The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
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PREFACERead more at location 72
Note: GC ha sempre disprezzato il concetto di classe. il capitalismo lo superava. nn è così... la mob soc è facilmente prevedibile anche nelle sovietà capitaliste tesi libro precedente: l elite inglese era la più prolifica. lo studio della dinamica dei cognomi confrrma PRE@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. It tries to show that extraordinarily simple models of social mobility can successfully predict outcomes across a whole range of societies and institutions.Read more at location 77
The original intent of the project was just to extend conventional mobility estimates from the modern world into the distant past in countries like England and India.Read more at location 93
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.Read more at location 95
Having for years poured scorn on my colleagues in sociology for their obsessions with such illusory categories as class, I now had evidence that individuals’ life chances were predictable not just from the status of their parents but from that of their great-great-great grandparents. Indeed there seems to be an inescapable inherited substrate,Read more at location 97
This whole project was actually sparked by a suggestion of Nicholas Wade, a science writer for the New York Times, that surnames could be used to test a hypothesis from the earlier book, of higher reproductive success among upper social classes in preindustrial England. I am happy to report that they confirm that hypothesis.Read more at location 109
Mishka’s Café, Davis, October 2013 THE SON ALSO RISES ONE IntroductionRead more at location 143
Note: scommettere sul futuro dei ragaazzi. è così difficile? come giustificare le diseguaglianze? centralità del concetto di MS la misura di ms risultati apparenti: +dieguaglianza- mobilità. la famiglia conta poco. c è una mobilità buona e una cattiva. ms cattiva: 1 casuale: se vinco alla lotteria mi arricchisco ma senza merito x le istituzioni 2 volontaria: san francesco sceglie la povertà ma la sua ms all in giù non rispecchia certo istituzioni meritorie che puniscono i pigri tesi: le misurazioni convenzionali esprimono per lo più ms cattiva difetto degli studi convenzionali: si concentrano sul singolo e su un singolo aspetto dello status restando in balia del caso: 1 fortuna 2 scelte di trade off (sono di famiglia ricca e studio filosofia da mantenuti penso a wittgenstein)... esempio: bill gates è un drop out se misurassimo lo status in termini di education dovremmo registrare una mobilità verso il basso. come rimediare. o si considerano tutti gli indicatori di status (cosa difficile e soggettiva) o ci si limita a quelli certi allargando l analisi alla famiglia. e infatti i fratelli di gates laureati a pieni voti neutralizzano la sua bizzarria le stime convenzionali si concentrano sul fenotipo mentre la stima sui cognomi cattura anche gli influssi del genotipo come neutralizzare il caso? lavorsndo sul lungo xiodo e sulla famiglia... x es. studiando i cognomi lo studio dei cognomi ci dice invece che la ms nella storia è bassa. magari è continua e in grado alla lunga di produrre effetti sostanziali... xò resta bassa l istruzione pubblica e la lotta al nepotismo non hanno migliorato la situazione il welfare non ha migliorato la situazione l emancipazione della donna nn ha inciso su ms: ci si accoppia con gli stessi criteri di prima una triste notizia: mentre ieri ms era all ingiù, oggi è all in su xchè lo studio dei cognomi è migliore: è l unico intergenerazionale... è meno soggetto al caso che invece predomina x gli individui... tiene conto del genotipo oltre che del fenotipo spiegazione dei risultati: genetica... istituzioni conservatrici domande chiave x comprendere la componente genetica: c è più mobilità nei gruppi aperti? gli adottati? le famiglie numerose vs i figli unici? regresso alla media (tipico dei processi casuali) implicazioni della spiega genetica: 1 il talento conta + dei privilegi 2 investire sui figli nn paga 3 investire sui poveri nn paga 4 l unica politica efficiente è quella che facilita i matrimoni misti 5 i costi di redistribuzione sono bassi imho: 5 nn mi convince. senza incentivi nn si impegna né l élite né la massa. risultato: mobilità invariata rispetto a quella che ci sarebbe coi giusti incentivi ma risultati complessivi inferiori. 1@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@ Edit
To what extent would their fortunes have changed had they been raised in Govan?Read more at location 149
How can we justify the inequalities of income, wealth, health, and longevity so characteristic of the capitalist economy unless any citizen, with sufficient courage and application, has a chance of attaining the grand prizes?Read more at location 152
A convenient summary measure we can use for intergenerational mobility is the correlation of the income, wealth, education, occupational status, and even longevity, of parents and children.Read more at location 155
The intergenerational correlation can be interpreted as a measure of social entropy. The lower this correlation, the greater the degree of social entropy,Read more at location 168
Regression to the mean appears very strong, and human societies seemingly display a high degree of entropy in their social structure.Read more at location 183
On the conventional picture of social mobility rates, the lower mobility rates observed in countries such as Britain or the United States represent a social failure. The life chances of the descendants of high- and low-status ancestors can be equalized at low social cost.Read more at location 200
The association in figures 1.3 and 1.4 of greater social mobility rates in higher-income societies also suggests that one of the gains of the Industrial Revolution has been an increase in social mobility rates.Read more at location 209
Again under conventional mobility estimates, genetic transmission of talent must be unimportant in the determination of social success. Nurture dominates nature.Read more at location 213
The very low correlations observed in Nordic countries imply that the importance of families and inheritance in determining socioeconomic success must be purely a feature of the social institutions of societies.Read more at location 216
These conclusions from conventional scholarly estimates of social mobility rates, however, sit poorly with popular perceptions of social mobility.Read more at location 218
If the standard mobility estimates are correct, the chance that a family like this could maintain a high social status over seventeen generations is vanishingly small.Read more at location 229
Pepys is not the only rare surname to maintain a surprising presence and persistence at the upper reaches of English society.Read more at location 233
Using surnames to track the rich and poor through many generations in various societies—England, the United States, Sweden, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Chile—this book argues that our commonsense intuition of a much slower rate of intergenerational mobility is correct.Read more at location 243
Surnames turn out to be a surprisingly powerful instrument for measuring social mobility.Read more at location 245
The problem arises when we try to use these estimates of mobility rates for individual characteristics to predict what happens over long periodsRead more at location 248
Families turn out to have a general social competence or ability that underlies partial measures of status such as income, education, and occupation.Read more at location 250
The randomness with which underlying status produces particular observed aspects of status creates the illusion of rapid social mobility using conventional measures.Read more at location 252
Underlying or overall social mobility rates are much lower than those typically estimated by sociologists or economists.Read more at location 253
Social status is inherited as strongly as any biological trait, such as height. FigureRead more at location 256
Counterintuitively, the arrival of free public education in the late nineteenth century and the reduction of nepotism in government, education, and private firms have not increased social mobility.Read more at location 263
Even the redistributive taxation introduced in the twentieth century in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden seemingly has had no impact.Read more at location 265
Instead social mobility seems to be a constant, independent of inequality.Read more at location 267
These high estimates of underlying intergenerational correlation imply that 50 to 70 percent of the variation in general social status within any generation is predictable at conception.Read more at location 277
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.Read more at location 282
Surname frequencies show that the rich were a growing share of the population in the years before 1800. Their genes, consequently, are found more widely in the English population in the nineteenth century than would be expected. But after 1880, the process operated in reverse. Surname frequencies show that the rich families of 1880 have produced surprisingly few descendants living now.Read more at location 285
These effects are likely common in Western Europe. The different demographic correlates of social status before 1800 and after 1880 show that in the modern world, social mobility tends to be predominantly upward, whereas in the preindustrial world it was mainly downward.Read more at location 288
Why do the results of our surname measures differ so much from those of conventional mobility studies?Read more at location 291
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.Read more at location 293
Second, people make tradeoffs between income and other aspects of status. They may choose to be philosophy professors instead of finance executives. 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.Read more at location 295
Because current studies are all measures of just one aspect of status, they overestimate overall mobility.Read more at location 298
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. Conventional studies of social mobility measure just the inheritance of particular aspects of the status phenotype. But families also have an underlying status genotype, which is inherited much more faithfully.Read more at location 305
Indeed, 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.Read more at location 316
Studies of social mobility are plagued by a reflexive assumption that more social mobility is good. The last section of the book considers the likely sources of mobility and whether improving the rate of intergenerational mobility would indeed produce a better society.Read more at location 318
If genetics matters most, then the outcomes for adopted children will be largely uncorrelated with those of their adoptive parents but highly correlated with those of their biological parents.Read more at location 333
Another implication of a genetic explanation of status persistence is that family size does not matter in determining social outcomes for children. The idea of a tradeoff between quantity and quality in family life is one of the sacred doctrines of neoclassical economics, one that lies at the heart of attempts to explain the long-delayed arrival of modern economic growth. But if genetics dominates in the transmission of status, by implication this tradeoff is insignificant or nonexistent.Read more at location 339
If the main determinants of economic and social success are wealth, education, and connections, then there is no explanation for the consistent tendency of the rich to regress to the society mean even at the slow rates we observe.Read more at location 345
Only if genetics is the main element in determining economic success, if nature trumps nurture, is there a built-in mechanism that explains the observed regression. That mechanism is the intermarriage of the children of rich and educated lineages with successful, upwardly mobile children of poor and uneducated lineages.Read more at location 352
If nature does indeed dominate nurture, this has a number of implications. First, it means the world is a much fairer place than we intuit. Innate talent, not inherited privilege, is the main source of economic success.Read more at location 357
large investment made by the upper classes in the care and raising of their children is of no avail in preventing long-run downward mobility:Read more at location 358
Third, government interventions to increase social mobility are unlikely to have much impact unless they affect the rate of intermarriage between levels of the social hierarchy and between ethnic groups.Read more at location 361
In order for a society to increase social mobility over the long run, it must achieve the cultural homogeneity that maximizes intermarriage rates between social groups.Read more at location 363
The practical implication is that if you want to maximize your children’s chances, you need to pay attention not to the social phenotype of your marriage partner but instead to his or her status genotype.Read more at location 365
The social world is much fairer than many would expect. And the evidence is that in the end, the descendants of today’s rich and poor will achieve complete equality in their expected social position. This equality may require three hundred years to come about.Read more at location 373
But an important corollary to the finding that social outcomes are the product of a lineage lottery is that we should not create social structures that magnify the rewards of a high social position.Read more at location 377
Nordic societies seem to offer a good model of how to minimize the disparities in life outcomes stemming from inherited social position without major economic costs.Read more at location 381
It is notable, however, that the emancipation of women in recent generations has had no influence on social mobility rates. Emancipated women mate as assortatively as before and transmit their status to children as faithfully as in the patriarchal societiesRead more at location 388
