10 questions for Greg Clark

Over at my other blog Herrick posts a response to 10 questions for Gregory Clark. Clark is an economic historian whose most recent book Farwell to Alms is making a splash. I read the book recently, but because I'm not well versed in economics I've held off saying much. I will add that Clark's point that the typical humans of 1800 were poorer and less well off than those of 10,000 BCE is an important insight, and it is born out by decades of analysis of remains which show that farmers are on average underfed and nutrient deprived vis-a-vis hunter-gatherers.

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What a fascinating treatise. One wonders what Clark makes of the current U.S. situation where American college graduates with every socio-economic edge are displaced by Ukrainian and other third-world graduates, and many can't even find their closest public library on a map.

You can (and many do) blame generations of public school conditioning; is that the whole answer?

One wonders what Clark makes of the current U.S. situation where American college graduates with every socio-economic edge are displaced by Ukrainian and other third-world graduates, and many can't even find their closest public library on a map.

college is the new high school. sort of.

That's exactly my point. Is it the schools, is it parents, is it social expectations, is it TV and video games, is it the mass of immigrants dragging down school populations? Ask, and you'll get many answers.

John Taylor Gatto says, like Clark, that school writing by teenagers in 1910 was more erudite than that of today. Certainly, I've seen samples of that, but he doesn't fully subtract the effects of the offset produced by the reality that in those days it was a very select population whose kids were in school at 14.