{"id":4289,"date":"2014-08-11T06:58:18","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T06:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/?p=4289"},"modified":"2014-08-10T00:02:26","modified_gmt":"2014-08-10T00:02:26","slug":"does-capitalism-promote-social-mobility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/2014\/08\/11\/does-capitalism-promote-social-mobility\/","title":{"rendered":"Does capitalism promote social mobility?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In debating this topic on another blog post with Geoff Roberts, I came across this book review<\/a> of a book which seems to deal very much with this question. I think this review makes for a fascinating read. Let me know what you think:<\/p>\n

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The storyline of capitalism\u2014and the technological innovation that simultaneously supports and drives it forward\u2014is almost always one of ever-greater personal freedom and opportunity. Slaves and serfs, whose families had been chained to the plows of noble-born landowners generation after generation, are transformed into wage earners who sell their services in demand-driven labor markets. Wage owners pull themselves up by their bootstraps and educate their children, who then enter the professional ranks. With the liberal application of hard work, inventiveness, or entrepreneurial chutzpah, anyone can rise through the ranks of society. The sky is the limit. Or is it?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/div>\n

This is the question that\u00a0Gregory Clark<\/a>, economics professor at the University of California, Davis, seeks to answer in his new book,\u00a0The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Princeton University Press, 2014). Clark has a predilection for investigating interesting questions, as well as for literary puns. His last book,\u00a0A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Princeton University Press, 2007), sought to explain why the Industrial Revolution sparked and caught fire in England, and not in other parts of the world. His Darwinian answer was that England was peopled by descendants of the upper classes, who over hundreds of years had survived at higher rates than people in the lower classes. As a result, English upper class values, such as hard work, rationality, and education, which were conducive to an industrialized society, also survived.<\/p>\n

Clark figured this out by collecting and analyzing data on the English economy from 1200 to 1870. In\u00a0The Son Also Rises<\/em>, he uses a similarly data-driven approach. This time, he uses uncommon surnames, such as Pepys, \u201cto track the rich and poor through many generations in various societies\u2014England, the United States, Sweden, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Chile.\u201d Specifically, he matches up the wealth of parents and that of their offspring. The more correlation, the less social mobility.<\/p>\n

Just as Thomas Piketty\u2019s\u00a0Capital in the 21st Century<\/em>\u00a0(Belknap Press, 2014), calls into question the role of capitalism in wealth creation, Clark calls into question the role of capitalism in social mobility. But both conservatives and liberals will find justification for their views in the facts uncovered in\u00a0The Son Also Rises<\/em>. Clark, who rightfully opens his preface with the words, \u201cThis book will be controversial,\u201d found to his surprise that intergenerational social mobility cannot be taken for granted. Industrialization did not move wealth to the wider population, at least not as freely as the prevailing free enterprise storyline would suggest. (Clark basically says that \u201ca hundred years of research by psychologists, sociologists, and economists\u201d into social mobility has all been incorrect.)<\/p>\n

Instead, Clark\u2019s research reveals that the global level of social mobility is basically unchanged over the past 800 years. In England, for instance, he finds that the level of social mobility was the same after the Industrial Revolution as it was before it. \u201cThe rich beget the rich, the poor beget the poor,\u201d Clark concludes. \u201cSocial status is inherited as strongly as any biological trait, such as height.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Clark does not say that mobility doesn\u2019t exist, or that social positions never change. Indeed, his research reveals that upward and downward mobility are both continuously at play in human society. One critical factor is the intermarriage between rich and poor, which over time creates a constant regression to the mean. \u201cIn the end, the descendants of today\u2019s rich and poor will achieve complete equality in their expected social position,\u201d explains Clark. \u201cThis equality may require three hundred years to come about,\u201d but it will inevitably come, unless a family takes dramatic steps (for example, through its choice of marriage partners) to maintain its position in society.<\/p>\n

For me, the salient point is that social mobility is being driven by \u201cinnate inherited abilities,\u201d not by the ascendancy of capitalism or democracy or any other economic or political ideology. People born rich may go on to be successful, but wealth is not the most important thing they inherit. Far more important are nature and nurture: the genetic abilities they get from their parents (which they will only pass on if they marry people as capable as themselves), and the confidence, education, and connections their families provide.<\/p>\n

This is a difficult message for the unlucky people born to less capable parents; they have high barriers to social mobility, as they have throughout history. Capitalism may make it easier for some individuals to realize their potential, but it does not create that potential in the first place. That\u2019s an insight worth remembering when you hear claims to the contrary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In debating this topic on another blog post with Geoff Roberts, I came across this book review of a book which seems to deal very much with this question. I think this review makes for a fascinating read. Let me know what you think:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1237,1054,17],"tags":[1394,1396,1393,1395],"class_list":["post-4289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equality-2","category-featured","category-politics","tag-capitalism","tag-gregory-clark","tag-social-mobility","tag-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}