Book

The Son Also Rises

Gregory Clark · 2014

The Son Also Rises

About

Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.

The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility is a 2014 book by the economic historian Gregory Clark (Princeton University Press). It develops a surname-based method for tracking social mobility across many generations, using rare surnames — associated at some point in the historical record with high or low status — as markers that can be followed through centuries of records (university admissions, probate records, professional rolls) in a way individual-level income and occupation data cannot. Applying the method across England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Japan, Korea, and Chile, Clark finds a strikingly uniform and slow rate of underlying social mobility: it takes ten to fifteen generations, not the two or three implied by conventional single-generation mobility studies, for a family’s status to fully regress to the mean. The finding holds regardless of a society’s welfare policies, tax regime, or political system, leading Clark to argue that conventional mobility measures — which look only at the correlation between one generation and the next — dramatically overstate how much status actually changes hands, and that the true rate of mobility is a slow-moving, largely inherited constant.

In the wiki

  • Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating — Clark defends the book’s central claim under sustained challenge from Tyler Cowen: that relative social mobility in England has been essentially flat since medieval times, unmoved by industrialisation, the welfare state, or centuries of institutional change. He extends the surname method beyond the book to new material — Britons who emigrated to Australia, Canada, and the United States retained their relative social standing even as absolute living standards rose sharply, and Hungary’s pre-Communist elite regained its relative position once Communism ended, evidence he reads as showing Status Persistence operating ‘in some very physics-like way’ across radically different institutional environments.

See also