Quotes from Gregory Clark

Are bombs the only way of setting fire to the spirit of a people? Is the human will as inert as the past two world-wide wars would indicate?

the good society would have a low rate of inheritance of social status and correspondingly low variations in income and wealth.

A recent study of four generations of families in Malmö suggests that intergenerational earnings and education correlations in Sweden have been at the modern level for at least three to four generations. The initial generation in the Malmö study was born between 1865 and 1912.

The argument is instead that it rewarded with economic and hence reproductive success a certain repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world, such as the ability to perform simple repetitive tasks hour after hour, day after day. There is nothing natural or harmonic, for example, in having a disposition to work even when all the basic needs of survival have been achieved.

The time and energy that innovators invested in new methods thus yielded a much higher social return than the meager private return they reaped.

But the generalized spillovers from innovation activities are not in practice measurable. Nor is the total amount of activity designed to improve production processes measurable. Investments in innovation occur in all economies. But unknown factors speed and retard this process across different epochs and different economies.

Another irony is that the achievement of mass affluence in much of the world--the decline in child mortality, the extension of adult life spans, and the reduction in inequality--have not made us any happier than our hunter-gatherer forebears.