Aporia Podcast

The final video from our 2023 ISIR series is a brilliant interview with Professor Greg Clark, one of the most important hereditarian scholars. We mainly talk about Greg’s groundbreaking study published in June: The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. It’s worth quoting at length:

There is widespread belief across the social sciences in the ability of social interventions and social institutions to significantly influence rates of social mobility. In England, 1600 to 2022, we see considerable change in social institutions across time. Half the population was illiterate in 1800, and not until 1880 was compulsory primary education introduced. Progressively after this, educational provision and other social supports for poorer families expanded greatly. The paper shows, however, that these interventions did not change in any measurable way the strong familial persistence of social status across generations.

Greg is a Danish National Research Foundation Professor in Economics at Southern Denmark University (Odense), as well as a Chair at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. He’s also a Visiting Professor in the Economic History Department at LSE. This year, he became a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis.

As we discussed in the interview, Greg has a penchant for Hemingway puns (something that got him in trouble) when it comes to book titles. You should buy both of them. And follow him on Twitter/X.

Our magazine: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/

Read our magazine: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/

Read our magazine: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/

John Michael Bailey is an American psychologist, behavioural geneticist, and professor at Northwestern University best known for his work on the etiology of sexual orientation. His research indicates that sexual orientation is heavily influenced by biology and male homosexuality is most likely inborn. Bailey wrote The Man Who Would Be Queen, a book intended to explain the biology of male sexual orientation and gender to a general audience, focusing on gender nonconforming boys, gay men and transgender women.

Ed West is a journalist, essayist, and author.

He has one of the best Substacks out there: https://www.edwest.co.uk/

Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. His research interests center around the psychology of human judgment and decision-making. In particular, he is interested in the social influence and persuasion process and how people are influenced by (mis)information and gain resistance to persuasion through psychological inoculation. He is also interested in the study of fake news, media effects, social networks, and belief systems (e.g., conspiracy theories), as well as the emergence of social norms, polarization, reasoning about evidence, and public understanding of risk and uncertainty. His research spans from social psychology to cognitive science using a variety of techniques, from virtual reality to survey and lab studies to computational social science and large-scale (online) interventions.

His book FOOLPROOF: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity (HarperCollins/WW Norton, www.foolproofbook.com) was listed by the BBC, Cosmopolitan, Apple, Men's Health, and Next Big Idea's as one of the most anticipated non-fiction books of 2023.

He has published around 150 papers and is ranked among the top 1% of all social scientists worldwide (Clarivate ISI Highly Cited Researcher) and among the top 2% across all scientific fields.

Cory Clark received my Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. She worked as the Director of Academic Engagement for Heterodox Academy and is now the Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project and a Visiting Faculty Scholar in The Wharton School and School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

​Her hobbies include phojography (taking pictures while jogging), phodography (taking pictures of her dog), solo travel to beautiful or weird and murdery places, and planning for her future beet farm/live music venue/goat sanctuary, to be called Beets, Beats, & Bleats.

Dr. Russell T. Warne earned his Bachelor’s of Science degree in psychology from Brigham Young University in 2007 and his PhD in educational psychology (with an emphasis in research, measurement, and statistics) from Texas A&M University in 2011. Between 2011 and 2022, he taught at Utah Valley University and obtained tenure and the rank of associate professor. Currently, Dr. Warne serves on the editorial board for Intelligence. He was the associate editor for the Journal for the Education of the Gifted and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of School Psychology, Gifted Child Quarterly, and the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment.

Dr. Warne has published over 60 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals and is the author of the acclaimed undergraduate statistics textbook Statistics for the Social Sciences: A General Linear Model Approach. His book, In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence was published by Cambridge University Press in October 2020.

Paul Bloom is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art.