Clarke’s work is convincing because he’s replicated it across several quite different cultures using diverse data sources.
He is especially careful not to get distracted by any kind of nature v nurture questions. He simply notes that (a) people mate assortively; (b) transmit their social status reliably over multiple generations. You can read between the lines of course.
The maths is also very simple by the standard of academics economics these days. Sadly I doubt he’ll get the Nobel despite being the most preeminent economic historian of this century.
People forget that Germany, Japan, and Italy were among the most developed countries in the world in the 1930's and much of their wealth survived the war, not only infrastructure and human capital but also institutions. The Marshall Plan just got things rolling again.
Clarke's argument is weakened because he interprets the survival of the educated upper class as being representative of the fate of the actual elite. Intelligentsia is resilient because it controls stable institutions like universities and academies while the mercantile class is far more vulnerable to both the vagaries of the market and the shocks of revolutions. Plus the educated have credentials and intellectual skills which survived communist nationalizations better than capital. Intellectuals were also overrepresented in revolutionary movements and were often privileged by communist regimes as long as they kept the party line.
In Eastern Europe many pre-communist writers, artists and professors led cushy lives by praising the Party while the few who resisted met grim fates. The members of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie were not that lucky being systematically targeted for repression and in the best case they were allowed to join the ranks of intellectuals or paper pushers but (almost) never did they remained in the elite.
The experience in many Eastern European countries does not gel with your claims that being part of the intelligensia gave you greater protection. Stalin and Hitler both committed mass atrocities (e.g. Katyn) during WWII to wipe out large parts of the elite. And it wasn't just the aristocrats.
Spatial prosperity tends to fluctuate around a mean and as above setbacks tend to get unwound within a generation or so.
That doesn't mean that relative prosperity can't change. 5000 years ago Egypt was the richest place in the world, then it was Greece, then Rome, then northern Italy in the Renaissance, then further north again in Europe after the Industrial Revolution.
These things change, but over the course of dozens of generations, so I tend to think the dream of equalising global income any time soon is a fantasy.
It may be controversial in this particular forum, but by far the best way of sustainably raising global incomes is by letting people move from poor countries to rich countries where their labour productivity rises instantly. This has lots of other implications (mainly cultural) but it better than any development aid policy.
Legally any money flowing from the US to a developing nation counts as "aid". This includes IMF loans that are known for their high interest rates and trapping countries in debt which ultimately hinders development. Countries like Pakistan, Argentina and Sri Lanka are prime examples of countries perpetually suffering from the effects of US "aid".
I would approach any study that looks at the effects of US (and other IMF member nations) aid with more scrutiny. "Aid" can refer to a lot of different things.
Argentina perpetually suffers from populist policies, mostly due to Peronists in power but also other parties from time to time. It also suffers from perpetual budget deficits in the provinces and the inability of the federal government to force the provinces to solve that problem. And it also suffers from the consequences of decades of autarkic economic policies (they used to call it "import substitution" because it sounds less stupid) inflicted to a country with zero chance to be prosperous under autarky.
It does not "suffer" from the effects of US aid or IMF loans.
- "The United States can “print” dollars (and the Federal Reserve does so regularly), but Argentina cannot. The same is true of other countries in the Global South with large external debts denominated in foreign currencies." => And yet that doesn't stop more than 20 developed countries who also can't print dollars from being developed.
- "a country can develop its own industry and reduce its dependency on expensive imported goods, especially advanced technologies or fashionable consumer products." => That is what I call autarky. The author doesn't seem to know much about trade.
- "If a nation excels in some sectors of the economy, it may be able to export more, improving its balance of payments." => Look at the data for automobile production in Argentina for the last few years. It's grown enormously and that is not a low value added industry.
- "or a barter system, circumventing the US dollar." => The author definitely knows nothing about trade.
- "All these common-sense policies" => They are not common-sense just because he says so. If he wants international trade to function in a way reminiscent of the bronze age, the onus is on him to prove that it is common-sense.
- "Argentina has defaulted on its debt eight times. It even made history with the world's biggest ever default ($95 billion in 2001)" => If taking loans is bad, and defaulting is bad.... then what?
- "Harvard doctor in economics Domingo Cavallo - who directed Argentina's central bank during the last dictatorship and" => that's an Ad hominem. Domingo Cavallo directed Argentina's central bank for two months starting in july 1982. The Falklands/Malvinas war ended in june 1982, and Galtieri quits in june 18 1982, in effect beginning the end of the military dictatorship. After that Domingo Cavallo enters the central bank. Insinuating that Cavallo somehow supported the dictatorship seems very deceitful from the author. Cavallo definetely made mistakes, but you don't need to smear him in order to analyze what he did right and what he did wrong.
The early Industrial Revolution through WWII was an era in transition from Malthusian (my being wealthy means others must be poor) to "we can all get rich, especially smart people."
For a variety of reasons we can all understand various groups got stuck in the old zero sum mindset (slaveholders, the axis, the communists) right as the world was changing to make that mindset obsolete. One can understand how they came to their conclusions, but one wishes they could have exercised enough foresight to realize they didn't need to take such drastic actions to prosper.
Oh well, we are Monday morning quarterbacking with more data then they had and much more comfortable lives.
Do we have any good correlational data of some measure of "human capital" and economic growth/prosperity? If it is "human capital" that survives these disasters and plants the seed of economic recovery, what is it exactly? Why do some well-educated countries which appear to have high human capital not grow? I feel like there's something missing from this equation.
Human Capital of Europe(including germany) is affected by WW2. They lost famous merchant group due to schizoid brutalism and immigration. Maybe that's why USA is more developed than Europe.
Obviously people going to prostitutes are not a representative sample of a given population. What I find interesting is long term impact of assortative mating on physical traits. But this happens so slowly that it can only be studies after several generations.
For example, taller men are more likely to marry and have children. As marriage and birth rates continue to decline in general, will we finally see average heights in some countries go up as shorter men fail to reproduce and die out?
Same for obese women. If more women become overweight and thus cannot get married and do not have children, will we see a decrease in average weight of women as the current cohort of obese women die out without offspring? Or there won't be a change because more women of lower socioeconomic status have children when they're younger before they become overweight?
It depends. So for instance with the height example, it might be reproductively advantageous for men but not women. Thus the effects might largely be canceled out because shorter men reproduce slightly less (correlation is small) while shorter women reproduce more. Some people call this sexually antagonistic selection. It actually would be interesting to see if taller parents invest more in reproductive success of daughters while shorter ones invest more in that of their sons. The example of obesity is more likely. I haven’t seen any papers on reproductive success and obesity but I am aware that such people often have reproductive issues. However, I also think weight gain is heavily environmental in nature. Basics laws would be enough to lower obesity. For most of history humans have maintained healthy adiposity, but we are now in an environment where sugars and fatty foods are plentiful. In the U.S around 70% of the population is overweight or obese per the CDC. I imagine within the next 100 years we will probably find some regulatory tools to combat this or develop certain health innovations. But assuming obese individuals have less kids (I’m not sure) and nothing is done to change the situation, as time passes those who can handle the modern environment of culinary temptations would be selected for more and reproduce more kids.
I think the black population in the US is perfect for studying the effects of obesity and fertility. Black women are the most overweight group in the world. They become overweight also quite young. Is there a correlation between being overweight and having fewer or no children?
Anecdotal: Beyonce and Jada Pinkett Smith are relatively slender and have children. While a whale like Lizzo weighing in a almost 120 KG has no children. And at 35, being that overweight I don't think she's capable of having children.
It is complicated but this paper notes that studies usually find a positive association between BMI and children birthed. But also causality is difficult to establish as in general mothers seem to gain weight the more children they have. So rather counter intuitively it appears that bigger women have more kids assuming they control for race and other factors.
The link is not working, can you update it? This is hard to study because women will gain weight that they cannot lose after giving birth. Best way to approach this would be to have data on the BMI of women before they're pregnant. And then after giving birth to see how much of that weight they lose.
And compare that with the cohort of women who are already overweight before pregnancy.
Track these two groups with a third group of overweight women never have children. That way we can see the fertility rate by BMI.
Yes its definitely heavily confounded, so it doesn’t really tell us much about reproductive success and its relation to weight in the sense that you and I would like to understand. I’m surprised more work hasn’t been done on this topic.
The title of this paper is “The causal effect of number of children on later-life overweight and obesity in parous women. An instrumental variable study”
The more you read history stories, the more you understand things get better in the end.
Thanks, I needed this today.
Clarke’s work is convincing because he’s replicated it across several quite different cultures using diverse data sources.
He is especially careful not to get distracted by any kind of nature v nurture questions. He simply notes that (a) people mate assortively; (b) transmit their social status reliably over multiple generations. You can read between the lines of course.
The maths is also very simple by the standard of academics economics these days. Sadly I doubt he’ll get the Nobel despite being the most preeminent economic historian of this century.
People forget that Germany, Japan, and Italy were among the most developed countries in the world in the 1930's and much of their wealth survived the war, not only infrastructure and human capital but also institutions. The Marshall Plan just got things rolling again.
Clarke's argument is weakened because he interprets the survival of the educated upper class as being representative of the fate of the actual elite. Intelligentsia is resilient because it controls stable institutions like universities and academies while the mercantile class is far more vulnerable to both the vagaries of the market and the shocks of revolutions. Plus the educated have credentials and intellectual skills which survived communist nationalizations better than capital. Intellectuals were also overrepresented in revolutionary movements and were often privileged by communist regimes as long as they kept the party line.
In Eastern Europe many pre-communist writers, artists and professors led cushy lives by praising the Party while the few who resisted met grim fates. The members of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie were not that lucky being systematically targeted for repression and in the best case they were allowed to join the ranks of intellectuals or paper pushers but (almost) never did they remained in the elite.
The experience in many Eastern European countries does not gel with your claims that being part of the intelligensia gave you greater protection. Stalin and Hitler both committed mass atrocities (e.g. Katyn) during WWII to wipe out large parts of the elite. And it wasn't just the aristocrats.
Spatial prosperity tends to fluctuate around a mean and as above setbacks tend to get unwound within a generation or so.
That doesn't mean that relative prosperity can't change. 5000 years ago Egypt was the richest place in the world, then it was Greece, then Rome, then northern Italy in the Renaissance, then further north again in Europe after the Industrial Revolution.
These things change, but over the course of dozens of generations, so I tend to think the dream of equalising global income any time soon is a fantasy.
It may be controversial in this particular forum, but by far the best way of sustainably raising global incomes is by letting people move from poor countries to rich countries where their labour productivity rises instantly. This has lots of other implications (mainly cultural) but it better than any development aid policy.
Legally any money flowing from the US to a developing nation counts as "aid". This includes IMF loans that are known for their high interest rates and trapping countries in debt which ultimately hinders development. Countries like Pakistan, Argentina and Sri Lanka are prime examples of countries perpetually suffering from the effects of US "aid".
I would approach any study that looks at the effects of US (and other IMF member nations) aid with more scrutiny. "Aid" can refer to a lot of different things.
Argentina perpetually suffers from populist policies, mostly due to Peronists in power but also other parties from time to time. It also suffers from perpetual budget deficits in the provinces and the inability of the federal government to force the provinces to solve that problem. And it also suffers from the consequences of decades of autarkic economic policies (they used to call it "import substitution" because it sounds less stupid) inflicted to a country with zero chance to be prosperous under autarky.
It does not "suffer" from the effects of US aid or IMF loans.
"It does not "suffer" from the effects of US aid or IMF loans."
Yes it does. This article provides a comprehensive history of disfunction in Argentina: https://geopoliticaleconomy.substack.com/p/argentina-neocolonial-debt-history
From that article:
- "The United States can “print” dollars (and the Federal Reserve does so regularly), but Argentina cannot. The same is true of other countries in the Global South with large external debts denominated in foreign currencies." => And yet that doesn't stop more than 20 developed countries who also can't print dollars from being developed.
- "a country can develop its own industry and reduce its dependency on expensive imported goods, especially advanced technologies or fashionable consumer products." => That is what I call autarky. The author doesn't seem to know much about trade.
- "If a nation excels in some sectors of the economy, it may be able to export more, improving its balance of payments." => Look at the data for automobile production in Argentina for the last few years. It's grown enormously and that is not a low value added industry.
- "or a barter system, circumventing the US dollar." => The author definitely knows nothing about trade.
- "All these common-sense policies" => They are not common-sense just because he says so. If he wants international trade to function in a way reminiscent of the bronze age, the onus is on him to prove that it is common-sense.
- "Argentina has defaulted on its debt eight times. It even made history with the world's biggest ever default ($95 billion in 2001)" => If taking loans is bad, and defaulting is bad.... then what?
- "Harvard doctor in economics Domingo Cavallo - who directed Argentina's central bank during the last dictatorship and" => that's an Ad hominem. Domingo Cavallo directed Argentina's central bank for two months starting in july 1982. The Falklands/Malvinas war ended in june 1982, and Galtieri quits in june 18 1982, in effect beginning the end of the military dictatorship. After that Domingo Cavallo enters the central bank. Insinuating that Cavallo somehow supported the dictatorship seems very deceitful from the author. Cavallo definetely made mistakes, but you don't need to smear him in order to analyze what he did right and what he did wrong.
And those are just the first four pages....
Sob story. These countries were poor before colonization. Remain so after because they exiled human capital.
Aid and Marshal plan are very different and to compare them and draw conclusions seems to be flawed to me.
What difference(s) do you have in mind here?
You say so, ergo it must be true?
https://psychology-spot.com/ipse-dixit-gratuitous-affirmation-fallacy/
Emil, why haven't you posted this one here: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/06/a-plethora-of-evidence-for-genetic-influence-of-american-race-ethnic-gaps-in-intellligence/ It seems like a major contribution.
The early Industrial Revolution through WWII was an era in transition from Malthusian (my being wealthy means others must be poor) to "we can all get rich, especially smart people."
For a variety of reasons we can all understand various groups got stuck in the old zero sum mindset (slaveholders, the axis, the communists) right as the world was changing to make that mindset obsolete. One can understand how they came to their conclusions, but one wishes they could have exercised enough foresight to realize they didn't need to take such drastic actions to prosper.
Oh well, we are Monday morning quarterbacking with more data then they had and much more comfortable lives.
Do we have any good correlational data of some measure of "human capital" and economic growth/prosperity? If it is "human capital" that survives these disasters and plants the seed of economic recovery, what is it exactly? Why do some well-educated countries which appear to have high human capital not grow? I feel like there's something missing from this equation.
Human Capital of Europe(including germany) is affected by WW2. They lost famous merchant group due to schizoid brutalism and immigration. Maybe that's why USA is more developed than Europe.
Obviously people going to prostitutes are not a representative sample of a given population. What I find interesting is long term impact of assortative mating on physical traits. But this happens so slowly that it can only be studies after several generations.
For example, taller men are more likely to marry and have children. As marriage and birth rates continue to decline in general, will we finally see average heights in some countries go up as shorter men fail to reproduce and die out?
Same for obese women. If more women become overweight and thus cannot get married and do not have children, will we see a decrease in average weight of women as the current cohort of obese women die out without offspring? Or there won't be a change because more women of lower socioeconomic status have children when they're younger before they become overweight?
It depends. So for instance with the height example, it might be reproductively advantageous for men but not women. Thus the effects might largely be canceled out because shorter men reproduce slightly less (correlation is small) while shorter women reproduce more. Some people call this sexually antagonistic selection. It actually would be interesting to see if taller parents invest more in reproductive success of daughters while shorter ones invest more in that of their sons. The example of obesity is more likely. I haven’t seen any papers on reproductive success and obesity but I am aware that such people often have reproductive issues. However, I also think weight gain is heavily environmental in nature. Basics laws would be enough to lower obesity. For most of history humans have maintained healthy adiposity, but we are now in an environment where sugars and fatty foods are plentiful. In the U.S around 70% of the population is overweight or obese per the CDC. I imagine within the next 100 years we will probably find some regulatory tools to combat this or develop certain health innovations. But assuming obese individuals have less kids (I’m not sure) and nothing is done to change the situation, as time passes those who can handle the modern environment of culinary temptations would be selected for more and reproduce more kids.
I think the black population in the US is perfect for studying the effects of obesity and fertility. Black women are the most overweight group in the world. They become overweight also quite young. Is there a correlation between being overweight and having fewer or no children?
Anecdotal: Beyonce and Jada Pinkett Smith are relatively slender and have children. While a whale like Lizzo weighing in a almost 120 KG has no children. And at 35, being that overweight I don't think she's capable of having children.
It is complicated but this paper notes that studies usually find a positive association between BMI and children birthed. But also causality is difficult to establish as in general mothers seem to gain weight the more children they have. So rather counter intuitively it appears that bigger women have more kids assuming they control for race and other factors.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S22113355
The link is not working, can you update it? This is hard to study because women will gain weight that they cannot lose after giving birth. Best way to approach this would be to have data on the BMI of women before they're pregnant. And then after giving birth to see how much of that weight they lose.
And compare that with the cohort of women who are already overweight before pregnancy.
Track these two groups with a third group of overweight women never have children. That way we can see the fertility rate by BMI.
This is hard to do.
Yes its definitely heavily confounded, so it doesn’t really tell us much about reproductive success and its relation to weight in the sense that you and I would like to understand. I’m surprised more work hasn’t been done on this topic.
The title of this paper is “The causal effect of number of children on later-life overweight and obesity in parous women. An instrumental variable study”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211335521002187#b0235