Social Mobility Illusion

Description

Justin Murphy:

"In the U.S., the correlation between a person’s income and their parents’ income is about .6. That’s not too high. It implies that about 36% of all the variation in earnings can be predicted by looking at parents. In the Scandinavian countries, where they try harder to promote social mobility, the correlation is about .2, which means parental earnings can only explain about 4% of the variation in the next generation’s earnings.

These data suggest that all family advantages and disadvantages get erased after about 3-5 generations.

These data represent the social mobility illusion.

In fact, about 56% of anyone’s general social status can be explained by one’s family lineage. The real correlation is .75, much higher than we typically estimate. Not only is social mobility much lower than people think, the real and lower rate of social mobility holds across a more general measure of social success. “Social status” includes earnings but also achievement in selective and prestigious occupations.

Conventional estimates of social mobility are misleading for two reasons: They focus on income, and they focus on one-generation differences. Money is more volatile than competence and ability, plus there is more randomness across one generation than there is across three generations.

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

* Book: The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. By Gregory Clark.