The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility Author: Visit Amazon's Gregory Clark Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0691162549 | Format: EPUB
The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility Description
Review
"
The Son Also Rises . . . suggests that dramatic social mobility has always been the exception rather than the rule. Clark examines a host of societies over the past seven hundred years and finds that the makeup of a given country's economic élite has remained surprisingly stable."--
James Surowiecki, New Yorker
"Audacious . . ."--
Barbara Kiser, Nature
"
The Son Also Rises. . . . That is the new Greg Clark book and yes it is an event and yes you should buy it."--
Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
From the Inside Flap
"This is the most exciting research on the 'American Dream' of social mobility to come along in many years. The Son Also Rises provides deep insights into not only the ability or inability of children to surpass their parents' socioeconomic class, but also into the surprising importance of the family to generate prosperity in general."--William Easterly, author of The White Man's Burden
"The Son Also Rises is a remarkable challenge to conventional wisdom about social mobility. Using highly original methods and ranging widely across world history, Clark argues that the activities of governments impact mobility much less than most of us think--and that the only sure path to success is to be born to the right parents. Everyone interested in public policy should read this book."--Ian Morris, author of Why the West Rules--for Now
"An important and original contribution to the literature on social mobility, The Son Also Rises is provocative and adversarial, and a brilliant tour de force. Bravo!"--Cormac O Grada, author of Famine: A Short History
"The Son Also Rises is clever, thoughtful, and well written, and provides a completely new perspective on an enduring issue--the extent of social mobility. This very provocative book will garner a great deal of attention."--Joseph P. Ferrie, Northwestern University
See all Editorial Reviews
- Series: The Princeton Economic History of the Western World
- Hardcover: 384 pages
- Publisher: Princeton University Press (February 23, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0691162549
- ISBN-13: 978-0691162546
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
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, and Clark's strong genetic conclusions seem to rely on several sleights-of-hand. 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 two deterministic predictors: time, and an underlying "social inertia" (my name) term.
In this book, Clark makes conclusions about the nature and mobility of social mobility and status by examining surname research, and, to a lesser extent, twin studies.
Surname research seems to be Clark's specialty and most of the book is devoted to it. Basically Clark picks rare family names (like Pepys) and combs through historical databases (such as lists of Oxford graduates, members of Parliament, or wills proved in court) looking for that surname. Because these records can stretch back hundreds of years, he is able to get a sense of the rise and fall of different families. He assumes, for instance, that a group family that has more Oxford graduates (or more licensed physicians per person, etc.) than average has above-average social status.
The surname research, pulled together from a number of different countries (US, Britain, China, Korea, Japan, India) all seems to suggest that families rise and fall at a slower rate than what other sociologists were assuming. He thinks the correlation between generations is generally around 0.75, meaning that it'll take about 10 generations for the effect of a family's current status to almost totally dissipate, instead of the 4 generations other researchers assume. According to Clark, the basic limitation of other research is that it failed to account for the fact that, conditionalizing on the income of the parents, the income of the grandparents and other relatives is still predictive of children's income.
The surname part of the book is pretty exhaustive, and in my opinion got a bit boring in parts. However I was glad he presented so much evidence for the people who want to delve deeper. The other part of the book cited twin studies and argued that the best explanation of this high correlation is genetic.
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