Today Razib talks to Garett Jones and Gregory Clark, prominent economists whose research heavily explores the long-term, underlying drivers of prosperity, human capital, and social development. Jones, an American economist who earned his Ph.D. from UC San Diego, is a professor at George Mason University and a research fellow at the Mercatus Center. He specializes in macroeconomics and monetary policy, and is well-known for books like Hive Mind, 10% Less Democracy, and The Culture Transplant, which explore how national IQ, cultural norms, and institutional structures impact economic growth and productivity. Meanwhile, Scottish-born economic historian Clark earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University and spent much of his academic career as a professor at UC Davis. Clark’s work focuses on long-run economic growth, the Industrial Revolution, and intergenerational social mobility, topics he has extensively detailed in his highly debated books A Farewell to Alms and The Son Also Rises.
The discussion mostly revolves around Clark’s new unpublished book, To Have and Have Not. First they talk about how the book uses centuries of British family records to argue that persistent social status is consistent with genetic inheritance reinforced by assortative mating. Clark highlights the similar predictive importance of maternal and paternal relatives, limited long-term effects of inherited wealth, and little evidence in his data that family size or birth order substantially affects occupational outcomes; Jones emphasizes how these findings challenge conventional explanations of inequality, while Razib explores their historical and cultural implications. They also examine Clark’s argument that publication bias exaggerates the benefits of additional compulsory schooling, the collapse of fertility among British elites, and the speculative possibility that European marriage patterns contributed to the Industrial Revolution. The conversation extends to selective immigration and its potential long-term consequences, before returning to academic freedom, ideological pressures on research, and the possibility that AI could help investigate neglected questions. Clark also announces that Polity Press has agreed to publish the book after earlier publishing difficulties.
