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Gregory Clark published The Inheritance of Social Status: England, 1600-2022. You can find breakdowns of the results and methodology by geneticist Alexander Young and Cremieux in Twitter threads. The main takeaway is that a model of genetic inheritance and assortative mating nearly perfectly explains social status across nine different measures.
This builds on previous findings that dramatic changes in social structure or wealth transfers are often only temporary setbacks for elite families. In China, the Cultural Revolution, perhaps the single biggest upheaval in social structure and wealth redistribution in human history, saw the pre-communist elite families spend one generation below median income/education before outearning and outlearning other households by 16% and 11%, respectively, in the second generation. A similar phenomenon is seen in the American South following the Civil War, where it took antebellum elite families one generation to regain equal footing, with the second generation surpassing their counterparts in income and education.
Critics of the hereditarian hypothesis have posted critiques of the study, but, to my knowledge, no clear alternative hypotheses or explanations for the genetic model fitting basically perfectly.
It’s fascinating that even Turkheimer, one of the most prominent anti-HBD academics in this debate (and one of the most prominent academics in the space in general) barely gets 30-40 retweets in his commentary on a huge paper like this. It kind of shows how, even on the anti-hereditarian side, academic opinions don’t really matter. Sure, Vox might quote Turkheimer in an article on why group genetic differences are supposedly bullshit, but his views have nothing to do with why the article was written, they could be omitted or he could have never replied to their email and the article, save for the quote, would have been exactly the same. Turkheimer is useful to bolster the ‘mainstream’ narrative, but his role is narrow.
Arguing for hereditarianism is like being an economist in the Soviet Union in 1950 and arguing, using complex economic models and a lot of math and comparative data, that free markets could be better than centrally planned economies. The amount of data you have is completely irrelevant; your faculty peers of the establishment position might halfheartedly attempt a rebuttal as an intellectual exercise, but in truth everyone knows that the reason your paper isn’t going to lead to any big policy debate is because the Party has its ideology and intends to keep it and, most importantly, does not justify its maintenance of the current system on the grounds of an ongoing scientific enquiry. Marx and Lenin performed the scientific analysis, by definition socialism follows capitalism, by definition a reversal is undesirable and morally and thus politically wrong.
Likewise in this case. The right has the strange idea that progressive universalism, perhaps because the scientific revolution was coterminous with the emergence of many liberal ideas, is grounded in some kind of (flawed or misguided) scientific analysis. Certainly it has aspirations to that effect. But progressivism as ideology was never founded on ‘science’, it was founded on feeling and on sentiment, and so no scientific evidence can challenge it.
HBD arguments are persuasive to the people who can be reached. Eventually it will undermine the narrative.
By the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a spent force. Even though apparatchiks emptily repeated the slogans at party conferences, few true believers remained. How many KGB agents didn't secretly wish they had been born in the West?
Likewise, the empty platitudes of wokism will become more hollow. To me, and to anyone who is paying attention, HBD is true and obvious. The believers in blank-slatism will start to look more and more deranged, much like a Soviet functionary who actually believed in Marxism in 1980 (so cringe). Sure, one still can't say the true thing out loud. But passionately supporting the dogma will start to look pretty silly as well. The eye rolls will increase.
The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.
The world’s second most powerful country is run by avowed Marxist-Leninists as a one-party state by a Leninist vanguard party; Marx and Lenin’s writings are taught as fact in its schools, its political elite are often true believers, many of the aesthetics (eg. socialist realism in public art) of Marxism-Leninism remain the default there and so on. That they embrace a limited form of capitalism (so did Lenin with the NEP, by the way) doesn’t change that.
You can avow, believe, and teach something all day long. That doesn’t mean you are that thing.
China is about as Marxist-Leninist as the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. If you want to “no true Marxism-Leninism has ever been tried” me, then go ahead, but in a real sense yes the CCP is a successful Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and minor alterations in economic doctrine over the last forty years do not change that fact.
Well, that is true, but only in the trivial sense that the ideology is incoherent, and therefore it can't actually be tried. If China was truly MLM, then they would at least be on the path towards the withering away of the state and the transition to a classless, moneyless society - they would at least have it as a goal. But plainly the leadership of China does not view this as a desirable goal in any sense. And I don't blame them - it's not a coherent goal, it's not something that can actually be achieved.
I don't know what level of centralized state planning it would take for me to say that China has a different "economic system" than the US. I haven't thought much about it. I'm skeptical of the idea that we can meaningfully speak of different types of economic systems in the first place - I'm skeptical of the idea that there was a distinct "feudalist mode of production" for example. The US, like China, also has government management of the economy and public-private cooperation. It strikes me as a difference of degree rather than kind.
If "Marxism-Leninism was a spent force by the 1980s" means anything, then I think it would mean something like "by the 1980s, even the true believers recognized that the global socialist utopia was not going to materialize". And I don't think there are any true true believers among China's leadership or intelligentsia today. True believers in central state planning, sure - but Marxism never took central state planning to be its ultimate goal.
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