Greg Clark responds to critics

Despite not having read A Farewell to Alms, a while back I reviewed Deirdre McCloskey’s review of it. I was gratified to find that I was correct in that Clark & McCloskey agree on fewer points than McCloskey assumes they do when I found via GNXP Clark’s reponse to critics and defense of his Malthusian interpretation of history. I was baffled before by McCloskey’s misunderstanding of regression to the mean, and now I’m shocked again that Bowles (of Bowles & Gintis fame) screws the pooch on that issue as well. Like other commenters, I’m not sure why Clark seems to downplay IQ (although he has become more of a naturist putting less stock in culture) when as Jonathan Haidt argues, the traits he’s concerned with may be even more controversial.

In other crimethink news, n/a (who you may recall giving me an award) in a comment at the Inductivist has given a link to an downloadable pdf of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique. Yuri Slezkine’s book is available through my local library system and doesn’t have any of that group-selection stuff that I find implausible. Plus, I find myself much less prone to sustain a session of reading with pdfs on the computer than paper. After that I might get to CoC though. Until then, I enjoy n/a’s poking holes in Mencius Moldbug’s sweeping assertions based on little evidence.

John Sabotta Says:

January 19, 2009 at 5:22 am

The skull background to n/a’s blog graphic is both tasteful and highly appropriate.

I don’t know why, but the word “Nordish” always strikes me as inordinately hilarious.

January 19, 2009 at 5:24 am

“I’m not exactly Nordic – I’m, uh, kind of Nord-ish.”

teageegeepea Says:

January 19, 2009 at 7:16 pm

I heard that joke before, but for “Jew-ish”.

Barbar Says:

January 21, 2009 at 10:23 pm

As I understand it, Clark argues that a certain wealthy segment of England’s population had higher-than-average reproduction rates. This led to the spread of certain values in the general English population, which then led to the Industrial Revolution. Does he have any evidence that the wealthy people he studied actually had the crucial values, that the crucial values actually spread through the society through family inheritance, or that the crucial values actually led to the Industrial Revolution?

I thought that was the thrust of McCloskey’s critique, and Clark’s response doesn’t seem to answer any of these really quite basic questions.

Jan de Vries had a pretty good closing line in his review in the Journal of Economic History: “one cannot suppress the thought that had this book been written by a historian its subtitle would have been: Some Findings from Suffolk Testators, 1620-1638.”

January 22, 2009 at 12:21 am

Among the traits discussed is decreased violence. Both the poor and nobility were surprisingly violent by modern standards in medieval England, and Clark found that the surnames of criminals decreased over time while the surnames of relatively wealthy farmers became more prevalent. I think he also had some data on interest rates which he associates with impatience (Austrians like to call it “time-preference”) to back up that point. There’s a video presentation he did in New Zealand (I think) called Survival of the Richest.

January 22, 2009 at 8:31 am

There’s a difference between evidence that is consistent with a viewpoint (so that if you already believe the thesis, it increases your strength of belief) and evidence that is *compelling* to agnostics (because it rules out or at least poses problems for other competing explanations).

I can believe that there were different levels of reproductive success for different social classes in England. But it’s a long way from there to an explanation for the Industrial Revolution, and I don’t see how Clark’s account is anything other than very speculative. Good breeding is hardly the only possible explanation for society-wide shifts in the patterns of violence and interest rates. On a more micro level, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the rich farmers were actually hardworking and thrifty, and there doesn’t seem to be an explanation for how they got that way (if they were indeed that way) in the first place.

So: a very interesting thesis, but I’m a bit astonished on how purely speculative it seems to be.

Sister Y Says:

January 22, 2009 at 3:29 pm

There are many reasons why wealthy farmers would pass on their surnames more than would criminals, regardless of comparative rates of genetic paternity, only one of which involves illicit encounters with the stableboy.

January 22, 2009 at 6:59 pm

Barbar, when Greg wrote the book he thought culture passed down from parents played a larger role. Since then he has changed his mind and concluded that it was mostly genetic. So I don’t imagine there’ll be much in the book proving it was the latter rather than the former that determined things. I don’t know what evidence he gives for thiftiness among kulaks, but I think the crime data shows they were in some sense more cut out for modern peaceable society then their peers.

Oddly enough Sister Y, I believe Clark discusses bastards (who were apparently well-documented in wills) in his video.

January 22, 2009 at 7:35 pm

My previous comment (#6) doesn’t make any reference to how traits are passed down; “good breeding” can refer to either genetic or cultural transmission. So I would reproduce that comment verbatim now, but that doesn’t seem very productive. Again, I think it’s important to make a distinction between evidence that doesn’t contradict your view and evidence that actively poses problems for other competing views.

January 23, 2009 at 7:17 pm

I think his evidence against competing views is supposed to be the long period of no (sustained) economic improvement despite institutions relatively good by modern standards.