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Gregory Clark published The Inheritance of Social Status: England, 1600-2022. You can find breakdowns of the results and methodology by geneticist Alexander Young and Cremieux in Twitter threads. The main takeaway is that a model of genetic inheritance and assortative mating nearly perfectly explains social status across nine different measures.
This builds on previous findings that dramatic changes in social structure or wealth transfers are often only temporary setbacks for elite families. In China, the Cultural Revolution, perhaps the single biggest upheaval in social structure and wealth redistribution in human history, saw the pre-communist elite families spend one generation below median income/education before outearning and outlearning other households by 16% and 11%, respectively, in the second generation. A similar phenomenon is seen in the American South following the Civil War, where it took antebellum elite families one generation to regain equal footing, with the second generation surpassing their counterparts in income and education.
Critics of the hereditarian hypothesis have posted critiques of the study, but, to my knowledge, no clear alternative hypotheses or explanations for the genetic model fitting basically perfectly.
I skimmed the paper and there's something I don't understand, I'm not an expert on this so hopefully someone can explain it to me.
Fisher has equations that describe how for a given intensity of a assortative mating and a given degree of relatedness how much phenotype correlation we should expect. Clark compares how different measures of social status correlate for each degree of relatedness (sibling, cousin, grandkids, second cousin etc) and finds that the correlation declines for each generational step in the way Fisher's equations describe. That genetic distance predicts the change in correlation in status metrics is strong evidence that there is a genetic component to status.
Clark says that because the rate at which status outcome correlation declines with genetic distance is constant over time there has been no change in social mobility, but doesn't the initial correlation matter? If I look at Table 2 Parent Child Higher Education status correlates at 0.53 from 1780-1860 and at 0.37 from 1860-1919. That looks like it could be a decline in the heritability of educational attainment but Clark says that the important thing is that the change between parent-child and cousin-cousin educational status correlation fits Fisher's equations in both data sets. He says that because social status measures decline with genetic distance at the same rate rate in all these different time periods there's been no change in social mobility. But wouldn't a society with a 0.8 correlation between say, siblings home values, have less social mobility than one with a 0.2 correlation even if they both declined at the same rate with genetic distance?
Not necessarily, because house value is a proxy for social status that depends on its contextual weight. If London is burnt to the ground, or becomes much more expensive, the relationship between social status and house value changes, but the underlying heritability of social status remains the same. If everyone had cheap houses, it doesn’t mean that the society has more social mobility, just that that variable doesn’t capture status any more. Note figure 3, where wealth has much weaker maternal heritability compared to occupational status and education.
Yes, the relationship between social status and a particular metric of status can change over time, literacy is a better indicator of social status in 1600 than in 1990. But I don't think we can assume everytime a particular metric of status becomes less heritable it is because it reflects status less, though I'm also not sure how you'd test whether a metric is genuinely measuring status.
It’s a pretty good prior tho, no? With an N= all British people 1600-2020 you could rank order each person per generation by Clarks’ variables, derive a temporal weight for each, then see who is at the top and bottom, and the rank of their relatives. As is, Clark has to do a lot of estimations, tho he does try to justify them. The alternative hypothesis would have to find a reservoir for status outside of money, occupation, or education, which seems plausible but I’m personally drawing a blank for possibilities.
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