History of Social Mobility
* Book: The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. By Gregory Clark.
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Context
Justin Murphy:
"When you look at general social status over many hundreds of years, the results are stunning.
Elites today disproportionately come from the same families that were elite hundreds of years ago—to a degree that is shockingly unknown to most people.
I never really grasped the illusion of social mobility until I recently read the provocative 2014 book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility by economist Gregory Clark. From which I’ve drawn all the data cited in this post, except for the American correlation coefficient at the top, which is more up to date.
Clark doesn’t just find that social mobility in the United States is overstated, he finds that there is little social mobility, in general, across time and geography. In England, Sweden, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Chile, from the present to the medieval period, he was hard-pressed to find any intergenerational mobility correlations greater than .75. He even dares to call it a “social law,” and a “universal constant.”
Whereas we like to think that familial impact on social status gets washed out in 3-5 generations, Clark finds that it’s more like 15 generations (300-450 years)."
(https://otherlife.co/p/social-mobility-illusion)
More information
- discussion at the Social Mobility Illusion