The Son Also Rises Read online

  THE SON ALSO RISES

  THE PRINCETON ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

  Joel Mokyr, Series Editor

  A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book.

  THE SON ALSO RISES

  SURNAMES AND THE HISTORY OF SOCIAL MOBILITY

  GREGORY CLARK

  with Neil Cummins,

  Yu Hao, and

  Daniel Diaz Vidal

  and Tatsuya Ishii,

  Zach Landes,

  Daniel Marcin,

  Firas Abu-Sneneh,

  Wilfred Chow,

  Kuk Mo Jung,

  Ariel M. Marek, and

  Kevin M. Williams

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Princeton and Oxford

  Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  Jacket design by Faceout Studio.

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Clark, Gregory, 1957–

  The son also rises : surnames and the history of social mobility / Gregory Clark.

  pages cm.—(The Princeton economic history of the Western world)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-691-16254-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Social mobility—History. I. Title.

  HT612.C53 2014

  305.5′1309—dc23

  2013042815

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Minion Pro with Maestrale display

  by Princeton Editorial Associates, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona.

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Mary

  CONTENTS

  Preface ix

  1 Introduction: Of Ruling Classes and Underclasses: The Laws of Social Mobility 1

  PART I Social Mobility by Time and Place

  2 Sweden: Mobility Achieved? 19

  3 The United States: Land of Opportunity 45

  4 Medieval England: Mobility in the Feudal Age 70

  5 Modern England: The Deep Roots of the Present 88

  6 A Law of Social Mobility 107

  7 Nature versus Nurture 126

  PART II Testing the Laws of Mobility

  8 India: Caste, Endogamy, and Mobility 143

  9 China and Taiwan: Mobility after Mao 167

  10 Japan and Korea: Social Homogeneity and Mobility 182

  11 Chile: Mobility among the Oligarchs 199

  12 The Law of Social Mobility and Family Dynamics 212

  13 Protestants, Jews, Gypsies, Muslims, and Copts: Exceptions to the Law of Mobility? 228

  14 Mobility Anomalies 253

  PART III The Good Society

  15 Is Mobility Too Low? Mobility versus Inequality 261

  16 Escaping Downward Social Mobility 279

  Appendix 1: Measuring Social Mobility 287

  Appendix 2: Deriving Mobility Rates from Surname Frequencies 296

  Appendix 3: Discovering the Status of Your Surname Lineage 301

  Data Sources for Figures and Tables 319

  References 333

  Index 349

  PREFACE

  THIS BOOK WILL BE CONTROVERSIAL. So the first task of this preface is to establish that while those listed on the title page collaborated on estimates of social mobility rates in various societies, the text itself was written by me. The interpretation of the evidence from these studies, and the proposed theory of mobility presented in the book, all represent my opinion alone. Also, none of the people I thank below should be taken as endorsing the conclusions of the book.

  My second task is to note that the spirit and style of this book follow those of my earlier book, 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. This is a claim based on incomplete evidence. It may be wrong. But even if it is wrong in aspects, I hope it will point the way to a better and more complete theory of the mechanisms of social mobility. Even in an area as freighted with aspirations and disappointments as social mobility, there should still be room for exploration and conjecture.

  The work discussed in this volume was undertaken with several collaborators. The most extensive collaboration was with Neil Cummins, who is jointly responsible for most of the material in chapters 4 and 5 on England. The chapter on China and Taiwan reports on the work Yu Hao completed for his graduate dissertation here at the University of California, Davis, where he devised the methods needed to deal with the small numbers of Han Chinese surnames. The chapter on Chile is a summary of just some of the ongoing dissertation research of Daniel Diaz Vidal, also at the University of California, Davis. The chapter on Japan is based on an exploration Tatsuya Ishii did for his senior thesis at UC Davis. Zack Landes assisted in getting the estimates for Bengal, including figuring out how to download the 2.2 million names of people in the Kolkata electoral register, the task itself being performed admirably by Lincoln Atkinson. Daniel Marcin of the University of Michigan alerted me to the existence of the tax lists for the United States published in newspapers in 1824 and 1825 and was able to supply us with several such lists. Firas Abu-Sneneh, Wilfred Chow, Kuk Mo Jung, Ariel Marek, and Kevin Williams, students in my graduate history class, worked on the social mobility of Ivy League students from 1850 and earlier as a class project. To all these collaborators I owe a debt of gratitude. This book would not have been possible without their contributions.

  This has not been an easy book to complete. A major obstacle was the limited abilities of the principal author. Patterns that seem blindingly obvious in retrospect were initially missed or dismissed. 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. Thus, in the early stages of the research, I gave sunnily optimistic talks about the speed and completeness of social mobility. 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. 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, looking suspiciously like social class, that underlies the outcomes for all individuals. This book is the product not of acute intelligence but of muddling through to a conclusion that should have been obvious to anyone who looked.

  A second obstacle was the extent of the data collection needed to expand the scope of the original study to a wider range of countries and time periods. I am grateful for the grant I received from the NSF (SES-0962351), which was crucial to financing this effort. I am grateful also to the various research assistants who were employed with these funds: Douglas Campbell, Yu Hao, Xi He, Natalie Ho, Tatsuya Ishii, Max McComb, Claire Phan, Richard Scriven, Stephen Sun, and Daniel Diaz Vidal at UC Davis, and Joseph Patrick Burke and Raphaelle Schwarzberg in London. Grants from the All-UC Group in Economic History to Yu Hao and Daniel Diaz Vidal to aid their dissertation research, and a fellowship from the Economic History Association t
o Yu Hao, were also enormously helpful. John Daniels and Jean Stratford of the Social Science Data Service at Davis were generous with their help on many issues of organizing data collection. Ancestry.com was generous in allowing Neil Cummins and me special access to its wonderful online data sources for the purposes of research.

  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. But in exploring surnames, I came to realize that they say a lot more about the nature of the social world.

  As before, I owe a huge debt to Princeton University Press. Joel Mokyr, the series editor, and two reviewers of the manuscript, Joe Ferrie and Cormac Ó Gráda, were extraordinarily generous with their time and expertise. Peter Dougherty managed to take time from his more-than-full-time job directing the press to cajole the manuscript to completion, including spending a whole day with me in Los Angeles trying to wrestle an early, inchoate draft into a functioning shape.

  Peter Strupp and his team at Princeton Editorial Associates did a stellar job in designing the book and marching it, and its author, through a tightly compressed production schedule.

  As always, I owe a great debt to my colleagues in the economics department at UC Davis, first for providing a congenial and intellectually stimulating environment and next for listening over lunch to endless accounts of the arcana of surname practices and to a variety of half-baked theories of the nature of the social world we inhabit. Colin Cameron contributed the insight that led to the simple model that underlies the book. Pontus Rendahl, my former colleague, was pressed into service for his knowledge of Swedish institutions.

  I also owe a debt to Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis. It was through interacting with them at the Santa Fe Institute that I came to understand the issues in social mobility. For me these two scholars represent an intellectual ideal: inquisitive, adventurous, independent of academic fashion, always open to new ideas and challenges, laughing at the march of years. Another expert on social mobility, Gary Solon, was generous with his comments and suggestions. This, of course, does not imply that they would endorse any of the conclusions of this book.

  The final content of the book has benefited enormously from the comments and criticisms of lecture and seminar audiences at the American Economic Association Annual meetings (San Diego); Autónoma University, Madrid; Bilbao University; California State University, East Bay; Cliometric Society meetings (Boulder); the Colombian Economic History Congress (Bogotá); Cornell University; City University of New York, Queens; Economic History Society meetings (Cambridge); Edinburgh University; the European Historical Economics Society (London); FRESH conference (Pisa); George Mason University; Glasgow University; Harvard University; the INET Conference on Social Mobility (University of Chicago); the International Congress on Medieval Studies; Kalamazoo; the London School of Economics; the Murphy Institute of Tulane University; Northwestern University; the PSID Conference on Multigenerational Social Mobility (Ann Arbor); the Scottish Economic Society; the Sound Economic History Workshop (Lund); State University of New York, Binghamton; the Tsinghua Summer Workshop for Quantitative History (Tsinghua University); University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Davis; the Anderson School of Management at UCLA; University of California, Riverside; the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago; the economics department at the University of Chicago; University of Copenhagen; University of Michigan; Warwick University; and Yale University.

  The one advantage of studying social mobility is that—unlike much of the dry, convoluted, and useless arcana of academic economics—it is a topic on which everyone is informed by her or his own history and experience. So I also benefited from discussions outside the bounds of economics with Anthony Clark, Gerry McCann, Felicity McCann (née Pakenham-Walsh), Patrick Kerr, and Anna and Ernie Spencer.

  My last and greatest debt is to Mary McComb, for reasons too numerous to list here.

  Mishka’s Café, Davis, October 2013

  THE SON ALSO RISES

  ONE

  Introduction

  Of Ruling Classes and Underclasses: The Laws of Social Mobility

  FIGURE 1.1 SHOWS A BOY IN GOVAN, a grim, deprived district of my hometown, Glasgow, in my youth in the 1970s. Will his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren be found in similar circumstances? To what extent would the chances of a middle-class child of equal ability, placed in the same family in Govan, be reduced by the poverty of his parents? Figure 1.2, in contrast, shows the pleasant suburban Glaswegian street I grew up in, appropriately named Richmond Drive. To what extent is the status of the children raised in that street predictable just from that picture? To what extent would their fortunes have changed had they been raised in Govan?

  These questions have, of course, been the subject of extensive enquiry by sociologists and economists.1 Most people believe that high rates of social mobility are fundamental to the good society. 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? Why wouldn’t those in the bottom half of the income distribution in a democracy punitively extract resources from the top half if they have no prospect of ever obtaining these goods through the market system?

  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. This correlation varies from zero to one. Zero represents complete intergenerational social mobility, with no correlation between generations: under these conditions, we can predict nothing about children’s outcomes from the circumstances of their birth. A correlation of one represents complete immobility, with a perfect correlation between the status of children and parents: we can predict at birth the entire outcome for any child.2

  FIGURE 1.1. Boy playing football in Govan, Glasgow, Scotland, 2008.

  FIGURE 1.2. Richmond Drive, Cambuslang, Glasgow.

  This intergenerational correlation is closely related to another important concept, that of the rate of regression to the mean (calculated as one minus the correlation). This is the average rate at which families or social groups that diverge from the mean circumstances of the society move toward that mean in each generation. Thus we refer to the intergenerational correlation as the persistence rate of characteristics. The intergenerational correlation can be interpreted as a measure of social entropy. The lower this correlation, the greater the degree of social entropy, and the quicker a particular structure of advantage and disadvantage in any society is dissolved.

  The intergenerational correlation also has a convenient intuitive interpretation. The square of the correlation is the share of the variation in social status that is explained by inheritance. That share will also be between zero and one. For practical purposes, if the correlation is less than 0.3, then the square is 0.09 or less, suggesting that almost none of the outcomes for the current generation are predictable from parents’ circumstances. In such a society, each generation is born anew. The past has little effect on the present. The intergenerational correlation thus indicates the degree to which the accidents of our birth, or, more precisely, our conception, determine our fate.

  Most people believe, from their own experience of families, friends, and acquaintances, that we live in a world of slow social mobility. The rich beget the rich, the poor beget the poor. Between the Old Etonian and the slum dweller, between Govan and Richmond Drive, lies a gulf of generations. But a hundred years of research by psychologists, sociologists, and economists seems to suggest that this belief is fictional. Conventional estimates imply that social mobility is rapid and pervasive. The Old Etonian and the slum dweller are cousins.

  Standard estima
tes suggest high modern intergenerational mobility rates. Figure 1.3, for example, shows estimated intergenerational correlations of earnings across a variety of countries. That correlation ranges between 0.15 and 0.65. But these rates imply that inheritance explains only 2 percent to 40 percent of the variation in individual incomes in any generation. Figure 1.4 shows the same pattern for years of schooling, with implied intergenerational correlations ranging from 0.3 to 0.65. Only 9 percent to 40 percent of the variation in years of schooling is explained by inheritance. Regression to the mean appears very strong, and human societies seemingly display a high degree of entropy in their social structure.

  FIGURE 1.3. Intergenerational earnings correlation and inequality.

  FIGURE 1.4. Intergenerational education correlation and income inequality.

  If all the factors that determine people’s life chances are summarized by their parents’ status, then these persistence rates imply that all initial advantages and disadvantages for families should be wiped out within three to five generations. In this case the correlation in any measure of social status, such as income, between generations n steps apart is the intergenerational correlation raised to the power n. If the intergenerational correlation for income is 0.3, for example, then the correlation between grandparents and grandchildren is 0.32, or 0.09. Between great-grandparents and great-grandchildren, it is 0.33, or 0.027. Thus with intergenerational correlations in the range 0.15 to 0.65, correlations for subsequent generations quickly approach zero.

  In the standard picture portrayed in figures 1.3 and 1.4, intergenerational mobility rates vary substantially across societies. They are high in the Nordic countries, which have lower income inequality. The degree of income inequality is represented by the Gini coefficient, which is zero with complete equality and one when a single person in society has everything and everyone else nothing. If much of the inequality in modern society is driven by inequality in access to capital, education, and social networks, then the good society would have a low rate of inheritance of social status and correspondingly low variations in income and wealth.