I suspect the same story can be told of the Irish Travellers, whose current condition mirrors Engels accounts of the Irish workers in England in 1845:
"For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman."
('Condition of the Working Class in England', 1845)
In your post on the French Canadians, you mention that Catholicism may partially explain why literacy remained correlated with fertility for nearly century after it reversed in England. In a future post, it would be interesting to look into whether this partially explains the improvement of the conditions of Irish people.
Russel Warne recently wrote a compelling post arguing that the popular late-20th century Flynn effect explanation for Irish convergence is incorrect:
"Let’s suppose that a younger son in a non-Cagot family could not tolerate remaining celibate. Instead of waiting until a bride with a plot of land became available, he would marry a girl with no land. With few means to support a family, his mental and behavioral traits would be purged from the gene pool."
Eh, no. If 99% of those choosing to wed die out, then the remaining 1% are still adding to the gene pool, unlike the 100% of those who remain celibate. And their survival will be a lot higher than 1%, they'll be the driving force behind urbanisation, or the migrants who were opening up new lands (IIRC at that point the Ukraine, before then liberated Spain).
Medieval peasants practiced primogeniture?! The younger sons (and presumably an equal number of women then) remained single??? First time I hear this. How come they were willing to remain single all their life? They didn't all become soldiers conquering someone else's land?
There was a full-scale caste system under the Silla Dynasty in Korea, and a semi-caste system afterwards - is there any research about the relationship between modern day outcomes and being a 'nobi' (somewhere between a serf and a slave) versus higher, 'free' castes? Or was there too much interbreeding between castes meaning it became meaningless?
Also interesting for Clark's argument regarding differential fertility is the phenomenon of the 'fallen yangban' - an impoverished 'noble' (future President Park Chung-Hee a notable example of one). There were so many yangban by the 19thC that many were not rich at all, despite their social status theoretically demanding that they be more or less idle.
I suspect the same story can be told of the Irish Travellers, whose current condition mirrors Engels accounts of the Irish workers in England in 1845:
"For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman."
('Condition of the Working Class in England', 1845)
In your post on the French Canadians, you mention that Catholicism may partially explain why literacy remained correlated with fertility for nearly century after it reversed in England. In a future post, it would be interesting to look into whether this partially explains the improvement of the conditions of Irish people.
Russel Warne recently wrote a compelling post arguing that the popular late-20th century Flynn effect explanation for Irish convergence is incorrect:
https://russellwarne.com/2022/12/17/irish-iq-the-massive-rise-that-never-happened/
"Let’s suppose that a younger son in a non-Cagot family could not tolerate remaining celibate. Instead of waiting until a bride with a plot of land became available, he would marry a girl with no land. With few means to support a family, his mental and behavioral traits would be purged from the gene pool."
Eh, no. If 99% of those choosing to wed die out, then the remaining 1% are still adding to the gene pool, unlike the 100% of those who remain celibate. And their survival will be a lot higher than 1%, they'll be the driving force behind urbanisation, or the migrants who were opening up new lands (IIRC at that point the Ukraine, before then liberated Spain).
Medieval peasants practiced primogeniture?! The younger sons (and presumably an equal number of women then) remained single??? First time I hear this. How come they were willing to remain single all their life? They didn't all become soldiers conquering someone else's land?
There was a full-scale caste system under the Silla Dynasty in Korea, and a semi-caste system afterwards - is there any research about the relationship between modern day outcomes and being a 'nobi' (somewhere between a serf and a slave) versus higher, 'free' castes? Or was there too much interbreeding between castes meaning it became meaningless?
Also interesting for Clark's argument regarding differential fertility is the phenomenon of the 'fallen yangban' - an impoverished 'noble' (future President Park Chung-Hee a notable example of one). There were so many yangban by the 19thC that many were not rich at all, despite their social status theoretically demanding that they be more or less idle.