Is Social Status Determined By Your Genetics? - Gregory Clark

What's this new paper of yours about the inheritance of social status? So the paper looks at 425,000 people in England over the course of 400 years who are all linked together by descent and marriage and just asks what describes how you inherit social status. And it ends up that there are actually three very interesting aspects. One is that there's a very strong inheritance of status, much stronger than people conventionally believe. And so there's an underlying correlation that's really strong. The second astonishing aspect is that that correlation hasn't changed over the course of 400 years. There's no more social mobility now than there was in the 17th century, the 18th century, the 19th century. But the most surprising element of all is that if you want to predict how correlated people will be then that prediction is based on what's their genetic correlation. And so the data is just very consistent with a really simple model of genetic transmission where what just matters is how many how many genes do we have in common and that'll explain how much outcome we'll have in common. Uh and uh that as I say is for many people very surprising and also quite troubling for a lot of people. What is the methodology of you being able to track genetics across such a long period of time? How how are you able to do that? Presumably ancestry.com wasn't tracking people 400 years ago. Right. Um so the lineage stuff is is fine. And so basically I was using there there are all these kind of interesting societies in Britain and one is the Guild of One Name Studies. And these are two or 3,000 people who've devoted themselves to following the history of particular surnames in England. And they've done fantastic jobs kind of actually tracking people's genealogy over hundreds of years. And so that part is is is straightforward. But the only thing we can do here is we don't have we have no direct genetic evidence here. What we can look at though is what would be the predictions of a genetic model of transmission. And that has a distinctive and very clear set of predictions about how correlated fourth cousins, third cousins, second cousins, first cousins will be. Uh and and it all depends on how much assortment there is in marriage, how strong these correlations will remain. And so there's also, you know, predictions about siblings, about grandparents grandchildren. And as I say the the very surprising thing here is that the predictions of that model are very consistent with this data for England. Uh and it it really is uh you know, so as I say so so there's nothing conclusive here, there's nothing direct. But there is just a very interesting empirical pattern. And then as part of the paper I also can say, well what about other features of inheritance of status that would be consistent with genetic transmission? Do they also hold? And so here's one example is with genetic transmission mothers should always have an equal influence as fathers in terms of outcomes for children. Because you get half of your genetics from each parent. Now if we go back to 19th century England fathers play a very different social role than they do now. If you look now mothers still actually spend much more time with children than do fathers. And so we would actually expect with social transmission that maybe sometimes fathers are more important and other times mothers are much more important. But the data for this lineage in England is very clear. If you want to predict children's outcomes mothers and fathers play exactly the same weight. And and you know, one so early on we have evidence on the literacy of mothers and fathers and so that's equally predictive of what the child literacy would be and it doesn't matter if it's a boy or a girl. In in those cases it's again equally predictive. For other outcomes like occupation we don't have occupations for women in the 19th century. But we can proxy women's occupations by for example taking their brother and then taking their husband's brother. And that'll actually give us a good proxy for what their occupational status is and then we can say which predicts child outcomes better. Is it the mother's proxy or the father's proxy? And the answer again is no, it's exactly the same weight. And so and that's true as I say all the way through the last 300 years that mothers and fathers play exactly the same role in terms of outcomes except for one important outcome. And that outcome is wealth. For wealth fathers are much much more influential than mothers. And that's because wealth tended in England to flow on the patriline. That men inherited more family wealth than women did. And so what matters is what your grandfather's wealth on the patriline as opposed to your grandfather on on the matriline. So as I say it's there's this this is one piece of interesting ancillary evidence. A second piece is what's the effect of birth order on outcome? Right? And in the social world, I mean I don't know if you have children, I had three. And the oldest child gets much much more parental attention than the younger ones do, right? And talk to anyone who has children and this is true. I mean the parents are new thing when the first kid comes along. The parents have all these ideas about how they're going to shape these kids. And so and and empirically we know that older children get more attention than younger children. So you might expect that older children will do much better in terms of social outcomes. Uh it turns out in this data no, it's in almost every case birth order doesn't matter. Your chances in life are the same whether you're first or the last. And a lot of the families in the 19th century there are 10 children. And so you would think the 10th one is coming into this kind of crowded family, there's no more space. My own parents were both from families of 12. And by the time, you know, my father and mother, I think we both were number nine. By the time they came along the housing's incredibly tight. You're sharing a bed with three siblings and stuff like that. And but it turns out it it it it doesn't matter except again there's a slight exception for the top 1% of families in the 19th century, the kind of elite the oldest son is doing better than the younger sons. But that's the only thing that matters. So the old and the older son inherits more but is also more likely to be sent to university than the younger sons. So you do see slight deviations for this. But for 99% of the population it doesn't matter what birth order is. And then another thing you can look at is what about family size? Isn't that going to influence your outcomes? Because the more children there are, the less resources there are, the less parental attention. Again in the era so there's an era up to marriages of around about 1880 where in England family size was random. People made no attempt to control fertility. And it is amazing but they just apparently got married, produced children. Sometimes there's only one child. You know, just the accidents of fertility. In the sample we have there's one guy who has 27 children from two different wives. And so you get this enormous variation in family size. And again it has no effect except for richer families for wealth. And then if you're from a larger family then your wealth actually declines. Right? And so if you're from a wealthy family and it's larger your wealth declines because the wealth has to get divided. Yeah, the if if inheritance is going to play a large role in determining your future level of wealth and there are more people taking from that pie each sliver of the pie is smaller. Yeah, right. So so as I said so that's another aspect. Uh another thing we can look at is do you ever need to meet your parents for them to influence your social outcomes? And so in a lot of the period that we're looking at, you know, parental death is occurring at relatively early ages for some people in their 50s, 60s. And so about 10% of the kids their father dies before they're 10 years old. And we can then say how correlated are you with your father as a function of you know, you you knew them all the way up to your 21 or they died or they died before you were 10. It makes no difference to outcomes. You you don't do any worse in life. You're not any less correlated with your father. Uh you you apparently you never need to meet your parents for them to have exactly the same influence on your outcomes. So, so as I say, this study then is based on this observational data, right? And so it doesn't prove anything directly. But I'm working on a book which is going to have all of this kind of ancillary evidence about the nature of social life. And as I say, there's a surprising amount of this says it's not social transmission. It seems to actually be genetic transmission that is the consistent pattern that would explain people's outcomes. When you talk about outcomes, you're using words like social status, where they end up in life, stuff like that. What what what is social status based on what you're talking about here? Right. So, the specific measures we have are did you go to higher education of some kind? Uh what was your literacy earlier on? Uh the best one we have is what's your occupational status, right? And then we also know for everyone who's most people who are alive now, what's the value of your house that you're living in? And that's pretty good indicator of your income level. And then also what's the nature of the neighborhood you're living in? Is it one where there's a lot of educated people, there's low crime rates, stuff like that. So, we have a kind of measure of And and that's we got down to the the almost the street level. Uh what's the quality of of that? And so as I say, so we have these kind of multiple measures. But what I've seen with the data here is that these things tend to move pretty closely together. That basically high status people have more education, more wealth, uh higher occupational status, they live in nicer neighborhoods, uh they tend to live longer, uh all of these things. And that's why I I think of it inherently as there's there's just some underlying kind of social abilities that people have. And that that's the thing that's being transmitted that between the generations. It's interesting to think about how you tried to tease apart social transmission and genetic transmission or genetic inheritance, I suppose. Because a lot of people would look and say, well, you know, if you come from a family that is well-off, think about the culture that you have around the house, around the dinner table. Think about the sorts of things that are being spoken about. Think about the kind of friends that you're going to play with, the your parents are going to have. You're going more likely to go to after-school clubs. You're more likely to maybe have a tutor or maybe be encouraged to play sports or to play a musical instrument or all of these different things. And yet it seems like behavioral genetics wins out yet again. Yes. And so now it turns out I didn't I you know, because I'm coming from an economics and kind of history background. And I just got interested in this and I had this data and I thought, well, let's try to fit a genetic model, what would happen? Uh in this field is very fractious and very kind of ideal kind of ideology is very important to people. And it turns out most of the people actually don't want to believe that simple genetic transmission plays an important role in social life. And so most of the people in this field actually seem to believe that cultural transmission of the type that you've described is actually very significant and very important. But there is one kind of puzzling thing about that, which is people don't focus on this a lot, but there's a lot of variation within any family in terms of the outcomes for children. And children's outcomes are no more correlated than and they have roughly the same correlation as between a parent and a child. What what the you know, the correlation of child outcomes. Now, if you really believe strongly in cultural transmission, I you know, when I look at I was one of four children. If I look at the expectations my parents had of us, if I look at the dinner table conversations I sat around in, if I look at the housing we lived in, the neighborhood we were in, it's all the same for all four of us. And so if you really believe cultural transmission, you would expect that siblings really would show very very strong correlations. Right, because you have you have essentially the same environment for all siblings. Right. But and the only thing that would have been the only variable that you would have had would have been some sort of genetic one that you got this particular combination of sperm and egg and somebody else got the rest. Right. And and so it turns out then that the one And people don't seem to focus on that a lot that there is this puzzle with cultural transmission, which is how do you explain why siblings are actually significantly different. And and I would with genetic things that is partly because you inherit different genes from each parent. But a lot of it is just because whatever genetic blueprint you have, there's a randomness about what body eventually gets assembled from that blueprint. And that means that even identical twins are not identical in terms of their phenotype, right? And you know, people there's this very famous investigator of twins, Plomin. Um he had a whole project which sought to look in detail at families where you had identical twins and one was different from the other. You know, like one went to college and one didn't. And he interviewed the twins, he interviewed all their relatives. I think they spent years doing this in detail analysis. And they came up with inclusion in the end, they could find nothing that would actually explain why these differences existed. And so I say I think there actually it's something again where genetic explanation has this idea, well, there's this this irreducible randomness life. And and about how the genetic instructions get implemented. And that explains why even identical twins will not turn out to be identical. Um and so so as I say, so so cultural explanation is this interesting alternative. The it it's hard to test, right? Because someone could say, well, I believe in culture, but I believe it has exactly the same form of transmission as would come through genetics. And then, you know, it's such a loose form of explanation, right? Because everyone has their own ideas about how culture operates, what matters, is it that, you know, you have some figure in the family that you can look up to, is it the actual contact that matters, is it the schooling that people go to? Um and so it's very hard to um to find, you know, stuff that would refute a kind of cultural explanation because inherently, unlike the genetic explanation, it's just not super well kind of specified. But as I say, I think the strongest thing is this fact of the way siblings vary within families. And the fact that it's very hard to then to to understand why sibling number one is doing great, sibling number two is struggling, when so much is common in terms of people's backgrounds and as siblings when they're growing up. Why do you think it is that this genetic explanation of social inheritance and social status is so ideologically unpopular? Um I Well, it absolutely seems to be because it's it's saying somehow mechanically at birth your life chances are pretty much determined, right? And that uh the state or society is not going to be able to do very much to actually change outcomes, right? And so it implies a kind of relatively conservative social policy because it would say all the expenditures on schools and other things like that are really not going to have that much effect in terms of of social outcomes. Uh and so I think it's that. And then also people are worried immediately about what does that imply about uh the relative fertility of different groups in society and the implications of that, what does you mean about relative fertility? Oh, because once once you say, look, what's happening is that one person is successful in life because they have this genetic material and another person is unsuccessful because they don't have the favorable genetic material, then the issue immediately comes up, well, you know, if this first group was to multiply and increase their share of society, there would be all of these potential social benefits. If the other group was not to do that, they would be in avoidance of social costs. And so, people are, I think, rightly very concerned about the potential social implications of this. But the only problem is, I mean, when we're thinking about how the world is, it's very it's it's very important not to to adopt certain positions just because it would make life easier, right? Uh I mean, when you're thinking about, you know, the way the the the world is actually operating, uh it the important thing is is never to have the end view in sight in terms of what explanation do I favor, what explanation do I find plausible here. I mean, we'll just have to live, you know, whatever this act the explanation is is, if it turns out genetics really is important, we'll just have to live with those consequences. Uh What is Sorry. What what is the consequence of ignoring the genetic implication? Um well, I there's there's several consequences. One is, uh for example, I think as a society we've come I you know, and and I should say as a background point here, I've made my life working in education. But it's firmly my belief that we've vastly exceeded the amount of education that people should usefully get in this society, right? That And and we've done that in part because it's been regarded as the key to social mobility, social advancement, leveling the playing field. And now we're adding forever. Now, instead of just getting a BA, people now think that they have to get a master's degree. Uh there's there's actually, you know, the empirical evidence that education is actually improving people's lives is actually very weak. Uh But didn't you say didn't didn't you say previously that one of the uh parameters that you'd used was education level, whether or not they did get to higher education. So, you're saying that that as a useful indicator of someone's future life outcomes is becoming less and less effective at being predictive. Uh I I I Yes. Uh Here's an example of of why this doesn't seem to be very predictive. So, in the UK at various states we've extended the amount of compulsory schooling that people get. So, I think like 1973, 46, 1919, we've and we moved from 12 years to 14 years, 15 years, 16 years. I think now it's supposed to be closer to 18 years. We can actually look at those episodes and you get then two cohorts of people. You get the people from just before the change who get, on average, you know, they only have to be there till 15. And then you suddenly get a new cohort who on average get a half a year of extra schooling. And then you can look empirically and say, well, what happened? Did that improve these people's life outcomes? And the answer for Britain is no. Uh none of these adjustments to education showed up in any way as an improvement in uh you know, income or uh mortality, longevity, none of these things were actually changed. And we also have this house value evidence. So, you could say did the people who got an extra half year of education end up living in a slightly nicer house or in a nicer neighborhood? The answer is no. Okay. And so, so so as I say, that I mean, the problem is that we've we're now spending about 10% of national income on education in various forms. And in part, as I say, this is really driven by this idea that path to kind of universal social mobility is to get everyone educated. And I think that's an illusion. And that, you know, there there are other things we could spend that income on. One of the things we could do is just we could just redistribute more money to people at the lower end of the income spectrum. Uh rather than thinking that everything has to go through something like education. And so, you know, I'm here in Denmark now. Denmark is, I think, one of the most equal societies in the world. And it's quite impressive what they've actually achieved in Denmark. There's there's not a lot of homeless people. There's um you know, this the state will provide for you and, you know, the the labor market seems to provide pretty well for people. The minimum wage is something like 20 or 25 pounds effectively in this society. And so, you know, I think there's a lot of social policy that's actually very useful and very helpful. And that if we think that the things we have to spend on are stuff like education in order to improve social mobility, I think that's end up just a lot of waste of resources in this society. Shouldn't assortative mating nudge this stability? Isn't that kind of a little bit of a dice roll? What what role does marriage play in this? Well, it it turns out in in the data that I'm looking at, that's the that's the key element of the story is that we can measure assortative mating. It turns out Britain has fantastically good marriage records because the the marriage record in uh England and Wales at least, uh from 1837 onwards, it actually asks uh what is the father of each party and what's the father's occupation. And what's the husband and wife's occupation. And then also, earlier on, it also effectively measures literacy. And so, it actually, you know, there's a lot of information on these marriage records and the government is sitting on something like 110 million of these. And uh but it costs, I think, 11 pounds to to order one of them. But there's a bunch of kind of freelance amateur anarchist genealogists who've set about going to the record offices and recording this data and and setting it up on a website. And so, we were able to get about 1.5 million of these records from this site. And what's evident in that data is that people are matching very very closely in marriage. Uh and that that's consistent and not changing in England all the way from 1837 till now. And that when people somehow in marriage what mattered to people was the underlying social status of the person they were marrying. And that is something that has very big social consequences because A, it's going to mean that the inheritance of status is much stronger. And if what was happening is that men just married a random woman, right? So, suppose men the only thing they cared about was the physical attractiveness of their spouse, and they married in that way, then the parents would not be very strongly correlated in status and consequently the children will not be very strongly correlated with any individual parent. Because, just to interject, a a woman's attractiveness has a negligible or not at all relationship between her social status. Right. And and and and so, so we could imagine that kind of model of marriage. And what that'll do then is also, over time, it would result in less distribution of abilities in society. Right? Because if what's happening is very high status people marry only very high social abilities people, then you get over time a widening of the distribution of abilities in society. And so, who decides to marry whom actually has these huge social consequences in terms of how strongly status is passed on, but also in terms of what's the overall distribution of abilities within society. And so, uh with a the marriage pattern that you're observing in Britain then, uh this is what is actually driving this very slow social mobility. And you could actually predict with genetic transmission that if you just force people to marry at random, you would actually almost double the rates of social mobility in British society. Uh that's the redistribution strategy that we should be pushing toward. None of this education stuff. Just get people to get people to mix the social status that they're marrying within more. That's right. If you just gave them a random here's someone's ID number or something. I guess they don't have an ID in Britain, but here's here's your number. Yeah. Uh and and and this is actually very interesting. And so, so we've actually done some work uh on another aspect of marriage, which it it was widely believed that the way marriage works is that somehow women tend to marry up. The women trade off uh physical attractiveness for status in males. And studies definitely show that when people report their kind of ideal marriage partner, that women report more about income or education stuff like that and men report more about physical appearance, right? And so so we were expecting potentially in this data to find that when we have this huge collection of marriages that women on average would be somehow moving upwards in this you know pattern. And and men would be marrying women of somewhat lower status. Now the only way that can actually work in society if everyone's marrying everyone then you've got to have equality in terms of status. But what easily can happen is that it could be that high status women who are not physically attractive find it difficult to find mates and then low status men whatever their characteristics are also find it difficult to find mates. And the interesting thing for the English data all the way through is that there's absolutely no sign of this. On average men and women are marrying people of equal status and that's you know the end it's the same pattern for right at the top of the distribution and right at the bottom of the distribution. And so somehow the way marriage is operating in practice is that people are just matching up mainly on their kind of social status. And that you you actually not getting this as I say marrying up by women or marrying down by men. And so so that's a kind of interesting social aspect of our society which is why do people choose to marry in that way, right? It's not obvious that that's going to be the happiest marriage or the ideal marriage. Why would it be that people seem to care so much about someone's kind of underlying status? But I think what what this reflects is that when you're dating someone uh we have these very imperfect measures as social scientists about how many years have you been to school, what's your occupation, what's your income. People getting married actually have much much more information. You can tell by talking to someone for not that long a time what's their sense of humor what's their knowledge how smart are they, how clever are they, how imaginative are they and that it's interesting that these things seem to matter a lot when people get married and that they're leading to this kind of very tight assortment of people at very similar levels of social hierarchy. Uh and as I say they're underpinning this tendency to have just a lot of persistence across generations. Yeah, so your research points out that historically men tended to pair with women who have fathers with similar social status to themselves. That's great, yeah. As men fall behind women in education do you think that women will begin to pair with men who have fathers of similar status to themselves? Um oh so now this yes this is clearly happening that that women are getting more years of education. Uh the difference in earnings is not great still. I think men are still ahead in terms of earnings. Um but yeah but I think what's just will happen is that there's a ranking of males as prospects in the marriage market and there's a ranking of women. And so now women are actually going to typically marry men potentially who have less level of education but I think the relative ranking is going to remain the same. Yeah, so maybe women will be likely to evaluate the education of a date's father before deciding to commit to a date. Like does this man have the education genes even if he himself did not attend college? Right. So one of the interesting aspects of the data that I have is that uh it turns out if you want to predict for a given marriage how well the children are going to do in life there's a huge amount of information in the relatives of the people getting married. And so in fact if you wanted to set up a new dating service you could actually tell people here's the optimal waiting of the uncles, the aunts, the grandparents and stuff like that that if you just want to maximize what your social prospects of your children are this would constitute the ultimate match then, right? So you don't genealogical dating Yeah, that's right. And then you could get these algorithms now that would actually tell you you know this would be a significantly you know better child in terms of social outcomes if you were to to match in this way. Uh and so yeah so so as I say it is interesting because people when they're matching they they look like they're trying to maximize the prospects for their children. Mhm. Right, in terms of the choosing a mate. Right? Uh and and as I say that's an interesting social feature. I don't know why we would tend to do that because it's it's not true in all societies. So for example if you go to large parts of the Middle East now or even Native American communities in South America cousin marriage is still very common. Where you end up actually having very restricted choice as to who you can marry and so that in that type marriage you're actually less able to assort even though you're marrying your cousin which is kind of ironic uh that you're that these cousins actually will be more different socially than the way people are actually marrying in somewhere like England. So they're actually Wow, that is so insane that if if left to random chance people will find on the street someone who is closer to their family social status than someone who is actually a part of their own family. Yes, no that's an amazing feature, yes. But it is actually true. That is bonkers. That is completely bonkers. Um so yeah so so as and and the other thing that was amazing about this is that this pattern as I say the the new source of marriage data starts in 1837. That pattern is there immediately in 1837 even though at that time most women didn't formally have occupations. And and so the way we're able to judge how well they're matching is to look at the parents, to look at the fathers and see how closely are they correlating in terms of this marriage pattern. And and so as I say this is a time when most of these women that men were marrying were going to be engaged mainly in raising children. But still when they married they wanted someone of kind of very similar social position to themselves. Um and and so as I say so so it's it is a surprising feature of the nature of marriage in this society. Does this mean By the way one thing I should add is part of the reason I've taken up this position in Denmark is actually to get access. Denmark has this amazing set of kind of register data where everyone here has an ID number and every action in your life is recorded under that ID number. And the government then so this is true of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark. Uh social scientists come to these societies because you know they to take just one example I've seen a paper which looks at people's earnings and it's correlation and connection with the psychiatric medications that they were prescribed. This is the real surveillance state. Who knew that Scandinavia was the real surveillance state? Dear God. No, they don't reveal any individual information but as I say that they they have this amazing set of data here and so one of the things we wanted to look at is well is this pattern you see in England is that just peculiar to England or Yeah, I mean that was my first my first question. England very classist system very well established we use words like posh you know it is still very ingrained accent denotes status an awful lot school that you went to grammar schools the introduction of things like that old boys clubs gated communities all that sort of stuff very prevalent in England. What's the likelihood that this is a quirk exclusive to just the United Kingdom? Right. And yes and so the reason I actually was interested here was to see could we look at say modern Denmark because everyone thinks of this as a very high mobility society. It's very egalitarian and very different. Now uh there's a study that's been done in Sweden where they've managed to assemble a kind of a similar kind of panel of relatives but actually in this case they're just looking also across people who married. So they're looking at who's what's the connection between you and your brother-in-law you and your brother-in-law's wife's cousin where they assemble 141 different types of relatives and some of them go across five marriages, right? And with this data they have they can actually link you to people who you never actually going to meet in social life but you know you're five marriages apart. And what is interesting is people maintain a correlation in outcomes like education even across five marriages, right? That's how strong these social links are. And when we look at then how strong that correlation is in marriage in Sweden, it's the same strength as in England. People are matching up in the same way in marriage in terms of their underlying status, and they have this very slow implied rate of social mobility also in a place like Sweden. And so I think this is this is a general kind of maybe North European or European, probably all of Europe, kind of pattern, right? And I don't know what it's going to be like in in some other societies. I suspect it's not going to be that different, right? When I read about places like China and the kind of things that people are looking for in terms of mates in China. And so I think, you know, the British have, you know, and and I've, you know, I as I say, I grew up in Scotland and then spent I was an undergraduate in England and then I've spent a lot of time in America. The British actually keeps beating themselves up that somehow they have a uniquely class-ridden and classist society, but there's actually no evidence of that, right? I mean, social mobility like to abuse ourselves. You know what I mean? We will find something to feel ashamed about. Just that Puritan that Puritan work ethic is I'm whipping myself with a cat of nine tails. That's what we're here for. You know, and and it turns out so I I grew up in Glasgow in a fairly kind of gritty area, and so I had a good friend there who uh became an oil trader in London. He was being very successful. You know, and he went to university before he did that. He actually has married a woman who is from a very distinguished family in the English upper classes. Uh and, you know, and and Clambering out of the muck and the mire one rung at a time. Congratulations, mate. So So as I say, so I've even seen in kind of personal life that there is kind of you know, quite a lot of social mobility. My and and also from studying England in the past, um there's this group, the Huguenots, who arrived in England in the 1680s, and they were Protestant refugees from France. And relatively educated, but they, you know, they had their own religion, uh they had spoke French. Um they It's amazing how quickly they assimilated into the upper reaches of English society. And people with these Huguenot surnames, which are quite distinctive, by 1800, they were 30 times more likely to go to Oxford or Cambridge than the average person in England, right? And so, you know, so you think about these places as, you know, exclusive old boys clubs, stuff like that. But the experience of English society is that there there definitely is this upper class, there are these fancy schools, there's Eton, there's Harrow, there's all the rest of that stuff. But my experience looking at this is that it's a very open upper class. If you've got the money, the education, the connections, the doors actually the doors actually open. Okay. Okay, so does this mean largely that people who are in the upper class are locked in in across time? You mentioned that one of your friends has managed to clamber out of the blood and the feces and the hay and get get up in get up into the highfalutin upper troposphere. Over time, do these people like revert back to the mean, revert back to their mean? Um well, I mean, the the important thing about the as I say, the upper class is that that there's, you know, it's slow. It takes about 300 years, but that there's a universal force of kind of regression into the mean. So if we go back and take people 300 years ago who are the most elite people in society, I mean, it's taken a long time for it to happen, but there is this universal tendency to move downwards if you're an elite, and if you're at the bottom, there's an equal tendency to move up. And that's one of the astonishing features of social life looking at this genealogy is the people in the bottom 10%. They're the ones whose kids have the most prospect of upward mobility. And you know, it's very hard to actually then kind of stop people falling into poverty because it's not that you can go and find the bottom 10% of people and say, "Okay, they're the ones we need to treat." Because it turns out a lot of people who are falling into poverty are people who are coming from a bit higher in the social spectrum who just have bad luck. And kind of move down. Wow. Right? And so so that you know, one thing that's actually interesting to me is so I've spent a lot of time studying economics, and frankly, we've accomplished almost nothing. I don't know why there's a Nobel Prize in the economics because, you know, we can't predict what the outcome of the economy is going to be next year, we can't predict which are going to be growing economies, which are declining. Macroeconomics is just a random effect. But when it comes to social mobility, there at the group level, societies actually are you see really almost a kind of physics of social mobility. Yeah. So if I tell you, you know, here's a here's a thousand people who have the top 1% of social status, I can predict pretty much exactly where their children will be for the next 10 generations. Uh That's in So just think about that sentence that you've just said there. That's like clairvoyance or divination or something. Right. No, I mean, what it is just saying that at least at the you can't predict for any individual, right? And for every individual family, there's different path, there's a lot of randomness, right? So that's the thing that we say to people is, "Look, the the the good news is your outcomes don't seem to be entirely determined by genetics. There's also complete randomness as well." Fantastic. Fantastic. Where's the Where's the agency in this? Oh, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. There's some dice being rolled somewhere by a god. Yeah, but I mean, this is this is a a Plowman's Maxim, right? Genetics to do not predetermine, but they do predispose. Yeah. And when you smear that across enough of a populace, you end up with just like you like thermodynamics, right? It's like winds that blow in particular directions, and they encourage particular outcomes. Right. No, I mean, what So what is impressive actually I mean, so this is why I'm actually I'm almost a little surprised by how how kind of exercised people are about class and social mobility, right? Because somehow there is this kind of feeling that that that there is this permanent advantage group that they're able to take advantage of their position all the time, and, you know, get all of these unearned benefits. Um if you look at people who are at the top 1% of the society, what is more impressive is whatever wealth they have, they're not able to stop their children moving downwards on average. Because of regression to the mean. Yeah. And they're not There's nothing they can do that Well, I hear I mean, I I can I can bro bro science an explanation for why that is, which is that most people aren't able to look longitudinally at anything. They're able to look at things during their period of life, and when they came in, these people were at the top, and when they go out, those people are at the top. You know, maybe there's some movement, but this regression to the mean happens over long, long, long periods of time. It's this generation, this genera this idiot child that decides to gamble his money away, this you know, drunk, this blah blah blah blah blah. Slowly just chips and chips and chips away, but anybody that's using this sees a them and an us. It's a tribal game, and they've been at the top, and they will always be at the top, and this is exactly why the Rockefellers or the lizard alien people or whoever it is that's in charge of the world have always been there and will always be there. Yeah, no, I I agree. I mean, the uh yes, it's as I say, it's hard for people to take that kind of long perspective. And and even, you know, modern uh economists or sociologists often are just looking at the current generation, the earlier generation. So one kind of nice thing about the field I'm in, which is looking at, you know, people 300 or 400 years, is that you really can see that dynamics play itself out, and you can and and the other thing that you can see is that all of these incredible social changes with political franchise, education, social services, all the rest of that stuff, hasn't fundamentally changed British society. That we we could be living in the Victorian era. It's the same era. Yeah, I mean, the obvious the obvious question is, what's the implication of this for a a society that prays at the altar of meritocracy? Like what what what are the implications? You put all of this data together, you've realized this sort of a thing. What does this mean? Like what what what what are the implications? Well, one implication is that I is I think that society is more meritocratic than people tend to believe. That people with ability tend to be able to move up within the society, right? And and people without ability are tending to move down no matter what their parentage was or what advantages they got from their parentage. And that that people tend to be over-focused on this kind of absence of meritocracy or the importance of your cab lineage, your class, and stuff like that. And so one thing I actually draw is some kind of sense of we do live in a surprisingly meritocratic world. Now, in other terms, in terms of social policy, um one implication, one immediate implication, for example, is if you look at the experience of the Huguenots coming to England, their descendants are still five times as likely to go to Oxford and Cambridge than the average person in England 300 years later. So one kind of interesting implication of this is that if you're concerned about the output of the society as a whole or the social functioning of the society as a whole, then in immigration policy, you should really look seek out high-status immigrants, right? Uh because they not Would that Would that not push down the social mobility of the native population? It would. But But it would you know, that group will eventually be assimilated into the society as a whole. And so if we look, you know, five generations from now, the society as a whole will be better off. a more productive populace. Right. But it is true, you know, if you have elite immigrants, then they tend to displace the upper classes. Whereas if you have low-status immigrants, they that tends to favor the upper classes in the society, and it tends to compete with people at the lower end of the society. But it does say that you know, immigrants are actually going to have a surprising kind of long-term impact on the society. They're not just going to be absorbed and leave the society otherwise unchanged. Right, because you've taken a a kind of a hermetically sealed genetic bomb and you've deposited it, and the aftershock, the aftereffect of that is going to continue down the road. Right. And and and now it it turns out, so one of my co-authors, Neil Cummins, has done some study, you know, because I'm of Irish origins. he's years of age. He was born in Ireland. Uh Irish immigrants to Britain are still somewhat of an underclass in Britain, uh even though a lot of them have been in Britain for 100 or 150 or more years. Doesn't bode well for the Irish genetics. So So yes, as I say, so if it ends up if that is really because of the uh the genetics of that population, it's kind of interesting that it's it actually it has an impact for for very long uh time. Uh and so So because there are some views that would say, "Look, everyone has exactly the same potential." You know, so when immigrants come in, it doesn't matter what their educational background is, what other things are, because Throw them in the primary school and a secondary school and get them a sixth-form degree, and they're going to be just the same. And it's it's it'll make no long-run impact on the society. Uh but as I say, I think if you really do believe that there is this element, then it would say, "Well, in immigration policy" So So some societies, for example, like Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, have these incredibly restrictive immigration policies where basically they want you only if you're pretty highly educated. Uh and what that would say is that will actually have kind of long-lasting impacts on those societies in terms of average educational levels, average ability levels, uh and uh So that's So but other than that, you know, look, people choose to have children, they choose not to have children. They will have these social consequences. It would have these social consequences if it's transmitted also just by social means. Yeah, that's that's an interesting that's an interesting question, given that we've got uh uh declining birthrates at the moment, uh for the first time in quite a while, and the particular cohorts that are choosing to reproduce are uh assorting as well. Uh it seems like people who are more right-leaning are having proportionally less fewer children than people who are left left-leaning. Uh downstream from that that has to select in some ways for social status, educational achievement, so on and so unless it's totally random, which it could be, but it seems unlikely that that would be the case. Uh have you got a prediction given the changing birthrate of what this is going to do to the inheritance of social status? Well, uh it turns out there have been some studies in England because they've got this thing, the UK Biobank. And so the UK Biobank has metrics of what your educational potential is based on your genetics. And Base Britain, dear God. Uh but uh then you can they can actually people can look at it and say, "Well, how many children do people have based on what their educational genetic educational potential is?" And the answer is it's very slightly uh what's called dysgenic. That is, there's a very slight tendency for people with lower potential, just genetic potential, to to have more children. But But it's really not that significant. But what is actually interesting, again looking at this data in the past in England, is that these forces of relative fertility across different groups were really big in the past. And so in the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution, the upper classes in Britain were super fecund and were basically having 50% more children than the lower classes in each generation. And so you do see this period where if you think if it is the the case that it's all based on genetic potential, that the average abilities of England were rising. Immediately after the Industrial Revolution, we moved to a completely different phase where the upper classes just gave up having children. And within like one generation, they moved from having three or four on average children to having one child. It's amazingly quick transformation. And so then actually you enter this other period where you are And this is the period where the eugenicists are all running around cuz they were responding to what they saw as this incredible social problem. But then since I think the 1960s or something like that, there hasn't been that much change. But there are actually these periods in the past where you would actually get these significant changes in what average ability levels would be in Britain. Has there been any other unique step change uh in the last recent history uh that means that some of the rules and lessons that we've taken from 1600 to 2000 or whatever uh may no longer apply? The introduction of uh hormonal birth control and reliable contraception, uh the introduction of homeschooling or of the internet, or you know, like is there anything that you think is a potential step change, a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree, when it comes to the influences on this stuff? Um uh to be honest with you, no. I mean, I actually think that uh people look at all the new technologies we have and everything else, and they think, "Oh, fundamentally, you know, social life must have dramatically changed, and the possibilities have dramatically changed." But uh you know, the other than the decline in the number of children, we're really not seeing a lot of change in the nature of social life in Britain. It It hasn't changed that much since, you know, the the pre-industrial era. Uh and uh you know, there's a surprising kind of constancy to the way people live family life, the way people produce children, and stuff like that, other than the fact they just have many fewer of them. Um and so So yeah, I'm not expecting any great social revolutions from things like, you know, so things like assisted reproduction technology, that's become important. It kind of favors upper-class people because it's expensive. And you know, so it it's going to affect potentially relative fertility. But I think it's still the case that it's a kind of minority of all children are born in that way. And so I don't see it as having dramatic impacts. Now, the one thing that is on the horizon that would be kind of Personally, I would find a little bit worrying. Are you going to talk about embryo selection? Yes. There it is. IVF, embryo selection, I knew it. So uh I have talked to some of the people who are who are have got venture capital now and are trying to develop these technologies. Now, the thing about embryo selection is currently you've got to look among among your own embryos, right? And so there isn't that much It's not modification, it's selection. Yeah. Yeah, there's not that much range. But I would be convinced that in somewhere like China they will go ahead with this, right? And and when one illustration of this is, now when the United States is, you know, it's quite common for upper class parents to think, well, a a kind of a nice pathway to a good college is if their kids are good at athletics. And so there are all there used to be all these slots where you could be in the hockey team, you know, at Harvard. Uh a whole bunch of those middle class parents were giving growth hormones to their perfectly normal sized children in order to gain them. Create some studs that would go get into an Ivy League education. Yeah. And and, you know, and costing a huge amount of money. I mean, this stuff is incredibly expensive. And, you know, if parents are willing to do that, right? If they're willing to take, you know, someone who's 5 ft 10 and say, we're going to take you to this special doctor and get you these growth hormones, um then people will engage in embryo selection. So, I don't I don't disagree. I I do think that it plays into at least the the use of growth hormone plays into the highly environmental, highly uh um culturally influenced, non behavioral genetic, non genetic determinism view of the world. I think that the upper classes are going to have to square the circle of accepting behavioral genetics as as powerful of a force that it is because publicly the luxury belief that is often put forward is, you know, it it it it we just need to do more welfare and we need to do so on and so forth and it doesn't really matter, you know, you haven't got this determinism through genetics and stuff. That's perilously close to eugenics. That just sounds an awful lot like something that Adolf Hitler would have spoken about. Meanwhile, they're mating assortatively. Uh but they they are going to have to ultimately put their money where their mouth is with regards to this because if certain families that decide to use embryo selection and then maybe even gene enhancement embryo enhancement techniques, uh they're going to fall behind. It's an arms race ultimately for offspring and those people are going to fall behind. Yeah, and I mean, the the at least the evidence in the US is if you look at how much people are willing to spend for private schooling, which it it's unclear how much advantage that has, but they're spending 50 or 60,000 a year on stuff like that. that. And so I'm I'm confident in place like the US they would do this, but I'm even more confident in a place like China that they would do this. I mean, because there people are are trying to have boys as opposed to girls or stuff like that and they're willing to abort a fetus if it's the wrong gender. Uh and and so I actually I I do fear that, you know, and and there are definitely people who want to break down that barrier and push, you know, us towards these technologies. The only thing is, I mean, things like educational outcome depend on like a thousand different loci on the genome. And so it's not going to be easy to There's the education gene that we just need to tinker with. Yeah, right. You know, so there's no simple uh solution uh to that. Uh but but it, you know, it it seems for sure that that stuff like that will will come it in future. And um and then, I mean, the the other puzzle will be will people just decide, well, maybe I I don't need my partner's egg. I'll get some other egg. I like I like you as a wife around the house, but your genetics Yeah. But There's this really smart girl at work. So, uh so so so there, you know, it it it will be interesting to see uh what people do. But I think I mean, the advice for upper class parents now is, you should just enjoy your children, right? If you really are upper class, they're unlikely to exceed you in terms of their outcomes in life. They're more likely to move towards the mean. And so if you're having children, it should be with that realization that, you know, that's just the nature of social life. I I can't resist when I'm teaching students, I should never do this. I'm sure they hate me. I actually point out to them that since they actually represent an upper class group, if there's 50 of them here in the class, it's predictable that their children will do less well in life than they will. All of this hard work to give your children the advantage so that they can slip down this snake and just end up a little bit behind where you were. Yeah. So, I should I've got a future at that resolution to self, do not find this out. Did you see this study on physical attractiveness and intergenerational social mobility that came out recently? Oh, I don't think I did. So, uh Alexey Gugushvili and Gregor's Bulczak. I've absolutely butchered that. Physical attractiveness matters both for males and females intergenerational social mobility outcomes, but it is more important for males even when childhood characteristics are accounted for. Using data of about 11,000 individuals from the United States National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we contributed to the existing scholarship by investigating if physical attractiveness assessed when individuals are around 15 years old is an important predictor of intergenerational social mobility measured after 20 years. Results, we found that physical attractiveness matters for both male and female intergenerational social mobility outcomes, but it is more important for males even when childhood characteristics, such as various aspects of parental socioeconomic position, individuals health, a proxy for IQ, neighborhood conditions, and interviewers fixed effects accounted for using imputed data for observations with missing information. Across three measures of social mobility, education, occupation, and income, physically attractive males are more likely to be socially mobile than males of average attractiveness. Conclusion, physical attractiveness is an independent predictor of intergenerational social mobility outcomes regarding individuals educational, occupational, and income attainment. So so couple I I I actually I haven't seen that paper. I I do need to actually go and look at it now. Uh but um one thing that's interesting there again is you you would expect from the conventional wisdom that it would be women who would actually be the ones where physical attraction would match up more than men. But what I can tell you is that someone has just produced a working paper on economists where they've actually identified their physical attractiveness and found that more attractive economists have do better in terms of publication. And and I don't know what they must have gone to the websites of universities or something like that and then scraped these things and then had someone rate them. Uh and there, as I say, the puzzle is journal editors not normally look at pictures of people, you know, when the paper comes in and say, well, how handsome or how tall is this person? Uh and so I suspect for these things that probably um physical attractiveness is just another part of social competence. That basically highly competent people know to get a nice haircut, you know, and occasionally shave and stuff like that. And that uh that that it's really just an another kind of imperfect indicator of basically what people's kind of overall social abilities are. What was the response when you dropped this paper? Oh, this uh the the PNAS paper. Well, well, you'd probably have heard about that. I I got uh canceled at Glasgow University. Tell that give us give us that story. But but that was in some sense that was my fault because I had published two books each with a Hemingway pun. So, my first book was a farewell to arms, a brief economic history of the world. The second book was The Sun Also Rises, Surnames and Social Mobility. And so there's a great pun that involves uh genetic transmission. And so that is For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls. Uh IQ and social life not IQ, sorry, genetics and social life. And so anyway, I was due to give a talk at uh the uh economics department at uh Glasgow and this was in the time of COVID. And so I call in and they say, well, just one problem. The the dean had ordered that the cancel the the seminar be canceled. There was a petition by a hundred members of the faculty uh saying that they this was pseudoscience uh that eugenics was to be opposed in all of its forms. And so it was astonishing because then the dean said, well, I actually have looked at the paper and I don't see any problem with the paper, but the title is a problem. So, if you would just change the title, we'll reschedule the seminar. But then I felt on principle that I can't really have the I don't care that much about the title, but I can't have the dean uh tell me that. And so that, as I say, it was an astonishing turn in universities that a bunch of people, and I'm sure most of those people are in, you know, humanities or sociology or other subjects like that, feel that they can actually call for cancellation of of something else. I mean, so that you you could imagine they could come and be critical and stuff like that. But but also, I mean, that that we reached that stage. And and effectively, when they did that, there there was no cost to the university of doing that, right? I thought the the the dean and the principal of the university played it very well because as administrators because they said, "We are not canceling anything. There's just so much interest in this talk that we think we need some kind of enhanced security." And so, we we're just deferring things to to get to a better place. Um but the funniest thing then was that someone put me in touch with a reporter from The Times. And I thought, "Well, you know, they should publicize that these guys do stuff like this." And The Times now is the world's most worthless newspaper. The reporter for The Times had a story that was headlined, "Eugenesis denied opportunity to speak at Glasgow University." sake. So so as I say, it's it is And and they couldn't even get my age right or, you know, there were various other things they couldn't get right in the story. And so so yes, so that has actually been uh a a concern. Uh and and I also noticed I mean, so when I'm doing this stuff, you know, it's there's every possibility that something is wrong, that you haven't done things correctly, you know. That's the nature of doing these kind of studies. Uh but I do notice that the the kind of Twitter climate that surrounds anything that has any hint about genetics is brutal and unforgiving, right? And people are just ready to go to the barricades. Why do you think that is? Uh I I honestly I don't really understand why it's become kind of so ingrained because for example, height is genetically determined, right? And no one seems to get very upset about that fact. Uh and they do all of these studies, the same kind of studies they do for education. They can tell you for everyone, here's what their height potential is. Uh we know how it's transmitted, we know it's equally transmitted from mothers and fathers. And and you know, and and so people or eye color or other stuff like that, people seem to find that's perfectly fine. So why people somehow think that because social characteristics are also genetic potentially genetically transmitted that it's time to kind of to go to the barricades and to just, you know, think of some reason why this cannot be true? you know, use your theory of mind, what do you think this is a threat to to them? It's evidently a threat to something. Yeah, that it's an interesting question. I mean, why? Because it's not just that people say, "Oh, I'm not interested in that." Or, you know, "Don't tell me that." And stuff like that. They actively want to exclude any such discussions from the academy, right? I mean, they they want to close down those types of investigations. Uh and uh you know, and and and as I say, I I I'm still a little bit mystified as to uh why, you know, why the in particular this has become so controversial, right? Cuz I I say I've noticed now I've read a bunch of stuff in behavioral genetics. And a lot of people who are practicing behavioral genetics are very busy trying to find reasons for why behavioral genetics does not directly affect that much about people's lives, right? So where, you know, so now there's this thing called genetic nurture. I I don't know if you've read about that. No, what's this? So Sounds awful. It sounds It sounds like it's going to annoy me and I'm going to think about it for the rest of the day. Right. So here's this interesting study that was done just a couple years ago. Uh you inherit half of your parents' DNA on average. And so, what they did was they can type that DNA and say, "This is what your educational potential is." And so what they did in this study in Iceland was they took people's outcomes. They had their own DNA and then they had the DNA that didn't inherit from their parents. They had no influence on their body, right? Because this was the stuff that didn't get transmitted to them. And then they looked at predicting how many years of education they would get as a function of the DNA you did inherit and the DNA you didn't inherit. And it turns out the DNA you didn't inherit is also predictive of what your outcome is going to be. And it has about half the weight of the DNA you actually inherited. And what they explanation then that they proposed for this is that basically, maybe the way genetics is working is that your parents, because of the kind of DNA they have, set up a certain kind of an environment and a certain kind of nurture for you. And that's actually what's doing the work. That's what's transmitting to the next generation what your social status is. And then it's going to be correlated with your DNA because you inherited the DNA from the parents. But it's not directly the DNA that's doing the work. It's the environment that's actually There's so much acrobatics and going on to try and dance around Oh my god. Wow, that's that's really impressive. I've got I've got a circus I've actually got the image of a circus in my mind at the moment of someone doing like spirals through the air. Yeah, I don't know. I so I I've had a couple of conversations. I had a conversation with Paige Harden a few years ago that wrote The Genetic Lottery. Uh Paige, very very great researcher. Uh Stuart Ritchie's been on the show. Plomin's been on the show. Uh Stuart's Stuart's fantastic. Paige I found particularly interesting uh because, you know, she's somebody who is politically from the left but uh scientifically um from the behavioral genetics camp. I A couple of things that I can think of. Uh anything that looks like g- gene-ish, like genetic type explanations, uh immediately lambasted as being right of center or far right or, you know, completely like bigoted. Um the academy at the moment is left-leaning uh and becoming increasingly uh feminized as well. Like just literally in the um uh proportions of women that you have that are attending as undergraduates. And, you know, this is going to grow into mostly female professors over the next few decades as well. Um some great research by Corey Clark found that behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology explanations were most likely to be disliked by female professors um because they are seen as being uh less empathetic. They're sort of less touchy-feely, they're less egalitarian. Uh whereas the male professors uh were more uh happy to have this come across. So I think generally you have this shift toward a people not things or a empathy not reality um approach. Uh that that could sway things in in one way. And I guess in another, you know, I come from a a very working-class background. The The only thing that was remarkable about Stockton-on-Tees was that it had the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then after a while it it didn't it didn't even have that anymore. Um it had the widest high street in the UK as well, I think. The widest pedestrian high street in the UK. So really clutching at straws to try and come up with something. Um and, you know, I I feel very proud. I think I I think I'm the first person in my family to go to university. I ended up getting a master's as well. And I I I really love the things that I do. And I see in myself I do feel sometimes like being told that my successes uh aren't mine to own quite so much feels it feels disempowering in in a way. Um it also feels reassuring in a way because you can kind of go hands-off the wheel in some regards. Right. And but it does make you think, "Well, uh hell. Like I I I thought I worked really hard at that thing." And I did, right? I did. I had to do the thing. And the thing was hard. But for someone to come along and say, "Well, yeah, but you didn't choose your conscientiousness level. And you didn't choose your openness to experience. And you didn't choose your your eroticism. And you didn't choose your blah blah blah." And you're like, "Yeah, I get that." Uh and it's a difficult circle to square. And I'm I'm I'm still yet to work out how to fully fold this into my worldview, you know? I'm I'm currently in London uh about to do my live tour. And I've got these live shows that I'm doing. And I'm standing on stage. And I'm telling people on stage that they have way more control over their outcomes than they think because the bar is set incredibly low because most people have externalized their locus of control. And if you take a tiny little bit of work ethic and apply it, that you can make massive changes in your life because I've seen this myself. But for me to square that circle with this genetic predisposition thing is really really difficult because I know that there are things that people can do that can give them better outcomes even later into life because it happened to me. Right. And yet, over time, genetics is this, you know, this sort of gravitational force that just sucks people toward whatever they were supposed to be in any case. Uh IQ I I agree with you that I mean, it is you you know, because the way we lead our life is by making all these conscious struggles and making these decisions and and deciding to spend time on this as opposed to something else. And so it is very hard to square with saying, "Well, that's just that was just your the lottery produced. That's the type person you are." And yeah, no, I and I agree for motivational speakers that the news about genetic transmission is not great. Right, guys. I know that you were coming here to feel empowered, but we're going to do an hour and a half on behavioral genetics. Leave feeling despondent. Goodnight. Yeah, wow. I don't know. I don't know. Everything interesting that happened in your life happened about 30 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, this was this was Plomin's Plomin's big piece of advice. Like the single most important decision that you can make in your child's outcomes are who you have them with. And if you want to have if you want to have a better child, you know, don't bother reading books about diet and neonatal care and and optimal bedroom temperature for neurological growth during the toddler years and all the rest of it, just spend more time finding a smart partner. Right? Like that's that's the that's the big solution. And it's disempowering and I think that it pushes against the a meritocratic world that says, "Your successes are yours to bear." Alond Botton's got this beautiful beautiful analogy. I wish that he had a conversation with Plomin or or yourself or someone cuz I think it would have been really great. He says um back in ancient Greece, the beggars on the street were referred to as unfortunates that Lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them, right? And you'll remember Lady Fortuna, she's holding a set of scales. And the reason that she's holding a set of scales is that she gives and she takes away, right? That there is supposed to be this balanced to the universe, which I think is a nice excuse for why some people have good things and other people don't. That oh, they'll get their comeuppance eventually. But if you roll the clock forward by 2,000 years, what is it that we call them? People who don't have anything going on, they're a loser. Right? It's not that they're unfortunate. It's that if the people who succeed are worthy of bearing the fruits of their successes, the people who don't succeed are worthy of bearing the losses of theirs as well. And that's why this language that kind of centers the locus of control upon the individual has has changed. And that is, you know, fundamentally what a meritocracy is. Uh you are able to enact change in your life. Your merit is what will determine your outcomes. And there are relatively few barriers in the way. And it means that for the people maybe this is a luxury belief as well in some regards. People that are at the top, they don't want to be told that the only reason that they managed to get into this highfalutin institution was because of their mother's mother's mother's father's mother's all the way back. Yeah, so I mean, maybe you could say, "Well, there is this always this random element." And maybe it's openness to kind of experience or something like that can can increase that randomness, right? That that this would be the thing to say, "Look, like half of your outcomes in some sense depend on just random shocks." And so maybe there's a way of kind of choosing to take more gambles in life, right? And and uh Right, because for example, as an academic, there's certain types of paper you can write that are just much more risky than others, where, you know, half the time it's going to come to nothing, you know, more than half the time, 90% of the time, but it might kind of pay off. It might, you know, go somewhere. Roll the dice. Yeah, so so that and that would be a thing about what kind of attitude you have to life, right? Are you going to be conservative or kind of afraid of of these things or you know But I suppose, you know, coming into it, well, what have you got? Are you trying to conserve or are you trying to explore? Are you trying to hold on to what it is that you have? You know, if you've managed to come from a family that's from a wealthy background, maybe you do. You like let's just don't be the generation that it up for, you know, great-grandpa who made a few million pounds doing whatever whatever. Like let's just not be optimized to not be an idiot as opposed to be a hero. Whereas someone that's lower down the distribution, you would look to explore more than exploit, right? We need to I've got very little to lose. My downside is limited. My upside is is basically asymmetric. So yeah, fascinating fascinating. Greg, I I think it's so interesting. I'm really excited for you to write this book. I think it's uh I think it's I I don't know what the conclusion is. I think that what will be really important when you do finally sort of round all of this out will be to try and put some sort of like I don't know. How does someone ameliorate this into their life? I think is what you know, it's fascinating all the way down. Super interesting. Really really really cool. The question that everyone's going to be left with is All right. And now how am I supposed to see the world and myself? Right. It's very difficult. The the one very practical piece of advice I would say is that as a modern society, we are obsessed with child-rearing and with and effort in children. And and we have a society where increasingly it's not clear that we're actually going to sustain ourselves as a society, right? And so one kind of interesting message I think would be to say, "Look, there's not a lot of evidence that all of that stuff matters much. Just have children and enjoy them, right? You don't have to go through this excruciating kind of thing called parenting. You could just relax, have a glass of wine. They'll be fine. Not while you're pregnant. Not while you're pregnant. after that, right? Yeah. But but you know, and and that actually would be one kind of I think an an important lesson that actually people would would need cuz I know as a first parent myself, we went to ridiculous extents in terms of what we did, you know, as parents. To try and determine and predispose your child's outcomes despite the fact that they're on a set of train tracks that are heading to the same destination. Yeah. Yeah. And and you know, if I could get all that time back, that's what I want. But anyway, so so there are some kind of upsides to this. Uh and um And then you know, but as a person kind of intellectually, it it's kind of nice to see that there really even in the complicated social world that we live in, this idea that there really is almost a kind of physics to social life. Mhm. It's kind of attractive and and kind of powerful. Uh So yeah, so I guess my big ambition though in life is not to not to write a how-to book for for middle-class parents. Ameliorating behavioral genetics. No, I understand. Great clock, ladies and gentlemen. Greg, I think your work's fantastic. This is really really interesting. I can't wait to see what you do next. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your work or read more of the stuff that you've done? So so the article that just came out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is actually open access. And it's actually not that hard for people to look at that and read that. And then, you know, I have if you just Google my name, I have a website with a bunch of kind of working papers on various topics that they they can do. And then hopefully in a year or so there will actually be a book finally. Thanks a lot. My pleasure. Thank you, Gregory. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe.