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How am I to make sense of the fact that the castes in India have been highly endogamous for the past two thousand years and that the pre-industrial world was Malthusian? Shouldn't that have resulted in the gradual replacement of the lower castes with the upper castes, or did the upper castes not actually receive any material benefit as a result of their higher status?
Gregory Clark has argued that in England, the upper classes did replace the lower classes as a result of their material advantage. But they did not form distinct endogamous castes, so most of the descendants of the upper classes fell into the lower classes and there was some limited mixing between the classes. But India, my understanding is that the Brahmins didn't become Shudras, so why didn't the Shudras go extinct?
If the taboo against performing manual agricultural labor by a member of the scholarly class is strong enough, then their less capable children will simply be bad scholars rather than falling into the lower classes of society as they did in England where the class barriers were much weaker.
The question is not "Why didn't they fall into the lower classes?" but "Why did they not outbreed the lower classes?".
Why do you assume that wealth or social status was directly correlated with fertility in every pre-industrial society? That may have been the case in many places, but certainly not in the classical Mediterranean nor in the many cases of market-dominant minorities such as the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Parsis in India, Jews in Europe, or Sogdians in Tang Dynasty China.
Indian religions in particular seem to promote an ascetic path as the most holy way to live, and the individuals who chose such a path with its attendant celibacy seem disproportionately likely to have been from the priestly castes. The practical economic benefits of having additional children are also specific to an agricultural lifestyle in which they can perform manual labor and act as surrogate parents for their younger siblings. If your children are religiously forbidden from engaging in those activities then they are an economic drain rather than an asset, and are diverting the time and resources your servants could be spending expanding your property or sponsoring temples. If you are, furthermore, entrusted with the transmission of sacred texts that must be memorized and recited perfectly, you are likely better off instructing a smaller number of children to make sure they each get it right.
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