Podcast: Thinking Class (LS 30 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: #131 - Gregory Clark - Why Everything The West Believes About Social Mobility Is Wrong
Pub date: 2026-06-11

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Professor Gregory Clark is a British-born economic historian at the University of California, Davis and holds a DNRF Chair at the Danish National Research Foundation and a professor at the Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG) at the Department of Economics, SDU. Furthermore, he is a Visiting Professor at London School of Economics (LSE) and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Davis. He is the author of A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World and The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility.

In this conversation Greg and I think out loud about:

Why some societies became rich while others remained poor — and why it has little to do with institutions
Why Indian cotton mills in the 1920s could not match Lancashire despite identical technology
What Clark discovered from studying more than 422,000 English people across four centuries
Why social mobility appears largely unchanged since the Middle Ages
Why Denmark and Britain have almost identical mobility rates despite radically different welfare states
Why family size, birth order, and the death of a father have no measurable effect on life outcomes
Why the upper classes decline at the same rate the lower classes rise — and what that symmetry means
Whether England has been a meritocracy since 1300
Why governments may be attempting to solve problems that are largely resistant to policy
Clark's forthcoming book — and why it is proving difficult to publish

Find Professor Clark's work:

A Farewell to Alms: https://amzn.to/4vak59q
The Son Also Rises: https://amzn.to/4okonIx
London School of Economics: https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/greg-clark

Related episodes:

#130 Iain McGilchrist — There Is A Great Deal Of Ruin In The Western World: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2277944/episodes/19292333
#034 Garett Jones - Why Migrants Make Countries Like The Ones They Left: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2277944/episodes/15347853
#127 Jonathan Rose — What The British Working Class Lost And Who Is Responsible: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2277944/episodes/19175544

Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast on the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam.

▶ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkingClass
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New episodes every Thursday at 3pm.

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