Gregory Clark Says We Humans Suck at Social Mobility


Gregory Clark writes interesting books. His last one, A Farewell to Alms, made a contentious argument about why, after a hundred centuries of zero average economic progress, growth suddenly exploded around 1800 in the tiny island of England and then spread throughout Europe and the world. Basically, Clark argues that the Industrial Revolution started in England because of “accidents of institutional stability and demography….and the extraordinary fecundity of the rich and economically successful. The embedding of bourgeois values into the culture, and perhaps even the genetics, was for these reasons the most advanced in England.”

Bourgeois values! Genetics! Rich people reproducing faster than poor ones! That was bound to piss off some people. I myself found it pretty fascinating, but I also felt like Clark was drawing some pretty spectacular conclusions from some pretty scant data. Sadly, I read Farewell to Alms on one of the original Kindle reading devices, and thus found it virtually impossible to follow. It relies heavily on tables and charts, and those rendered so poorly that I had a hard time following Clark’s argument. Shortly after that I ditched my Kindle.

I’ve since replaced it with a succession of tablets, all of which render the book just fine. But I’ve never gone back to reread it, and now Clark has a new book out, The Son Also Rises.1 His latest big idea is that status is remarkably stable over periods of centuries. Families that were well off in 1700 are, on average, still pretty well off. Basically, we suck at social mobility. Josh Harkinson interviewed him for Mother Jones:

MJ: How do you measure status?

GC: I have a number of different measures for different societies. So for England, where we have some of the best data, we know everyone who went to Oxford and Cambridge from 1200 to the present. That tells us who the educational elite were in England over 800 years, and then we can ask, “What are the names that are showing up in that elite, and how persistent is their appearance in this elite?”

….We find that there is a very strong persistence of elite families at the universities. In recent years, the universities have tried to become more meritocratic and more democratic: They admit students based on performance on national exams. They don’t give any privilege to the fact that your parents went there. And public financing for tuition is now available. But what we find is that elite families persist at Oxford and Cambridge at the same rate as they did in the 19th century. It hasn’t managed to change the rate of social mobility.

Clark uses this strategy of following family names in other countries as well, and comes to similar conclusions. Is this legit? Are family names enough to figure out who’s going up and who’s going down? I have my doubts, but I haven’t read the book. And I have to say that my personal experience is a data point in favor of Clark’s thesis. Many years ago I got interested in genealogy and started digging up my family tree. Roughly speaking, I managed to go back about 200 years through most of my branches. And one of the things that intrigued me was just how homogeneous it all was. Some of my ancestors were better off than others, but mostly within a pretty narrow band. As near as I can tell, none of them were destitute and none of them were rich. They were small farmers, shopkeepers, linen drapers, sign painters, electricians, and stonecutters. Over seven or eight generations, social mobility has been pretty close to zero.

So maybe there’s something to this. I’ll let you know what I think if I end up reading the book.

1Yes, he’s apparently stuck on Hemingway puns. This is undoubtedly a rich vein for economists. Next up: To Have and Halve Not. Followed by For Whom the Swell Toils and The Gold Plan and Me.


If you buy a book using a Bookshop link on this page, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate