For a couple of decades, economic historian Gregory Clark, author of two books with Hemingway-inflected titles, A Farewell to Alms and The Son Also Rises, has been studying huge databases of property records, vital statistics, and estate files from early modern England to learn more about the influence of nature vs. nurture.
England is the key location in all of economic history because that’s where the Industrial Revolution happened. Fortunately, we have an abundance of surviving documentary evidence from England over the last 800 years because there has been little disruption due to invasion or revolution that might lead to the intentional mass burning of documents, as happened often during the French Revolution. For example, we still have several hundred official documents concerning the transactions of William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
To Have and Have Not: The Determinants of Social Status in England, 1600-2026
Draft 6/5/2026
Gregory Clark
Danish National Research Foundation Professor, Southern Denmark University
Economics Chair, Danish Institute for Advanced Study, SDU
Visiting Professor, Economic History Department, LSE [London School of Economics]
Preface
This book was intended to complete a trilogy of Hemingway punned books from Princeton University Press, with a title “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls? Genetics and Social Life, England, 1600-2024.”
As I predicted the title of the third volume would be in my 2014 review of Clark’s second book, The Son Also Rises. But the world was rapidly becoming less amused by silly Hemingway puns about a verboten concept. So in 2021, Clark got canceled. From the Glasgow U. Guardian:
Adam Smith Business School postpone seminar by eugenicist
Luke Chafer
18th February 2021
A highly controversial seminar to be led by Gregory Clark, a visiting professor at London School of Economics, to be delivered for the Adam Smith Business School has been postponed amid pressure from student groups.
… The talk that was scheduled to be to be delivered was titled: “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A lineage of 400,000 individuals 1750-2020 shows genetics determines most social outcomes”. In his book of a similar title, For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: Genetics, Demography and Social Outcomes, he argues that socio-economic status is genetically inherited through the “genetic transmission of … some mysterious mix of drive and ability”. He also theorised that “200 years from now the descendants of enslaved African-Americans will still be underrepresented”.
Five years later, we finally have his book as a online PDF, but you can’t buy a physical copy because academic publishers have turned it down. Perhaps Passage Press would like to bring it out?
Back to the Preface of Clark’s new book:
But it embraces what is regarded as not just an intellectual failure, but also a moral affront. This is that genetics, at least in a society like England 1600-2026, plays a large role in directly determining people’s social outcomes, while social influences are surprisingly weak.
A recent Substack essay by [economist] Brad DeLong, titled, Big Trouble in Little Human Genetic Difference-Worshipper Land, illustrates nicely the hostility and contempt felt by the academy for anyone who would suggest an important role for direct genetic determination of social outcomes: “[A]ttempts to carve out a large, causal, manipulable “main effect” of genes on complex social outcomes keep reducing, on closer inspection, to approximately zero” (DeLong, 2026).
Thus an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which contains the essence of the argument of the book, has been attacked by such prominent behavioral geneticists as Marcus Feldman and Kevin Lala as “scientific racism” (Lala and Feldman, 2024), and “racist pseudoscience” (Lala, Brown, Twyman and Feldman, 2025). Similarly a presentation of the core arguments of the book at Glasgow University in 2021 was indefinitely “postponed” by the Dean in response to a letter signed by 110 Glasgow University Faculty condemning the work as pseudo-science and eugenics.
A majority of the reviewers at Princeton fell in solidly with the received wisdom on the unimportance of genetics, without seriously engaging with the copious empirical evidence presented that cultural and social causation could not explain the patterns of inheritance observed in England. Chicago University Press considered the manuscript, but ultimately reported that they could not find reviewers willing to review it!
The databases that are the empirical center of this book were constructed jointly with Neil Cummins of LSE. Though my earlier book on surnames and social mobility (Clark et al., 2014) was funded in part by an NSF grant, it proved similarly impossible to get grant funding for a project to examine the role of genetics in social mobility. One NSF referee even stated that NSF grants should support only proposals which showed how to increase social mobility. Another noted “I failed to see any really ‘nuts-and-bolts’ discussion of how these findings might aid in enhancing social mobility or reducing inequality.”
Consequently much of that data compilation was funded by generous grants from two private sources. First from Mary Katherine McComb, and second from Michael Dearing in support of Economic History at the University of California, Davis. Indeed without their support many of the chapters in the text would not have been possible.
In the last two years generous funding from the Danish National Research Foundation allowed for completion of the project, and also for the chapter comparing England, Denmark, and Sweden. I am also very grateful to the members of the Guild of One-Name Studies who shared carefully researched genealogies, and to the members of the FreeReg organization, who transcribed and made available nearly two million marriage records.
The book summarizes work done jointly with Neil Cummins most extensively, but also with my former student Matthew Curtis, and current students Martin Kristensen and Christian Nielsen at the University of Southern Denmark. This does not imply they endorse any of the conclusions I have drawn from the data. Jonathan P. Beauchamp of George Mason University provided very useful critical comments on a draft of this manuscript.
Parts of the manuscript have been published in the following articles:
Clark, Gregory. 2023. “The Inheritance of Social Status; England, 1600-2022.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 120(27) e2300926120.
Clark, Gregory, Neil Cummins, Matthew Curtis. 2019.“Twins Support the Absence of Paritydependent Fertility Control in Pretransition Populations.” Demography, 57(4): 1571-1595.
Clark, Gregory, Neil Cummins, Matthew Curtis. 2024. “Three new occupational status indices for England and Wales, 1800–1939.” Historical Methods, 57(1): 41-66.
Clark, Gregory and Neil Cummins. 2025. Hypergamy reconsidered: marriage in England, 1837-2021. Plos One, 20(2), e0316769.
Clark, Gregory and Martin Kristensen. 2026. “The Myth of Nordic Mobility: Social Mobility Rates in Modern Denmark and Sweden.” Comparative Economic Studies, 68(1): 6.
Clark, Gregory and Christian Nielsen. 2026. “The Returns to Education: A Meta-Study.” Kyklos. https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.70041.
Clark, Gregory and Neil Cummins. 2027. “How long do wealth shocks persist? Less than three generations in England, 1700-2026.” Forthcoming, Review of Income and Wealth.
CONTENTS
1. Introduction………………………………………………………………5
PART I: THE NATURE OF STATUS INHERITANCE…………………….11
2. Social versus Genetic Inheritance……………………………………….12
3. Families of England Genealogy…………………………………………20
4. The inheritance of status in England, 1600-2026……………………….38
5. The inheritance of status, Denmark and Sweden, 1990-2026…………..63
6. Genetic Nurture…………………………………………………………..79
PART II: EVIDENCE FOR DIRECT GENETIC INHERITANCE………..87
7. Gender Symmetry…………………………………………………………89
8. Family Size……………………………………………………………….110
9. Birth Order……………………………………………………………….134
10. Place of Birth……………………………………………………………..150
11. Longevity…………………………………………………………………170
12. Dead Relatives…………………………………………………………...186
13. Wealth Shocks……………………………………………………………198
14. Linearity………………………………………………………………….209
PART III: SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF GENETIC INHERITANCE……216
15. Social Interventions 1873-2026 – Education…………………………….218
16. Migration…………………………………………………………………237
17. Social Class and Reproductive Success, 1520-2026…………………….256
18. Marital Assortment and the Industrial Revolution…………………….272
19. Conclusions………………………………………………………………284
Postscript
20. Eugenics………………………………………………………………...292
Technical Appendix……………………………………………………………..295
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..300
1. Introduction
To what extent are social outcomes such as occupations, income, wealth, longevity, and health socially versus genetically determined? And to what degree can life outcomes be changed by social interventions? Despite generations of research, and armies of social science researchers, these questions remain unresolved. But it is an orthodoxy of modern social science that while there are genetic influences on social outcomes, this influence is modestnrelative to social factors. Another orthodoxy is that genetics affects social outcomes nearly as much through influencing the child social environment as through direct effects on social outcomes.
This book explores these issues in depth, employing a large genealogical data base of 449,000 English people 1600-2026, as well as the detailed records of more than 1.7 million marriages in England 1837-2022. This rich new data suggests strong and surprising conclusions.
In the last two sentences of his new book, Clark suggests how realism on nature vs. nurture might help the on-rushing crisis of declining fertility:
Paywall here.
