The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility Author: Gregory Clark | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HNF5Z96 | Format: EPUB
The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility Description
How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this 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. The good news is that these patterns are driven by strong inheritance of abilities and lineage does not beget unwarranted advantage. The bad news is that much of our fate is predictable from lineage. Clark argues that since a greater part of our place in the world is predetermined, we must avoid creating winner-take-all societies.
Clark examines and compares surnames in such diverse cases as modern Sweden, fourteenth-century England, and Qing Dynasty China. He demonstrates how fate is determined by ancestry and that almost all societies—as different as the modern United States, Communist China, and modern Japan—have similarly low social mobility rates. These figures are impervious to institutions, and it takes hundreds of years for descendants to shake off the advantages and disadvantages of their ancestors. For these reasons, Clark contends that societies should act to limit the disparities in rewards between those of high and low social rank.
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.
- File Size: 9082 KB
- Print Length: 372 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0691162549
- Publisher: Princeton University Press (February 23, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HNF5Z96
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,900 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Economic History - #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > World > Medieval - #20
in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Class
- #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Economic History - #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > World > Medieval - #20
in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Class
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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