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What Hacker News says
- > family holdings, individual wealth management, sons of well-to-dos becoming proverbial doctors and lawyers
The last. The article wants to make it sound like this is inherited wealth (alla Picketty) but this isn't really supported. For example, you find much the same pattern even across say the cultural revolution, which I hear was rather rough on inherited nest eggs. The rec. book on this (as in one of the old comment threads below) is Clark, "The Son Also Rises" ( http://amzn.to/2jFnUmZ ).
- Surnames and Social Mobility in England, 1170-2012
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-014-9219-y?n...
Logo Springer SearchMenu Human Nature December 2014, Volume 25, Issue 4, pp 517-537 Date: 15 Nov 2014 Surnames and Social Mobility in England, 1170–2012
Gregory Clark, Neil Cummins
$39.95 / €34.95 / £29.95
Rent the article at a discount Rent now * Final gross prices may vary according to local VAT. Get Access Abstract Using educational status in England from 1170 to 2012, we show that the rate of social mobility in any society can be estimated from knowledge of just two facts: the distribution over time of surnames in the society and the distribution of surnames among an elite or underclass. Such surname measures reveal that the typical estimate of parent–child correlations in socioeconomic measures in the range of 0.2–0.6 are misleading about rates of overall social mobility. Measuring education status through Oxbridge attendance suggests a generalized intergenerational correlation in status in the range of 0.70–0.90. Social status is more strongly inherited even than height. This correlation is unchanged over centuries. Social mobility in England in 2012 was little greater than in preindustrial times. Thus there are indications of an underlying social physics surprisingly immune to government intervention.*Gregory Clark, co-author of the above article wrote an excellent book, The Son Also Rises, the topic of the linked article about his research into social mobility. It's basically invariant across societies.
- Read books you always wanted but wouldn't get around to with all the distractions available at home. Be it classics, political theory, maybe something light and scientific? Generally, whatever doesn't require additional materials.
Here are some titles of that kind I enjoyed.
Anabasis by Xenophon
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
The Son also Rises by Gregory Clark
- > Wealth does not pass three generations. - Chinese proverb
Not true. Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises. Social status has a heritability of 0.7ish in every society he measured it in. That's almost as high as the upper bound estimate for IQ. To give an idea of how powerful heritability of social status/roles is consider this: Norman surnames are over represented among the battlefield casualties of WW1 and 2 for the UK. Nearly a thousand years later a prospensity for organised violence lives on. And despite the Cultural Revolution and 30 years of Communism, the same surnames that were over represented among the Mandarins of Qing China are over represented among the upper echelons of today's Communist Party.
〉tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything.
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. -- Socrates
- That may be the idiom, but evidence suggest otherwise.
See Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises (2014), tracking intergenerational wealth in England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile:
- I haven’t read the book so I am not familiar with his specific argument.
However he’s an economist, not a geneticist. And the description of the book on Amazon focuses on last names and ancestry, not genetics.
https://www.amazon.com/Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Princeton/dp/...
This book looks to me like it’s arguing that social policies don’t do much to affect familial networks, not that it’s arguing that the elites all have magical genes that keep them on top.
