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Surnames offer depressing clues to the extent of social mobility over
generations
Feb 9th 2013 |From the print edition
THE Great Gatsby curve is the name Alan Krueger, an economic adviser to
Barack Obama, gave to the relationship between income inequality and social
mobility across the generations. Mr Krueger used the phrase in a 2012 speech to
describe the work of Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa, who has shown
that more unequal economies tend to have less fluid societies. Mr Corak reckons
that in some places, like America and Britain, around 50% of income differences
in one generation are attributable to differences in the previous generation
(in more egalitarian Scandinavia, the number is less than 30%).
Even that may paint too rosy a picture. Mr Corak s work draws on recent studies
that compare income levels between just two generations: fathers and sons. That
is out of necessity; good data covering three or more generations are scarce.
But reliance on limited data could lead to overestimates of social mobility.
Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California, Davis, notes that
across a single generation some children of rich parents are bound to suffer
random episodes of bad luck. Others will choose low-pay jobs for idiosyncratic
reasons, like a wish to do charitable work. Such statistical noise makes
society look more changeable than it is. Extrapolating the resulting mobility
rates across many generations gives a misleadingly sunny view of long-term
equality of opportunity. Mr Clark suggests that family history has large
effects that persist for much greater spans of time. Fathers matter, but so do
grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Indeed, it may take as long as 300-500
years for high- and low-status families to produce descendants with equal
chances of being in various parts of the income spectrum.
Mr Clark confronts the lack of good data by gleaning information from rare
surnames. You can tease mobility trends from surnames in two ways. One method
relies on past links between certain names and high economic status. In a 2012
paper, for instance, Mr Clark examines prosperous Swedes. The unusual surnames
of 17th-century aristocrats and the Latinised surnames (such as Linnaeus)
adopted by highly educated 18th-century Swedes are both rare in the Swedish
population as a whole. By tracking the overrepresentation of those names in
elite positions, he is able to work out long-run mobility rates.
As late as 2011 aristocratic surnames appear among the ranks of lawyers,
considered for this purpose a high-status position, at a frequency almost six
times that of their occurrence in the population as a whole. Mr Clark reckons
that even in famously mobile Sweden, some 70-80% of a family s social status is
transmitted from generation to generation across a span of centuries. Other
economists use similar techniques to reveal comparable immobility in societies
from 19th-century Spain to post-Qing-dynasty China. Inherited advantage is
detectable for a very long time.
A second method relies on the chance overrepresentation of rare surnames in
high- or low-status groups at some point in the past. If very few Britons are
called Micklethwait, for example, and people with that name were
disproportionately wealthy in 1800, then you can gauge long-run mobility by
studying how long it takes the Micklethwait name to lose its wealth-predicting
power. In a paper written by Mr Clark and Neil Cummins of Queens College, City
University of New York, the authors use data from probate records of
19th-century estates to classify rare surnames into different wealth
categories. They then use similar data to see how common each surname is in
these categories in subsequent years. Again, some 70-80% of economic advantage
seems to be transmitted from generation to generation.
Mr Clark s conclusion is that the underlying rate of social mobility is both
low and surprisingly constant across countries and eras: the introduction of
universal secondary education scarcely affects intergenerational mobility rates
in Britain, for example. This consistency, he suggests, shows that low mobility
may be down to differences in underlying social competence . Such competence
is potentially heritable and is reinforced by the human tendency to mate with
partners of similar traits and ability.
Bob s your uncle, unfortunately
This is a distressingly fatalistic view of opportunity. Studies using the few
multi-generation datasets that exist offer a slightly more encouraging picture.
A Swedish analysis of the city of Malmo, using data covering individual
families over four generations, finds a meaningful relationship between a child
s educational attainment and that of his great-grandparents, more evidence
that a look at just one generation leads to overestimates of mobility. By
subjecting the same data to a surname analysis, Mr Clark calculates that 60% of
income differences in Malmo are attributable to economic advantages in previous
ones lower than his own rate but still higher than Mr Corak s single-generation
estimates.
Painstaking work by Jason Long of Wheaton College and Joseph Ferrie of
Northwestern University provides another perspective. They have spent the past
decade poring over census returns from America and Britain, identifying
families with children in one count, tracking down the same children as adults
in another, and thereby building up a multigenerational dataset. An analysis of
three generations shows that in both America and Britain the effect of high (or
low) incomes in one generation lasts for at least two more. Yet their study
also suggests it is possible to break patterns of immobility. Although American
and British mobility rates had converged by the middle of the 20th century,
America s social order was considerably more fluid than Britain s in the 19th
century. The past has a tight grip on the present. But in the right
circumstances, it can apparently be loosened.
Sources
"Do poor children become poor adults? Lessons for public policy from a cross
country comparison of generational earnings mobility", Miles Corak, Research on
Economic Inequality, 2006.
"What is the true rate of social mobility? Evidence from the information
content of surnames", Gregory Clark, American Economic Association conference
paper, January 2013.
"What is the true rate of social mobility? Surnames and social mobility in
England, 1800-2012", Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins, September 2012.
"What is the true rate of social mobility in Sweden? A surname analysis,
1700-2012", Gregory Clark, August 2012.
"Long-run intergenerational social mobility and the distribution of surnames",
Dolores Collado, Ignacio Ortuno-Ortin, and Andres Romeu, American Economic
Association conference paper, December 2012.
"Social mobility in multiple generations", Robert Mare and Xi Song, Population
Association of America conference paper, September 2011.
"Grandfathers matter(ed): Occupational mobility across three generations in the
U.S. and Britain, 1850-1910", Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie, American Economic
Association conference paper, 2012.
"Intergenerational occupational mobility in Britain and the U.S. since 1850",
Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie, forthcoming in American Economic Review.
"The intergenerational persistence of human capital: An empirical analysis of
four generations", Mikael Lindahl, Marten Palme, Sofia Sandgren Massih, and
Anna Sjogren, IZA discussion paper, April 2012.