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Gregory Clark
Clark in May 2023
Born	(1957-09-19) 19 September 1957 Bellshill, Scotland
Academic career
Field	Macroeconomics, economic history
Institution	University of Southern Denmark University of California, Davis London School of Economics University of Michigan Stanford University
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA) Harvard University (PhD)

Gregory Clark (born 19 September 1957) is a British economic historian who worked mostly at University of California, Davis and is now the Danish National Research Council professor of economics at the University of Southern Denmark. He is known for his economic research on the industrial revolution and social mobility.

Biography

Clark, whose grandfathers were migrants to Scotland from Ireland, was born in Bellshill, Scotland. He attended Holy Cross High School in Hamilton. In 1974 he and fellow pupil Paul Fitzpatrick won the Scottish Daily Express schools debating competition. He earned a BA degree in economics and philosophy at King's College, Cambridge in 1979 and a PhD in economics at Harvard University in 1985. His thesis was supervised by Barry Eichengreen, Jeffrey G. Williamson, and Stephen Marglin. He became an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1985 to 1989 and at the University of Michigan from 1989 to 1990. He moved to the University of California, Davis and became associate professor in 1990 and professor of economics in 1996. He was formerly (until 2013) chair of the economics department at the University of California, Davis and became a distinguished professor emeritus there since 2018. Between 2017 and 2020, Clark was a visiting professor in economic history at the London School of Economics. In 2023, he became the Danish National Research Council professor of economics at the University of Southern Denmark.

Clark's areas of research are long term economic growth, the wealth of nations, the economic history of The Industrial Revolution, England and India, and social mobility. He is also a visiting professor in the Economic History Department at London School of Economics and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis.

In 2021, a talk by Clark, titled "For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 Individuals 1750-2020 Shows Genetics Determines Most Social Outcomes", was cancelled due to accusations of promoting eugenics.

Social mobility

Summary

Much of Clark’s research has examined social mobility throughout history and its dependence on surnames and ancestry. He has long supported the idea that social mobility is a slow and tedious process—one which can take generations. Moreover, he believes that social policies can reduce inequality, but ultimately, it is one’s ancestry and bloodline that will shape their life outcomes.

The Son Also Rises (2014)

In his non-fiction study of social mobility, The Son Also Rises (2014), Clark examines the importance of surnames in moving through the social ladder. The book follows families from England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile, and Clark studies whether or not certain surnames were present in various aspects of society—college registration, members of government, etc. Clark’s study that ethnically homogenous societies had similar rates of social mobility led to his inference that racism may not be a factor impacting social movement. Clark determined that social mobility is slow moving, consistent, ancestral, and impacted by endogamy. Ultimately, Clark argues that social mobility is a decades-long process even for one family.

Influence of Ancestry

Gregory Clark analyzes the influence of ancestry on social mobility and socioeconomic status. Clark argues that although income inequality has increased in the United States since the 1970s, social mobility has remained static. He suggests that individual life chances and opportunities can be predicted by lineage up to 60% of the time. Clark highlights how surnames can indicate social standing, and elite surnames are still disproportionately represented in various aspects of society. He concludes that policies can improve opportunities, but social mobility is slow and often predetermined by ancestry.

Criticism

Critics of Clark's research argue that he ignores racial discrimination as a means of preventing social mobility for minority groups in America. They also criticize Clark's terminology wherein he deemed Black and Hispanic people as "underclass." Based on Clark's research, there would not be racial equality until at least 2240, and critics deem this timeline unrealistic based on growing demand for socioeconomic equality.

Selected publications

Books

• A Farewell to Alms (2007), a Malthusian look at economic history
• The Son Also Rises (2014), on social mobility.

Research Articles

Human Capital, Fertility, and the Industrial Revolution (2005)

In his 2005 work, Human Capital, Fertility, and the Industrial Revolution, published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, Clark presents the notion that there is an intuitive connection between the Industrial Revolution and what is known as a society’s ‘demographic transition’. Although this particular work examines this relationship in the context of England, the analysis is applicable to virtually any other society that has undergone such development. Such a connection stems from the observation of pre-industrialization societies having a high fertility rate, little education, a greater value placed on physical labor over a person’s experiences/skills (human capital), and a low rate of productivity growth, while modern post-industrialization societies with high incomes possess the opposite characteristics.

Upon examining a wide range of potential drivers of a society’s fertility, including income, the economic value of human capital, families’ capacities to have/afford children, and the changing status of women, via analysis of historical records and estimations based on wills left by male testators, Clark ultimately comes to the conclusion that the cause(s) for, or even the existence of, a relation between the Industrial Revolution and demographic transition is difficult to determine.

Such ambiguity can be largely attributed to several of the concessions and acknowledgements that Clark makes throughout this work. Perhaps most obviously is that much of the analysis completed on income and human capital in this work is based on estimations made from information found in wills. This is in and of itself a potential source of error. In addition to this, the trends mentioned in this portion of the work are derived from these estimations along with incomplete fertility rate data. Clark notes that data reporting gross fertility rates during this time period can be misleading due to its failure to account for child mortality rates, which may significantly affect the relevant fertility figures. Clark also mentions that a major challenge in determining a relation between the Industrial Revolution and the demographic transition is that the reasoning behind such a relation must match and be able to explain the established sequence of events that are known to have led to and occurred after these major transitions.

The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004 (2005)

In the article, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004, published in December 2005 in the Journal of Political Economy, Clark uses data containing the real wages of building craftsmen and laborers to argue that the Industrial Revolution was not a decisive and instant change in the state of working class for England. Instead, he proposes that the growth of real wages was a prevailing trend accelerated, rather than started, by the Industrial Revolution.

Clark includes a discussion of human capital as well, where his data conflicts with the perspectives taken by Becker, Murphy, and Tamura in their 1990 working paper Human Capital, Fertility, and Economic Growth, as well as in other papers. An idea in Human Capital, Fertility, and Economic Growth was that an increase in human capital leads to a higher rate of return on such capital, implying immediate economic growth. However, Clark’s data suggests that instead of human capital having an immediate impact, wage gains for the working class in England were instead delayed until later stages of industrialization even if human capital (as exemplified by rising literacy rates) was increasing in the years leading up to the industrial revolution.

An article by Judy Z. Stephenson, 'Real' wages? Contractors, workers, and pay in London building trades, 1650-1800, argues that Clark’s 10% discount of building wages in his data to account for the overhead of contractors was not enough. She says that Clark underestimated London construction wages because of this.

An article by Chris Vickers and Nicolas L. Ziebarth, Economic Development and the Demographics of Criminals in Victorian England, uses Clark’s real wage data in their analysis of the demographic composition of criminals of England and Wales in the 19th century.

An article by David S. Jacks, Kevin H. O'Rourke, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Commodity Price Volatility and World Market Integration since 1700, uses Clark’s data to demonstrate a higher volatility in commodity prices in the period 1820-1860 than the volatility for the period 1700-1775.

An article by Sascha O. Becker, Erik Hornung, and Ludger Woessmann, Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution, describes one of Clark’s assessments as similar to the idea that education did not contribute heavily to the economic growth of England during the Industrial Revolution.

Survival of the Richest: The Malthusian Mechanism in Pre-Industrial England (2006)

In this 2006 work, Clark, along with Gillian Hamilton, explores and argues in favor of a pillar of the Malthusian model: the assumption that higher income corresponds to greater reproductive success. This aspect of the Malthusian model is examined in the context of England during its pre-industrial period (1585-1638). Clark touches upon the Malthusian model in his earlier work Human Capital, Fertility, and the Industrial Revolution, but finds that historical record does not always support such an assumption. Acknowledging that the empirical support for this aspect of the Malthusian model is weak, Clark and Hamilton utilize wills to gather figures on which to estimate fertility rates, social status, and income of people in England in its pre-industrial period (1585-1638) to arrive at the conclusion that wealth was in fact related to reproductive success.

This notion appears once again in his book A Farewell to Alms, and is central to the book’s controversy, where it has often been labeled as social Darwinism. An interesting contradiction that exists across these two works is that while Clark attributes a greater reproductive success for wealthier men to factors relating to marriage in Survival of the Richest, he attributes it to factors with a ‘biological basis’ in A Farewell to Alms. While the former work reasons that wealthier men may have had the capacity to have more children due to younger wives, higher remarriage rates, or simply higher infant/child survival rates, the latter work focuses on a mechanism by which wealthier families were potentially able to instill and foster traits in their children that would in turn increase their chances of success.

Clark acknowledges in Survival of the Richest that his explanation for the historical trend that portrayed wealth as a positive predictor for reproductive success was based on figure estimations derived from wills, and therefore of potentially questionable accuracy (due to the wills not necessarily containing explicit statements of all relevant quantities). In fact, in reference to the accuracy of the figures Clark required, critics have indicated favor for those found in parish birth/death records. Clark additionally concedes that wills do not provide the necessary information to conclude, for example, whether wealthier men of the time in fact remarried more frequently, leaving his explanation remained largely unsupported. Even in his more recent work of A Farewell to Alms, however, Clark’s argument for the relationship between wealth and reproductive success has also been criticized for its lack of empirical support.

Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies (2009)

In 2009, Gregory Clark conducted research on wealth inheritance and inequality across generations in the article “Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies.” The study collected data from 21 populations (including hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, and agriculturalists), and focused on small-scale societies that were minimally affected by modern nation-states. Clark’s research uses a mathematical model to analyze intergenerational wealth transmission, represented by the formula:

$w_{i}=\beta (w_{p})+(1-\beta ){\underline {w}}+\lambda _{i}$

where $w_{p}$ is the household parent’s wealth, $w$ is the average population wealth, $\beta$ is the extent of intergenerational wealth transmission, and $\lambda$ accounts for exogenous shocks. This model reflects the factors that influence one’s expected wealth. The other main equation from the article categorized wealth into three classes: embodied (individual attributes such as body weight and practical skills), material (tangible assets), and relational (social connections and additional types of assistance). These variables were used in the equation:

$W=\gamma (E^{e}M^{m}R^{r})$

with $W$ measuring a household’s well-being. The extent of intergenerational transmission (β) and the significance of each wealth class were used to estimate the intergenerational transmission of wealth. Their model identified three main results: (1) being born into a wealthy background provides considerable benefits within a society (2) economic systems with easily heritable wealth results in greater inequality (3) the types of wealth that are most critical in a society tend to be transmitted more effectively through generations. Within the populations studied, wealth inequality was most evident in pastoral and agricultural populations through intergenerational transmission. The findings display how intergenerational wealth plays a large role in the inequality small-scale societies experience.

The Surprising Wealth of Pre-industrial England (2010)

In the article, The Surprising Wealth of Pre-industrial England, published in August 2010 in the SSRN Electronic Journal, Clark, along with Joseph Cummins and Brock Smith, use occupation statements in men’s wills to determine the proportion of farming and non-farming occupations in England. With this data, they imply that incomes did not significantly differ in the two eras.

An article by Stephen Broadberry, Bruce M.S. Campbell, and Bas van Leeuwen, When did Britain industrialise? The sectoral distribution of the labour force and labour productivity in Britain, 1381–1851, finds that 58% of the labor force during the mid-sixteenth century was still employed in agriculture, which is approximately in line with Clark’s findings. They mention that they believe the proportion of agriculture in the labor force was decreasing decisively from at least the middle of the seventeenth century, while Clark suggests that the decrease began much later. In addition, they state that Clark’s perspective is not easily reconciled with English urbanization changes during the seventeenth century.

An article by Clark, 1381 and the Malthus delusion, addresses the conflicting estimates of pre-industrial income between his previous work and from a then working paper by Broadberry et al. He reinforces his proposal that pre-industrial incomes were similar to incomes in 1800 in England, which contradicts the estimate that incomes tripled over this time.

Surnames and Social Mobility in England, 1170-2012 (2014)

Clark’s research in “Surnames and Social Mobility in England, 1170–2012” focuses on using educational status to display social mobility over the time period. The study centers on intergenerational social status—how strongly a child inherits their parents social standing. Clark used two main models to display social mobility. The first is the formula:

${\bar {y}}$_kt $=$ $\beta {\bar {y}}$_kt-1 $+$ ${\bar {u}}$_kt

to measure intergenerational social mobility, where ${\bar {y}}$_kt represents a measurable form of social status, ${\bar {u}}$_kt represents random shocks, and $\beta$ represents how much of an individual's social status comes from their parents. The equation uses $k$ to represent surname groupings. The second formula is:

$x$_t $=$ $bx$_t-1 $+$ $e$_t

where $x$_t measures social competence and $e$_t accounts for unexpected events. The $b$ represents the correlation between a current family’s underlying social competence and that of past generations. The amount that a family’s average social status continues across generations is between $b$ and $\beta$.

Clark’s research specifically centers on using educational status to approximate intergenerational social mobility. This was achieved by looking at the percentage of people from each surname group who attended Oxford or Cambridge, and converting this data into a mean educational status (and therefore social mobility). The data implied that there was a mild improvement in social mobility throughout the time period studied. The correlation between social mobility across generations steadily decreased, suggesting that it was unaffected by factors such as the Industrial Revolution and redistributive taxation. Some critics argue that this finding does not account for discrimination or societal factors, relying on underlying social status instead. Additionally, the data revealed that intergenerational social mobility follows the Markov process, where a new generation’s status is only correlated to their parents and not previous generations. By seeing a consistency in intergenerational social standing from 1800 to 2012, familial status strongly correlates to social mobility for future generations.

For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 English Individuals 1750-2020 shows Genetics Determines most Social Outcomes (2021)

For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls is a 2021 study by Clark, presented at the University of Glasgow. In this paper, Clark examines the persistence of social status across generations, focusing on the concept of the heritability of status and the limitations of policies aimed at promoting social mobility. The title is a reference to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, which explored intelligence and class structure in American life. Clark’s work expands on these themes by incorporating historical, genetic, and sociological data to explore social status across various societies and over long time periods.

Clark employs surname analysis as a key method for studying social mobility, a technique he previously used in The Son Also Rises (2014). Using data from a sample of 402,000 English individuals spanning from 1750 to 2020, Clark tests whether cultural or human capital, as opposed to genetic factors, better explains the inheritance of social status. Surnames serve as proxies for family lineage, allowing Clark to track the persistence of elite or disadvantaged status over time. This method provides a quantitative framework to assess intergenerational mobility and reveals that mobility rates are generally lower than those estimated by conventional sociological or economic surveys.

Clark’s findings have sparked considerable debate, particularly regarding the role of genetics in social mobility. Critics argue that his emphasis on heritability risks downplaying structural factors that perpetuate inequality, such as racism, sexism, and class-based discrimination. Additionally, the use of surnames as a proxy for social status has been challenged as an oversimplification that may not capture the complexities of individual mobility.

Clark’s assertion that public policies have limited long-term effects on mobility has also been controversial. Many scholars contend that interventions in education, healthcare, and housing can significantly affect individuals and communities, even if the impacts are not immediately visible across generations. These controversies culminated in the cancellation of a scheduled lecture at the University of Glasgow in 2021, after over 110 lecturers and faculty members signed a letter accusing Clark’s work of promoting “discredited science” and perpetuating racist ideologies.

External links

• Gregory Clark's homepage

Category:Living people Category:1957 births Category:People from Bellshill Category:Scottish economists Category:Scottish people of Irish descent Category:Scholars of socio-economic mobility Category:Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Category:Stanford University Department of Economics faculty Category:University of Michigan faculty Category:University of California, Davis faculty Category:People educated at Holy Cross High School, Hamilton Category:Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Category:21st-century American economists Category:British economic historians Category:Academic staff of the University of Southern Denmark