligence?Steve Hsu  1:12:15  Well, that's the most personally frustrating aspect of all of this stuff. If you asked me ten years ago when I started doing this stuff what were we going to get, everything was gone. On the optimistic side of what I would have predicted, so everything's good. Didn't turn out to be interactively nonlinear, or it didn't turn out to be interactively pleiotropic. All these good things, —which nobody could have known a priori how they would work—turned out to be good for gene engineers of the 21st century. The one frustrating thing is because of crazy wokeism, and fear of crazy wokists, the most interesting phenotype of all is lagging b

Gregory Clark is Distinguished Professor of Economics at UC-Davis. He is an editor of the European Review of Economic History, chair of the steering committee of the All-UC Group in Economic History, and a Research Associate of the Center for Poverty Research at Davis. He was educated at Cambridge University and received a PhD from Harvard University.His areas of research are long-term economic growth, the wealth of nations, economic history, and social mobility.Steve and Greg discuss:0:00 Introduction2:31 Background in economics and genetics10:25 The role of genetics in determining social outcomes16:27 Measuring social status through marriage and occupation36:15 Assortative mating and the industrial revolution49:38 Criticisms of empirical data, engagement on genetics and economic history1:12:12 Heckman and Landerso study of social mobility in US vs Denmark1:24:32 Predicting cognitive traits1:33:26 Assortative mating and increase in population varianceLinks:For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 English Individuals 1750-2020 shows Genetics Determines most Social Outcomeshttp://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ClarkGlasgow2021.pdfFurther discussionhttps://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/03/genetic-correlation-of-social-outcomes.htmlA Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the Worldhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_AlmsThe Son Also Riseshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.--Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU.Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on Twitter @hsu_steve.

Judith Duportail présente la chronique de Tal Madesta qui propose de supprimer le droit à l'héritage. RESSOURCES CITÉES "La fiscalité des héritages : connaissances et opinions des Français", document de travail de France Stratégie, écrit par Pauline Grégoire-Marchand (2018)"Le Capital au XXIe siècle", Thomas Piketty (éd. Seuil, 2013)"L'impôt sur l'héritage", André Masson, dans la Revue de l'OFCE N°156 (2018)"Résistances à l'impôt, attachement à l'Etat - Enquête sur les contribuables français", Alexis Spire (éd. Seuil, 2018)"Faut-il supprimer l'héritage ?", vidéo du Monde, disponible sur Youtube "Surnames and Social Mobility in England, 1170–2012", Gregory Clark et Neil J Cummins, dans Human Nature (Novembre 2014)"Patrimoine : des inégalités démultipliées", sur le site de l'Observatoire des inégalités Extrait du "Catéchisme révolutionnaire" de Mikhaïl Bakounine (éd. de L'Herne, 2009), publié sur le site Toupie.org CRÉDITS : On peut plus rien dire est un podcast de Binge Audio animé par Judith Duportail. Réalisation : Alice Ninin. Production : Charlotte Baix. Édition : Sirine Azouaoui. Générique : Josselin Bordat (musique) et Bonnie Banane (voix). Identité sonore Binge Audio : Jean-Benoît Dunckel (musique) et Bonnie El Bokeili (voix). Identité graphique : Sébastien Brothier (Upian). Direction des programmes : Joël Ronez. Direction de la rédaction : David Carzon. Direction générale : Gabrielle Boeri-Charles. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Welcome to another season of your favourite podcast! We are starting off the season by exploring the many explanations of The Industrial Revolution with economic historian and writer Davis Kedrosky. You can learn more about Davis' work from his excellent newsletter here. You can also listen to this podcast through all the other options here. The transcript of the conversation is below.TRANSCRIPTTobi; So briefly, what is the Industrial Revolution? And what is its significance? I mean, we've all seen the charts, you see these different trend lines charting world living standards from the Middle Ages, and then somewhere in the middle 18th century, there's this huge jump, you know, that is generally termed as around the time the Industrial Revolution started. So what's the Industrial Revolution, basically? And why is it significant? Davis; Right. So I guess what you've asked here is two impossibly three questions. So what is the Industrial Revolution? The Industrial Revolution is actually multiple events, which is the bad historian answer. But essentially, you first have the British Industrial Revolution. This is a period that starts around 1760 and continues for about a century until 1860. That's sort of the standard periodization and basically consists of the structural transformation of one economy, the British economy, from a largely agrarian country to one based on manufacturing, especially in a couple of key sectors, those being textiles, iron, and various types of steam goods. So this event is transformative in a number of ways. It's not transformative, in that it brings about a titanic increase in living standards. Because really, for most of the period, living standards in Britain do not rise. It's significant because it is really the first true stirring of economic dynamism anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of the Netherlands in the 17th century. But in this case, in Britain, the industrial revolution is truly sustained. And that brings us to the second part of the question, what is the Industrial Revolution? Because there's first the British Industrial Revolution, and then a European and then a Global Industrial Revolution. By the middle of the 19th century, the technologies that sustain the British Industrial Revolution are spreading to the European continent, and Britain's rivals - France, Germany, parts of Eastern Europe, and Northern Europe and southern Europe - are all starting to take part. And this becomes a continental phenomenon. And this is occurring toward the middle and the latter half of the 19th century, eventually spreading to North America, and is based on new technologies. Primarily based on the application of science to the growth process. And this growth, unlike, perhaps the British industrial revolution, and certainly unlike any growth episode in world history was sustained. Because we are where we are today. It was the beginning of modern economic growth. And so that actually gets into why this episode is significant because it is the spontaneous transformation of a largely stagnant, slow-growing economy, perhaps less so in Britain, but certainly the case in Europe and the rest of the world until something that increasingly approach the relatively rapid pace that we're seeing today, and learn to apply technological advances in a consistent fashion to the improvement of human welfare.Tobi; I'm curious, yeah, like you said, the data is usually put somewhere around 1760, to about 1860, for the first Industrial Revolution. Why did it happen when it did? Because usually, you get two sides of this story, where some scholars will argue it was a really long, slow buildup; while you get the impression from some other scholars that was a sudden discontinuity from a previous, longer trend. So why that period in time, what was different?Davis; If I said that I believe that the Industrial Revolution was a discontinuity from a long trend, I would have historians barking at my door for the next year, and I, you know, might not ever have a career in this discipline. But what I will say is that there are a number of theories about why the industrial revolution happened and how it happens. And this paints me as a historian, but I think it's sort of irresponsible to settle on one. So I borrow from all of them. But I'll just, you know, for the benefit of the listener, I will lay out as many as I can, that I think are relevant. So I guess in the classic phase of the debate, starting in the 19th century when people realize starting with people like Karl Marx... realized that the changes that had been occurring over the previous century in the economy of Britain had been of truly historic magnitude. Two competing theories for why the industrial revolution happens: and I'm borrowing from Deirdre McCloskey here - the conservative approach, which is to say, basically capitalists saved, they were frugal, they built up a larger capital stock, and eventually learned to make whatever gains and growth that they were achieving self-perpetuating. And of course, more capital per person means more productivity, more productivity means greater income per head. So that's the conservative interpretation. The Socialist interpretation is that of Marx, which is that the industrial revolution is based on expropriation, that a process of force was involved in first, the primitive accumulation of capital by capitalists and by capitalist farmers; in dispossessing the peasantry from the countryside and driving them into the factories where they could serve as low wage labour. This increase the profits of the capitalists, and in turn created the self-perpetuating growth process that we are observing continuing today. Both of those continue to be influential, and certainly, their strains have been incorporated into the modern economic history discourse. But so far as we're concerned in talking about economic history, I think that there are really three main theories. And so one of them is definitely the slow growth over time take. And that's the unified growth theory of people like Oded Galor and David Weil, and they essentially argue that an evolutionary process occurs over time whereby a combination of selection and population growth leads to the accumulation of technologies, increase in the rate of innovation. And then this innovation in turn leads to economic growth. And that is also abetted by fertility transition, such that population growth is no longer correlated with economic growth. And that leads to a growth in income per head. Then we have... I think it's about the same year - the end of the first decade of this millennium, we had two theories that have really transformed economic history come out that really set the terms for the causes of the Industrial Revolution debate.The one that's been, I think, most influential among economists is that of Bob Allen. And in his book, The British Industrial Revolution and Global Perspective, he argues that Britain had a unique combination of factor prices - that wages were extremely high in Britain, and capital and energy were extremely cheap. And so what this led producers to do was to substitute labour for capital and also make innovations that would have this labour-saving effect by using lots of capital and energy. The prime example is the steam engine, which used cheap British coal to perform the work that would otherwise have been performed by muscle power. And so the continual creation of these labour-saving inventions is sort of the basis for the Industrial Revolution and increases worker productivity. This is the Allen theory. The Allen theory has received some very strong critiques. People like Jane Humphries and Judy Stevenson have really attacked the empirical basis of Allen's work. They've suggested that wages in Britain were not nearly as high as Allen had computed and that his series made some improper assumptions that led it to be inflated and this really changed the sorts of profits to technological innovation that Allen had to suppose would be driving this process. And so that's where the Allen theory stands today. It's sort of the cleanest mechanism for describing the industrial revolution in an economic sense, but it faces some factual challenges. The other one that occurred about the same time is that of Joel Mokyr. He wrote a book called The Enlightened Economy, I believe in 2009, in which he argued that it was rather ideas rather than economic incentives that led to the transformation of Britain. That it was industrial enlightenment that occurred, and a culture of improvement that swept Britain and led many people of the intellectual class of the country to start taking an interest in practical matters, devising innovations that would improve society, that would make doing practical tasks easier, and then crucially, sharing them with the people around them in a sort of Republic of Letters - in which intellectuals across England and across the continent all communicated to iterate upon each other's technical ideas. And this, in turn, provided the creative spark for modern economic growth and crucially incorporates the sort of scientific aspects that is the foundation of the second or European Industrial Revolution. These are the two main competing theories and people like Nicholas Crafts have attempted to synthesize them into a single argument suggesting that, you know, one explains the demand and one explains the supply of inventions. But others hold that they're incompatible. But you can kind of pick and choose your favourite aspects as Crafts did.Tobi; Yeah, I mean, I get that. But from a global perspective, you're looking at other parts of the world like India, Africa. There are other - I'd say, maybe within the economic history profession - not so popular, but quite popular with the lay public. For example, the institutionalist view of Acemoglu and Robinson who claim in their book and also in some of their papers that the Glorious Revolution laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. That's one, I'll like you to address some critiques of that. And secondly, what's the difference between Galor's Unified Growth Theory and sort of the Neo Malthusian story that people like Gregory Clark are constructing?Davis; Okay, I'll start with the Acemoglu and Robinson theory about the Glorious Revolution. So [what] they essentially argue is that the Glorious Revolution is a watershed event that turns England into a participatory democracy, in which people are free to possess, transfer and use private property without fear of expropriation from the supposedly tyrannical monarchy that existed beforehand. And in the institutionalist view, the security of property rights and participatory democracy are both crucial for economic growth because they allow people to transfer assets to their most productive uses. And these sort of efficiency gains also lead to investment and modern economic growth is supposed to follow from that. Yeah, so Acemoglu and Robinson are sorts of making a distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions. Extractive institutions are supposed to be the sort of, European and broadly global pattern whereby elites have no incentive to promote economic growth and do not allow participation by the common citizen in the political discourse. Whereas inclusive institutions are very much the exception but are established in Britain in the sense that I've previously described, in both the economic and political spheres.They allege that, and I quote, "the industrial revolution started and made its biggest strides in England because of her uniquely inclusive economic institutions. These, in turn, were built on the foundations laid by the inclusive political institutions brought about by the Glorious Revolution, and that they gave man of talent and vision such as James Watt, the opportunity and incentive to develop their skills and ideas and influence the system in ways that benefited them and the nation". So yeah, that's the Acemoglu and Robinson view. Um... I'm not so fond of this one. Tobi; Why? Davis; I have to be careful because there are many people who see a sort of, attack on Acemoglu and Robinson, or even a critique of Acemoglu and Robinson as a critique of institutionalism itself, and I am by no means an anti institutionalist. Because I mean, it's painfully obvious that institutions are extremely important in explaining differential development. But some empirical flaws with the Acemoglu and Robinson contention, especially in its "Why Nations Fail" iteration is that the Glorious Revolution really didn't actually bring about the sort of sweeping political changes that they suppose occurred. British Parliament was still corrupt, the electorate was tiny and dominated by landed elites rather than merchants. Certainly, industrialists come [in the] early part of the 18th century. So those sorts of sweeping changes couldn't really have had a very big influence on the beginning of Britain's economic transformation. Second of all, Parliaments just do not guarantee economic growth anyway, there are plenty of examples of Parliaments filled with wealth holders and merchants who use their political powers in order to just extract rents from the economy at large. So this happens in places like Poland, for example, where parliament is so strong that the ruler cannot issue any legislation without its consent. But that power is then used by the Polish parliament to support the feudal rights of landowners over their serfs and that leads to agricultural stagnation rather than economic growth. So parliament is not necessarily the keystone of economic transformation. Finally, private property in England was already quite secure by the time of the Glorious Revolution. And that event did not bring about any kind of radical transformation in the way that property was treated in England. The Bill of Rights that was passed in 1689 did not impose any limits on Parliament's ability to confiscate property. So you basically see the replacement of the monarch's despotic power over property such as it existed, which was in curtailed form by Parliament. So it's not clear to me that you can attach an economic discontinuity to a political discontinuity in this way. I mean, indeed, in the century following the Glorious Revolution, there really isn't an economic discontinuity. There is perhaps an acceleration in the rate at which the British population is moving out of agriculture, but that had been occurring for over a century in Britain. Those are some of the main difficulties with the Acemoglu and Robinson theory. Then I believe you asked about...um...Tobi; Yeah, Greg Clark and...Davis; Right. So this is not an area that I've really worked with very much. And by the way, there are a number of iterations on the Unified Growth Theory. But as best as I understand it, unified growth theory is concerned with the sort of, the transition between a Malthusian regime and a post-Malthusian regime through the lens of the demographic transition and the returns to innovation. And in their model, population growth tends to increase the rate of technological progress, and technological progress, in turn, increases the returns to investing in human capital. And there's sort of a positive feedback loop between investment in human capital and the rate of technological growth, which has the additional effect of decreasing fertility and a sort of quality versus quantity trade-off. Clark's hypothesis is a little bit different. So Clarke, as I recall, argues most famously in the Farewell to Arms, sorry, A Farewell to Alms. (That is quite a slip there). His argument there is that, basically, the differential reproductive rates of the wealthy lead people of their habits and mindset to become the dominant subset of the population in certain advanced regions, and their behaviour - the behaviour that made them wealthy - is sort of the basis for growth-inducing economic interaction. Those are the main differences. I guess they don't interact with one another that directly, in my point of view.Tobi; So I mean, as long as we are interrogating several theories of the causes of the Industrial Revolution, I read McCloskey's trilogy, right? And I mean, she spent a lot of time criticizing all these other theories about the causes of the Great Enrichment, as she called it. And at the end of the day, she basically, well, I'm not an expert, but in my opinion, she resorted to a bit of a sleight of hand as well, which is to say that well, the cause of this Great Enrichment is liberalism. The spread of freedom, and basically attributed that to luck. Do you buy that? And how does that differ from say, Acemoglu and Robinson, you know... Feels a bit arbitrary.Davis; As I understand it, liberalism is only a part of the McCloskey hypothesis. There's also an aspect to which it has to do with the spread of the bourgeois virtues among the people of Britain and an economic mentality that had not previously existed, and that these sorts of behaviours are the key to an efficiently transacting and innovating culture. Yeah, so there's not just liberalism uber alles. But as far as liberalism is concerned, it's clearly not a sufficient condition for economic growth, it has to be combined to be even beneficial with certain kinds of state capacity such as the provision of some kinds of basic essential services, especially infrastructure, and the provision of social overhead capital in order for the benefits of industrialization not to be winnowed away. I mean, a good example is Britain, in fact, where certain kinds of laissez-faire behaviour by the state are actually detrimental to the British economy. British cities grow much too fast for their infrastructure, and in many ways, they really are the sort of hives of scum, filth, and overcrowding they're drawn up as in your standard Charles Dickens novel. And part of the reason for that is because much of the investment in public infrastructure was shunted away from the state and toward private individuals and this process did not occur as seamlessly as it might have. And so, you know, there's poor sanitation, improper access to good drinking water, inadequate housing stocks, and all these social bads, actually, probably, reduced the rate of economic growth. So if liberalism is to be helpful, it has to be an appendage of a larger growth process. And I really do not think it's either sufficient or necessary for industrialization. You can look straight to one of the foremost industrializing countries of the last four decades in China, where industrialization has occurred apace in, really, the absence of political liberalism. And you can make arguments about whether that growth will be sustained. But there is certainly dynamism and there is certainly an improvement in per capita living standards and convergence with the West. You can even make the argument for Soviet Russia and its early years as Bob Allen has - that from about the late 1920s until 1970, Soviet Russia under a planning regime grew quickly enough to have some measure of convergence with the West, and certainly an increase in living standards.Tobi; Two final questions before I let you go. One of which would be, as you mentioned in the introduction, after the 1760 or thereabout event, a lot of economies in Europe, France, and of course, Germany, caught up with the British economy and, of course, by the end of the Second World War, America had become the preeminent global economic power. Why did the British economy decline?Davis; That's a question that some economic historians don't accept at all, and that I'm hoping to explore in the relatively near future. But the old Edwardian argument that Britain has just matured, and that it's had its spell as the leading industrial nation, but there are inevitable limits to growth, and that they've reached the limit of their possibilities and handed over the torch to the United States and to Britain's European rivals. You know, the answer here is obviously a little bit more complicated. But one of the standard responses is to say, well, the kind of growth that Britain experienced from 1760 to 1860, was of a fundamentally different character than that that made the United States and Western Central Europe successful during the 19th century. And that's basically down to this distinction between tinkering and engineering-based innovation that is responsible for the creation of many of the main inventions of the British Industrial Revolution and the application of science to technology, drives innovation during the Second Industrial Revolution. So in the first industrial revolution, you see, particularly in the textile sector, a range of innovations arising from learning by doing, from people within the industry solving problems that occur to them in the production process and making incremental improvements, really, without the aid of any kind of formal knowledge. Not all of these improvements are incremental, like inventions like the flying shuttle, the water frame, the spinning jenny, all these things bring about colossal improvements in productivity, and they make Britain by 1850 the world's leading textile exporter, but none of them required deep formal knowledge of how to construct machinery of the physics of the engineering process. Whereas by the end of the 19th century, some of the leading sectors like steel, electricity, the construction of automobiles, chemicals, all of these industries require significant scientific knowledge in order to advance to an appreciable degree. So there's the argument that Britain's success in tinkering-based innovation-led it to undervalue the importance of investment in human capital, specifically through an education system. And consequently, there was sort of an inadequate generation of young scientists and professional engineers coming through the ranks just at the time when they were most needed in transitioning the British economy toward the modern industries that we're taking hold in Germany and the United States. That's probably true to an extent. But there's also a degree to which Britain is simply following its comparative advantage in other kinds of industries in the face of the industrialization of the United States and the Central European powers. Britain is always going to have an advantage in the provision of financial services and shipping, and that is really one of the directions that the British economy takes in the years before World War One. And so the economic historian Simon Carly has argued that this isn't senescence, this is not the ageing and stagnation of the British economy, but really a movement in a new direction to conform with her resource possibilities and comparative advantages. Obviously, the United States is always going to have a much larger advantage in heavy resource-based industrialization, because of the massive reserves of ores, minerals, timber at its disposal.Tobi; Final question before I let you go, if we look at contemporary economic growth and policies, especially in countries that are still behind income-wise, what can we learn from the Industrial Revolution? Because a lot of people project different things depending on the causal story that they buy, or that they want to believe. Advocates of industrialization and the East Asian style of industrial policy take different lessons, people who favour the Institutionalists also use that to give their own sort of policy advice. People who favour liberalism will say, well, it's about political freedom. So what are we supposed to learn from the Industrial Revolution, so to speak, does that particular period of history have anything to teach us at all?Davis; You and every sort of public, economic intellectual in every country that has tried to develop ever since the Industrial Revolution wonders the same thing. And the thing that's really interesting and unique about the British Industrial Revolution is not just that it's the first of its kind, but that it's the only Industrial Revolution that occurs without a model. Because every other industrialization process in history looked back on the British experience, and said, you know, we should imitate this aspect and that aspect. And that where Britain has been successful, we should expect to be successful too. They've taken Britain's successes and applied them to their own, to some extent. The British Industrial Revolution is unique because there is no precedent, there is no model for what occurred. It really did happen spontaneously, because even though there may have been some elements in the British government that wanted to promote economic growth, that's the famous mercantilism of the 17th and 18th centuries and really, one of the reasons why Adam Smith writes his great book, The Wealth of Nations in 1776, is because these are all people interested in making the country wealthier. But they had no idea that industrialization was sort of what could or would follow. And so, in terms of the lessons that we can draw from this, they are to some extent limited. We know that because of the degree to which all of these countries that have attempted to follow the British model have either successfully or unsuccessfully failed to do so. The United States, for example, was moderately successful at industrializing, say, in New England, along British lines, but immensely successful in going its own way in a variety of Heavy Industries toward the end of the 19th century. Partly because of the simple scale, but also because of the human capital and skill advantages that we've been talking about. You know, it's quite reasonable to argue that many of the East Asian countries would have struggled to industrialize in the spontaneous fashion that Britain did because they were situated in a position in the global economy in which they did not have a comparative advantage in the industries that would end up transforming them until they employed industrial policy in order to break free and to get out of low level local agrarian traps. And I know that people will shout at me and say that Meiji Japan was already growing prior to the world wars. But I don't think it was necessarily true that Meiji Japan was set to grow in the spectacular fashion that Japan did after 1945. But all this is debatable. But what is certainly true from the British example, is that it demonstrates, in some respects, the extent to which a different combination of political liberalism and state capacity can make a difference in producing some economic separation. So if you have the right political economy, by comparison with your neighbours, you can have a bit of a growth advantage. This is not to say that if you have had Britain's political economy from the 18th century, you would somehow grow faster today. Rather, if you had Britain's advantage in political economy, you might have. But in my opinion, and this is not to sound too down, the genesis of the Industrial Revolution is primarily in the long process of the transformation of productive forces from the 16th century onward. And no hand was taken really by any institution in shaping them. And that spontaneity, and that mystery really, is what makes the Industrial Revolution so interesting. And so also just why it has been so difficult to copy. And why nations that have intentionally industrialized have needed to find their own recipes for doing so.Tobi; Finally, what are you working on right now? And why are you excited about it?Davis; Yeah, so I'm planning on obviously continuing with my Substack and blog, I never really know what to call it. I don't know if it's a newsletter or a blog, or what? I guess it just depends on...Tobi; I think it's both. Davis; Yeah, I guess it depends on how you access it. But yeah, I've got a couple of projects in various stages of production. I have an economic history paper that is presumably being refereed at the moment, so we'll see how that's received and whether major transformations will be needed to bring that toward publication. And then I also am in some of the very early stages of what could be an exciting project in Canadian economic history. But I don't want to reveal too much about that at the present. I'm not exactly like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that it sticks because I have way too much time in order to, sort of, incentivise desperation like that.But I do think it's, at this point, beneficial to engage in a diverse array of possibilities for work that I can consider doing.Tobi; It's been great talking to you, Davis, and I wish you all the best.Davis; Yeah, thanks. Fun conversation. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

This is an interview with Dr. Gregory Clark, Distinguished Professor of Economics at UC-Davis, and a Visiting Professor in the Economic History Department at LSE. Dr. Clark is an editor of the European Review of Economic History, chair of the steering committee of the All-UC Group in Economic History, and a Research Associate of the Center for Poverty Research at Davis.

The first half of the episode discusses distinguished professor Gregory Clark's book, A Farewell To Alms. During the eighteenth century, England underwent a period of rapid industrialization and economic growth. Clark explains why industrialization made the whole world rich but not equally rich.The episode ends with Prof. Clark and Greg exchanging views on how much our fate is affected by our family status. Clark provides an insider's view into his latest book, The Son Also Rises, demonstrating how little has changed since the 1300s in terms of social mobility.  Listen to Gregory Clark as he shares how history, ancestry, and marriage patterns shape current economics outcomes.Episode Quotes:How England's static society eventually lead to fantastic economic opportunitiesAnother feature of English history is that between even 1300 and 1800, it was a static society in terms of living standards, life expectancy. A lot of the institutions are not changing that much. But there was significant change occurring economically. And the most dramatic of these changes, is that the prevailing interest rate on the most safe loans in medieval England was 10%— real return that you could get. Now, hedge funds would go wild if they could guarantee without risk a 10% real return. That was available to every person in medieval England. And you could buy land in half acre lots, and you know, a half acre would only cost something like two weeks wages for someone. And so, everyone in medieval England had access to transforming their economic condition in the course of their lifetime. It's a land of fantastic economic opportunities.Difference in time spent doing work between pre- and post-industrial worldAnd then, another feature of the pre-industrial world is that over the long run, people seem to actually start working much more. We can actually observe very good records of England right about 1800. One of them actually comes from the criminal courts where witnesses describe what they were doing at the time they saw the crime, or they heard the window break or whatever. And from these type of diaries, you can actually observe how much time people are spending at work. And people are working about 10 hours a day, six days a week in this world. That's a very high rate of labor input compared to our hunter-gatherer societies. So, again, it's a puzzle about why do people work so much, right? One of the amazing mysteries of the modern world, is that people are still— once you count things like commuting time or home food preparation, other things like that— they still spend— compared to most creatures in the animal kingdom, a surprisingly high amount of time at work.Human Nature and its Relationship to CapitalismI think the more interesting, aspect is that we have adapted to capitalism, and we've actually adapted biologically to capitalism. That is going to be part of any story about the delay in the industrial revolution and also the location of the industrial revolution. And that, in the centuries, that preceded the thousands of years of settled agrarian society, there was some kind of interplay going on between human nature and capitalism.Time Code Guide:00:01:53 How did you come up with the explanation on the divergence between highly industrialized and less industrialized countries00:04:54 Examples of differences in wages in India and Argentina00:07:46 What are the economist's thoughts on industrial revolution00:10:21 How literacy rates affect the community's economic development and social mobility00:12:35 The rewards of industrial revolution00:21:03 Protestantism and the industrial revolution00:25:23 Is there something unique about the way you assemble resources in these market economy?00:29:15 Mortality rate and wealth00:32:24 What drew you to this idea of tracking social mobility and using the data sets that you used?00:42:23 Why social mobility was greater during the Medieval England than modern England?Show Links:Guest ProfileAcademic ProfileGregory Clark on LinkedInHis WorkGregory Clark on Google ScholarsWhy Isn't the Whole World Developed: Lessons from the Cotton MillsThe Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social MobilityA Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

Gregory Clark teaches about the relationship between faith and fear. Faith and fear oppose each other. Where one is present, the other cannot be. Support the show: https://ldsp-pay.ldschurch.org/donations/byu/byu-speeches.html See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

HANG LOOSE With the backdrop of the lush greenery and the azure Pacific Ocean in the distance, I sat attentive (and appreciative) in the home of the octogenarian storyteller Gregory Clark. A man of many trades, he abides by “hanging loose” in life because “one thing always leads to another.” Life as an Australian diplomat in China and Russia led to journalism, then teaching in Japan, writing books about the tribal theory of the Japanese, TV appearances, lecture circuit, and involvement with opening Akita International University. Gregory enjoys the countryside and owns substantial property in the Boso peninsula, Chiba, where he has built rental homes. His witty remarks entwined in the acute observations of various subjects made this “loose” summer midday a blessed delight.

Adrian and Devin speak with Chisun Lee, Deputy Director of Election Reform Program Democracy and Gregory Clark, research and program associate both from The Brennan Center for Justice.1st Segment: Investigating Money in Politics (1:50)Super PACS  History of money and politicsRise of dark moneyBreak-The High Line 2st Segment: The Fight for Fairness and The Brennan Center for Justice (11:43)Overview of TBCJEngaging with the publicRelationship of money and policyBreak: Know Myself3rd Segment: There Must be a Better Way (22:50)Small donor matching systemBest case scenarioBreak: Stars and ConstellationsFinal Messages (34:55)Break: FunkEnding (45:49)Upcoming Episode: Criminal Justice Reform, May 18th (SEASON CLOSE)Weekly Round-Up #17, May 15th 1pm CST (LAST WRU)DonateCharity of the Month: Campaign ZeroPerson of the Week RequestsCommunity Calendar Events RequestsLike, Follow, Share, SubscribeThanks and FarewellThe Brennan Center for Justice  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carol Saffer talks with Gregory Clark, treasurer of the Macedon Ranges Rural Australians for Refugees.

In the winter of 2021, I noticed a minor controversy regarding ‘academic cancellation' around Gregory Clark, an economic historian at UC Davis. Representative pieces are Glasgow University in row over decision to invite guest speaker Gregory Clark, and Why is the woke mob so scared? The Free Speech Union put together a petition, Letter to Adam Smith Business School About No-Platforming of Professor Gregory Clark Signed by Over 70 Academics, signed by numerous public intellectuals after his talk was canceled. This was not entirely surprising. In 2014 Clark submitted a piece to The New York Times, Your Ancestors, Your Fate, which outlined some of his findings in his book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. His conclusion was that social status was far more persistent across lineages than economic historians had realized. This contention drew some sharp reactions. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a review headlined For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls. As it happens, I know Greg a bit from my time at UC Davis, and I sent him an email and asked if he'd talk about the controversy. He agreed and cleared up the major points. The crux of the issue is that he had taken to the headline “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls” (his earlier book was A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World), and his use of the phrase “bell curve” in the talk's title had engendered the perception he was a eugenicist. Thankfully we did not spend most of the conversation on the controversy. Greg was more bemused than alarmed. Rather, we explored Greg's descriptive finding, very high long-term persistence of social status across lineages, and discussed possible reasons for this, including genetic factors. Is Greg Clark a “genetic determinist”? We discuss. You decide.

American Watersheds is a fun and educational ride through American Political and Cultural History. This autobiography is written to entertain and educate current college students and people everywhere. The story allows the reader to follow movie and music links to movies, concerts and documentaries. It is an interesting study in Media, Science, Telecommunications, Sociology, Psychology, Labor History, Music History, Political History, Cultural History and even Religion. This is a book people will want to keep forever for the wealth of interesting links to whole worlds of Entertainment and Wisdom. https://store.bookbaby.com/book/american-watersheds- https://www.bookdepository.com/American-Watersheds-Gregory-Clark/9781098321680 https://linktr.ee/Addyadds BitChute https://www.bitchute.com/channel/BgElNaoKAoii/ BNT Channel: https://brandnewtube.com/@addyadds UGE Video: https://videos.utahgunexchange.com/@addyadds Brighteon: https://www.brighteon.com/channels/addyadds Parler: https://parler.com/profile/AddyAdds/posts Gab: https://gab.com/addyadds GoFundMe - https://www.gf.me/u/x2grxp Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/AddyAdds SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/AddyAdds Paypal https://www.paypal.me/oneaddyadds My Socials: https://www.instagram.com/addyadds/ https://www.twitter.com/OneAddyAdds https://www.facebook.com/OneAddyAdds Streamyard Referral Link: https://streamyard.com?pal=6421268531249152 Free 4K Youtube Video Downloader: https://www.4kdownload.com/?ref=adakinolsen Rumble Video Referral Link: https://rumble.com/register/AddyAdds/ Melon App Referral Link (Like Streamyard but cheaper!) https://melonapp.com?ref=addyadds Payoneer Referral Link: http://share.payoneer.com/nav/Lmb0EEiNudeNJ38btxFcpWbkR4pis787ooOgIO2PQxkw571ngrT5trNaGXUny-vD4p_LD4agYCxXTe3B69gleg2 https://cash.app/$AddyAdds B T C : 19LZoqmcHjxTnxs5tHv5qpgo971iD3vXVH

We'd like to think of our societies as places with a lot of social mobility, in which individuals can climb the ladder by working hard. But by tracking families with rare surnames across the centuries, Gregory Clark, an economist, has shown that social mobility is much rarer than we'd like to think. The descendants of 14th century Florentine aristocrats, 18th century Korean civil servants and 19th century Swedish notables, research Clark conducted or inspired has shown, are much more likely to work in prestigious professions or own a lot of money in the 21st century. Why could that be? In the latest episode of The Good Fight, Yascha Mounk talks to Gregory Clark about the limits of social mobility; why some families succeed while others fail; and what implications that should have for social and economic policy. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: goodfightpod@gmail.com Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by John T. Williams and Rebecca Rashid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves — their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries? To answer these questions Joseph Henrich draws on anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition — laying the foundation for the modern world. Shermer and Henrich discuss: psychology textbooks that “now purport to be about ‘Psychology’ or ‘Social Psychology’ need to be retitled something like ‘The Cultural Psychology of Late 20th Century Americans’,” Darwin’s Dictum: “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observations must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.” What views Henrich is writing for and against, evolutionary psychology and the search for human universals in the context of his thesis that WEIRD cultures are so different, Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and how his thesis holds up under modern studies, a 2×2 grid analysis of his thesis (what about the exceptions?): Cell 1: Catholic/Protestant Influence + WEIRD characteristics Cell 2: Catholic/Protestant Influence + non-WEIRD characteristics Cell 3: Non-Catholic/Protestant Influence + WEIRD characteristics Cell 4: Non-Catholic/Protestant Influence + non-WEIRD characteristics the problem of overdetermining the past (so many theories explaining history: Jared Diamond’s geographic models, Ian Morris’ War: What is it Good For?, Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (ideas having sex), Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, economic historian Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, Benjamin Friedman’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, normative vs. descriptive accounts of human behavior polygamy vs. monogamy, 1st cousin marriages? conformity, shame and guilt, illusions, loss aversion, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, superstitions, religion doesn’t have to be true to be useful, national differences in cultural psychology (for example: Italy a loose culture, Germany a tight culture), origin of writing and literacy rates, origin of religion and its purpose(s), the “Big Gods” theory of religion’s origin, the purpose of religious rituals and food taboos, families and kin, kin selection, group selection, meaning and happiness in non-WEIRD cultures, “Then you get Westerners who are like ‘I’m an individual ape on a pale blue dot in the middle of a giant black space” and “What does it all mean?’”, physical differences: “WEIRD people have flat feet, impoverished microbiomes, high rates of myopia and unnaturally low levels of exposure to parasites like helminths, which may increase their risk of heart disease and allergies.”, and When we colonize Mars and become a spacefaring species, what should we take with us from what we’ve learned about human history and psychology? Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist and the author of The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, among other books. He is the chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where his research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making, and culture.

Sara Hendren examines how much more accessible our world is to those with disabilities. Gregory Clark of the University of Utah discusses robotic hands. Jeff Speck, city planner and author, outlines walkable city rules.

Joe Borgia of the National Basketball Association on referees. Caroline Criado Perez on her book "Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men". Andrew Simpson, animal trainer, on being a wolf whisperer. Gregory Clark of Univ of Utah and Keven Walgamott on a new prosthetic arm that can move and feel the same as a human arm. Brenda Bowen of Univ of Utah on the Salt Flats. Aaron Carroll of Indiana Univ on research bias.

Guest speakers include Bjorn Neumann, Gary Saul Morson, Gregory Clark, Mark Wilf, Dr. Alan Gwertzman, Dr. Charles Schwartz, Stuart Greenbaum, Michael Flamm, and Arnette Heintze.

Addressing the Fear in Our Lives Scott C. Esplin begins with "Daddy, Is Jesus Real?" In the second half, we hear from Gregory Clark on "Some Lessons on Faith and Fear."

Author G. Scott Clemons speaks about Aldus Manutius, the printer who saved Western classics. Scott Denning of Colorado State University explains the sources of oxygen on the planet. Gregory Clark of the University of Utah discusses robotic hands. Author Julie Zickerfoose rescues wildlife. Author Gregory Wawro of Colombia University explains where the filibuster came from. James Baker speaks on DNA and genealogy.

Music Industry Lawyer Erin Jacobson on music masters. James Gaskin of BYU on being polite with your digital assistant. Denise Pope of Stanford University on back to school tips for parents. Michael Platt and Danita Platt of Michaels Desserts on baking your own happiness. David Kaye of the University of California on internet hate speech. Gregory Clark of the University of Utah and Keven Walgamott on a new prosthetic arm that can move and feel the same as a human arm.

Rod Arquette Show Daily Rundown - Monday, July 15, 20194:35 pm: Julie Kelly, Senior Contributor to American Greatness joins the program for a conversation about what she says is the crumbling of the Never Trump-Left Alliance and its failure to produce a viable 2020 candidate5:05 pm: President Trump doubled down today on his weekend tweets criticizing four Democratic congresswomen, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, saying they might be communists and they are free to leave the country. Rod takes your reaction at 888-570-80106:05 pm: Erik Paulsen, Honorary Co-Chairman of Pass USMCA Coalition, joins the show to discuss his recent Deseret News op-ed piece in which he outlines why he believes the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement will fuel growth across America’s economy6:20 pm: Gregory Clark, an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Utah, joins the show to discuss why he says the school owes the family of slain student Lauren McCluskey an apology6:35 pm: Gibb Dyer, a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at Brigham Young University, joins the show to discuss the decrease in “family capital” in the United States and the reasons behind the problem

Today's guest is economic historian Gregory Clark, and our topic is England's New Poor Law of 1834. Gregory and his co-author, Marianne E. Page, wrote a paper on the topic entitled "Welfare reform, 1834: Did the New Poor Law in England produce significant economic gains?" Spoiler alert: It didn't. The English Old Poor Law, which before 1834 provided welfare to the elderly, children, the improvident, and the unfortunate, was a bête noire of the new discipline of Political Economy. Smith, Bentham, Malthus, and Ricardo all claimed it created significant social costs and increased rather than reduced poverty. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, drafted by Political Economists, cuts payments sharply. Because local rules on eligibility and provision varied greatly before the 1834 reform, we can estimate the social costs of the extensive welfare provision of the Old Poor Law. Surprisingly there is no evidence of any of the alleged social costs that prompted the harsh treatment of the poor after 1834. Political economy, it seems, was born in sin.  

Sep. 25At Bethlehem, Pa. (Facebook Fightnight Live):ADVERTISEMENTAnthony Mercado vs. Victor Vazquez, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsStephen Fulton vs. Esteban Aquino, 8 rounds, featherweightsRaeese Aleem vs. Alcides Santiago, 6 rounds, junior featherweightsMoney Powell IV vs. Josue Obando, 6 rounds, middleweightsJoe Hanks vs. Terrance Marbra, 6 rounds, heavyweightsErik Spring vs. James Robinson, 6 rounds, junior middleweightsColby Madison vs. Nicoy Clark, 6 rounds, heavyweightsKenny Robles vs. Corey Gulley, 6 rounds, junior welterweightsMichael Coffie vs. Curtis Head, 6 rounds, heavyweightsMartino Jules vs. Felix Sosa, 4 rounds, featherweightsAt Tokyo, Japan:Hiroto Kyoguchi vs. Tibo Monabesa, 10 rounds, junior flyweightsSep. 28At Oakland, Calif. (ESPN+):Jose Uzcategui vs. Ezequiel Maderna, 10 rounds, light heavyweightsJerwin Ancajas vs. Alejandro Santiago, 12 rounds, for Ancajas' IBF junior bantamweight titleRico Ramos vs. Daniel Olea, 10 rounds, featherweightsGenesis Servania vs. Carlos Carlson, 10 rounds, featherweightsJoshua Greer Jr. vs. Giovanni Delgado, 10 rounds, junior featherweightsAskhat Ualikhanov vs. Angel Hernandez, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsJanibek Alimkhanuly vs. Carlos Galvan, 8 rounds, super middleweightsChristopher Zavala vs. Dominic Blanco, 4 rounds, junior lightweightsDerry Noble vs. Edson Noria, 4 rounds, bantamweightsJustin Cardona vs. Arturo Izaguirre, 4 rounds, lightweightsAt Temecula, Calif. (Showtime):Devin Haney vs. Juan Carlos Burgos, 10 rounds, lightweightsThomas Mattice vs. Zhora Hamazaryan, rematch, 8 rounds, lightweightsCem Kilic vs. Deandre Ware, 8 rounds, super middleweightsReginald Rouzan vs. Robert Miller, 4 rounds, light heavyweightsDarren Cunningham vs. Saul Hernandes, 4 or 6 rounds, featherweightsAdrian Gutierrez vs. Lennard Davis, 4 or 6 rounds, welterweightsRoberto Meza vs. Gabriel Rodriguez, 4 or 6 rounds, featherweightsRicardo Valdovinos vs. Kevin Shacks, 6 rounds, junior welterweightsAnthony Franco vs. David Payne, 6 rounds, middleweightsAt Jeddah, Saudi Arabia:World Boxing Super Series final: George Groves vs. Callum Smith, 12 rounds, for Groves' WBA super middleweight titleChris Eubank Jr. vs. JJ McDonagh, 10 rounds, super middleweightsDarren Surtees vs. Kane Baker, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsMikael Lawal vs. Tamas Kozma, 6 rounds, cruiserweightsAliu Bamidele Lasisi vs. Artid Bamrungauea, 8 rounds, bantamweightsKem Ljungquist vs. Mourad Omar, 8 rounds, heavyweightsZuhayr Al Qahtani vs. Giorgi Gviniashvili, 4 rounds, junior welterweightsAt Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico:Wilfredo Mendez vs. Axel Aragon, 10 rounds, strawweightsJean Carlos Torres vs. Luis Joel Gonzalez, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsJohn Correa vs. Victor Abreu, 6 rounds, welterweightsAntonio Vargas vs. TBA, 6 rounds, junior featherweightsJean Rivera vs. Emmanuel Roman, 4 rounds, welterweightsAlfredo Cruz vs. Louis Rios, 4 rounds, junior bantamweightsAngel Marrero vs. Nick Steven Torres, 4 rounds, junior welterweightMagnanamai Baez vs. Genesis Lopez, 4 rounds, female strawweightsAt Hollywood, Fla.:Logan Yoon vs. John Renteria, 10 rounds, junior welterweightsMussa Tursyngaliyev vs. Deivi Bassa, 10 rounds, featherweightsLivan Navarro vs. Armando Alvarez, 10 rounds, welterweightsDerrieck Cuevas vs. Silverio Ortiz, 10 rounds, welterweightsAt Madrid, Spain:Marc Vidal vs. Kiko Martinez, rematch, 12 rounds, for Vidal's European featherweight titleAt Changsha, China:Wulan Tuolehazi vs. Jayr Raquinel, 12 rounds, flyweightsZhimin Wang vs. Hero Tito, 10 rounds, lightweightsZhang Zhilei vs. Donald Haynesworth, 10 rounds, heavyweightsSep. 29At Indio, Calif. (Facebook Watch):Jorge Linares vs. Abner Cotto, 12 rounds, junior welterweightsRomero Duno vs. Ezequiel Aviles, 8 rounds, lightweightsTravell Mazion vs. Allan Zavala, 8 rounds, junior middleweightsOscar Duarte vs. Roger Gutierrez, 8 rounds, lightweightsElnur Abduraimov vs. Aaron Hollis, 4 rounds, lightweightsAt Mexico City (beIN Sports Espanol):Jose Carlos Paz vs. Jorge Paez Jr., rematch, 10 rounds, middleweightsAt New York:Edgar Berlanga vs. Gregory Clark, 6 rounds, super middleweightsJude Franklin vs. Danny Flores, 6 rounds, junior lightweightsMelissa St. Vil vs. Mayra Hernandez, 8 rounds, female junior lightweightsBakhodir Jalolov vs. Thomas Hawkins, 6 rounds, heavyweightsKhalid Twaiti vs. Carlos Ramirez, 4 rounds, featherweightsJosue Vargas vs. Maynard Allison, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsMathew Gonzalez vs. TBA, 4 rounds, junior middleweightsZachary Ochoa vs. TBA, 6 rounds, junior welterweightsPedro Gonzalez vs. Alexander Serna, 4 rounds, welterweightsJunior Younan vs. Evert Bravo, 6 rounds, light heavyweightsGiovanni Scuderi vs. Charles Johnson, 4 rounds, cruiserweightsJustin Biggs vs. Noe Lozano, 6 rounds, junior middleweightsAt Santander, Spain:Zakaria Attou vs. Sergio Garcia, 12 rounds, for Attou's European junior middleweight titleAt Bracknell, England:Luther Clay vs. Yahya Tlaouziti, 8 rounds, welterweightsNick Webb vs. TBA, 6 rounds, heavyweightsNaylor Ball vs. vs. TBA, 6 rounds, heavyweightsGeorge Lamport vs. TBA, 6 rounds, junior middleweightsRohan Date vs. TBA, 6 rounds, welterweightsDerek Renfrew vs. TBA, 6 rounds, super middleweightsAaron Collins vs. Ricky Rose, 4 rounds, welterweightsAndre Grant vs. Taka Bembere, 4 rounds, junior lightweightsAt Cornwall, Ontario:Albert Onolunose vs. Patrice Volny, 10 rounds, middleweightsBrandon Brewer vs. TBA, 10 rounds, middleweightsAt Singapore:Muhamad Ridhwan vs. Paulus Ambunda, 12 rounds, junior featherweightsSep. 30At Ontario, Calif. (Fox Sports 1/Fox Deportes):Victor Ortiz vs. John Molina Jr., 12 rounds, welterweightsBrandon Figueroa vs. Oscar Escandon, 10 rounds, featherweightsJoe Joyce vs. Iago Kiladze, 8 rounds, heavyweightsKarlos Balderas vs. TBA, 6 rounds, lightweightsEfe Ajagba vs. TBA, 6 rounds, heavyweightsJoey Spencer vs. TBA, 4 rounds, junior middleweightsJames DeGale vs. TBA, 8 rounds, light heavyweights

Sep. 25At Bethlehem, Pa. (Facebook Fightnight Live):ADVERTISEMENTAnthony Mercado vs. Victor Vazquez, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsStephen Fulton vs. Esteban Aquino, 8 rounds, featherweightsRaeese Aleem vs. Alcides Santiago, 6 rounds, junior featherweightsMoney Powell IV vs. Josue Obando, 6 rounds, middleweightsJoe Hanks vs. Terrance Marbra, 6 rounds, heavyweightsErik Spring vs. James Robinson, 6 rounds, junior middleweightsColby Madison vs. Nicoy Clark, 6 rounds, heavyweightsKenny Robles vs. Corey Gulley, 6 rounds, junior welterweightsMichael Coffie vs. Curtis Head, 6 rounds, heavyweightsMartino Jules vs. Felix Sosa, 4 rounds, featherweightsAt Tokyo, Japan:Hiroto Kyoguchi vs. Tibo Monabesa, 10 rounds, junior flyweightsSep. 28At Oakland, Calif. (ESPN+):Jose Uzcategui vs. Ezequiel Maderna, 10 rounds, light heavyweightsJerwin Ancajas vs. Alejandro Santiago, 12 rounds, for Ancajas' IBF junior bantamweight titleRico Ramos vs. Daniel Olea, 10 rounds, featherweightsGenesis Servania vs. Carlos Carlson, 10 rounds, featherweightsJoshua Greer Jr. vs. Giovanni Delgado, 10 rounds, junior featherweightsAskhat Ualikhanov vs. Angel Hernandez, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsJanibek Alimkhanuly vs. Carlos Galvan, 8 rounds, super middleweightsChristopher Zavala vs. Dominic Blanco, 4 rounds, junior lightweightsDerry Noble vs. Edson Noria, 4 rounds, bantamweightsJustin Cardona vs. Arturo Izaguirre, 4 rounds, lightweightsAt Temecula, Calif. (Showtime):Devin Haney vs. Juan Carlos Burgos, 10 rounds, lightweightsThomas Mattice vs. Zhora Hamazaryan, rematch, 8 rounds, lightweightsCem Kilic vs. Deandre Ware, 8 rounds, super middleweightsReginald Rouzan vs. Robert Miller, 4 rounds, light heavyweightsDarren Cunningham vs. Saul Hernandes, 4 or 6 rounds, featherweightsAdrian Gutierrez vs. Lennard Davis, 4 or 6 rounds, welterweightsRoberto Meza vs. Gabriel Rodriguez, 4 or 6 rounds, featherweightsRicardo Valdovinos vs. Kevin Shacks, 6 rounds, junior welterweightsAnthony Franco vs. David Payne, 6 rounds, middleweightsAt Jeddah, Saudi Arabia:World Boxing Super Series final: George Groves vs. Callum Smith, 12 rounds, for Groves' WBA super middleweight titleChris Eubank Jr. vs. JJ McDonagh, 10 rounds, super middleweightsDarren Surtees vs. Kane Baker, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsMikael Lawal vs. Tamas Kozma, 6 rounds, cruiserweightsAliu Bamidele Lasisi vs. Artid Bamrungauea, 8 rounds, bantamweightsKem Ljungquist vs. Mourad Omar, 8 rounds, heavyweightsZuhayr Al Qahtani vs. Giorgi Gviniashvili, 4 rounds, junior welterweightsAt Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico:Wilfredo Mendez vs. Axel Aragon, 10 rounds, strawweightsJean Carlos Torres vs. Luis Joel Gonzalez, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsJohn Correa vs. Victor Abreu, 6 rounds, welterweightsAntonio Vargas vs. TBA, 6 rounds, junior featherweightsJean Rivera vs. Emmanuel Roman, 4 rounds, welterweightsAlfredo Cruz vs. Louis Rios, 4 rounds, junior bantamweightsAngel Marrero vs. Nick Steven Torres, 4 rounds, junior welterweightMagnanamai Baez vs. Genesis Lopez, 4 rounds, female strawweightsAt Hollywood, Fla.:Logan Yoon vs. John Renteria, 10 rounds, junior welterweightsMussa Tursyngaliyev vs. Deivi Bassa, 10 rounds, featherweightsLivan Navarro vs. Armando Alvarez, 10 rounds, welterweightsDerrieck Cuevas vs. Silverio Ortiz, 10 rounds, welterweightsAt Madrid, Spain:Marc Vidal vs. Kiko Martinez, rematch, 12 rounds, for Vidal's European featherweight titleAt Changsha, China:Wulan Tuolehazi vs. Jayr Raquinel, 12 rounds, flyweightsZhimin Wang vs. Hero Tito, 10 rounds, lightweightsZhang Zhilei vs. Donald Haynesworth, 10 rounds, heavyweightsSep. 29At Indio, Calif. (Facebook Watch):Jorge Linares vs. Abner Cotto, 12 rounds, junior welterweightsRomero Duno vs. Ezequiel Aviles, 8 rounds, lightweightsTravell Mazion vs. Allan Zavala, 8 rounds, junior middleweightsOscar Duarte vs. Roger Gutierrez, 8 rounds, lightweightsElnur Abduraimov vs. Aaron Hollis, 4 rounds, lightweightsAt Mexico City (beIN Sports Espanol):Jose Carlos Paz vs. Jorge Paez Jr., rematch, 10 rounds, middleweightsAt New York:Edgar Berlanga vs. Gregory Clark, 6 rounds, super middleweightsJude Franklin vs. Danny Flores, 6 rounds, junior lightweightsMelissa St. Vil vs. Mayra Hernandez, 8 rounds, female junior lightweightsBakhodir Jalolov vs. Thomas Hawkins, 6 rounds, heavyweightsKhalid Twaiti vs. Carlos Ramirez, 4 rounds, featherweightsJosue Vargas vs. Maynard Allison, 8 rounds, junior welterweightsMathew Gonzalez vs. TBA, 4 rounds, junior middleweightsZachary Ochoa vs. TBA, 6 rounds, junior welterweightsPedro Gonzalez vs. Alexander Serna, 4 rounds, welterweightsJunior Younan vs. Evert Bravo, 6 rounds, light heavyweightsGiovanni Scuderi vs. Charles Johnson, 4 rounds, cruiserweightsJustin Biggs vs. Noe Lozano, 6 rounds, junior middleweightsAt Santander, Spain:Zakaria Attou vs. Sergio Garcia, 12 rounds, for Attou's European junior middleweight titleAt Bracknell, England:Luther Clay vs. Yahya Tlaouziti, 8 rounds, welterweightsNick Webb vs. TBA, 6 rounds, heavyweightsNaylor Ball vs. vs. TBA, 6 rounds, heavyweightsGeorge Lamport vs. TBA, 6 rounds, junior middleweightsRohan Date vs. TBA, 6 rounds, welterweightsDerek Renfrew vs. TBA, 6 rounds, super middleweightsAaron Collins vs. Ricky Rose, 4 rounds, welterweightsAndre Grant vs. Taka Bembere, 4 rounds, junior lightweightsAt Cornwall, Ontario:Albert Onolunose vs. Patrice Volny, 10 rounds, middleweightsBrandon Brewer vs. TBA, 10 rounds, middleweightsAt Singapore:Muhamad Ridhwan vs. Paulus Ambunda, 12 rounds, junior featherweightsSep. 30At Ontario, Calif. (Fox Sports 1/Fox Deportes):Victor Ortiz vs. John Molina Jr., 12 rounds, welterweightsBrandon Figueroa vs. Oscar Escandon, 10 rounds, featherweightsJoe Joyce vs. Iago Kiladze, 8 rounds, heavyweightsKarlos Balderas vs. TBA, 6 rounds, lightweightsEfe Ajagba vs. TBA, 6 rounds, heavyweightsJoey Spencer vs. TBA, 4 rounds, junior middleweightsJames DeGale vs. TBA, 8 rounds, light heavyweights

Sendet uns Audiokommentare per Whatspapp, Telegramm, Signal oder Threema: 0177 899 535 9 Die Kommentare der Hörerinnen und Links zu den Quellen findet ihr auf www.mikrooekonomen.de. Dort auch Shownotes mit Verlinkungen, Bildern und ggf. Videos. Liebe Hörerinnen, Liebe Hörer, die Mikroökonomen sind ein unabhängiger Podcast über Wirtschaft, der, wenn die Zeit vorhanden ist, bemüht ist die Themen auszurecherchieren. Wir wollen keine Werbung machen und dauerhaft ein unabhängiges Informationsangebot aufbauen, dass die Dinge anders macht. Möglich wird dies erst durch Euch. Vielen Dank dafür! Ihr könnt uns direkt unterstützen: Herack, Marco IBAN: DE61 4306 0967 2065 2209 02 BIC: GENODEM1GLS oder... http://mikrooekonomen.de/spenden/ *** Challo *** Nachklapp Generationen-Latenz - Kommentar von Franz - What is the True Rate of Social Mobility? Surnames and Social Mobility in England, 1800-2012 by Gregory Clark & Neil Cummins (PDF) *** Wirtschaftsgeschichte - This Time Is Different - Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff *** Die großen US-Hightechs verdienen prächtig - Handelsblatt: Amazon greift nach dem Börsenthron - Heise: Apple-Zahlen: Doch besser als erwartet - Handelsblatt: Google-Mutter Alphabet steigert Gewinn um 73 Prozent – was dahinter steckt (Google Steuerquote halbiert; von 20 auf 11%) - Macwelt: Apple muss an Irland 13 Mrd. Euro zurückzahlen – Irland stimmt zu *** EU Digitalsteuer gescheitert - Handelsblatt: Krachende Niederlage für Macrons Digitalsteuer - EU Steueroasenliste: Es begann mit 40 Ländern, öffentlich wurde aber eine erste Version mit 17 Ländern von denen am Ende nur 9 übrig blieben *** Nestlé legt Vittel trocken - The Telegraph: French town of Vittel suffering water shortages as Nestle accused of 'overusing' resources *** Westafrikanische Währungsunion *** Hörer-Frage von Julius - Wikipedia: Westafrikanische Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion - Die UEMOA und die CFA-Zone: Eine neue Kooperations-Kultur im frankophonen Afrika? - Definition “fester Wechselkurs” im Glossar der deutschen Bundesbank - Für Weiterleser: Wikipedia: Theorie optimaler Währungsräume *** Picks - Hannah pickt einen Podcast: piqd Thema: Wie steht es um die soziale Gerechtigkeit in Deutschland - Ulrich passt. Intro-Music: Title: “Femme Fatale: 30a”; Composer: Jack Waldenmaier; Publisher: Music Bakery Publishing (BMI)

Nothing changed the course of human history as much as the industrial revolution. Yet its cause is a mystery: Why did it occur in the late 1700s, and not sooner (or later)? Why did it occur in Britain, a relatively small and geographically isolated country, and not somewhere much bigger like China, or elsewhere in Northern Europe like the Netherlands? This episode features economic historian Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms and one of the leading scholars of the industrial revolution. Greg and Julia explore different theories, as well as the epistemological challenges of answering this kind of causal question about history.

  Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke by Gregory Clark Welcome to Mere rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, terms and movements that shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and if you’ve like to get in touch with me you can email me at mererhetroicpodcast @gmail.com or tweet out atmererhetoricked. Today on Mere Rhetoric I have the weird experience of doing an episode on someone who isn’t just living, but someone who was my mentor. If you’ve ever had to do a book report on a book your teacher wrote, you understand the feeling. But I really do admire the work of Gregory Clark, especially his seminal work in Burkean Americana. Clark is was been the editor of the Rhetoric Society Quarterly for eight years and recently became the President Elect of the Rhetoric Society in America, which means, among other things, he’s responsible for the RSA conference, like the one I podcasted about earlier this summer. He also wrote a fantastic book called Rhetorical Landscapes inAmerica, that became the foundation for a lot of work that looks that the rhetoricality of things like museums, landscapes and even people. In the final chapter of Gregory Clark’s Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke, he poses the question “where are we now?” (147). We’ve certainly been many wonderful places. In Rhetorical Landscapes, Clark has packed up Kenneth Burke’s identification theory of rhetoric and applied it to the national landscapes of America. Clark suggests that our identity as Americans comes, largely, from our experiences with common landmarks. To demonstrate this power of Burke’s concept of identification, Clark has taken us through more than a century of American tourism, from New York City in the early 19th century to Shaker Country to the Lincoln Memorial Highway. We’ve been convinced by Clark of the rhetorical power of these places to create a national identity. We’ve seen how mountains and parks and even people can evoke a feeling of identification. It’s been a long, lovely ramble by the time we get to Clark’s question. Reading his words, one can’t escape the image of a wanderer who, having ambled through one delightful landscape after another finds himself suddenly disoriented as to his current location. Clark himself describes his project as “a ramble” and it is this apt description that encapsulates both the dizzying strengths of the book (147). Surely one of the most striking strengths of this ramble is the remarkable company we keep. Clark has brought the human and extremely likable specter of Kenneth Burke along for this meander through American tourism. The Burke of this book has not only provided us with the language of identification in our community of travelers to “change the identities that act and interact with common purpose;” he’s consented to come along with us (3). Clark presents Burke as one who was “himself a persistent tourist in America” (5). Burke very charmingly has written about his traveling “’go   go    going West, the wife and I/.../ “Go West, elderly couple”’” (qtd. Clark 7). When Burke’s theories of national identification are presented to us chapter-by-chapter, we enjoy their application in the presence of a critic who is not cynically immune to the process of identification, only acutely aware of it. Presented as accessibly and understandable, Clark has written us a Burke we can road trip with. If Clark has presented for us a clear, insightful and accessible version of Burke through this rambleit is because of his own remarkable prowess as a teacher. He is willing to let Burke be a fellow-traveler with us and he is willing, himself, to join us personally in the ramble. We readers are fortunate to have Clark with us, just as much as we are to have his clear explanations of what Burke would say if the deceased were alongside us. Just as Burke is not immune to the seduction of American tourism, Clark gives us ample insight into how the American landscape affected his own identification as an American as a child. In the chapter on Yellowstone, Clark describes how, as a child from “a marginal place in America” he had been taught that “America was in faraway places like New York or Washington, D. C., or Chicago or California” (69). When Clark first went to Yellowstone National Park, he noticed the variety of license plates in the parking lot and could suddenly feel “at home among all those strangers in a new sort of way—at home in America” (69). While Clark gives us every possible reason to respect him as a serious, meticulous scholar of both rhetoric and American tourism history, he never lets us forget that he, like Burke, like us, is also another tourist in awe of the places we define as quintessentially American. With knowledgeable and accessible teachers like Burke and Clark at our sides, we readers feel comfortable seeing how we, too, fit into this landscape. While the scope of the book covers the extremely formidable years of American nation-making (from the days of “these” United States to when the country is solidly coalesced into “the” United States), the institutions then established are still foremost in the psyche of Americans of all generations. Readers of Rhetorical Landscapes in America will be hard-pressed to read a chapter without immediately applying the Burkean theories to their own individual experiences with these ensigns of American identity. Have you been to NYC? Have you been told that you have to see Yellowstone? All of these places are part of how we structure our American identity. Where are we going? Working topically, vaguely chronologically, Clark and Burke accompany us through New York City, Shaker country, Yellowstone, The Lincoln Highway, the Panama-Pacific world’s fair and the Grand Canyon. It’s almost like a car game on a long road trip: okay, what do these six things have in common? While each of these locations lead themselves to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a touring American (eg, in the chapter Shaker country we discover how guides to the region have lead to identification “not with the Shakers, but with the other touring Americans who gather to wonder at the spectacle the Shakers create” and thus objectified Shakers), (52). Including a city, a people, a park, a road, an event and a building in a park could arguably be a way to expand the definition of the “landscape.” Why are we rambling through these American landscapes with Burke and Clark, after all? The argument appears to be, after all, to situate a Big Rhetoric theory of identification into a series of Big Rhetoric artifacts—so big, in fact, that it includes mountains and highways. Those who are resistant to wholeheartedly adopting Burke’s expansion of rhetoric to include not just persuasion, but also identification, will find Clark’s scope of artifacts as unconvincing; those who are frosty towards opening the canon of rhetoric past the spoken word, and past the written word into the very land we travel will bristle at the idea of giving something as Big Rhetoric as a city, a people, a landscape a “meaning.” These two groups of reader are by-and-large impervious to the convincing and meticulous readings that Clark provides of these locations. They’ve already made up their minds and aren’t likely to change them, despite the quality of Clark’s argument. Clark and Burke are observant, meticulous and personable traveling companions, This is an excellent book, one that opens up rhetoric to more than just written texts, but something that can encompass views and groups of people as well. I love thinking about the implications of place on national identity and I’m not the only one: scholars from Diane Davis to Ekaterina Haskin have taken up the idea of how a tour of places and spaces and people can create an argument for national identity. So when you come back from your summer vacation this year, think about not just what you saw, but who it made you become.    

Dewey Part Deuce   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric. Or maybe welcome back, because last week we talked about John Dewey and today we’re talking about John Dewey again. You don’t have to go back and listen to the last week’s episode on Dewey and aesthetics, but if you like this, Dewey part the Deuce, then you migh want to go check out the previous episode on Dewey and the artful life. Today, today thought,we get to talk about Dewey’s political and educational contributions.   Dewey was a huge fan of democracy and of education for democracy. He said, “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous." One scholar summarized Dewey’s politics in this way: “First, Dewey believed that democracy is an ethical ideal rather than merely a political arrangement. Second, he considered participation, not representation, the essence of democracy. Third, he insisted on the harmony between democracy and the scientific method: ever-expanding and self-critical communities of inquiry, operating on pragmatic principles and constantly revising their beliefs in light of new evidence, provided Dewey with a model for democratic decision making…Finally, Dewey called for extending democracy, conceived as an ethical project, from politics to industry and society.” Dewey was big on democracy. this idea, especially about participation in democracy instead of just representation inspired much of his writing in education. The kind of progressive education that Dewey endorsed was education for democracy, education that focused on making student empathetic and engaged citizens.   Dewey’s most articulate thinking about engaged democracy comes as most good thinking does: in response to an interlocutor whose ideas make our blood boil. For Dewey this was Walter Lippmann. the famous Lippmann-Dewer debates begne in 1922 when Walter Lippmann wrote s book called Public Opinion. In Public Opinion, Lippman says that democracy is demo-crazy--public opinion is actually shaped by adverstisers and demogogues who can manipulate the public into thinking what ever they want. The people as a whole can’t make any decision that hasn’t already been made by sleezy Madison Ave. types. So Lippman says that instead the government should be led by experts, preferably scientitic and objective types who would be immune to propaganda. Instead of democracy romantically conceived, he suggested representation and political experts.   Well this got Dewey’s goat and in The Public and its Problems, he responded to Lippmann’s view of democracy. Instead of relying on experts for democracy, Dewey recommends that “"it is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations; what is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns." Sure, he admitted, there could be ignorant publics swayed by propaganda, but the solution was not to toss the baby with the sludgewater--education was what the populace needed if they were to engage in participatory democracy.   The Dewey Lippmann Debate has gotten a lot of press from recent rhetoricians. Search for it on Google scholar and you’ll find over a thousand entries since 2011. In the 2008 meeting of the Rhetorical Society of America, a “lively panel” discussion took place where, according to one witness “Jean Goodwin effectively advanced journalist Walter Lippmann’s critique of the “omnicompetent” citizen against Robert Asen’s John Dewey, who represented hope for collaborative dialogue.” And in the most recent meeting of the Modern Language Association, another scholar pointed out how the Lippmann-Dewey debate relates to the current expert-laden political rhetoric. A recent collection of essays on called Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice, Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, eds. also reminds us of the perrential importance of asking ourselves “Are our citizens trained for democracy? Can they be?” The debate, so it seems, continues.   The kind of education you would need to particpate in democracy includes not just information about the value of nuclear energy or the political history of the middle east: you need to have some sense of how you fit in to a democracy, what the moral obligations you have and what the society can provide you. For Dewey, America’s ideal model of civic engagement wasn’t a selfish, me-first mentality, but neither was it entirely collective and socialist. In Individualism Old and New, Dewey says it’s time to move past the old, rugged, wild-west homesteader kind of individualism that theAmericans he was writing to could possibly remember, or at least could remember stories of their parents and grandparents. while his audience of early 20th century Americans idealized that kind of independence, they were also increasingly aware of how to connect. The experience of world war have taught them that “Most social unifications come about in response to external pressure” (11) and “personal participation in the development of a shared culture” (17). Defining that interconnectivity against the struggles and hardships of war and poverty may seem intutive but the move from frontier rugged individualism to an individualism that recognizes our interconnectivitity is at the core of Dewey’s political philosophy.“Each of us needs to cultivate his own garden. But there is no fence around this garden” (82).   Now just so you know that last week’s episode on the aesthetic of Dewey wasn’t totally separated fromt his sort of thing, Dewey also talked about how that “shared sulture” happens through art, and how this art educates, cultivating the skills that are necessary for democracy: “The art which our times needs in order to create a new type of individuality is the art which, being sensitive to the technology and science that are the moving force of our time, will envisage the expansive, the social culture which they may be made to serve” (49). Or, another way, “The work of art is the truly individual thing” (81). Even though this is the end of our Dewey Duo, if you have thoughts about John Dewey’s influence in rhetoric, art, politics, philosophy, or any of the many wonderful things he was invovled in, drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com. Until then, go cultivate that fenceless garden, recognizing the capacity of those around you to contribute to a democracy made whole.

Kenneth Burke       Welcome to Mere rhetoric a  podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have shaped the rhetorical world. I’m mary h and today we’re talking about KB       Burkey was a major rhetorican who lived May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993. Also, his middle name was Duva and his grandson wrote this song. [Cat’s in the Cradle]       But Burke didn’t always want to be a rhetorican. In fact, rhetoric was kind of out of favor as an academic discipline when Burke was coming of intellectual age: he wanted to be a poet, live in Greenwich Village and be part of the Marxist bohemians. But events conspired to develop Burke as rhetorican. For one thing, he got the Marxists mad at him when he suggested the word “people” as a replacement for “worker.” Also, his poetry wasn’t taking off. That made him begin to move away from politics and production of poetry and start thinking more about criticism.       His first critical work counter-statement is still powerful today as a response to new criticism and the artforart’ssake crowd. Here he demonstrates the power of art on an audience, the rhetoricality of art. In Gregory Clark’s words, here he is “less concerned with seeing the arts thrive than helping the people on the other end of the arts” as form is received by the reader. He developed his aesthetic-rhetorical connections when he wrote extensive on how literature is a sort of "equipment for living," giving people the models of action, wisdom and expectation that help them deal with reality.       From this auspicious start, Burke’s importance to rhetorical studies only took off more. His re-definition of rhetoric as “a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” broke rhetoric out of the aristotlian understanding of rhetoric that had dominated for millennia.       Burke’s A Grammar of Motives  has as its epigraph, ad bellum purificandum -- toward the purification of war. He supposedly handwrote this saying mounted over his windowframe where he worked in an obscure New Jersey farmhouse, far from the typical academic hubbub. It’s possible that what he meant by a purification of war is that according to burke scholars James P. Zappen, S. Michael Halloran, and Scott A. Wible’s gloss of A Grammar of Motives “studying "the competitive use of the coöperative," helps us to "take delight in the Human Barnyard," on the one hand, and to "transcend it by appreciation," on the other.” Transending binaries was a big deal for Burke.       One of his biggest ideas is the “burkian third term.” Let’s imagine a war. A sandwich war. Say you really, really want tuna fish sandwiches for lunch, and I think tuna is gross (I don’t, but that’s just what makes it hypothetical). I want peanut butter and marshmellow sandwiches for lunch, but you think they’re too high in calories. We can argue all day, through lunch, and on empty stomachs about which sandwich is better, but Burke would remind us that there is a “third term” which unites us: sandwiches. We can both see eye-to eye about sandwiches. The ablity for people to connect ad divide over similarities and differences was fascinating to Burke.       In fact, that leads us nicely to another of his main ideas: identification. In A Rhetoric of Motives (not to be confused with the Grammar of Motives or the never-published Symbolic of Motives), Burke describes how symbols don’t just persuade people to do things—they also persuade people to an attitude (50). When I tell you, “well, at least we both agree on sandwiches for lunch,” we haven’t changed anything about our inablitity to choose a sandwich, but maybe I’ve changed your attitude—to me, to our lunch, to arguments in general. If I’m able to “talk your language by speech, gesture, tonality, order image, attitude idea” I’m doing what Burke calls “identifiying [my] ways with yours.” In that moment, we become consubstantial: part of me is you, and part of you is me as we engage in this identification. We are “both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial” (21).         Another big idea is Burke’s pentad. This way to interpret motives and intention is described in depth in the grammar of motives. Then pentad is this: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. Later, Burke would say that he wished he could had added “attitude” as a sixth-ad. The eample burke gives is this: say a guy trips you with his legs on the bus: do you get angry? You might But if the guy had a broken leg, that changes the agent and the agency—maybe he couldn’t help it. And if the purpose was not to humiliate you, but an accident, you might not think it an insult. The pentad can impact this human action’s communication: was getting tripped a deliberate rhetorical insult or wasn’t it?       The last big idea of Burke’s is the terministic screen. The way we use language, especially poetic language, determines how we see the reality against us. If we’re used to seeing the world through certain terms: war, sandwich, bus, we’ll only see those terms. The terms, to use a catch phrase, both reflect and deflect the reality around us.       This is only a brief introduction to Kenneth Burke, and there’s lots more to say about him and his influence on Rhetoric. I recommend checking out kbjournal.org, a free resource of Kenneth burke scholarship for more information. You also might check out of the work of some of the biggest Burke scholars: Jack Selzer at Penn State, Ann George at Texas Christian University, Gregory Clark at Brigham Young University, Elizabeth Weiser at Ohio State.       If you have experiences with Kenny B (as I think we can now call him) or if you would like to have another podcast about one of Burke’s theories, please email me at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com       Until next time, remember even if you become a big-time rhetorician, you should still  take time play ball with your boy in the backyard.  

    Henry Hume, Lord Kames (1696-1782)       Henry Hume, Lord Kames was a distant relative as well as friend to David Hume, although they spell their names differently.  David Hume changed the spelling so that his English readers would pronounce it properly.  Henry Hume kept the original spelling H-O-M-E.               Unlike David Hume, Lord Kames did not go to university nor even have the benefit of a sojourn to France to broaden his education. Much more like Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennet, Kames was born the third son out of nine children to a heavily indebted but well-respected family.  He was educated at home with his siblings and was apprenticed as a solicitor.  Unlike Lizzie Bennet, who faces limitations due to her gender, Kames was able to participate in a number of philosophical societies and gentlemen’s clubs.  He further expanded his knowledge through jobs such as Curator of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh which gave him access to a wealth of books.        There are a number of factors contributing to Kames success.  Clearly two of these factors were his talent and his drive.  Another was the luck of a long life.  Kames was born in 1696 and lived through much of the eighteenth century to the ripe age of 86.  Contemporaries commented on his remarkable good health in old age, the longevity of his memory, and his feisty personality.  Kames is quoted as saying of old age “why should I sit with my finger in my cheek waiting for death to take me?’  He did not specify which cheek.        After his apprenticeship he worked his way up through the judicial ranks to become a highly respected judge, which is how he acquired the title Lord—it was not a hereditary title but an honor associated with his work as a judge.  Lord Kames again like Lizzie Bennett benefited from a lucky marriage.  He waited until age 47 to finally decide to marry.  His bride, Agatha Drummond, an attractive socialite eleven years his junior came from the wealthy Blair Drummond family.  James Boswell’s journals praise her for her looks, conversational skills and sense of humor—high praise from Bozzie.  Agatha’s original marriage portion was a moderate £1000 without any prospects due to an older brother with a family of his own.  However in 1766, Agatha unexpectedly became heiress to the entire Blair Drummond estate upon the unfortunate death of her brother and his son.  Thereafter, she and her children styled themselves Home-Drummond to acknowledge her family’s legacy and her husband Kames actively worked to enjoy and care for the sumptuous estate.       The inheritance impacted Kames’ work by providing a country writing retreat.  He was a prolific writer with 8 legal histories, plus books on diverse subjects like agriculture, and political science.  His book with the greatest impact on the history of rhetoric and the subject of our talk today was Elements of Criticism.  Published in 1761, Elements of Criticism brought the Enlightenment’s “scientific” view of human nature to the critical evaluation of the fine arts.  I would like to highlight how this interesting eighteenth century text connects to some very recent conversations about multimodal, visual and spatial rhetorics.                 Elements of Criticism made a splash and was a bit controversial due to its expansive inclusion of the visual arts with belle lettres.  Developing a theory of criticism for the fine artsrequired Kames to take sides in debates about human nature, beauty, and human nature.  He is participating in these with writers like Frances Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and Edmund Burke.  At the time he was writing the orthodox and moderate factions of the Presbyterian church were vying for power in Scotland.  Based on theological ideas going back to the Reformation, both sides had mixed feelings about the impact of visual arts like paintings and sculpture on the viewer. In some areas theater was illegal.          Most of Elements of Criticism engages with literary texts for its examples and illustrations but his methods take into account the multimodality of the work.  For example, Kames takes encourages readers to take into account the musical and melodic qualities of poetry in his analysis of meter.  In spite of the disapproval of theater in Edinburgh, he works in criticism of plays and operas—not just the librettos but also of the staging and sets tacitly indicating through these inclusions his views on theater debate.       For those listeners interested in spatial theory or rhetorics of space, Kames applies the final chapter of the book the criticism of gardening and architecture.  The chapter thinks about how progression through space and the arrangement of objects in space can influence the mind and especially the emotions.  Kames emphasizes the natural style of gardening over more ornate or fantastic styles.  He presents the ornate French gardens as an example of what not to do, and praises the harmony of Chinese models.       Many of Kames’s proscriptive and prescriptive critiques participate in a larger Scottish Enlightenment conversation about taste in which moderates posed that fine arts were acceptable if morally improving to the audience or reader.  In this argument the wealthier members of society had an obligation to develop their taste as a sort of moral education.  For Kames, taste could also be developed by the lower classes through proximity to and observation of tasteful public works.  This idea represents a synthesis of ideas about the human tendency towards imitation and new concepts of the moral sense.  This chapter along with Sir John Dalrymple’s Essay on Landscape Gardening popularized the natural garden trend in mid-eighteenth century Scotland.               Elements of Criticism had a lasting impact as a textbook well into the 19th century and was by no means confined to Scotland.  The work was quickly translated into German and appeared in the library of Emmanuel Kant.  It crossed the Atlantic where it was taught in rhetoric courses at Yale side-by-side with texts by authors like Hugh Blair and George Campbell, according to the research of Gregory Clark.         To close our discussion of Elements of Criticism I would like to bring things back to the author himself.  Lord Kames, after all, did not have the benefit of a formal education, nor did he have the restrictions.  Although his writing is clear, he does not aspire to the heights of rhetorical eloquence.  In his judicial practice he was well known for using casual and even ribald language with his colleagues.  According to local legend, Kames at his retirement took leave of his colleagues with a cheery “Fare ye a’weel, ye bitches!”       Thanks for listening to our podcast today.  This is Connie Steel at the University of Texas for Mere Rhetoric.           Chambers, Robert.  Traditions of Edinburgh, Vol 2.  Edinburgh:  W. & C. Tait 1825, p 171.   Googlebooks Web.        Clark, Greg.  “Timothy Dwight's Moral Rhetoric at Yale College, 1795–1817.” Rhetorica:  A Journal of the History of Rhetoric.  Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring 1987) pp 149-161.   Home, Henry, Lord Kames. Elements of Criticism.  Edited with an Introduction by Peter Jones (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). 2 Vols.  www.libertyfund.org May 31, 2015. Web.       Lehmann, William C. Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas.  The Hague:  Martinus Hijhoff, 1971.  (International Archives of the History of Ideas.  Info on Agatha and the family, on Agatha p 64-65.  “Bitches” 135 (from Chambers).       Miller, Thomas.  “The Formation of College English:  A Survey of the Archives of Eighteenth-Century Rhetorical Theory and Practice.”  Rhetoric Society Quarterly.  Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer, 1990) pp 261-286.                          

We talk with Dr. Clark about the amazing things he and his research team are doing to improve the lives of amputees.

How much of our social status is tied to that of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favour of greater social equality, Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises, proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. In this bookpod, Gregory Clark, a Professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, talks to Craig Barfoot about his novel technique of tracking family names over generations to measure social mobility across countries and periods.  It led him to conclude that even in countries apparently committed to equality - like Sweden and the USA - it can take hundreds of years for high status families to revert to the mean of ordinariness.  

Surnames predict social status with surprising accuracy. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Gregory Clark discusses this phenomenon with David Edmonds. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. A transcript of this and other episodes is available from Social Science Space

Surnames and social mobility - How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? Laurie Taylor talks to Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis, about movement up the social ladder over 8 centuries, from medieval England to modern Sweden. Using a unique methodology, Professor Clark tracked family names to assess social mobility across diverse eras and societies. His conclusion is that mobility rates are less than are often estimated and are resistant to social policies. It may take hundreds of years for descendants to move beyond inherited advantages, as well as disadvantages. He's joined by Andrew Miles, Reader in Sociology at the CRESC, University of Manchester and author of the only systematic study of historical social mobility in the UK. Also, elite graduates and global ambition. Sally Power, Professorial Fellow at the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, talks about a comparative study which finds that British students from top universities seek worldwide opportunities, whereas their French counterparts wish to 'serve' France. In theory, globalization has dissolved national borders and loyalties, so why do elite students from France and England have such strikingly different visions of their future? Producer: Torquil Macleod.

Professor Rae discusses the rise of mass affluence, the joint stock corporation, and advertising/consumer culture in America. Gregory Clark's theory of the causes of the Industrial Revolution, including England's "downward social mobility" in the medieval and early modern periods, are explored. According to this theory, the upper classes produced children in greater numbers than in other countries, and there were fewer jobs of high social status. This led to upper class children working in "lower class" jobs, infusing lower economic strata with upper class outlooks toward work. Clark also touches on a genetic, Darwinian explanation for England's Industrial Revolution. Professor Rae also discusses other causal explanations for the Industrial revolution, including exogenous and endogenous growth theories, institutions, and Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction. The wealth-generating power of the joint stock corporation is also presented.

Professor Rae discusses the rise of mass affluence, the joint stock corporation, and advertising/consumer culture in America. Gregory Clark's theory of the causes of the Industrial Revolution, including England's "downward social mobility" in the medieval and early modern periods, are explored. According to this theory, the upper classes produced children in greater numbers than in other countries, and there were fewer jobs of high social status. This led to upper class children working in "lower class" jobs, infusing lower economic strata with upper class outlooks toward work. Clark also touches on a genetic, Darwinian explanation for England's Industrial Revolution. Professor Rae also discusses other causal explanations for the Industrial revolution, including exogenous and endogenous growth theories, institutions, and Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction. The wealth-generating power of the joint stock corporation is also presented.

Clark further illustrate the logic and implications of Malthusian theory (chapter 2).