Are you angry that you were rejected from Oxford University? Angry that you can’t afford that three-bedroom in the heart of the city? You don’t have a single non-executive directorship to your name.
Your great, great, great, grandfather is the only one at fault. Gregory Clark, an academic, claims in a book titled “The Son Also Rises” that a big part of what our ancestors did 300 years ago determines how successful we are today.
Clark believes it takes 10 to 15 generations, as opposed to more optimistic projections that suggest past affluence or poverty can be wiped out in three to four generations. Therefore, people who feel that their humble upbringing is holding them back shouldn’t go to their parents’ income for an explanation because that only explains 10% of the range in a person’s status, whereas our long-term lineage explains between 50% and 60% of the variation.
In essence, this means that if your ancestors owned a business 200 years ago, there’s a good chance you will as well. By tracking changes in familial fortune using surnames, Clark came to his conclusion. In historical archives like the Doomsday Book and the Royal Society records, he identified the family names that predominated in privileged positions.
He then monitored how long it took for those surnames to lose their power to indicate wealth. Given that his findings show that capitalism has not produced rapid or lasting mobility, was Clark shocked by them? He is very startled and, as he says, “astonished.” We realized that surnames were displaying a surprising persistence in social life that traditional approaches were unable to pick up on after a considerable amount of time had passed.
According to Clark, mobility in feudal England wasn’t radically different from it is today. It took eight generations for upwardly mobile 12th-century artisans to be assimilated into the 16th-century educated elite. Contrarily, the 21st-century descendants of the 1 per cent centers of mid-Victorian England are likely to be three times as affluent as the typical man or woman on the bus, despite the introduction of inheritance tax and fast industrialization.
The fact that the ancestral shadow seems to cover every country analyzed, without exception, is arguably the most startling aspect of the study. “Social mobility rates are comparable among nations with vastly different institutions and economic distributions. Similar rates are found in dog-eat-dog, free-to-lose America, and cradle-to-grave communist Sweden.
Similar rates are found in both capitalist Taiwan and communist China. The homogeneous nation of Japan and the racially divided US likewise have comparable rates, he claims. If Clark’s research is confirmed, it would suggest that efforts to give society even a semblance of social mobility have been in vain. As he puts it, “Only extreme, drastic, and unacceptable state interventions have any hope of increasing social mobility.”
According to his research, not even the Communist Revolution in China in 1949 was able to have a significant, long-lasting impact on mobility. While it may be expected that the old boys’ network is to blame for the slow pace of change, Clark claims that, in reality, our “social competences” are passed down to us from our parents.
Some have claimed that he is a genetic determinist as a result of this conclusion. It must be noted that he clarifies in his own writing that he is not asserting that aiding the weak doesn’t result in “absolute, commendable benefits,” only that doing so doesn’t raise social standing. It still has drawbacks, though.
He claims that if their ancestors were not wealthy themselves, the enormous investments made by the extremely wealthy in the education of their own kin would finally come to nothing. The lineage lottery appears to be similar to playing the real lottery in that there aren’t many winners.
