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:
Yes, the same is probably true for the Travellers. Hopefully, there might be some relevant studies about them.
It looks like the demographic expansion of the middle class began to slow down during the late nineteenth century in Protestant societies, while it continued well into the twentieth century in Catholic societies.
I read Russel's post, and I agree with his analysis. I've become wary of IQ data; in part, because IQ studies differ from each other methodologically, and in part because IQ has only a partial genetic component. The future lies with studies that use alleles associated with educational attainment.
An interest phenomenon I am anecdotally aware of in Northern Ireland is that, whilst 50 years ago the underclass was Catholic, the most dysfunction elements of the underclass are now Protestant. I'm sure emigration plays a role here, but it would be interesting if the Catholic fertility/income correlation is also a feature, given now dramatically differing birth rates have altered the province in living memory.
"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).
No, it wasn't 100% of those who waited. I'm talking about conditional celibacy, not lifelong celibacy. Men remained celibate until a plot of land became available.
This was actually a widespread phenomenon in pre-industrial Europe. Marriage was conditional on having a plot of land, and that often meant that sons would postpone marriage until they were in their 30s.
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?
In southwest France (before the Revolution), daughters inherited land only if the family had no sons. But a daughter could always marry someone with land. A younger son had limited choices:
- hope that his older brother would die before having offspring
- marry a woman who had inherited land (because she had no brothers)
- emigrate or join the army
There is an abundant literature on primogeniture in France. Unfortunately, it's mostly in French. The following is a Google translation of the French wiki:
The traditional Pyrenean family system, as a principle of social organization, is one of the most historically characteristic examples in the world of the home system, a concept of the social sciences now assimilated to that of the "famille souche" described by Frédéric Le Play on the basis of the Pyrenean system. This system of customary law, which has also been described more broadly (in more or less attenuated forms) in south-west France and northern Spain, differed in particular by a preciputary succession (single heir), unlike egalitarian successions (division of the patrimony between all heirs). In this system, according to the definition given by Claude Lévi-Strauss: "the house is a legal person, holder of a domain, composed of both tangible and intangible goods and which is perpetuated by the transmission of its name, its fortune and its titles through a real or fictitious lineage."
[...] The house, symbol of the family, is therefore placed above individuals:
- Each house has a name that will become the family name, and every individual living in that house will take its name. For example, the establishment of a new house is responsible for the surnames Etxeberri in Basque, Cazenave in Gascon, or Casanova in Occitan. ;
- the house is indivisible between the heirs and unsaleable to anyone: it is administered by a head of the house (the heir most of the time) who had only the usufruct of it in the sense that it was somehow forbidden, morally at least, to sell;
- It contains the extended family (up to a dozen people): from elders to young people, nephews, cousins and servants.
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 looked for such research. Unfortunately, everything I found was about the yangban of the nineteenth century, and not about their present-day descendants. I get the impression that the subject is somewhat taboo in South Korea.
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/
Yes, the same is probably true for the Travellers. Hopefully, there might be some relevant studies about them.
It looks like the demographic expansion of the middle class began to slow down during the late nineteenth century in Protestant societies, while it continued well into the twentieth century in Catholic societies.
I read Russel's post, and I agree with his analysis. I've become wary of IQ data; in part, because IQ studies differ from each other methodologically, and in part because IQ has only a partial genetic component. The future lies with studies that use alleles associated with educational attainment.
An interest phenomenon I am anecdotally aware of in Northern Ireland is that, whilst 50 years ago the underclass was Catholic, the most dysfunction elements of the underclass are now Protestant. I'm sure emigration plays a role here, but it would be interesting if the Catholic fertility/income correlation is also a feature, given now dramatically differing birth rates have altered the province in living memory.
"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).
No, it wasn't 100% of those who waited. I'm talking about conditional celibacy, not lifelong celibacy. Men remained celibate until a plot of land became available.
This was actually a widespread phenomenon in pre-industrial Europe. Marriage was conditional on having a plot of land, and that often meant that sons would postpone marriage until they were in their 30s.
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?
In southwest France (before the Revolution), daughters inherited land only if the family had no sons. But a daughter could always marry someone with land. A younger son had limited choices:
- hope that his older brother would die before having offspring
- marry a woman who had inherited land (because she had no brothers)
- emigrate or join the army
There is an abundant literature on primogeniture in France. Unfortunately, it's mostly in French. The following is a Google translation of the French wiki:
The traditional Pyrenean family system, as a principle of social organization, is one of the most historically characteristic examples in the world of the home system, a concept of the social sciences now assimilated to that of the "famille souche" described by Frédéric Le Play on the basis of the Pyrenean system. This system of customary law, which has also been described more broadly (in more or less attenuated forms) in south-west France and northern Spain, differed in particular by a preciputary succession (single heir), unlike egalitarian successions (division of the patrimony between all heirs). In this system, according to the definition given by Claude Lévi-Strauss: "the house is a legal person, holder of a domain, composed of both tangible and intangible goods and which is perpetuated by the transmission of its name, its fortune and its titles through a real or fictitious lineage."
[...] The house, symbol of the family, is therefore placed above individuals:
- Each house has a name that will become the family name, and every individual living in that house will take its name. For example, the establishment of a new house is responsible for the surnames Etxeberri in Basque, Cazenave in Gascon, or Casanova in Occitan. ;
- the house is indivisible between the heirs and unsaleable to anyone: it is administered by a head of the house (the heir most of the time) who had only the usufruct of it in the sense that it was somehow forbidden, morally at least, to sell;
- It contains the extended family (up to a dozen people): from elders to young people, nephews, cousins and servants.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syst%C3%A8me_familial_pyr%C3%A9n%C3%A9en
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 looked for such research. Unfortunately, everything I found was about the yangban of the nineteenth century, and not about their present-day descendants. I get the impression that the subject is somewhat taboo in South Korea.