The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

384 Pages·2014·10.75 MB·English

by  Gregory Clark

THE SON ALSO RISES
SURNAMES AND THE HISTORY OF SOCIAL M OBILITY
GREGORY CLARK
with Neil Cummins,
Yu Hao, and
Daniel Diaz Vidal
and Tat suya 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 lTW
press.princeton.edu
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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
305.5T309—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 )apan 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
viii CONTENTS
PREFACE
This book w ill be co n tro versial. 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 success­
fully 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 explora­
tion and conjecture.
The work discussed in this volume was undertaken with several collabora­
tors. 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 chap­
ter on China and Taiwan reports on the work Yu Hao completed for his gradu­
ate 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 figur­
ing out how to download the 2.2 million names of people in the Kolkata elec­
toral 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 his­
tory 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 lim­
ited 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 grand­
parents. 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 cru­
cial 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, Nata­
lie 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 fellow­
X PREFACE
ship from the Economic History Association to 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 collec­
tion. 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
O Grada, 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 com­
pressed production schedule.
As always, I owe a great debt to my colleagues in the economics depart­
ment 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 inter­
acting 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: inquisi­
tive, 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 As­
PREFACE xi
sociation 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 Uni­
versity; City University of New York, Queens; Economic History Society meet­
ings (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 (Uni­
versity of Chicago); the International Congress on Medieval Studies; Kalama­
zoo; the London School of Economics; the Murphy Institute of Tulane Uni­
versity; Northwestern University; the PSID Conference on Multigenerational
Social Mobility (Ann Arbor); the Scottish Economic Society; the Sound Eco­
nomic History Workshop (Lund); State University of New York, Binghamton;
the Tsinghua Summer Workshop for Quantitative History (Tsinghua Univer­
sity); 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.
Mishkas Café, Davis, October 2013
xii PREFACE