Clark
Article
Clark is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 13, 2022 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “If past success correlates with future success (cf. Plomin , Clark , etc)”; “Sources: Qian , Chudnovskaya , Dalmia , Almas , Clark”; “Clark’s Farewell to Alms”. It most often appears alongside United States, Ashkenazi Jews, Canada.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: July 13, 2022
- Last seen: August 25, 2023
Appears In
- Book Review: The Man From The Future
- Hypergamy: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
- Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
Related Pages
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- United States (3 shared issues)
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- Ashkenazi Jews (2 shared issues)
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- Canada (2 shared issues)
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- Poland (2 shared issues)
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- Soviet Union (2 shared issues)
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- 1890s (1 shared issues)
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- 5G (1 shared issues)
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- Acemoglu and Robinson (1 shared issues)
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- ACX comments (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- Alan Turing (1 shared issues)
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- Albert Einstein (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
So the most successful Jews went to Budapest, and the poorest to America. If past success correlates with future success (cf. Plomin, Clark, etc), we would expect Budapest to continue to produce more talent.
Clark and Cummins don’t measure income, but they do find a very small (~0.5 pp) status advantage for husbands’ fathers; they round this off to zero, but maybe by the Norwegian logic it represents a substantial income difference. However, this difference disappears and even reverses by the last period in their study (1980 - 2021). Although they don’t directly measure income, there’s either no income hypergamy, or it’s happening in the total absence of class hypergamy. How could this be?
Clark and Cummins, authors of the English study, reverse this logic. In the study above, they show that on average husbands and wives are of equal class (contrary to the predictions of class hypergamy). But what’s the variance? Do men and women marry down equally often, or equally rarely?
A different Clark and Cummins study says: rarely. They find a correlation of 0.8 between wives and husbands’ social classes in England, which is “unchanged 1837-2021”. For context, a correlation of 0.8 is about the correlation between the SAT score of the same person taking the SAT two different times.
Inline links: A different Clark and Cummins study says
Overall, while anyone interested in economic growth should familiarise themselves with AR’s arguments, I don’t recommend reading Why Nations Fail. It is simply too much work to slog through without explaining the authors’ real evidence base, with little in the way of style or historical insight in compensation. I do not think this is too much to ask from a popular book: Clark’s Farewell to Alms, for instance, does a much better job of presenting basic statistical evidence for a more controversial (genetic) theory. At the other end of the spectrum, Galbraith, Landes and Mokyr give more readable narrative arguments for the importance of culture and technology.