2min chapter

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Greg Clark: Genetics and Social Mobility — #14

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CHAPTER

The Problem With Social Mobility in Scandinavia

In Denmark, they have a complete catalog in the government records of everyone's convictions and that people have done research about how does it link to adopted versus non-adopted children. And I think there's been no release of any individual information to this kind of policy they've had of allowing researchers access. So really, you know, Scandinavia has really become the laboratory for doing a lot of research now into things like social mobility.

00:00
Speaker 1
Yes,
Speaker 2
well, I want to congratulate you on that move to Denmark. And I agree with you there. I think the record keeping there is extremely strong. For example, I mentioned that they still have military service and they have IQ test scores for everyone that is inducted into the military. So that's effectively all the males in Denmark. So in all kinds of ways, I think they also have very good medical records as well. So in all kinds of ways, I think you can do really, really good research there. I
Speaker 1
noticed that one thing I was looking at when we were doing the surname evidence is I thought it would be interesting to link up softer people's criminal records. But it turns out you can't do that in someone like Britain because deliberately, they actually want to suppress those records for good some in some ways for very good reasons. But when I know in Denmark, they have a complete catalog in the government records of everyone's convictions and that people have done research about how does it link to adopted versus non-adopted children. And I think there's been no release of any individual information to this kind of policy they've had of allowing researchers access. And so really, you know, Scandinavia has really become the laboratory for doing a lot of research now into things like social mobility.
Speaker 2
Yes, I know that Finland and Estonia and a number of these countries have really good digital records across many different fields for each individual. So ranging from, I didn't know about the criminal record part, but medical records,
Speaker 1
things like IQ scores, incomes, all these things are actually, I think, readily accessible. Yeah, so I had to say it is a little problematic that this one group of societies, which has a very distinctive social structure, is the one that you can actually then study things like social mobility. So we'd like to do this, you know, in places like China or, you know, Russia, but hopefully it's still in some ways representative of the human condition.
Speaker 2
Yes.

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