In this episode, Simone and I talk about a controversial theory that has been supported by a new study. It's based on the theory that the poor were dying at a much faster rate than the rich, and the rich were maintaining their wealth in a way that led to their higher fertility rates.
00:00:00.000Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be here today. Today we are going to be talking about a controversial theory that I hadn't heard before, but recently was backed by a new study that came out.
00:00:12.100So the gist of the theory goes like this.
00:00:14.120In Britain, as disease continually killed off the poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the descendants of the wealthy.
00:00:21.920And that way, according to Clark, the less violent, more literate, and more hardworking behavior middle class values were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population.
00:00:33.180This process of quote-unquote downward social mobility eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap.
00:00:43.680So essentially, what he argued was something unique about the environment of Britain during that period, and in part, but to a lesser sense, the other countries where the Industrial Revolution caught on, created an evolutionary effect that altered the populations within these environments at a genetic level, making them more capable of creating something like the Industrial Revolution.
00:01:09.220More specifically, he said that what normally happens in history is as a population advances in technology, it produces more food, and then more people exist, and then those more people start to just starve and die.
00:01:26.580And so you don't really get the opportunity for this flourishing.
00:01:30.480But what was happening in Britain was a unique situation in which the poor were dying at a much faster rate than the rich, and the rich were maintaining their wealth in a way that led their higher fertility rates.
00:01:44.580And note, he brings data to this in the original explanation, which we'll get into, in such a way where their descendants filtered down through the social ranks.
00:01:53.640So it was more like you had this wealthy class that was producing way more children, and those children were filtering down through the other classes, whereas at the other end, at like the bottom of the poor, there's like this giant cyst cutting off, cutting off, cutting off every iterative generation.
00:02:10.400And the big new study that came out that was so cool on this looked at the polygenic scores for educational attainment, which today is associated with high educational attainment, which is probably associated with a number of other positive things, potentially, in the British population.
00:02:27.840So looking at samples of dead bodies, basically, from, you know, the year 1000 AD, 1100, 1200.
00:02:35.700And what you see here is basically no change in the rate that this appears from 1000 to around 1700.
00:02:45.760And then you go from 1700 to the mid 1800s, and it jumps a ton, it jumps, if you look at this graph.
00:02:52.340And to get an idea of what this means, if you go to the 1000 population in England, the top score, I don't know what this is, it might be like IQ test here, average IQ test.
00:04:40.620So you would have had, you know, 10 people in that range in the 1850s population for every one person born in that range in the 1000 CE population of intelligence.
00:04:56.600This matters because, and note here, I'm not saying this theory is true, but it's a very interesting theory because it looks at the development of a society without comparing different ethnic groups, which I always try to avoid doing when I can.
00:05:12.540It just looks within one ethnic group, which is really interesting.
00:05:17.360It is only comparing British people of one time period that didn't have an industrial revolution to British people of another time period, which did have an industrial revolution.
00:05:27.600And I note here that the British people of this other time period, like you go to a 1000 CE or something like that, like they did not seem capable.
00:05:34.580These are my own ancestors I'm talking about here.
00:05:37.280So don't accuse me of racism, of creating large scale civilization.
00:05:41.900As I point out in my one civilization video, my ancestors, if you're like, oh, what did the ancient Brits build?
00:05:48.580And it's like, well, there is some really nice and detailed ruins in ancient Britain.
00:06:49.300Like we can all, all men can look back.
00:06:52.000There's a great meme that's like all the men of like different ethnic groups are looking back at like ancient Rome.
00:06:57.480The, the, how often do you think you've got our, our Roman helmet right there with the Greek helmet in, in frame right here that I got for father's day, very father's day gift.
00:07:07.300But I found this to be a very interesting theory.
00:07:13.300So Clark begins by describing the pre-industrial world from 10,000 BCE to 1800 CE as a Malsusian trapped named after the economist Thomas Malsus.
00:07:25.500In this era, technological advances improved productivity and living standards temporarily.
00:07:29.840However, population growth quickly outpaced those gains, driving incomes back to substance levels.
00:07:58.700He was the original popular, popularizer.
00:08:02.140The modest proposal one was a bit, it wasn't just about population.
00:08:05.620It was mostly about the Irish because at the time they were breeding like Irish.
00:08:10.380And now they barely have kids at all, you know, as, as we've pointed out, they're going to be going extinct soon.
00:08:15.880The Irish are one of the populations that's definitely going to go extinct soon, which is sad, but whatever.
00:08:20.140Birth rates were high, but death rates from disease, famine, and violence kept populations in check.
00:08:26.320Societies worldwide, including England, were stuck in the cycle with no sustained per capita income gross.
00:08:31.580Clark notes that England was no exception until around the 1800s, when productivity finally outran population growth, enabling the Industrial Revolution.
00:08:40.920The question is why this breakout happened in Britain first.
00:08:44.860A central pillar of Clark's argument is that in pre-industrial Britain, particularly from the 1200 to the 1800s, economic success directly translated into reproductive success, creating a form of natural selection favoring certain trades.
00:08:59.900Yes. Wealthier individuals from middle and upper classes had more surviving children than the poor.
00:09:04.860For example, data from English wills shows that men with assets over a thousand pounds left nearly four surviving children on average, compared to fewer than two for those with under 10 pounds.
00:09:18.360And that is the reason why this is important to note, if this really was the reason why Britain became so successful,
00:09:24.540is that if we have the exact opposite happening today, if we really are heading into an idiocracy, we really can lose our civilization.
00:09:32.500Yeah, this shows that selective pressures both change the makeup of the genetic makeup in addition to downstream of that then culture of a society,
00:09:45.840but then also the output and development of that society.
00:09:50.220Yeah. And keep in mind that the change can happen quickly. It appears that most of the change happened between the 1700s and the 1800s.
00:09:56.240So that's something to watch out for if this is really happening.
00:10:01.100And what it means is that if you want humanity to continue to thrive, you essentially need to genetically isolate yourself from people who aren't thinking about this type of stuff.
00:10:13.380Which is, you know, another reason why we work so hard to source potential mates for our children, because, you know, you have got to be careful about them breeding with the gen pop.
00:10:23.060And this is going to become a bigger problem intergenerationally.
00:10:26.420You're already getting so much trouble for saying that.
00:10:29.780Well, look, if you look at the numbers, okay, the single genetic trait that is, because, you know, I can look at genetic polygenic scores and say these traits correlate with X or these traits correlate with Y.
00:10:54.560So you're going to get one population that's, like, low intelligence, high obesity, you know, some other likely negative traits that are very genetically successful.
00:11:03.600And I love it when people are like, oh, how dare you call these, like, negative if they're what is genetically successful was in the current environment.
00:11:09.900And it's like, something can be successful in a current environment and obviously not be successful was in the wider meta.
00:11:16.700Like, it's like becoming a hyper-specialized species before a mass extinction event.
00:11:22.140You can say, well, the species isn't genetically, like, it's not having problems genetically because it's having lots of kids.
00:11:30.700One of them could say, actually, these kids are very non-adaptable to changes in the environment.
00:11:35.380And so while they are winning within this environment, they are not likely to succeed within multiple potential environments.
00:11:42.040And worse, you could say, here's this other iteration of the species, which appears to specialize in taking advantage of the way that this species is specializing.
00:11:55.880And that's sort of what's happening to humanity right now.
00:11:58.860If any faction of humanity does break out and doesn't fall into this, you know, idiocracy sort of spiral, that faction is going to have a hugely disproportionate amount of power.
00:12:09.520Because as I said, in many other things, people are going to be bringing AK-47s to an automated drone swarm fight.
00:12:15.860It's just not going to be relevant what non-technologically engaged cultures do, even if they are, it's just happening to them.
00:12:45.860This wasn't due to higher birth rates, but better child survival.
00:12:49.000The rich could afford better nutrition, sanitation, and healthcare, reducing mortality and diseases that disproportionately affected the poor.
00:12:55.460In contrast, the poorest families often failed to replace themselves.
00:12:58.020Demographically, their lineages died out and their social positions were filled by the downwardsly mobile offspring of the rich.
00:13:05.420Clark contrasts this using research with hunter-gatherer societies, the Yenomi, where violence or aggressive traits correlated with higher fertility or with aristocratic classes.
00:13:18.500In England, whose warfare involvement led to lower reproductive success.
00:13:22.940So specifically, he pointed out that if you look at tribal groups, what you often see is engaging in warfare and being aggressive towards your neighbors leads to higher reproductive success by the research.
00:13:34.640But if you were in medieval England, the exact opposite was true.
00:13:38.280And what led to higher reproductive success was accumulating capital.
00:13:51.360If you're talking about a totally decentralized clan-based structure, but then why not, you know, higher reproductive success in, like, Islamic cultures, for example, right?
00:14:01.300Like, you could have even higher reproductive success by being wealthy in Islamic cultures because you could have multiple wives, right?
00:14:07.940So, like, if this was in effect, it should have affected them even more.
00:14:14.920Don't know what his counter to that would be.
00:14:17.080This survival of the richest meant that traits associated with economic success, such as discipline, thrift, and long-term planning, literacy, and nonviolence, were selectively favored and passed potentially through both cultural transmission, e.g. educational values, and genetic inheritance.
00:14:32.160Downward social mobility and the spread of bourgeois traits over...
00:15:06.080So, the rich produced more children than they needed to fill the late positions, so many offspring were demoted socially, becoming artisans, farmers, or laborers.
00:15:15.160These descendants carried the middle class values and possible genes of their forepowers, enriching the lower classes.
00:15:44.700They pointed out that if you go to the beginning of this period, that the homicide rates in the UK, in sort of the medieval period, were today equal to the highest homicide rates in the world in some country in Africa.
00:15:58.040So, like, the homicide rates were quite high in the UK back then.
00:16:01.220And I found actually very interesting that he used interest rates as evidence here.
00:16:06.320Showing that interest rates had to be competitive in the early medieval period, 10%.
00:16:11.080And then by the 1800s, it was only 4% to 5%.
00:16:13.080Which is actually a pretty strong argument outside of how sophisticated the banking system was.
00:16:17.740It's how much do people within the middle classes actually pay back their loans.
00:16:22.380And what you're seeing here is they paid back them with a higher probability over time.
00:16:29.080Clark estimates this process operated over 20 to 30 generations, about 600 to 900 years.
00:16:35.480Gradually transforming the population's average characteristics.
00:16:38.760By the 18th century, England had a workforce that was more productive, innovative, and oriented towards saving and investment traits essential for industrial capitalism.
00:16:49.200Clark suggested this was an evolutionary adaptation from hunter-gatherer instincts, impulsivity, short-term thinking, to those suited for agrarian and eventually industrial economies.
00:16:58.340He leans towards a genetic component, though he acknowledges cultural mechanisms, arguing that the changes were deep enough to alter human nature itself.
00:17:42.000From the Norman Conquest in 10,066 onwards, English enjoyed relatively politically stable as an island nation, with secure property rights and low internal violence.
00:17:52.920This allowed for selective pressures to operate consistently, unlike more turbulent societies like China or India, where invasions or instability disrupted the process.
00:18:15.600England's economy rewarded economic trades, e.g. thrift and innovation, more than martial prowess, accelerating the speed of bourgeois values.
00:18:40.800In comparison to other societies, in places like Japan or China, similar Malsusian dynamics existed, but less downwards mobility or differing selective pressures, favoring conformity over innovation, delayed breakthroughs.
00:18:53.760Poor countries today, Clark controversially implies, may lag due to incomplete adaptation of these traits, whether genetically or culturally.
00:19:01.820And if he's right, it means that feeding the poor or preventing poor people from dying is genetically sabotaging many countries.
00:19:13.160And that when wealthy countries do this to other countries, essentially they're trapping them in a cycle of intergenerational poverty.
00:19:19.840And that the UK did well because the poor did die.
00:19:33.540I'm just saying that other people are arguing this.
00:19:36.160I've even argued against his explanations here at times, you know, people.
00:19:40.420He argues this explanation, not just the Industrial Revolution, explains not just the Industrial Revolution's timing and location, but also persistent global income inequalities.
00:19:53.920So, before we go into this more, because I think that this is interesting, Clark argues that the transformation took hundreds of years because natural selection and cultural transmission operate slowly across generations.
00:20:05.880The process began in earnest in the medieval times around 1200 to 1250 post-Norman conquest in 1066, which established institutional stability, when England's economy rewarded traits like thrift, discipline, and literacy with higher reproductive success over 20 to 30 generations, approximately 550 to 900 years.
00:20:25.420So, the bourgeois traits spread downwards through society.
00:20:57.140And after this period where England was normalized, it really did suffer a lot less war than other regions.
00:21:02.920So, like, this extended period of peace in which poor people are allowed to die allowed for this, which plausibly, and then in – but I don't know.
00:21:17.220I push back because I think that, you know, there was a lot of conflict across the European continent throughout this period, even if people were under large states.
00:21:26.680And Europe industrialized, like, way faster than other locations.
00:21:30.140And I don't know if you had this same phenomenon playing out in the American frontier as much.
00:21:36.260And America industrialized super early, too.
00:21:39.540America, I think, industrialized because so many of the areas where you saw that early industrialization was, like, for example, in the South, where you had a bunch of people who literally moved there to create businesses to make money.
00:22:02.040And people who were literally only there just to make money instead of to, say, survive.
00:22:06.820And you had a very different set of – also, like, you had slaves who were working instead of, like, people kind of farming their own land in a much more –
00:22:15.720The South didn't industrialize for a long time because of slavery.
00:22:23.160A lot of people don't realize that when they argue that slaves, like, built America or whatever or, like, helped the South economically, that they're basically arguing for slavery.
00:22:34.600They're basically saying slaves were an economically beneficial institution, when if you actually look at the data, slavery almost certainly economically hurt the South and prevented the South from economically developing.
00:22:46.780But the wealthy parties and the entrenched power structures within the South benefited from keeping the institution of slavery around because they were in positions of power in part because of the existing economic structure that had been built within the region.
00:23:00.300But slavery was not good for the South.
00:23:02.080It wasn't good for the overall economy of the South.
00:23:04.980But after slavery ended, the South rapidly economically developed.
00:23:08.680And it's not like it was, like, a poise to be about to do this.
00:23:13.260But to this larger point, a lot of people – if you look at the selective pressures, because we can see by looking at the apologetic scores that we associate with educational attainment, we can see how quickly they're disappearing from population samples today.
00:23:28.600There was an Icelandic set that shows this well.
00:23:31.160You can also look at the dropping IQ of people who go to college, and it's dropping by about 0.1 points per year.
00:23:36.360This was both in a French and a United States study.
00:23:39.000And so we're looking at about a one standard deviation drop in the average IQ about every 75 years.
00:23:44.200But what you can see from his data is that this means a way faster drop in the number of people who are born in the top one or 5% of people's IQs.
00:23:52.980Because you get – that's where things disappear when you get this center moving.
00:24:12.320I mean, like, in general, the concept of evolutionary pressures changing the composition of a population, which in turn changes the way that that population engages with technology and commerce and capitalism.
00:24:29.380I mean, it makes a lot of intuitive sense.
00:24:31.700I don't know how you couldn't have that happen.
00:24:34.260Well, people would say it might take longer than this.
00:24:37.720But as we can see from the data, it clearly doesn't seem to.
00:24:57.640And there was another interesting study on this.
00:24:59.700If you're like, oh, like, has IQ ever gone down before after the collapse of a civilization?
00:25:02.940We see this in a study that came out that looked at Roman populations, and it showed that the Roman IQ reached – or it was propensity for educational attainment, which is what he was studying as well.
00:25:17.640Propensity for what is associated with higher educational attainment today.
00:25:21.040It went up, like, if you're talking about, like, the early Roman Empire, and then it went up, up, up, until you get to, like, the middle of the Roman Empire, and then it starts to collapse.
00:25:34.100The collapse in IQ happened before the collapse of the Roman Empire.
00:25:37.060And after the collapse, it started going back up again.
00:25:39.860But even today, the average Roman IQ is not as high as it was during the height of the Roman Empire, which is – I mean, it shows how dramatic these effects can be.
00:25:49.480And so I think one of the things – like, when I talk about the average IQ dropping likely by one standard deviation over the next 75 years, you know, people can hear this, and they're like, well –
00:25:59.760and I'm talking basically three generations is what I'm looking at here.
00:26:03.060People can look at this, and they can be like, well, I'm still not going to engage with your weird genetic technology or screening or whatever.
00:26:10.660And it's like, if you don't find another way to present some form of genetic selection and prevent this from happening within your own population, your population is going to go that pathway as well.
00:26:20.880Well, people already engage in genetic selection by choosing who they have kids with.
00:26:27.380That is very hard to do intergenerationally with fidelity around these sorts of things when one of your son has some hot girl who comes from gen pop flirting with them, right?
00:26:37.740You know, especially if your son is more economically successful.
00:26:40.360So you really need to culturally impart this.
00:26:45.260And if you don't culturally impart, like, genes are real and you have to pay attention to them, you are going to end up in the Ungabunga tribe.
00:26:53.020You know, the people who are so rabidly against the forms of genetic technology that we use, I do not think that they realize the horrors that they are committing their children to.
00:27:02.860Now, of course, they'd say about us, like that Addams Family scene, you know, your family is like some sort of weird medical experiment.
00:27:27.160I'll point out just one little caveat, too, that any trait that's correlated with success now, it could be intelligence, it could be anything else, could be a death sentence, depending on the conditions you're living with, you know.
00:27:40.800So to make any blanket value statement about these are good and these are bad genes is dumb, because as soon as the environment changes, that could completely flip.
00:27:56.380I mean, culturally speaking, we would have thought, you know, being Amish is is bad, right?
00:28:01.980Like it's not useful if we're talking about like cultural evolution.
00:28:04.420Yet it turns out that it's really useful in today's environment.
00:28:07.120I would have thought growing up being an Orthodox Jew isn't useful.
00:28:09.940And yet they're absolutely thriving if you're looking at like fertility rates and intergenerational cultural fidelity.
00:28:17.040So it's very hard to predict what's going to be good and what's going to be bad.
00:28:20.880That's why it's good to only make these decisions, not from a eugenic perspective, i.e. an absolute perspective, but from a polygenic perspective, i.e. from the perspective of your own family.
00:28:29.700Yeah, you need to make that judgment and you need to understand that you might be wrong and that people should have a right to make their own decisions.
00:29:36.520Like, fixer-uppers require a ton of work, and I hate the idea of getting fixer-uppers, and you did that on the human level.
00:29:44.840I mean, you invested in a graduate degree and a complete, like, several complete makeovers, tons of education, aside from formal school education.
00:29:54.360So I'm just saying, yeah, you earned it.
00:30:18.820And then, remember the kids crying over who gets the red rock after we finally opened it?
00:30:26.900Like, the collective grief in our households that we caused simply by doing this whole process of rock polishing and the stupid little plastic discovery education rock tumbler?
00:30:43.080Just watching a home ads video on women being the worst.
00:30:47.600I really feel like, you know, after we did that episode that, like, chilled me on the New York Times writer who was driven crazy by feminism, and I've been reading other articles about, like, what it's like to date these days.
00:30:58.600And I just feel so, a sense of despair for young people in this generation who don't have their parents actively helping them date.
00:31:05.420Like, obviously, we're trying to set things up for our kids.
00:31:08.980We work with other, you know, high-profile parents who are, like, super competent and agentic and orthogonal and try to, you know, keep track of them when they have kids around our kids' age.
00:31:19.140And we have a big CRM of this, and we're going to be working on building those relationships.
00:31:22.760I think that that's really the only way to secure a spouse for our kids anymore.
00:31:27.960That, and I think really underrated is the extent to which parents always did that in the past.
00:31:39.980They were always pretty involved in their kids' dating.
00:31:42.820And it's only really recently that parents became super hands-off on that front, on average.
00:31:49.920This expectation that there are these third spaces or there's this dating culture, which I think really saw its big rise in the 1950s, that will facilitate finding a partner, is just crazy.
00:32:05.500I have been listening to these historical biographies, and, you know, there's, like, there are maybe five men that you meet in, like, a 10-year period who might be people you could marry, you know, if you're a woman.
00:32:18.900Like, there just wasn't that much choice.
00:32:21.780And so either you would marry the person who's kind of obvious and who would propose to you or you would propose to them because you kind of don't have any other choices, or your parents would get involved and try to help.
00:32:35.640And now, I don't know, I, we have to get involved again because those third spaces and that dating culture is gone.
00:32:44.900And it was really unusual in the 1950s when we had this age in which there was almost this manufactured dating culture because I think to a certain extent it was outsourced to the state and schools would literally run videos, like propaganda videos, teaching you how to date and being like, this is how you do it.
00:33:03.660And there was just, there was structured language around it.
00:33:06.240There was the concept of going steady versus just dating people.
00:33:09.940And the way to escalate where you would have, you'd get their leather jacket or.
00:33:17.060Leatherman jackets, there were promise rings.
00:33:19.480Yeah, there was, it was, it was very, I mean, similar to like the London season, you know, there were, there were, there were signals and things meant something.
00:33:25.740Except in this case, the parents had abdicated their responsibility and the state slash larger society had taken it on.
00:33:35.380The state took over dating for a period and then it abdicated that.
00:33:39.000We decided his job was actually to prevent sex in dating, which is really what happened was the, the period of abstinence only and everything like that.
00:33:48.000The state took over dating and courtship from the family.
00:33:52.500And then it abdicated that during the abstinence only movement.
00:33:56.720It was really, really harmful for, for our culture because it, it, it normalized the demonization of human sexuality, which unfortunately just made it cool for kids and allowed kids to develop their own culture around what sexuality was.
00:34:14.880Which then they went into this period of total debauchery and then everyone was like, well, that's, that's wrong.
00:34:20.580And now they seem to have forgotten how to have sex, which, you know, we go over on their video, you know, the rates of sex are plummeting.
00:34:28.540Oh, what were people saying on the comments of the video today?
00:34:30.680I think in general, it was something along the lines of honestly, just women are terrible.
00:34:42.780Women don't realize this, you know, how bad they are.
00:34:45.820I think a lot of men didn't actually engage or a lot of viewers didn't actually engage with the topic of this being more about social class than about gender wars.
00:34:55.580And instead, many are still like repeating as though they're broken records.
00:35:01.300Women are delusional and they're, they're hypergamy.
00:35:04.080They're trying to get high value men that they don't warrant.
00:35:08.780And I agree that that's true, but let's stop beating the dead horse.