I yam what I yam

Emphasizing the move of Universities towards a deliberate unknowing, I came across this paper by Gregory Clark.  His work is challenging and there are some aspects with which I wish to disagree but which I find myself unable to create a robust refutation.  I suspect he might be right.

I remember the kerfuffle in the past year when Clark was to have presented his most recent findings.  Academics and students, not wishing their dissolute imaginings to be dashed by evidence, deplatformed Clark so he was not able to present the data.  One response to a strong argument is to make fun of it, a second is the old standby, ad hominem, and the third is the modern preference for deplatforming and censorship.  Censorship is not new by any means but censorship by universities is the new and startling wrinkle.  

From For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 English Individuals 1750-2020 shows

Genetics Determines most Social Outcomes by Gregory Clark.  From the Abstract.

Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are dominated by the belief that social outcomes depend mainly on parental investment and community socialization. Using a lineage of 402,000 English people 1750-2020 we test whether such mechanisms better predict outcomes than a simple additive genetics model. The genetics model predicts better in all cases except for the transmission of wealth. The high persistence of status over multiple generations, however, would require in a genetic mechanism strong genetic assortative in mating. This has been until recently believed impossible. There is however, also strong evidence consistent with just such sorting, all the way from 1837 to 2020. Thus the outcomes here are actually the product of an interesting genetics-culture combination.

In the paper, he concludes:

It is generally assumed that the elements that define social status – occupational status, educational attainment, wealth, and even health – are transmitted across generations in important ways by the family environment. Above we show that the patterns of correlation of social status attributes in an extended lineage of 402,000 people in England are mainly those that would be predicted by simple additive genetic inheritance of social status in the presence of highly assortative mating around status genetics. Parent-child correlations for a trait equal those of siblings, and the patterns of correlation of relatives of different degrees of genetic affinity is mainly consistent with that predicted by additive genetics. Further family size and birth order, elements that would significantly affect the family environment for children, have modest effects on adult outcomes. The underlying persistence of traits is such that people who have likely never interacted socially, such as second to fifth cousins, remain surprisingly strongly correlated in terms of occupational status and wealth. The patterns observed imply that marital sorting must be strong in terms of the underlying genetics.

If this interpretation is correct then aspirations that by appropriate social design, rates of social mobility can be substantially increased will prove futile. We have to be resigned to living in a world where social outcomes are substantially determined at birth. Personally I would argue that this should push us towards compressing differences in income and wealth that are the product of such inherited characteristics. The Nordic model of the good society looks a lot more attractive than the Texan one.