Social Immobility
...a striking new finding from economic historian Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis claims your success in life may actually be determined by ancestors who lived hundreds of years ago. That means improving opportunities across generations might be a lot harder than anyone imagined.
And all the previous work on social mobility suggests that the status of a name would change in three or four generations.
"If I just know that you share a rare surname with someone who was wealthy in 1800, I can predict now that you're nine times more likely to attend Oxford or Cambridge. You're going to live two years longer than an average person in England. You're going to have more wealth. You're more likely to be a doctor. You're more likely to be an attorney," Clark says.
They checked in England, Sweden, the United States, India, China, Japan and Chile.
"And astonishingly, there's no more mobility in Sweden on these measures than there is in South America," says Clark. "And that America looks just like England, looks just like Sweden."
And, even more astonishingly, the numbers were the same in the Middle Ages as they are today.
"We can't predict the individual aspects of where you'll end up, but if we want to rank you overall in society, maybe as much as 60 percent of the outcome is determined at the time of conception," Clark says.
And if Clark is right, that number is almost impervious to change. The Industrial Revolution didn't change it. Neither did the communist revolution in China, World Wars I or II, or even social policies like the GI Bill. Clark says he's still working on exactly how to interpret that information.
But it's clear he has growing doubts about whether public policy can really help people move up the social ladder.
And the good news, according to Clark, is that families do move up the social ladder. It just might take a few hundred years to get there.I found it a little mind blowing that despite many an anecdote to the contrary, America has no more social mobility than Europe in the Middle Ages. So does this mean that conservatives should stop thinking that people just need resolve and a good work ethic to make it in America or that liberals should stop wasting their time on wealth redistribution?
They do point out in another article (why NPR has two articles on essentially the same thing, I don't know) that we are doing better than India, so at least we beat out the caste system.
Comments
But really these findings are not that surprising. America has always been a meritocracy in perception only, with the ones benefiting from the slanted system using anecdotal evidence to steer attention away from facts. And when the status quo of a system that favors certain groups over others is left un-checked, you will get the kind of severe income inequality that we see today, with the rich getting richer and richer and everyone else (referred to as the 'soon-to-be rich' by those who want to distract people from the facts) have little chance of improving their relative position in their lifetimes.
My hope would be that this adds to the evidence (along with demographic data on prison populations, unemployment numbers, etc) supporting the idea that there are actually disadvantaged populations in America and that it could actually persuade people (read: conservatives)to help out those with an unfair disadvantage until they are able to catch up, or better yet, change the system so it no longer holds people down and helps them catch up even faster!
First they talk about "success" in life. How do you measure that? Most people would think of money as the easiest measure.
But they explicitly say they are not measuring that (other than maybe "wealth"):
"It's worth pointing out that Clark is talking about relative social position, not overall living conditions or income."
But what does that means exactly? How do you measure "status." It seems to me like the devil is in the details, and that the details are not very clear, at least in this article.
I would also say, who in America do you consider high status? We have our Kennedys, Rockefellers, etc. But for most people, I would think of sports stars, actors, entertainers, etc. I don't think there are many legacy football players. These are people that invariable sink or swim based on their talent.
The other thing I would point out is that, even though you may see success across generations in a family, this could be for good reason. Talents and IQ are passed along through genetics. So there may be merit-based reasons why the children of successful people succeed, independent of just some sort of shadow caste system.
I could say a lot more about income mobility, but I'll leave it there for now.
"who in America do you consider high status? We have our Kennedys, Rockefellers, etc. But for most people, I would think of sports stars, actors, entertainers, etc. I don't think there are many legacy football players. These are people that invariable sink or swim based on their talent."
The small number of sports and entertainment stars (and legacy entertainers seem quite plausible as so much depends on who you know to get into the industry) make those categories of upper class rather insignificant. He did say he was looking at things like university attendance and having certain high status occupations.
I think these measures could likely be more indicative of status than income alone. Being high status is about feeling that you are more important than someone else, whether or not they have money.
I remember when I was first looking at going into education and some people would say to me that that was one field they would never consider. Not because of the pay, but because of the status. Also if you look at parents who send their children to private schools, the motivation to have their children separate from "the others" is more significant than any other factor. Having money surely makes it easier to separate yourself, but it's not the end goal and it isn't always sufficient.
I don't think this study has overturned the whole of social mobility research, but I think it makes for some interesting hypotheticals. If social mobility generally takes hundreds of years, if it happens at all, what are the implications?
@Aaron
I can see how one could say that if social mobility is so difficult that we need to do even more to encourage it, but on the other hand the research seems to indicate that the upper class will go to incredible lengths to stay upper class. Even with wealth redistribution, they'll find some way to have "stars on thars" and keep themselves separate.
I think conservative/liberal economic arguments largely boil down to whether the most important goal is maximizing standards of living or minimizing social disparity. To me that's a bit of an open question. Are societies generally more happy if everyone has more material goods though some people have way more, or are they better off if people have less in general but there's more of a feeling of equality.
Conservatives see wealth redistribution as introducing inefficiencies into the market that make a smaller overall pie, while liberals tend to discount market forces and see the equality of slices as a victory. Conservatives tend to dismiss the inequity in pie slices and figure that if everyone has more there shouldn't be anything to complain about. Liberals seem to think that government influence in the marketplace has no deleterious side effects.
Personally I can't discount the power of the free market, but I do wonder if much of economic theory (with which I admittedly have only a cursory understanding) is a bit like when we apply physics to frictionless situations with massless strings and pulleys. The real world always has cheaters (whether it be companies or countries) as well as enormous complexity, so how well do our predictions hold? Enough to tell the poor that we can't help them otherwise we'll bring the whole country down?
Yet much of our social safety net is simply insolvent in the long run. Many on the left would seriously continue these programs until they've sucked every last penny out of the evil corporate America to pay for it.
So I tend to gravitate to the wishy washy middle ground (more the right side of the middle actually) that many see as unprincipled. But for now I'm comfortable there.
Maybe low pay counts against status, but then I thought this study was measuring something other than money, which is quite easy to measure.