The Value of Choosing the Right Parents: Creg Clark: Friday Focus: February 21, 2014
It was Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis who first taught me that very strange things are going on in the inheritance of inequality in America. They found that although measures of cognitive performance like IQ are strongly inherited, “the genetic transmission of IQ appears to be relatively unimportant”: high IQ-parents do have higher-than-average IQ-children, but that is now why the children of rich parents are richer than average. Moreover, “the combined inheritance processes operating through superior cognitive performance and educational attainments of those with well-off parents… explain at most half” of the intergenerational inheritance of inequality.
And Greg Clark has been doing a lot of work on this, so let me turn the microphone over to him:
Greg Clark: Your Fate? Thank Your Ancestors: “Mobility has always been slow.
When you look across centuries… social mobility is much slower than many of us believe, or want to believe. This is true in Sweden, a social welfare state; England, where industrial capitalism was born; the United States, one of the most heterogeneous societies in history; and India, a fairly new democracy hobbled by the legacy of caste. Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution.
To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents’…. The fortunes of high-status families inexorably fall, and those of low-status families rise, toward the average… but the process can take 10 to 15 generations…. We came to these conclusions after examining reams of data on surnames, a surprisingly strong indicator of social status, in eight countries–Chile, China, England, India, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the United States–going back centuries….
Does this imply that individuals have no control over their life outcomes? No… success still depends on individual effort… [but perhaps] the compulsion to strive, the talent to prosper and the ability to overcome failure are strongly inherited….
Let’s start with Sweden… one of the world’s most equal societies…. Sweden still has a nobility…. 56,000 Swedes hold rare surnames associated with the three historic tiers of nobles…. Another elite group are Swedes whose ancestors… Latinized their surnames in the 17th and 18th centuries…. Given the egalitarian nature of Swedish society, one would expect that people with these elite surnames should be no better off than other Swedes. That isn’t so… the average taxable income of people with noble names was 44 percent higher than that of people with the common surname Andersson. Those with Latinized names had average taxable incomes 27 percent higher than those named Andersson….
We found that late medieval England was no less mobile than modern England…. It took just seven generations for the successful descendants of illiterate village artisans of 1300 to be incorporated fully into the educated elite of 1500–that is, the frequency of their names in the Oxbridge rolls reached the level around where it is today. By 1620… people with names like Butcher and Baker had nearly as much wealth as people with high-status surnames like Rochester and Radcliffe….
For all the creative destruction unleashed by capitalism, the industrial revolution did not accelerate mobility…. If your surname is rare, and someone with that surname attended Oxford or Cambridge around 1800, your odds of being enrolled at those universities are nearly four times greater than the average person. This slowness of mobility has persisted despite a vast expansion in public financing for secondary and university education, and the adoption of much more open and meritocratic admissions at both schools…. At the current rate, for example, it will be 300 years before Ashkenazi Jews cease to be overrepresented among American doctors, and even 200 years from now the descendants of enslaved African-Americans will still be underrepresented…. But to be clear, we found no evidence that certain racial groups innately did better than others. Very high-status groups in America include Ashkenazi Jews, Egyptian Copts, Iranian Muslims, Indian Hindus and Christians, and West Africans. The descendants of French Canadian settlers don’t suffer racial discrimination, but their upward mobility, like that of blacks, has been slow….
In China… the 100 most common are held by nearly 85 percent of the population…. 13 rare surnames… were exceptionally overrepresented among successful candidates in imperial examinations in the 19th century. Remarkably, holders of these 13 surnames are disproportionately found now among professors and students at elite universities, government officials, and heads of corporate boards….
As the political theorist John Rawls suggested in his landmark work “A Theory of Justice” (1971), innate differences in talent and drive mean that, to create a fair society, the disadvantages of low social status should be limited. We are not suggesting that the fact of slow mobility means that policies to lift up the lives of the disadvantaged are for naught–quite the opposite. Sweden is, for the less well off, a better place to live than the United States, and that is a good thing….
What governments can do is ameliorate the effects of life’s inherent unfairness. Where we will fall within the social spectrum is largely fated at birth. Given that fact, we have to decide how much reward, or punishment, should be attached to what is ultimately fickle and arbitrary, the lottery of your lineage.