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Son Also Rises: Surnames And The History Of Social Mobility (2014)

by Gregory Clark(Favorite Author)

4.07 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1306320879 (ISBN13: 9781306320870)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Princeton University Press

review 1: Gregory Clarke concludes that the social persistence rate in the United States to be about 0.75, which means he can pretty much tell you how American newborns are going to end up in life, on average, based on parents' social status. In fact, it takes about 15 generations for the social status of families to not have predictive power of the future of newborn babies in capitalist United States.But here's what's interesting: the same persistence rate exists for people in socialist Sweden (universal healthcare and education, high tax/income distribution), caste system India, pre-industrial, feudal England, and both pre- and post-communist China (and many other societies I'm not mentioning). To try and sum up Clarke's conclusion: societal policies don't matter a damn. What matt... moreers is genetics. Quite compelling is the data showing genetic siblings correlate three times as high as their adopted siblings. So the best way to improve your newborn baby's future is to marry well, and that means not marrying the vice president of the bank, make sure his ancestors and extended family are also doing well, otherwise he's an outlier and his genes will show their true mediocrity down the line. A fascinating read that, if we're honest with ourselves and our own assessment of our family and our friends' families, is strikingly enlightening.
review 2: Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of the Political Order" and Peter Turchin's "War and Peace and War" both cited the role of social mobility in their theories, so this seemed to provide important insight into how this really works. This volume seemed to thoroughly explain the methodology and statistics to back up the author's assertions. He tested his model against data from Medieval England, modern England, the US, Sweden, China, India, and Chile. Social mobility was lower in almost all cases from conventional measures, and does not seem to have declined or improved with time. The author based this assertion by tracking surnames over time and used various measures of their social status to watch how fast they regress to the mean. Poor families should improve, and wealthy families should decline over time. However, higher status families tend to persist more than predicted. The author did not seem to consider the far greater human aversion to loss over opportunity seeking. He also identified several outlier groups and explained their unusual persistence (intra-group marriage or selective admission to the group, for example). His conclusion seems to be that your station in life is determined quite a bit by your genetics, although he qualified that by saying individual effort makes use of what nature provides. Education and other ways families prepare their child seem to make only a marginal difference. He demonstrated that social policies to improve social mobility and equality have had negligible effect. However, in his conclusion he bafflingly suggests more redistributive social policies. His methodology relied heavily upon using rare surnames to track elite and poor families, but I cannot help but wonder if the very fact that the surnames are rare that they are outliers in other regards as well.The takeaway from this should be that poverty and wealth are not permanent--even if the process is slow, talent emerges from the poorest families and brings them up, and elite families can't hang on to their position for long without merit. What's important is equality of opportunity and before the law, not outcome.Update: I'm concerned that some people will take away ideas that reinforce and justify associating with and marrying within their class to preserve their children's advantages. Worse, they could revive eugenic ideologies and accelerate the race to genetically engineer our offspring. less

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