The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022
The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022
Gregory Clark https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6972-4478
gclark@ucdavis.eduAuthors Info & Affiliations
Edited by Dalton Conley, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; received January 17, 2023; accepted May 17, 2023
June 26, 2023
120 (27) e2300926120
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2300926120
Significance
There is widespread belief across the social sciences in the ability of social interventions and social institutions to significantly influence rates of social mobility. In England, 1600 to 2022, we see considerable change in social institutions across time. Half the population was illiterate in 1800, and not until 1880 was compulsory primary education introduced. Progressively after this, educational provision and other social supports for poorer families expanded greatly. The paper shows, however, that these interventions did not change in any measurable way the strong familial persistence of social status across generations.
Abstract
A lineage of 422,374 English people (1600 to 2022) contains correlations in social outcomes among relatives as distant as 4th cousins. These correlations show striking patterns. The first is the strong persistence of social status across family trees. Correlations decline by a factor of only 0.79 across each generation. Even fourth cousins, with a common ancestor only five generations earlier, show significant status correlations. The second remarkable feature is that the decline in correlation with genetic distance in the lineage is unchanged from 1600 to 2022. Vast social changes in England between 1600 and 2022 would have been expected to increase social mobility. Yet people in 2022 remain correlated in outcomes with their lineage relatives in exactly the same way as in preindustrial England. The third surprising feature is that the correlations parallel those of a simple model of additive genetic determination of status, with a genetic correlation in marriage of 0.57.
Using a large genealogical database, which details the family connections of 422,374 people with rarer surnames in England for births from 1600 to 2022, the paper examines patterns of inheritance of social status in both preindustrial and contemporary England. Social status is measured by six outcomes: occupational status, higher education status, literacy, dwelling value, company directorships, and the index of multiple deprivation (IMD) for the residence location. Status correlations are calculated for all these outcomes for relatives up to fourth cousins.
These status correlations reveal four things. The first is that status persists strongly across even very distant relatives, across all measures of status. Even fourth cousins, who shared a common ancestor only five generations earlier, typically show statistically significant correlations in status. The second is that the decline in status correlations with each step outward in the lineage is a constant 0.79, for different measures of status, and for different epochs from 1600 to 2022. The vast social changes in England since the Industrial Revolution, including mass public schooling, have not increased, in any way, underlying rates of social mobility.
The third interesting feature of the correlations are ....
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More: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300926120