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

370 Pages·2016·5.55 MB·English

by  Gregory Clark

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
Neil Cummins,
with
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
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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
305.5′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
T
HIS 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