The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

The Princeton Economic History of the Western World #49

by Gregory Clark, Neil Cummins (Contributor), Yu Hao (Contributor)

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does it influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. Using a novel technique--tracking family names over generations to measure social mobility across countries and periods--renowned economic historian Gregory Clark reveals that mobility rates are lower than conventionally estimated, do not vary across societies, and are resistant to social policies.

Clark examines and compares surnames in such diverse cases as modern Sweden and Qing Dynasty China. He demonstrates how fate is determined by ancestry and that almost all societies have similarly low social mobility rates. Challenging popular assumptions about mobility and revealing the deeply entrenched force of inherited advantage, The Son Also Rises is sure to prompt intense debate for years to come.

Genres: Economics, History, Sociology, Nonfiction, Politics, Science, Society

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Clark, whose grandfathers were migrants to Scotland from Ireland, earned his B.A. in economics and philosophy at King's College, Cambridge in 1979 and his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1985. He has also taught as an Assistant Professor at Stanford and the University of Michigan.
Clark is now a professor of economics and department chair until 2013 at the University of California, Davis. His areas of research are long term economic growth, the wealth of nations, and the economic history of England and India.

Reviews

[Brad Foley · Rating 4 out of 5]

[major edit: I spent a couple days working through the math, and checking it with my own simulations, and have convinced myself that my earlier mathematical reservations were completely wrong. I've changed the review to reflect that]

The "Son Also Rises" was a fascinating read that seems likely to provoke controversy, but also to advance evidence-based discussions of equality and social mobility. Clark makes two major (somewhat separable) arguments in "Rises". First, that social mobility is much lower, and consistent across societies than anyone would have predicted. Second, that this low-mobility is biologically (in fact genetically) based. The first argument is better supported than the second. Clark's strong genetic conclusions seem rely on unassailable modelling (I tried) but some shakier genetic conclusions. They can't be dismissed entirely, however. Clark's evidence and reasoning is strong enough that the burden of proof is squarely on those who disagree with him. The implications the modern reader is left to draw are unsettling.

Clark's conclusions about the facts of mobility are astonishing. Typically, studies of mobility showed that intergenerational correlations (parent-offspring, typically father-son) in wealth are on the order of 0.4. This suggests ancestor-descendant correlations in wealth should be unobservable after about 4 generations. Across many cultures and times, and many different measures of status, Clark notes that identifiable elite or low-status groups regress to the mean at a rate between 0.75-0.85. This means that in fact differences in status persist for more than 10 generations.

Technically, Clark here models status as a single order Markov process, with three major components: time, [measurement] error, an underlying [latent] "social inertia" (my name) term. By this he emphasises we can model inheritance of social status from one's parents in exactly the same way we do height or eye color based on genetics. He notes that if we do so, we don't need to invoke any more complicated processes to explain the observed data (such as the status of extended family).

It turns out he's completely right about the models. I checked. If you model the inheritance process without the underlying latent term, you fail to match the data he's presented. If you model the process in the same way you would model additive genetic inheritance you get exactly the right answer. (I did this assuming a heritability of 0.4, parental-midpoint genotypes for the kids, renormalised mean and SD every generation, and a modelled range of assortative mating based on phenotype. I took beta and b vales from a number of the examples presented in the book.)

But here is where we begin to need to exercise caution. As a colleague is fond of quoting, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." We shouldn't let the simplicity of the model force us into a hasty overinterpretation of the underlying mechanisms. Clark jumps to a much less-cautious genetic interpretation of his results than almost any behavioural geneticist would (or at least should). Inheritance can be both genetic and epigenetic. Epigenetic is just a term that describes inheritance by any means but DNA (this isn't a magical thing: think language or religion). For instance, some primates and hyaenas inherit rank from their mothers. Fetal nutrition, maternal stress, early-life stress, and even languages and dialects, have effects on status and all have effects that are known to be transmitted across generations. Famously, maternal grooming in rats has profound (non-genetic) transgenerational effects on a range of personality measurements. It is extremely difficult to separate epigenetic and genetic effects when studying heritability.

Clark claims that because he can model inheritance of status as a first order Markov process, it actually is a first order Markov process based on transmitted characteristics inherent in the parents. Therefore, he claims, status is a deterministic product of a genetic "social competence" (his term). This is a strong claim. To his credit he discusses possible objections (such as inheritance of social networks). He also tries to quantify the non-genetic component of status in the best way possible, by examining adoption studies. Two studies, one on Korean adoptees in America, and another on adopted vs biological offspring in Sweden, seem to show a genetic heritabilty of income or education (here proxies for status) many times higher than conferred familial status.

The magnitude of these results is certainly far too high, as any number of factors (such as differences in the way parents and society treat adopted and biological children---see Hannah Williams) will bias these numbers. But at the very least we can find no reason to reject Clark's model, and I was persuaded that there is likely to be a higher effect of genetics on status metrics than I would ever have previously expected. Clearly more, and better, studies need to be conducted in this area.

At this point, any reasonable modern reader will be squirming. Raised under the spectre of the effects of early eugenics, racial determinism, and Manifest Destiny, we are rightly disturbed by attempts to reify social differences with biology. I'm reminded of the unproductive furor around "Sociobiology" and "The Bell Curve" (and Gould's error-filled attempt to rebut "The Bell Curve"). Clark spends much time demonstrating that there are no simplistic racial superiority claims to be taken from his data. His biologizing of hereditary class is inescapable, however. He tries to sugarcoat these interpretations with bland liberal prescriptions and platitudes, but they still rankle.

There have been notable failures in trying to increase social mobility (like Head Start in the US). But other recent studies have shown that good urban planning (access to public transport, and jobs, and good schools) can dramatically increase social mobility. Even if there is a genetic component to social status, Clark has almost certainly exaggerated it. Genetics certainly doesn't preclude other measures to increase social mobility. Then too, as Clark notes, inequality and mobility are different things, and we shouldn't confuse them.

In the end, "The Son Also Rises" was a thought provoking book, and one I'll read carefully again. I'd recommend it, as long as the reader doesn't accept any of the major conclusions without consideration.

[Nick Klagge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extremely interesting and provocative book, and I think it's worth reading for anyone interested in social stratification with a mildly quantitative bent. It has much in common with Piketty's "Capital in the 21st C.", but has received much less in the way of press coverage. Ultimately, I found the arguments and evidence presented partially convincing, but very thought-provoking.

I would distill Clark's argument down to a number of positive and normative claims.

Positive claims:
1. Social mobility, when correctly measured, is much slower than most statistical analyses would indicate; this is due to regression dilution and is only visible when looking at very long time-series.
2. When analyzed correctly, social mobility is highly invariant to differences in culture, government, and time. In particular, estimated rates of social mobility are not appreciably different in egalitarian and non-egalitarian societies, and were not noticeably disrupted by apparent disruptions such as the cultural revolution. They have not been appreciably changed by universalization of education, the franchise, etc.
3. The observed invariance is due to something that is indistinguishable from genetic heritability.

Normative claim:
4. Taking 1-3 together, liberal social policy should focus not on encouraging social mobility per se, but on narrowing the range of variation in outcomes.

Briefly, I am convinced by 1, partially by 2, not by 3, and mostly by 4.

I won't get deeply into the statistics here, but the argument in (1) is a fairly straightforward one that I think most econometricians would buy. Regression dilution occurs when the explanatory variable in a regression is only a noisy signal of the true item of interest; in this case, the relationship between the explanatory variable and the outcome variable is estimated to be weaker than it truly is. Clark's argument is that most statistical studies of social mobility necessarily look at partial outcomes such as income, education level, etc., when what they are really interested in is some unobservable level of underlying social class that determines likely outcomes for these observable variables. (Someone of high class may drop out of Harvard to start Facebook, demonstrating a low education level, or may decide to be a poorly paid professor of art history, demonstrating a low income level.) The estimated persistence of these variables between parents and children is an underestimate of the true persistence of social class. This is observable if you look at persistence of observable characteristics over many generations, using last-name frequencies in very long time series such as attendees of Oxford or British MPs--the level of multi-generation persistence is much higher that standard estimates would indicate. (Note that noisy measurement of the outcome variable doesn't cause a similar statistical problem.)

For (2), Clark basically looks at a wide variety of available long time series across countries, and shows that the best-fit persistence parameter is reliably in the range of 0.7-0.8, indicating that something in the range of 50%-65% of social class is inherited. This is true across countries and across long time spans. As I mentioned above, I think this is partially convincing. I do buy that there is less variation than we might like to think. The history of revolutions is filled with reversals, and I think it's fair to say that most liberal policy reforms have had the effect of compressing the class distribution without upending it. On the other hand, Clark's use of long time series is also a liability. When you are fitting a time series from 1200 to the present with a single parameter, of course there will be one best-fitting parameter. When you fit the curve, all of the variations in the series will appear to be "noisy" variations around that constant line, by construction. However, I think this "noise" can obscure real variation at that kind of time scale. In particular, a lot of Clark's negative argument centers around there being little effect from the social and political reforms of the 20th century. But in these cases, we only have a handful of generational datapoints to go on. It may sound funny to say that it's "too soon to tell" if, for example, the Civil Rights Act made a difference, but in the context of 800-year time series, I think it's true. There may be a little "wiggle" at the end of your time series; is it "just a wiggle"? Statistically, I also wonder what the confidence bands on Clark's parameter estimates look like.

I think Clark's case for (3), that the invariance is due to genetic heritability, is extremely weak. (He is careful not to make this claim outright, but I would say it is what his arguments amount to.) Clark is an economist, not a natural scientist. We all know that it is extremely hard to disentangle nature from nurture. For some reason, Clark gives nature privileged position as his "null hypothesis"--he essentially says that the data he has can't identify the cause as something other than genetic heritability. He references one or two studies of adopted children, but it's very half-hearted and little enough that it could easily be cherry-picked. Given the charged nature of the question, I think Clark would have been wiser to stay away from it altogether, particularly since the answer is almost certainly "some of both." The majority of his argument stands just as well without it.

Even if I disagree with (3), I think (4) is still largely sound--the primary objective of egalitarian social policy should be to compress the range of outcomes rather than to encourage mobility across widely divergent outcomes. We know that the former is possible, and Clark's research suggests that the latter is very difficult. But more basically, we don't want people having crappy lives because of random factors. Significantly, especially to the extent that "social competence" (as Clark calls it) is heritable, it is itself a random factor. I would also argue that compression of the distribution and increased mobility are to some extent complements. The more policy compresses the distribution, the less worthwhile it is to try to maintain your position in it.

I think Clark is probably intentionally provocative, but at any rate, I thought the book was very worthwhile.

[Aloke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mobility is much slower than previously thought: elites and underclasses can persist through ten to fifteen generations! And this is mostly impervious to even the most massive social upheavals (the industrial revolution, the cultural revolution, the welfare state, etc). To me this makes sense. Even in a revolution the social order isn't inverted; elites probably end up suffering less and they scramble out of the wreckage faster than the underclasses. The more things change... But on the flip side regression to the mean is inexorable, after 10-15 generations the descendants of the prince and the pauper will be equally average.

For those uncomfortable with the thesis that social status is largely heritable I would be on the look out for studies showing the contrary. Maybe I am in a bubble but most of the research I've seen seems to support the idea. See for example: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/03/... .

That said, even though social mobility is slower than previously thought even in egalitarian societies such as Sweden it does appear that there are differences and these are probably well worth a look. In Clark's model one's social status is a weighted average between the mean and your parent's social status (weighted heavily to the latter) plus a random factor. This random factor is also partly genetic but to the extent that social policies can influence these we should do what we can to avoid or cushion negative shocks.

[Dan Allosso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edit: it finally occurred to me: this is a book written by someone who has never seen the movie Gattaca.

This is a book that claims social mobility in modern America is basically the same as in modern Sweden, and that both are in fact just about the same as in sixteenth-century England. Everywhere, Gregory Clark says, persistence of social status is much higher than we normally suppose. Where most sociologists estimate persistence in the range of 40%, Clark puts it between 75% and 80%. And as mentioned, he says it has never really changed throughout history and that it's the same pretty much everywhere. As a result, the descendants of the victorious Normans  of 1066 are still disproportionately represented in the British Parliament, and the famous but tiny Pepys family has sent many more than its share of young men to Oxford and Cambridge.
 
First, I've gotta say that it doesn't really come as a surprise to me that the elite stay elite or that it can take 20 or 30 generations for a family at the top of the heap to "revert to the mean." Although Clark says it's statistically improbable for the Pepys clan to have continued to send more than its share to the best British schools, I don't think it's socially improbable at all. In fact, it's the outcome I expected.
 
The interesting thing about this book, though, is that Clark posits (without ever really coming right out and saying it) a genetic component to elite status and persistence. Rather than saying that the Pepys boys were accorded special privileges at elite British schools or that the sons and grandsons of hereditary MPs were more likely to be elected to Parliament, Clark says there's something called underlying social competence, and that it is inherited.
 
Hang on, what? Clark says that elite status is in the genes? Well, not exactly. What he says is that there's an unknown cluster of characteristics that, taken together, make a person socially "competent," and that these characteristics seem to be inherited. Although Clark's equation has a term built in for dumb luck, he thinks the randomness is much less than we normally believe it to be. If you're looking for a marriage partner, Clark says, don't trust the status of the individual alone. It might be luck. Look at the status of the whole family, and you'll get an indication of your potential partner's "competence" genes.
 
I haven't been able to find any reviews of this idea by historians (and just a couple by economists), possibly because the book was only published in 2014 and the glaciers of academic reviewing haven't ground it down yet. However, Richard V. Reeves of the Brookings Institution wrote a three-part take-down called "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" in March 2014. Reeves, who also recently wrote a long essay supporting the rags-to-riches perspective of Horatio Alger, says Clark's perspective is racist. Or at least genetically deterministic, which he suggests is basically the same thing. Clark responded that he wasn't being racist, some of the elite groups he tracks in the book are in fact of African descent. But Reeves has a point. "Racism is not History," he says. Yeah, the guy from Brookings is saying the effects of slavery and the rest of America's racist history are still being felt. Wow.
 
Clark's main point isn't really about race, though. He uses adoption and twin studies to suggest that there's an element to life success that isn't explainable by nurture. Even if that effect isn't as complete as Clark implies (I think he brushes by some of the caveats and exceptions in the studies he cites a little to quickly), it's a challenging idea.
 
The problem is, there's not enough to grab onto. The 11 herbs and spices remain secret -- we never find out what mental, emotional, physical, or other characteristics make a person "socially competent." And it's hard to believe that the factors that made people successful in the sixteenth century are all the same as those that make people successful today. Nor is there any real explanation of how particular families got to the top of the heap in the first place. The mobility equation takes center stage, and we don't really get to look under the hood at the social factors that could have led to success and then sustained it. This is unfortunate, because since Clark hasn't really identified the machine working behind the scenes, it's entirely possible that the effects he's measuring to derive the equation are in fact social rather than biological.
 
When Clark says the social mobility in Sweden is as low as in America or early-modern England, he's not saying that inequality is the same. The penalty of being at the bottom in a welfare society like Sweden is obviously much lower than it was in England or is in the US (I wonder if the lesser downside of low social mobility in Sweden doesn't have something to do with it continuing?). Clark does suggest that in a society like the US where Reeves's Horatio Alger dream is pretty much an illusion, we ought to think harder about our safety net.
 
Clark's numbers suggest that a person's status at birth can predict a lot about their life chances. That's a slap in the face to the American Dream. But let's think about it. If he's right at all -- even if we have no idea why he's right and disagree with the theory he advances to explain it -- then we really ought to be doing more to make it less painful to be average or poor in America.

[Matthew Yglesias · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most underrated big picture books about how society works.

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at UC Davis, does a series of research projects based around surnames to show some surprising things about social mobility. One thing he shows is that there is very little of it! Even in Sweden, people with last names indicating aristocratic lineage are significantly overrepresented in elite professions compared to people with last names indicating peasant lineage. Even more strikingly, he shows persistence of elite surnames in China across a Communist revolution.

He also shows a bunch of other sort of random things. Most people are aware that Jews are disproportionately clustered in elite occupations. What’s less well-known is that there are a lot of religious minorities like this. Coptic Christians in Egypt are more elite than the Muslim neighbors, but also more elite than Christians in Christian-majority countries. The same is true of Maronites in Lebanon. But also of Parsis in Iran. The common thread is that Islamic states traditionally made non-Muslims pay a special tax, so downwardly mobile Christians and Parsis tended to convert. What’s left is an elite rump. He suggests something similar is true for Jews. Conversely, in Ireland it looks like the most successful Catholics tended to become Protestants.

The implications of all this are disturbing at times. But fundamentally I think it helps underscore that all the hype around mobility as an indicator is overrated. The reason contemporary Sweden is a better place than Maoist China or contemporary India is that living standards are just really high across the board — the country is rich and key social needs are taken care of — not anything to do with mobility.

[Rinstinkt · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars because of the new idea and way of thinking.

A book about social mobility. But not just that. It is a book about aristocracy or social status, not in a dogmatic propagandistic sense but aristocracy as high status families. Do these families, over time, end lower in the social hierarchy? Do other low status families go higher? How fast? What are the factors that might influence this movement up or down the social ladder? Are there societies where there is long term social mobility is higher, maybe Sweden, the USA? ...

Most of you wont like the answer.

[This book should be seen in the context of the heritability of IQ, 50%+. Should be viewed in the context of modern governments because democracy, I think, needs the illusion of long term social mobility.]

[Graeme · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and fascinating work of impeccable scholarship. Why and how do individuals and entire families rise and fall in social status? Can inequality of outcome be simply engineered out of existence? Are Scandinavian countries, for all of their recent egalitarianism, completely immune to the precedence of certain families over others in prestigious institutions and occupations?

Gregory Clark demonstrates how an outstanding social scientist can use an assemblage of many sources of data to prove, with great rigor, how the world really works.

[Nik Storm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth reading. Interesting study

[Justus · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Son Also Rises is more "real science" than "pop science" which is both good & bad. It is good because it is rigorous in the way that pop science, with its reliance on a single study with an interesting finding, often isn't. But it is bad because The Son Also Rises can be tedious & repetitive at times, which accounts for most of my relatively low rating.

The basic idea is this: most studies of intergenerational social mobility show that it is fairly high, especially in countries like Sweden. Clark argues that it isn't high, it is low, and that progressive policies have made almost no impact on it. That social mobility is the same in Sweden as it is in the US, India, and Japan.

What's his explanation? What's his proof? What are the consequences if the theory is right?

His explanation seems plausible: each of us have a "perceived social status" that is actually the sum of our "real social status" plus some "random errors". Traditional studies don't account for these random errors and so give misleading results. Clark's methodology is to look at large groups -- so the random errors cancel out. So far, so good. This seems plausible. We can all think of examples where someone of high "real social status" has a random event (maybe Bernie Madoff stole all their money so they go from being rich to destitute) so they spend the rest of their life with a low "perceived social status".

What proof does Clark offer? He basically brings a single tool: track rare surnames over time to see their rise & fall in social status. Where the book is tedious is Clark repeats essentially the same analysis (with the same results) over ans over again. Sweden, US, UK, Japan, India, China. Members of Parliament, people who attended Oxford, Sephardic Jews, doctors, lawyers, French Canadians in America, Germans in Chile, and more. This is all good from a science perspective. The fact that he gets similar results all over gives us more confidence. But it doesn't exactly make engaging reading for a lay audience.

So if you come away convinced, or mostly convinced, what does it all mean? One part of it is actually similar to the message in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think: all the money & effort we spend on our children appears to largely be wasted because it seems like genes determine maybe 80% of how they turn out in life. So relax. Don't be a helicopter parent. That's all fair & good.

But Clark also points out that it means all the interventions a society does also seem to have limited effectiveness. Massive social changes -- the Communist revolution in China, the Meiji restoration in Japan, 900 years of UK history, Swedish social-democratic policies -- don't appear to substantially affect the slow regression towards the mean.

Does that mean we should stop trying? That it is all a waste of money? Not quite. Clark decides:

If we cannot change the heritable advantages and disadvantages of families in the economic and social world, we should at least mitigate the consequences of these differences. For although there is no evidence that we can change social mobility rates, there is plenty of evidence that societies can reduce inequality in earnings, wealth, health, and relative social status.

You could easily just read chapters 6, 7, 15, & 16 and come away with a firm understanding of Clark's argument & results. I think if he had led with those chapters and then dove into the detailed studies supporting it, I would have been more engaged. So this is a tough one to rate, especially because it has a relatively unique message that is burdened by a less than stellar execution.

[Tu Can · Rating 4 out of 5]

Social mobility (Vietnamese: Sự chuyển dịch xã hội).

The book brings readers two key messages, which are nothing new in content but in approach (for me).
The economist Gregory Clark used econometrics to dig deep down the nature of social mobility across at least 10+ typical nations in the world, with the time of scale of up to 200 years (7 generations approx.).

For your quick grasp, here are two main messages:
1. We are often with obsession that the world are fair.
Ex.: Our children, with poor family background, will have the same opportunities in the life, as compared to the rich ones.
Fact: The author shows that even in Switzerland, the social mobility is just slow. Those public policy in education and social offerings from government seems to take no effect in improving the social equality.

So, the social mobility, in general, is slow in the way pulling back to the average line.
And like George Orwell in his book Animal: "All are equal, but some are more equal than others".
We have to accept it as sad truth. No more complain, but find a way to tackle instead.

2. Some variables did play the game in making this slow mobility: historical event, genetics, endogamy, religions, luck,...
Understand the root causes behind the social mobility of this world or a specific country you want might help better navigating your course of action, which leads you one step closer in pursuing your life purpose.

(!) Note: You should carefully check the numeric matter: sampling, methodology, reasoning from econometric result,... in this book, before accepting its conclusion.

Anyway, this book is a nice one to read again

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a horror show of genetic fallacies and poorly understood models that appeared to be singularly focused on biological reductionism and avoidant of all other data. It does not seem aware of the mathematics of bit-sum persistence of spurious correlations. And ultimately, it is marred by a series of illogical leaps that seem intentionally misleading.

The book starts only timidly Speaking of potential biological origins for the correlations persistence. It seems to understand that more traditional explanations like the persistence of wealth in families, status structures in society, the barriers to entry in luxury life found in higher education and elite certifications, etc. would be difficult to find evidence against.

Then he quotes Charles Murray.

Then, as the book progresses, there is a growing frequency of leaps made where biological explanations are assumed and consequences drawn solely from that belief, until the final chapter is a full-on assault on the justification of the existing social hierarchies as a consequence of better genes. Charles Murray becomes the hero in some racial / social hierarchy “naturalness” hypothesis that alleviates all need for anyone to seek social equity or dissolve institutional structures of inequality.

This is a sad excuse for scholarship. It misstates the causal structure of heritability measurements, particularly the narrow-sense metrics predominant here. I am shocked at Princeton Press’s participation in this, given their strict ethical and scientific standards they express in their editorial pledge.

[Paca Lapuerta · Rating 1 out of 5]

I suggest that anyone who reads this book would benefit from reading the Stanford sociology paper cited below as well. Gregory Clark makes critical errors in understanding how his sampling technique affects the data. Additionally, His choice of genetics as an explanation of his model is his construct and not directly supported by the studies presented. His genetics based hypotheses require much more complete data sets and much more advanced mathematical models than those presented in this book.

Estimating Intergenerational Mobility With Grouped Data: A Critique of Clark’s the Son Also Rises
Sociological Methods & Research 2018, Vol. 47(4) 787-811 by Florencia Torche and Alejandro Corvalan

https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/...

[Private Account · Rating 1 out of 5]

I recently read: The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Both argue the nature/nurture question and side with nature. I thought both books were pretty bad (too long, extremely uncreative in the exploration of possible reasons for their findings, and not convincing) but they did provide some fun food for thought--hence this post.

First, a summary: In Surnames, Gregory Clark attempts to prove that if social mobility is studied by surnames, the rate of social mobility is always around .75. This means social mobility is much slower than was previously believed, and is much slower everywhere, even in places with massive government intervention like Sweden. Both rich and poor families always move, however slowly, toward the mean. (With or without government intervention, the poor get richer and the rich get poorer.) Therefore, says Clark, social stature is mostly nature, if not all nature. In Selfish Reasons Bryan Caplan concurs. Twin and adoption studies show that it is nature and not nurture that will most determine a person's income, educational achievement, health, happiness, character, and values (at least in middle and upper class America).

Second, the purpose: Both Clark and Caplan offer two kinds of advice (provided you accept the premise that nurture is largely irrelevant): advice to parents on how to maximize their breeding success and advice to public policy makers on how to make the world a better place.

For parents--if nurture is irrelevant:

Clark says, in order to maximize your chances of having The Best Children, invest a great deal of time and energy in the selection of your mate. The only way to have successful offspring is to mate successfully. I agree that mate-selection should be taken far more seriously. I also agree that DNA should be taken seriously. But I disagree that the proper mating goal should be to maximize education/income/occupation or social status of offspring. I have found little correlation between social status and happiness after basic needs are met. Moreover, psychologists generally agree that the number one determiner of happiness is physical health, then relationships, then income/occupation. So if I were mate-selecting, the most important thing would not actually be the social status DNA of my potential mate, but rather, his physical health (straight teeth without ever having had braces, no acne, no glasses, no allergies, etc). After that I would look for great communication skills and secure attachment. Only then would I start to look into his income/education/occupation. Selecting based on this order would ensure that I maximize my chances of having a happy spouse and happy children. They may not be doctors and lawyers, but who cares about that if they're not happy and healthy? Moreover, a far more convincing book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, shows that happiness and depression are highly contagious. Which means I maximize my own chances of happiness by selecting my mate first according to physical health, then relationships skills, then education/income/occupation. (And yes, the evidence shared in Connected directly contradicts both Surnames and Selfish Reasons on the nature/nurture question.)

It is this same value issue I have with Caplan's book in which I am instructed to spend less of my time and money on my kids (since nurture doesn't matter) and to have more kids since that will maximize my chances of having at least one total success of a child. But for me, success is based first on physical health. In order to maximize the physical health (DNA expression) of my offspring (and my own health) they should be spaced 4 to 5 years apart and ideally wouldn't be born after I am 35. After maximizing physical health I would focus on relationships. As a nanny I learned that when there are more than 2 kids, there wasn't enough of me to go around--someone always ended up starved for my attention. Perhaps in a different parenting world, one with more community in which there were more adults around with whom the children can bond, 2 kids wouldn't take all the attention I had to give, but in this parenting world, it's hard for me to imagine that attention-starved kids grow up to be securely attached individuals with high-quality relationship skills. If I had 2, one age 10 and one age 5, and thought that I had enough attention to give a 3rd, I would totally do it (and a 4th!) but in the mean time, I don't plan to have only 2 kids because I am a helicopter mom or because they need to attend private schools as Caplan seems to think, but rather because quality relationships with my children come before having trophy children.

And I guess that is the major problem I have with both of these books. Children are people, that's all they are, new people for us to have relationships with. Those relationships will be satisfying or unsatisfying depending upon how respectfully we relate to one another. Starting a relationship with the premise that a child ought to meet some expectation that I have about "what is successful" is a pretty controlling and disrespectful way to start a relationship. This is one of the main epiphanies I had while working as a nanny: parents destroy their children when they treat them as something other than people; children are not trophies, prizes, puppies, puppets, or toys.

I did think Caplan had a good point about grandchildren though. When people are in their 30's their ideal number of children is often zero or one, but by the time most people are in their 70's their ideal number of children is 5 (because that way they definitely have someone to hang out with and grandkids). My sister-in-law worked in an elderly home for many years and she made a similar conclusion: when you are 90 you will not care at all about whatever career you had, you will only care about your grandkids. This is confirmed whenever I read the Wesleyan University magazine that arrives in my mailbox periodically--the oldest alums stop talking about career achievements. Their paragraphs are always about their grandkids. (Note for Objectivists: this means that my real-life observations do not coincide with the fictional characters after whom Ayn Rand invited me to model my life--I would welcome any real-life evidence from readers supporting Rand's point of view.)

I also think this perspective is rather inconsiderate of the children. Yes, if you have five kids you may have maximized your chances of having at least one with whom you feel deeply connected. But what about the other four?!!! Shall we do like they did in the 1500's and throw the other four to the wolves?

I would rather have two kids and put a great deal of effort into creating relationships that will last a life time. Moreover, I would never "try to get" grandkids, but the following parenting choices that I would make either way, I believe, will contribute to me getting grandkids:
a) focusing on health--infertility is skyrocketing.
b) focusing on respectful relationships--people who love and enjoy their families are far more likely to want to have a family of their own.
c) proper child spacing combined with homeschooling--children who grow up knowing how to relate to people of many ages (a 10-year-old who plays often with his 5-year-old sibling, helps care for the baby, and spends a lot of time with young adults at his father's office) will likely find it easier to envision a life with children than the 30-year-olds who have only ever hung out with people their own age and know nothing about babies.
d) unschooling with a focus on the future--children who own their lives and who don't have to wait until they are 22 to pursue their dreams can get their 10,000 hours in a given field by the time they are 15 or 16. Which means they could have quite a bit of money put away and career success by the time they are 22. Which means they may be ready to have families of their own much younger than Standard American Children. And even if not--
e) parental help--books on evolutionary theory make it clear that we live as long as we do only because it is beneficial to offspring i.e. grandparents exist because they help care for the young. My son gets holiday gifts from his grandparents and that's it. Upper class friends of mine get insane amounts of free babysitting from their parents, some as much as 60 hours a week for 2 years. I hope to be able to offer insane amounts of free babysitting to my own grandkids--this should make it easier for me to get more grandkids and make parenting more fun for my kids.
f) including children in the world--the world for parents and children sucks right now (see my lecture 2). By creating a world that includes children, it would make having children a lot more fun.

I am not convinced nurture is irrelevant though.

-In Surnames, for example, the graphs of DNA winners and losers do not work for my family. I don't look at my genealogy chart and see a story of poor people moving ever so slowly toward the mean with some dips back into poverty, nor do I see a story of wealthy people moving ever so slowly toward the mean with some blips into extreme wealth. It doesn't matter what line you follow, my genealogy is more like: poor immigrant begets middle class man begets extremely wealthy man begets total financial failure begets middle class man. When I look at my genealogy chart and focus on education I see: farmer begets minister begets doctor who marries a fellow doctor and they beget a high school drop out. Am I just this anomaly with a combination of win/lose career-DNA or, more likely, are most of us DNA mutts? Don't most people have a poor relative and a rich one or is it really just me? Because I am inclined to argue that DNA purebreds don't make sense.

-Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives shows that social behaviors are contagious, from happiness to obesity. We will become the average of the five people with whom we spend the most time. Couldn't this be the explanation for the wealthy dynasties falling inexorably toward the mean rather than their failure to properly screen potential mates? When I think of the extremely wealthy people for whom I worked during my 20's--who were the five people with whom their children spent most of their time? Never their parents. And never wealthy people. Even if you send your child to the most exclusive private school in the world, his teachers will still not be members of the social class which his parents hope he will one day join. Nor will his nannies. Nor will his piano instructor or personal trainers. Nor will his college professors. What I see is wealthy people failing to raise their own children.

Many wealthy people genuinely believe that middle class teachers or super nannies have more to offer their children than they do. I think the opposite is true. Wealthy people who want their children to be wealthy like them need to be the primary teachers of their children. Want your children to think the way you do, the way a successful, wealthy person does? Don't have them taught to think by middle class teachers.

In A Mother's Job: The History of Day Care 1890-1960 I read about the white, protestant, upper class women who started daycare and pushed for free, compulsory public education. The goal was to reshape the children of the poor. The goal was for the children of the poor to be raised by middle class people so that they would acquire middle class values. What ended up happening is that all children are raised by middle class people. Isn't this a more plausible explanation as to why both rich and poor families generally rise or fall to the mean?

-Caplan claims that political values are nature, not nurture. I mean--WHAT??? So in 1770's there was just a lot of Libertarian DNA expressed and today, randomly, nothing to do with the liberal takeover of education, it's Fascist DNA that happens to be expressed?

-Both Caplan and Clark mention that nurture is far more influential than nature until children are four years old and only then suddenly nurture becomes irrelevant. And yet it makes more sense to both of these scholars that our DNA suddenly turns on at four than that school has replaced nurture in American society? Or school plus seven hours of television a day? To me it is clear: it's not that nurture is actually irrelevant, it's that nurture is simply not part of the equation any more when it comes to American parenting. The Standard American parent has been replaced and is kidding himself/herself to think that his/her paltry few hours on the weekend stands a chance against the combined nurturing/indoctrination/brainwashing forces of school and television.

Which brings me to my conclusions from these books:

1. Raise your own children. Occasional babysitting, yes. But no nannies, no daycare, and definitely no school public or private. Especially if you are wealthy. The wealthier you are, the more important it is to not hire out the raising of your children. Which means not only that you need to learn how to raise children well, but that one of the focuses of your children's childhood should also be learning how to relate to children well so that they will be great parents too.

2. And consider this: occupations run in families. Hollywood poo-poo's taking over Daddy's company--and that is very unfortunate. What if one of the greatest keys to success in business is doing the same or similar occupation of your parents? It takes 10,000 hours to be world-class at something. What will your child get his hours in just because of his childhood with you? Today we do the best we can to keep kids out of the real world. It's as if we are trying to ensure that they have no real-world skills by the time they are 22. Yet, when look at my own life, even though I was so focused on school, I still managed to get a leg-up in my parent's occupations--farming and writing from my father and wine from my mother. Had a school counselor sat me down when I was eighteen and said: Look, if you are super passionate about something else, by all means go do it, but if you could be happy working in wine, you will have a much easier life and you will find career success at a much younger age. You can go to college, study something new, get a bunch of debt, and spend your 20's and 30's acquiring the social network and skills required to do a new line of work and you will be successful--just much later (your 50's rather than your late 20's) and with much more strife. Do you like this other career SO much more than wine that you are willing to make that trade?

I am not saying that kids should do what their parents do or that parents should push their kids to do so, just that if it works out that way, it would be very advantageous. Outliers points out that it is very rare for children who grew up in poverty to become very wealthy, but it is very common for them to make it to the middle class. Children who grow up in the middle class are more likely to become very wealthy--which is exactly what my family tree shows. Which is to say: a truely successful career may require three generations. I notice that in Hollywood. Failed actors have children who are working actors and they have children who are successful. I'm not arguing that this is The One Rule, there will always be anomalies, but this idea that building something amazing takes more than one generation was common knowlege for farmers in the time of Laura Ingles Wilder. The pioneers were going to have it rough and they knew that going in. But their children would have it easier and their grandchildren even easier. The farm would get better over time. Doing a career other than what your parents did is like being a pioneer. It may be unfortunate that we idealize, as a culture, "getting out" of our hometowns and not following in Daddy's footsteps.

This knowledge is equally valuable for the father who hates his job and hopes his son does not follow in his footsteps. Don't want your kid to do your job one day? Make sure he gets that leg-up from an uncle or one of your friends. Because if you don't plan otherwise, he will wake up at 25 and realize that doing what you do is the easiest route to take.

For Public Policy Makers--if nurture is irrelevant

Poor people who work hard get to switch social classes and always have been able to do so--our ideas about the repressive feudal times are inaccurate. Social mobility as always been .75! Woot out! Ambitious people have always found a way and will always find a way! And unambitious people won't. All of Sweden's government interventions haven't changed their social mobility. DNA (or something in nature) is destiny. So don't bother with the nurture. Stop wasting your time trying to teach poor people and their children to fish. They never will.

This is great news, both Caplan and Clark insist. We don't need to worry anymore. Or try so hard. Leveling the playing field didn't work so we can stop trying.

Now, the authors obviously can't go Hitler, so they go Harrison Bergeron--leveling the playing field doesn't work so we are going to have to level the players. DNA is destiny, so even though the smart folk still have to do the work to acquire their income, it should be taken from them and given to those who lost the DNA lottery.

[Here is a link to the amazing 80's film based on Harrison Bergeron--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvqsv...]

As the awesome story Harrison Bergeron points out, the only reason anyone thinks this is okay is because they are only thinking in terms of money. But financial success isn't the only lottery we can win when it comes to DNA. Why are poor people the "less fortunate who should be compensated" and not the crappy athletes? What about lessening the blow for the ugly people? There are a lot of ways for life to be unfair. If I gotta share my IQ-related-wealth, then I think the pretty girls should have to wear masks and the good athletes should have their legs broken so their backs hurt as bad as mine. That sounds fair to me!

I am not joking. And if you think the above is insane, please reread the last paragraph and watch Harrison Bergeron.

From a public policy perspective, the only other option is the eugenics route--and if I read between the lines, I think this is how both Caplan and Clark really feel, they just can't say so. If nurture doesn't matter, if the poor cannot learn to fish, if DNA determines everything, as these writers claim with absolute surety, why should we, as parents, or as a society, invest anything in loser DNA? Especially considering that those with the loser DNA tend to have more children than the winners.

Clark showed that we always move toward the mean. Therefore he advises the ambitious breeder to examine the entire family of his potential mate to ensure the success of his offspring. But, collectivist thinker that he is, Clark doesn't examine the collective implications of his statement. If I were a collectivist, the fact that the human race will always move toward the mean, would translate to: the best thing to be done for the good of the human race is to kill off the DNA lottery losers. This would raise the mean for everyone left. And then the DNA lottery winners wouldn't have to hire private detectives to make sure they aren't going to accidentally dirty up with DNA with the losers.

Sorry, not room for the rest of this post, will put on my blog http://roslynross.blogspot.com/2015/0...

[Brian Asquith · Rating 2 out of 5]

What was great about this book was that Dr. Clark has clearly found an innovative way of tracking the status of families over time, and has applied this method of analysis to a wide variety of illuminating cases. I think he's shed some real light on the transmission of wealth and social status intergenerationally. The central premise alone will attract many readers.

That said, there are some very significant weaknesses. He reaches a very strong conclusion (it's all genetics!) on the basis of just surname analysis. While he does do a good job of trying to exhaustively rule out other explanations for his findings, our knowledge of the inheritance of intelligence and personality traits badly lags his claims, to the point where it seems often presumptuous for him to come out so strongly that it all must be inheritability.

On a last note, the prose is often repetitive. It's a pet peeve of mine, even though it seems to be a tic of many "popularizers" of economics.

[Paul Conroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genes matter more than anything else in determining social status. Status is largely conserved from generation to generation. It can take 500 years for a high status family to become average status, by intermarriage with average folk.

So, the only hedge against Downward Mobility is to marry and have kids with someone who comes from a group that has status at or above your own.

[Joseph Bronski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great sociobiology book. Argues that conventional measures of "status" are flawed because the metrics for individuals are noisy. This cancels out on the generational level, and generations of families based on last name analysis always correlate in status at 0.70 or so, no matter the era or the policies. This suggests status is highly heritable and hard to change with "institutions."

[Emre Sevinç · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that made me say "Oops! I didn't know it was that bad! Really?".

Apparently, regardless of inequality levels in a society, and the time period you and your family live in - be it a much nicer place such as Sweden, or in a society in USA where there are huge levels of inequality between people, or medieval England for a totally different scenario - once you are at the top of society, or at the bottom of it, it takes many many generations to regress to the mean. So, the good news is, at least, there's some regress to the mean, it is not that fixed. The bad news is, it takes so long for so many families, that you can practically take it for granted that your immediate generations will not be much better off (of course, that's only bad news if you are stuck towards the bottom).

The book definitely will lead to more research for economists, sociologists, and even biologists (after all, if it's really a fact, then there must be some biological component that lead to similar results in so many different societies, economical systems, and time periods, right?).

For the rest of us, the lessons learned from this book will probably lead to a good political debate: if indeed the social mobility simply doesn't happen as much as we'd liked, independent of many parameters; then we'd better strive for less unequal societies, because as the book shows, once a family is closer to the bottom, then it'll take many many generations to get rid of this. And if "life is not fair", then we'd better make it much less painful because we can, and well, why would you even want the opposite?

I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about "why such and such groups of people can't 'make it' after so much time", as well as to the people who believe "if you really work hard, you'll make it, and so will everyone, there's this thing called social mobility". Finally, people who believe "social mobility used to be great, but it regressed in the last few decades because of policies employed by neoliberal governments and institutions" will be disappointed by this book that very strongly shows that social mobility was never at that nice level to begin with.

Note to researchers: I'd love to read a similar analysis based on data of Turkey as well as the Ottoman Empire, who knows, maybe we'll come across a surprise?

[Jurij Fedorov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chapters

PART I Social Mobility by Time and Place
2 Sweden: Mobility Achieved? 19
3 The United States: Land of Opportunity 45
4 Medieval England: Mobility in the Feudal Age 70
5 Modern England: The Deep Roots of the Present 88
6 A Law of Social Mobility 107
7 Nature versus Nurture 126
PART II Testing the Laws of Mobility
8 India: Caste, Endogamy, and Mobility 143
9 China and Taiwan: Mobility after Mao 167
10 Japan and Korea: Social Homogeneity and Mobility 182
11 Chile: Mobility among the Oligarchs 199
12 The Law of Social Mobility and Family Dynamics 212
13 Protestants, Jews, Gypsies, Muslims, and Copts:
Exceptions to the Law of Mobility? 228
14 Mobility Anomalies 253
PART III The Good Society
15 Is Mobility Too Low? Mobility versus Inequality 261
16 Escaping Downward Social Mobility 279

My opinion on the book

I don't quite get it. It's just a bunch of scientific papers made into book/audiobook chapters? The book is not engaging, not fascinating. It's not even good at explaining the science. We kinda get surname experiments from all over the world proving heritability of success and wealth. But I'm sitting around waiting for deeper knowledge and new info and instead the author just vaguely circles the point again and again. Is he afraid of telling us what he means? Does he want it to be an overly long scientific paper? Scientific papers are horrible reading material. It's maybe the worst writing you can find. While this book is 10 times better than that it still has the same style and the same fearful engagement with facts and claims. Everything needs to be hazy and wordy so that no experiment is overblown and no angry reaction can be had.

It's very important data and hugely important experiments in modern social science. Something everyone need to understand. But I'm not sure I liked the book itself unfortunately. I rather have an experience especially with audiobooks. This feels more like a scientific summary. I may relisten to it next year to see what I missed. But I rather read other books about the same topic so see how they present it.

[Fearless Leader · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s all genes. Everything.

[Raziel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“All represent my opinion alone. Also, none of the people I thank below should be taken as endorsing the conclusions of the book.”

“In the early stages of the research, I gave sunnily optimistic talks about the speed and completeness of social mobility. Only when confronted with evidence of the persistence of status over five hundred years that was too glaring to ignore was I forced to abandon my cheery assurance that one of the joys of the capitalist economy was its pervasive and rapid social mobility.”

“The problem is not with the studies and estimates themselves. What they measure, they measure correctly.”

“Social status is inherited as strongly as any biological trait, such as height.”

“Once we measure generalized social mobility, there is no sign that inequality is linked to social mobility rates. Instead social mobility seems to be a constant, independent of inequality.”

“Their visibility, combined with a mistaken impression of rapid social mobility in the majority population, makes them seem like exceptions to a rule. They are instead the exemplars of the rule of low rates of social mobility.”

“These high estimates of underlying intergenerational correlation imply that 50 to 70% of the variation in general social status within any generation is predictable at conception.”

“These data do not imply that outcomes happen to people solely because of... their family background. Those who achieve high status in any society do so because of their abilities, their efforts, and their resilience in the face of obstacles and failures. Our findings do suggest, however, that we can predict strongly, based on family background, who is likely to have the compulsion to strive and the talent to prosper.”

“Suppose we assume that the various aspects of social status in each generation —income, wealth, education, occupation— are all linked to some fundamental social competence or status of families, with some random deviation. The random component for any aspect of status exists for two reasons. First, there is an element of luck in the status attained by individuals. People happen to choose a successful field to work in or firm to work for. They just succeed in being admitted to Harvard, as opposed to just failing. Second, people make tradeoffs between income and other aspects of status.”

“Bill Gates, for example, is a college dropout, a fact that would conventionally mark him as being of relatively low status. Yet the reason he decided to abandon his Harvard education was to further his wealth —an aspiration at which he succeeded spectacularly.”

“These differences can also be explained using the biological concepts of genotype and phenotype, which were introduced to deal with very similar issues of regression to the mean in biological characteristics across generations. The genotype is the set of genes carried by a single organism. Its phenotype comprises all of its observable characteristics... influenced by both by its genotype and its environment.”

“The same intergenerational correlation applies to the top and the bottom of the status distribution. Upward mobility occurs at the same rate as downward mobility.”

“All aspects of mobility, as reflected by income, wealth, education, and longevity.”

“This book suggests, based on these characteristics, a social law: there is a universal constant of intergenerational correlation of 0.75, from which deviations are rare and predictable.”

“We should not create social structures that magnify the rewards of a high social position. The justification for the great inequalities we observe is often that reward is the required stimulus for achievement.”

“It does not reflect any belief that women are unimportant: it merely results from the fact that until the last few generations, women’s status largely reflected that of their husbands.”

“Emancipated women mate as assortatively as before and transmit their status to children as faithfully as in the patriarchal societies of the past.”

“The term status genotype does not imply here that genes do in fact transmit status, just that the process looks similar in character to genetic transmission.”

“Rates of long–run social mobility are so low that the eighteenth–century elite in Sweden have persisted to the present day as a relatively privileged group.”

“Nearly one hundred years of Swedish social democracy has created a more economically equal society, but it has been unable to change the underlying rate of social mobility.”

“Social mobility is no higher for highly visible minorities, such as the Jewish and black population, than it is for less visible minorities: the descendants of the French settlers of Acadia and Quebec, the descendants of the rich of 1923–24, and the descendants of Ivy League graduates of 1850.”

“The underlying social mobility rates in the United States since 1920 are much lower than conventional estimates would suggest. Although surname groups tend to regress to the mean in occupational status, they do so far more slowly than conventional estimates imply.”

“Medieval England looks like a world of astonishing mobility. Artisans in 1300 were mostly illiterate workers scattered across English villages, yet by 1500 their descendants were fully incorporated into the English universities. And by 1620 they were fully represented even among the gentry whose wills were proved in the PCC. Even before the Enlightenment proclaimed the idea of the fundamental equality of humanity in the abstract, the social and economic system of medieval England was delivering equality of opportunity in the concrete.”

“This finding means that medieval England had mobility rates similar to, though perhaps modestly higher than, those of the modern United States and Sweden. In terms of social mobility, then, what did the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution achieve? Very little. Social mobility existed long before people even thought of it as a feature of the good society. It was never fast, but over generations, all ranks of society could enter equally into its upper echelons. By implication, the early elites eventually saw substantial downward mobility.”

“For one forefather to produce 8,500 descendants in the course of thirty–one generations would require that each generation produce an average of only 1.34 surviving sons per family. There is evidence that the upper classes of preindustrial England easily achieved such fertility levels.”

“In the long run, we are all equal in expectation.”

“The surname data we examine show absolutely no sign that any of the intellectual, social, and economic advances between 1300 and 2000 in England produced much increase in social mobility. Neither the Reformation in the sixteenth century, nor the Enlightenment of the early eighteenth century, nor the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, nor the political reforms of the nineteenth century, nor the rise of the welfare state in the twentieth century, seems to have had much effect on intergenerational mobility.”

“These are not people you expect to meet at your local chip shop or job center. These names reek of class, privilege, and distinguished lineage.”

“The persistence of wealth remained just as high for the last two, heavily taxed, generations as for the previous two, which escaped significant inheritance taxation.”

“These wealth measures have drawbacks as a general index of social mobility. First, it may be objected that of various components of social status —education, occupation, earnings, health, and wealth— the most persistent is wealth, since it can be directly inherited. Second, the measures of wealth discussed above may not fully reflect the social changes that took place in Britain in the twentieth century. For the last generation we observe, those dying in the years 1999–2012, the average date of birth was 1924. These people would, on average, have completed their schooling by 1946, before many of the social changes of the postwar era. This raises the question of whether social mobility might be much greater for people in England born more recently.”

“Greater longevity is making the circulation of wealth in modern economies increasingly socially dysfunctional.”

“Both the wealthy and the educationally privileged of 1800–1829 are losing their elite status only slowly. Yet since that time the nature of universities and the way in which they recruit students have changed dramatically.”

“Whatever the political arrangements, this surname group maintained its overrepresentation in Parliament and in the halls of Westminster. Lineage dominated ideology and party.”

“The tracking of rare surnames shows that social mobility rates for wealth, education, and political power are low in modern England.”

“Modern rates of social mobility also represent only very slight increases on mobility rates in the medieval period”

“THIS BOOK ESTIMATES SOCIAL MOBILITY RATES by measuring the rate at which surnames that originally had high or low social status lose that status connotation.”

“The first is that in all the cases examined, social mobility measured from surnames is much lower than from conventional measures.”

“The second surprising result is that social mobility seems to occur at a similar rate for different measures of status: wealth, education, occupational status, and membership in political elites. Wealth would seem to be much more heritable than education or occupational status.”

“The third surprise is that the rate of persistence is close to constant across wildly different social systems. It is little higher for the feudal England of the Middle Ages than for the progressive, equality–loving, social–democratic Sweden of today.”

“The proposal is that we must distinguish between a family’s surface or apparent social status and their deeper social competence, which is never observed directly.1 What is observed for families is their attainment on various partial indicators of social status: earnings, wealth, occupation, education, residence, health, and longevity. Each of these derives from underlying status, but with a random component.”

“The random component of aspects of social status exists for two reasons. First, there is an element of luck in the status attained by individuals. With respect to earnings, high–earning people happen to choose a successful field to work in or a successful firm to work for.”

“Second, people trade income and wealth for other aspects of status. Someone might choose a career as a philosophy professor as opposed to a lower-status but more lucrative career selling plumbing hardware.”

“The second assumption in this simple theory of all social mobility is that underlying social status in families regresses only slowly toward the mean, with a persistence rate, b, of 0.75. And this high rate of persistence is constant across all societies.”

“Conventional estimates of social mobility, based as they are on estimating the correlation of parents and children on partial measures of social status, systematically overestimate the underlying mobility rate.”

“What causes the conventional measures to overestimate underlying social mobility rates is the presence of the error term linking partial measures of status with underlying competence.”

“All that has happened is that the standard measures of mobility now more accurately reflect the low underlying mobility rates that always existed.”

“The mismatch between measured social mobility rates from partial aspects of mobility and underlying social mobility are dramatically illustrated in the inheritance of longevity. Across groups of people, longevity is highly correlated with social status.”

“In fact the correlation of longevity between individual parents and children is very low.”

“Suppose social mobility rates for different aspects of status really were very different. Suppose, for example, that wealth mobility was much slower than educational mobility. In that case, over the course of centuries, we would end up with a society where there was very little correlation between the various aspects of status. We would find a lot of wealthy, uneducated people and a lot of educated people with no assets to their names. Overall, the wealthy would be average in terms of their educational attainment: there would be little or no correlation between these two attributes. This is not the world we observe. Instead, there tends to be a consistent correlation between the various aspects of status. Maintaining such a correlation demands that the persistence of these attributes across generations be very similar.”

“Whatever the status of your parents, high–status grandparents predict a better outcome for you. Low–status grandparents predict a poorer outlook.”

“The different histories of these two groups of surnames have no effect on their subsequent rates of social mobility. The tendency to regress to the mean is just as strong for the group with the richer and more distinguished set of ancestors. The history of families does not matter in predicting the status of future generations: all that matters is the status of the parent generation."

“This model does leave open the question of why the underlying social competence of the Jewish and Asian communities is higher than that of the black and Latino populations.”

“Surname evidence shows that all social mobility can essentially be reduced to one simple law, x t + 1 = bx t + e t, where x is the underlying social competence of families. The persistence rate, b, is always high relative to conventional estimates, generally 0.7–0.8. It seems to be little affected by social institutions.”

“The standard approach in economics assumes that social status is transmitted through three channels: genetic transmission of underlying abilities from parents; transmission of cultural traits within families; and transmission of abilities through parental investment of time and resources in child rearing (in economic parlance, investment in 'human capital').”

“This picture of mobility mechanisms also implies that the intergenerational correlation of outcomes in the free-market economy is higher than is socially desirable. Children with the same innate abilities do not get equal chances in life. Those from higher–income families do better.”

“This raises the possibility that it is nature, much more than nurture, that propagates social status so persistently across the generations.”

“In England for parents who married between 1890 and 1960. High–status families had much lower fertility than those of low status. In contrast, in the preindustrial world, fertility was typically strongly positively associated with status. In England before 1780, this effect was so strong that the wealthiest parents had twice as many children as the average family.”

“Status is strongly inherited within families mainly through genetic or cultural transmission, or both.”

“If nature dominates nurture in the transmission of status, to what extent is the transmission genetic as opposed to cultural? The evidence presented here cannot answer this question.”

“We show below that endogamy is associated with a complete absence or a slowing of the process of regression to the mean for elite groups.”

“India is an interesting society in which to test... that social institutions can do little to change the rate of social mobility and that a key controller of mobility rates is the degree of marital endogamy among elite and underclass groups.”

“By some measures, social mobility is nonexistent.”

“This system of exclusion was so powerful that different castes and subcastes, even within small geographic areas, can now have distinct genetic profiles.”

“The Hindu community was traditionally divided into four castes. In descending order of status, these were Brahmins, priests; Kshatriya, rulers, administrators, and soldiers; Vaishya, farmers, bankers, and traders; and Shudra, laborers and servants. Each caste had hierarchically ranked subcastes.”

“Since Independence, the number of places reserved and the number of groups eligible for reserved places has increased. Up to half of available educational places and government jobs are now reserved.”

“The estimated persistence rate for income in India of 0.58, however, is not much higher than those for the United Kingdom (0.5) or the United States (0.47). The share of income variance in the next generation attributable to inheritance from parents in India is still only (0.58)^2 , or 0.34.”

“The effects of the reservation system between 1950 and 1999 cannot be fully inferred. On balance, it may have reduced the persistence rate for the initially high–status groups. But it has also served to increase persistence for a large and growing underclass of Muslims and poor Hindus who are ineligible for scheduled caste status.”

“As evidenced by surname distributions, the two–thirds of the population outside the reserved categories in Bengal has seen little change in relative social position over the past two generations. Among the groups included in the reserved categories, a few seem to have reaped disproportional gains, while others seem to have experienced few benefits.”

“Though the reservation changes the measured social status of these individuals, it does much less to change the underlying social competence of these families... Another possibility, however, is that groups that benefit from the reservation system have fewer of the family resources needed to relocate to the United States and practice medicine there.”

“This unusually low rate of social mobility is consistent with the argument [...] that group marital endogamy leads to persistent classes of the advantaged and disadvantaged.”

“The problem with measuring social mobility in China using surname distributions is that the Chinese have few surnames, and these surnames have been employed for millennia”

“Geography still matters to social status in China, a fact that slows mobility at the national level. The populations bearing the thirteen Qing elite surnames are all concentrated in the lower Yangzi River valley”

“The mobility rates estimated for modern China would be even lower were the geographical elements in immobility not excluded.”

“Despite the disruptions of civil war, land reform, and the Cultural Revolution, the data show a very slow decline in status of the Qing elite within Communist China.”

“We can be 95% confident that the true intergenerational correlation of status for Communist China lies in the range 0.71–0.92. Even at the lower bound of this range of estimates, this is a remarkable degree of status persistence by the elite in a society that experienced the degree of turbulence and anti–elitist actions in the early year

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now this is an interesting book! I hope the book becomes a seminal work where others research and write on the topic, because it's utterly fascinating and enlightening.

I've read Charles Murray's Coming Apart. I enjoyed the read and believe Murray describes a social phenomena fairly well. The Son Also Rises takes direct issue with a main thesis of Coming Apart and sheds significant light on what's really happening. Further, this book elucidates other social phenomena discussed in books such as The Triple Package. Quite clearly, the authors of those books discuss social phenotype whereas The Son Also Rises demonstrates the overwhelming importance of social genotype when looking at multi-generational trends.

What's interesting is that these sorts of books are usually written by authors such as Murray that are deemed evil right wingers by pretty much everyone. To the contrary, Clark appears to adopt "progressive" ideas when confronted with the reality that, much to our surprise, we're not all created equal and social status is mostly determined by winning the genetic lottery. Because luck is the predominant factor, the just method of dealing with the variance is to adopt social policy that will narrow the distance between the classes. This means more socialistic policy.

What isn't discussed, likely because it would require another book, are the ramifications of said policy. Clark argues, citing UK (n=1), that said policies would have little ill effects. I'm unconvinced of this particular argument, as impressive as it is.

If you're interested in class systems, social mobility, and human biodiversity, you'll love this book.

[TG Lin · Rating 2 out of 5]

這本書並不好啃，因此斷斷續續花了一個月讀了三分之二之後，最後還是決定看完結論便闔書待還。整體說來，《父酬者︰姓氏、階級與社會不流動（The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Socail Mobility）》並不是一本經濟學或社會學的「科普」讀物，反倒可以稱作是作者 Gregory Clark 的「學術論文」。三百多頁的重點，大多擺在作者與他的研究團隊是如何採樣、他們的模型各項參數的意義、以及他們為每一地域的假設與資料摘取的細節。
　
至於他的全書結論並不難懂︰無論在哪一種社會制度環境之下，整體社會階層流動，永遠跟其原本家族所屬的階層有絕大的關連。本作者用了一個評量的數字「代際相關性（Intergenerational Correlation）」，以 0 到 1 作為指標——0 表示下一代的收入與社會地位與上一代無關，1 代表兩代之間的收入與地位完全承繼——則無論該社會是民主或專制、公立教育系統與社會福利、信仰道德提倡的平等與階層秩序、國家富裕貧窮或開發程度的高低，這個數值在不同地區所統計出來的，都在 0.7 到 0.9 之間。換句話說，不計社會上一定會有的特例（貧困子弟白手起家、紈褲子弟敗壞家業）以整體統計來看，十個富裕或高地位的家庭有七到九個可以傳給下一代、十個窮困或低地位的家庭下一代有七到九個依舊如此。無論你在瑞典或印度，這個趨勢全都一樣。
　
不知從什麼時候開始，我們常常會在討論當前社會狀態時談到「社會流動性」這個詞。當我們不靠集權之力強制人民平等時，我們一向有個朦朧但肯定的傾向，就是增加「社會流動性」︰人人皆平等，一個人的獲得不由其出身來決定、而是靠他（／她）的個人才華公平競爭以取得恰如其份的地位。更具體來講，就是國家力量必須去提拔補助資源較少的群體、並要刻意壓制社經高層可以掌控的資源。但若照本書作者拿「姓氏」（也就是著眼在「家庭／家族」的延續上）來統計，「社會流動性」是個根本辦不到的假議題。本來就該流動的，時間久了一定會流動；用各種集體手段加以調控，流動的程度並不會變得特別高或特別低。
　
其實更進一步地想，這並不出乎正常的意料之外。無論是親生或收養，人類畢竟是人類，本來就是生物的一支。根植在我們的物種與文明的基因中，原本就會對自已的下一世代有特別的關照。因此，就算不用激進優生學的「龍生龍鳳生鳳老鼠的兒子會打洞」，但在人類嬰幼兒還需要由家庭長輩扶養長大的先天限制之下，我們怎麼能期盼「社會流動性」和基因傳遞有什麼太大的出入呢？
　
雖然本書的諸多採樣，我覺得有些偏頗與怪異（比如中國姓氏只採用長江下游的樣本），而且超愛創造新術語、新公式、乃至於繁瑣到讓非相關研究者看到眼花繚亂的迷宮，但無論如何，社會學研究，總是歡迎各種新的引入方法，讓各種派別學說相互激盪。對我而言，我並不會因為讀了本書而對人類感到失望；反而更確定了自己對生物演化學說適用於人類的信心。若要說，本書對於製定社會政策的啟示是什麼，我會認為還是那句老話︰發展才是硬道理，瘦死的駱駝比馬大。與其成天想著如何把富人的錢搶來分配給窮人，倒不如將餅作大，讓低社經地位的家庭也有足夠的資源得以過著體面的生活。
　
不是很值得推薦的書，除非對於社會學的研究圈而言。

[Christopher Becker · Rating 1 out of 5]

After slogging through this book, I I was left wondering how the author could reach the conclusion that elites are very slowly moving downwards over thousands of years and eventually those at the bottom will rise to the top. Really? A less sanguine view would be that those who held wealth and power in the past will continue to do so in the future. Clarke claims that under various political systems the impact of the political and legal systems have been irrelevant to the slow steady trend of social mobility. But one could just as easily say that those in power have continually come up with ways of staying in power despite policies that superficially tried to remove them. Yes even in Mao’s China. Clarke’s view that the world through history is a meritocracy is absurd. The elite’s success has almost nothing to do with ability. Instead it has everything to do with being in positions of power to set the rules of the game. Some examples include the role that property rights have played in preserving wealth for those at the top. Or the use of violence to repress and kill those that do not acquiesce to the elite. The list goes on and on. Colonialism, Slavery, redlining. All examples of how the elite suppressed various groups for their own financial gain. I would just skip this terrible book and read something by Piketty instead.

[Dеnnis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Что определяет успех человека в жизни? Насколько шансы преуспеть зависят от формы правления в стране? Профессор экономики Грегори Кларк по-новому подошел к ответу на эти вопросы. Выбрав в качестве объекта исследования фамилии, он проследил траектории судеб носивших их родов в таких разных странах, как США, Швеция, Корея, Китай, Англия, Индия, Чили и др. Анализ переписей населения, нотариально заверенных завещаний, списков членов правительств и выпускников элитных учебных заведений привел к весьма парадоксальным выводам. Например, в шведском «соцраю» равных возможностей, госзащиты и эмансипации за столетие социальная мобильность почти не изменилась и мало отличается от американской. В Китае, пережившем падение режимов, войны, интервенции, «культурную революцию» и Большой скачок, представителей семей, преуспевавших в империи Цин, можно найти среди членов Политбюро. Отследил Кларк и удел неоднозначно воспринимаемых меньшинств — цыган, евреев, коптов и пр. Исследование не охватывает Россию, а ведь как интересно было бы узнать, насколько выводы автора работают в нашей изрядно покореженной XX веком стране. К счастью, специально для российского издания написано предисловие, в котором ученый делится некоторыми соображениями на этот счет.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deep dive into a narrow dataset that shows persistence of status across generations is much much higher than the (already high) estimates derived using conventional analysis. Particularly surprising (to me), is how status across generations is apparently unperturbed by massive changes in "how the game is played." From medieval England to post-industrial revolution England, to China during the cultural revolution, from Sweden to the USA, from Japan to Chile, the persistence of family status is remarkably stable and consistent. Yikes!

I'm suspending judgment on Clark's provocative claim that family-level genetic differences explain this divergence. The book seems like it would be a good complement to two other recent treatises on inequality (Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century and Scheidel's The Great Leveler), as well as Reich's recent book on human genetics (Who we are and how we got here).

[Fernando Hoces de la Guardia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly controversial book. Claims that there is an almost natural law for social mobility across cultures and countries.
What I like: quantitative econ history; framework for social mobility; thorough analysis on relative prevalence of last names over time.
What I didn’t like: sweeping statements regarding social mobility based on a very narrow measure; lots of space to manipulate data and definitions; lack of better treatment of how to reconcile this “law” with current estimates from Chetty et al on varying access to opportunity over time in the US (using much better data)

[Joe Court]

Authors who feature statistics in their books will often call ‘unintuitive’ the conclusions to which those statistics lead the reader. I suspect that most people who read those books are sufficiently open-minded that their intuitions do not in fact clash with such conclusions. I must be close-minded, because I found Clark's conclusions rather unintuitive. Clark shows that social mobility is universally low, that it is impervious to both societal differences and major events. Families on the top or bottom rung at any given time will take very many centuries to regress to the mean. Social mobility does not differ significantly between feudal England and England today, or between the democratically aspirational Sweden on the one hand and China, at any time in its turbulent twentieth century, on the other. Nothing can remove the downy cushion, or lead anchor, of the status one gets from one's parents. The mechanisms of this inheritance are beyond the scope. As Clark says, status may not be inherited genetically, but if not then it is inherited in a way that matches genetic inheritance. The conclusions one can draw from this are as repugnant as they are unintuitive. I dislike that Clark coats the pill with sweet, politically digestible nothings, though I can’t really blame him.

These analyses do not match conventional estimates. One of the main reasons to trust Clark instead is that he uses surnames, taken from an ingenious variety of historical datasets, to trace families over long periods. I must confess, I was expecting this book to be something like a surname-focused world history. There is no doubt I would have enjoyed that, since I'm a loser and look on forebears.io after I meet someone with a surname that interests me. There are nice morsels of onomastics, concerning for example the high-status European immigrants in Chile, who brought wealth and names not only from Castille but also from Germany, Italy, and the Basque Country. The reader is only tossed such morsels insofar as they help them understand Clark’s social mobility thesis. However, I would not let that deter any potential buyer, since Clark’s thesis is vastly more worldview-changing than I can imagine any surname history being. Besides, it is delightful to watch Clark (or one of his PhD students) circumvent obstacles in the data, such as the homogeneity of surnames in China or South Korea.

I doubt this book will be widely read. Statisticians should read it, since they are best placed to critique Clark's analyses and produce work in the same vein. (Anecdotally, the statisticians I am aware of who have read this book think very highly of it.) However, the daft title and breezy design make it look rather pop-soc-sci and I doubt any statistician would give it a second thought if they saw it on a Waterstones table. Humanistic policy-makers should also read it. However, those who pick it up will find that, contrary to appearances, it is stats-heavy and basically academic. They will also find that Clark is an unfriendly writer, even a bad one. The book is poorly signposted and sometimes repetitive. Clark's sentences are long-winded and careless (don’t step in the treacly mixed metaphors). This does not prevent his book from being a masterpiece of truth.

Instead, this unassuming volume will lie undiscovered and dangerous in wild corners of university libraries, like a uranium deposit beneath the taiga. I, naturally, have tasted the strong stuff. I am an enlightened mutant sage from the future, twisting and frothing, ready to shut down any conversation (productively, natch) if my interlocutor so much as mentions social mobility.

Do we actually want policy-makers to read this? I don’t know. I feel that people learning home truths about what they do is generally important. However, it is not obvious that this would improve decision-making in the case of Clark’s book. It is not at all clear what a person interested in improving social mobility ought to do next. That shows the power of Clark's findings, though. Although empirical, his book goes deeper than convenient history or wonkish micromanagement, and induces the paralysing aporia inspired mostly by philosophy.

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is one of the most provocative books I have read recently -- it argues that irrespective of social institutions and efforts, the rates of mobility of societies is very low. That means that intergenerational correlation rates are very sound and worse, they have changed very little over the centuries. The author marshals statistics from the so-called sane and equal society of Sweden, the grossly unequal and feudal world of India, the secularised and uniformised Japan, modern England and America, and several other regions to arrive at this very same conclusion. Later in the book though he hints that often status is often biologically transmitted, and that there is a distinction to be seen between adopted children and biological ones. And the statistics often speak for themselves. Endogamy has made India for example an exceptionally immobile society. In China, a country with only around 2000 surnames, he notes that a vast majority of physicians, lawyers, and elite university graduates come from about 13 Han surnames from the Lower Yangze Valley. And for England: "Even if all we know about you is that someone with your surname was enrolled at Oxford or Cambridge in the years 1800–1829, then we can predict that you have a 65 percent better chance of being admitted to one of those universities now." And for Sweden he busts the myth of the socialist utopia by bringing to the fore several state institutions established pretty much only to preserve the gild of the royal and old elites.

The statistics and his arguments get only more and more stunning, however, there appear to be some gaping holes in the thrust of the book overall. For example, what is social mobility and what is the nature of the promise of social mobility? Almost invariably, the standard of social mobility for Clark is if someone's a physician, a member of the legislature or part of the respectable clubs, and is a student of the major universities of that area. Nearly no review points out how reductive this can be. There are obviously several tiers and degrees of social mobility. The phenomenon of mobility cannot be discounted merely because an 'underclass' does not in a few generations rise to be an elite. This flaw becomes very prominent and pertinent in the case of economies with powerful redistribution programmes for if they promise mobility it is not even in this shape but rather through welfare and comfort. From being in a state of dispossession to living a convenient life is a mode of social mobility. And it is exactly this that conventional techniques of standard of living measure. To completely oust them is majestic but not the most meaningful. Finally, even when one is an elite, one may not aspire to enter the circles that Clark reminds us of. There are many special cultural values, social rules, and particularities in societies that determine the choices that people make. If in a society, education is not valued to the same degree that a precious metal is, even the wealthiest of the wealthy who may even fund the very social elites that Clark talks about may not enroll their children in the universities they should be able to. Or what about communities who may be averse to politics. I make these objections as someone who is entirely steeped in Indian society. I can see these as being plausible complications. But the general point is that this is a case of an economist entering into social commentary without the tools of sociology.

[Dan Contreras · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hay libros que se sienten como conocimiento prohibido - conocimiento que atenta contra los fundamentos de la religión imperante que el simple hecho de tenerlos en tu librero es un transgresión violenta contra el Dios del momento.

Este libro, seco, académico y lleno de tablas y gráficas, es probablemente una afronta en contra de la religión civíca de los últimos 70 años.

La permisa es simple pero explosiva - La movilidad social es fenómeno extraordinariamente lento incluso en las sociedades mas egaliatarias como Japón o Suecia. Tu estatus socioeconómico está determinado por el estatus de tus padres y tus abuelos - no como el resultado de una conspiracion para mantener al de abajo, abajo. No. Sin como simple resultado de la genética.

Inteligencia y propensidad de trabajo son los principales factores que predicen estatus socioeconomico y son altamente heredables. Tan asi, que el estatus de tus papás se correlaciona en 0.80 con el tuyo. Tu status se correlaciona en 0.80 con el de tus hijos.

El libro consiste en el autor, de una manera despiadada pero eficiente y tranquila, destrozando la idea de que existe alguna clase de intervención que pueda acelerar la movilidad social. Desde todos los esfuerzos gentiles de las democracias mas "desarrolladas" (como Suecia), hasta los extremos de violencia comunista (la China de Mao) hasta los sistemas donde las Castas son parte del fundamento del pais (India). No importa, la genética gana y determina quien esta arriba y quien abajo.

¿Los samurais tenian todo el poder durante shogunato Tokugawa, sobrerepresentados en el gobierno y las profesiones? Sus decendientes estan sobrerepresentados en los millonarios, gobernantes y profesionales de Japón.

Los lords de Suecia en el 1800 son los ricos y existosos del siglo XXI.

Es más, los conquistadores Normandos de Inglaterra en el 1066 todavia gozan de una sobrerrepresentación en el parlamento y Oxbridge.

Su solución es tajante, y de humor seco. ¿Quieres movilidad social? Obliga a la reproducción aleatoria. Que un papá exitoso se case con una mamá bonita e inteligente le heredará una cantidad desproporcionada de privilegio a sus hijos al momento de que el esperma entra al ovulo. Los hijos del Brayan y la Kimberly nunca tuvieron oportunidad.

Le quité una estrella pq si esta muy seco y parece paper cientifico. Este libro es herejía pura y la verdad la gente de bien no lo debería de leer.

[Cody Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

TL;DR Clark gives a rather depressing prediction for society; no matter what social policy we enact, social mobility is almost nonexistent. Social policy can make these disparities smaller, but true mobility is slow.

There is a consistent talking point among conservatives that wealth does not last between generations. The point is that family wealth will normally only last up to three generations. The boom and bust of capitalism means that we don't need to worry about the extremely rich of our age, because that wealth wont last and fears about an established aristocracy are unfounded. This argument stems from studies showing that the correlation between parental and child wealth is low (~0.35). Meaning that within three generations, a great-grandchild's wealth will be statistically uncorrelated to the great-grandparents. Clark sets out to show that this social status correlation is higher than traditionally reported (~0.8) and that social intelligence lasts for hundreds of years.

Clark believes that the problem with many of the studies looking at intergenerational wealth is that they only look at one axis of social status, mainly wealth (astute readers will have noticed my switch between wealth and status above.) Clark believes this causes a systemic under representation of the correlation between generations. One might choose a job with high social status with low pay (run a non-profit organization that reads to blind orphans), or a high paying job with low status (most trade jobs), but this could reflect the same social intelligence. If a study only looked at one axis of status, then we would see that there is little correlation between a bank CEO and their museum curator children, but the social intelligence between generations would be roughly the same.

In order to measure the general social intelligence Clark looks at the rates of rare surnames across multiple "high status indicators"; this includes high status jobs like being a doctor or a lawyer, graduating from top-tier universities, in addition to income and wealth. What Clark finds is that regardless of governmental policy, social mobility is extremely slow. Rather than status being lost in three generations, it takes closer to 10-15 generations for a high status group to revert to the mean. One example Clark looks at is the relative representation of Norman surnames in Oxford and Cambridge (Many nobles in England had surnames traced back to Normandy because of the Norman conquest of 1066). In the year 1170 Norman surnames were over represented in Oxford and Cambridge by a factor of 16, by 1980 that had dropped to around a factor of only 1.5. Looking at the data across 800 years shows a correlation of 0.93! Across generations, cultures, government reforms and communist revolutions; if a family is at the top (or the bottom) it is likely to stay there.

Reading this book it's hard to walk way feeling optimistic. One of the most striking pieces of evidence presented by Clark is that even after the communist revolution in China, a movement that saw the systemic killing of landlords and elites, saw little change in the rates of elite surnames in high status positions. This leads to one of two positions; social mobility is truly immutable, and no level of governmental policy can fix this, or there's a systemic problem with Clark's methodology. While I really want to say there's a problem with the methodology, the evidence kind of looks like there are some strong innate qualities people have that lead them down certain paths. (One thing to note is that when Clark talks about nature vs nurture he appears to put both genetics and culture in the nature category. It's unclear from this book if he thinks that culture is an output of genetics or if these are independent qualities.)

Clark ends up falling into a similar vain as Fredrik deBoer; if status is innate and unchangeable, then we should use government to make it so that these innate differences don't lead to dramatically different qualities of life. While the mobility way be immutably low, we can make the mobility matter less. Clark doesn't go as far as Marxist revolution, but while the Nordic countries don't have total social mobility, the difference between the top and bottom tiers of society don't lead to the same quality of life difference that we see in America.

This book gives a lot to think about, and will provide a challenge to your beliefs no matter what side of the political aisle you're on. I'm still unsure if the case Clark makes is as strong has he presents it, or if his methods lead to the conclusion he thinks it does, but the data and arguments are worth reading.