#50 Social Mobility and the Industrial Revolution:What Can We Learn from History feat. Gregory Clark

The first half of the episode discusses distinguished professor Gregory Clark's book, A Farewell to Alms. During the eighteenth century, England underwent a period of rapid industrialization and economic growth. Clark explains why industrialization made the whole world rich but not equally rich.

The episode ends with Prof. Clark and Greg exchanging views on how much our fate is affected by our family status. Clark provides an insider's view into his latest book, The Son Also Rises, demonstrating how little has changed since the 1300s in terms of social mobility.

Listen to Gregory Clark as he shares how history, ancestry, and marriage patterns shape current economics outcomes.

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[dylanringwood]

It blows my mind how such a fascinating and important thinker routinely gets such low views on YouTube videos.

[Successbookblogger]

I cherish my copy of “The Son Also Rises” and kept it in mind as I read the confusing, far less rigorous volume “Privilege” by Shamus Kahn. My friends are sick of hearing me talk about Clark.

I think an unexplored aspect of the Industrial Revolution is the immense cultural impact of Isaac Newton and the fact the he was English. It may elude a demographic historian because of its singularity. But the fact that Newton utterly changed the idea of what could be known, what could be predicted, and that there was a thing called natural law that could be used for human benefit and was discoverable by humans….this concept, along with the glorious fact that Newton was English, had an enormous cultural follow-on effect. Alexander Pope died 1744 ( just before the Industrial Revolution) and wrote the famous line “God said ‘let Newton be’, and all was light” . I would argue that Newton’s profound cultural effect is the “smoking gun”, the “singularity” that may have ignited the Industrial Revolution. Newton was talked about incessantly, even obsessively. It is easy to imagine the tinkerers and shopkeepers mulling the possibilities opened up by Newton. That they too could be “mini Newtons” and discover their own laws. That a new era that connected mental inputs to physical outputs….had been born.

Perhaps this liberation of thought, and the empowerment it suggested, put England “over the edge”. I would guess there would be testable approaches to this hypothesis: for instance, comparative word-counts of “Newton” in the letters of entrepreneurs in England vs, say, France, or shopkeepers vs landed gentry.

[antipsikiyatriKizi]

He hasn't even spoken about the slave trade.