Clark offers detailed studies of the modern United States, modern Sweden, medieval and modern England, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile to show that patterns of social mobility are remarkably similar across societies. He deals with exceptions and anomalies toward the end of the book, and while there are unanswered questions and clear directions for further research, his treatment of the subject is impressively comprehensive.
Tracking surnames / He diverges from the usual studies of social mobility by using a novel approach. He “estimates social mobility rates by measuring the rate at which surnames that originally had high or low social status lose that status connotation.” That idea was inspired by a New York Times reviewer of his 2007 book A Farewell to Alms (Princeton University Press). Clark does this by assembling a wide range of data sources and looking to see whether names that appear in high-status probate records and income tax lists later appear among lists of people in high-status occupations (like doctors and lawyers), lists of students enrolled at elite universities, and other measures of status.
One of his most impressive contributions is his finding that societies differing widely in their institutions—from modern Sweden to medieval England to Maoist China—exhibit remarkably similar patterns of social mobility: slow regression to the mean over generations. His findings are robust to different measures of status like income, education, and representation in high-status professions like law and medicine. He explores this empirically by looking at the changing positions of surnames across different markers of status (income and education, for example) for different societies. The surname Pepys, for example, is over-represented in the medical field and in Oxford and Cambridge admissions, though ironically the most famous Pepys of them all—Samuel Pepys, the diarist—left no heirs.
Clark argues for “a law of social mobility” whereby a family’s position in society is determined by its members’ underlying “social competence.” It is an attractive and intuitive theory, but while this is distinct from inherited wealth or inherited ability, he nowhere defines exactly what this social competence is. At this stage in the research program, “social competence” is an X factor (literally—see the equation on p. 125) that explains trends in social mobility but that so far remains undefined and unmeasured. Rather, it is inferred from the patterns Clark identifies in the first half of the book for Sweden, the United States, and England and then tests in the second half of the book for India, China, Japan, Korea, and Chile. He claims to have discovered an element of “social physics” governing social mobility over time. If we may extend the analogy to the physical sciences, “social competence” is his Higgs Boson: predicted by the theory and essential to the argument, but not actually observed.
The story would be much more complete if he had defined and described social competence in greater detail, but this failure is an opportunity for further research rather than an irremediable flaw in his overall argument. Social competence will necessarily be a moving target, dependent on economic, political, social, and cultural contexts in society that are always shifting. Identifying the characteristics of the highest status people in a particular data set and then constructing a social competence index that measures a family’s social competence as a weighted average of the differences between a particular family and the highest-status family strikes me as something Clark could try, but such a measure is likely beyond the capacity of currently available data (and, for me, certainly beyond the capacity of a book review).
Resistant to manipulation / People who appreciate the dismal aspects of economics will welcome some of the book’s conclusions. First, social mobility patterns are basically the same across the societies Clark studies and are stubbornly resistant to attempts to create new societies through social democracy (as in Sweden) or violent communist revolution (as in Mao’s China). Second, attempts to redress historical injustices through programs like the reservation system in India that reserves spots in universities and public jobs for people from historically oppressed castes actually work to the detriment of the poorest people in society. Clark’s work suggests there is more than political will standing in the way of greater social mobility.
It is not clear, however, that social mobility should be at or near the top of the public policy agenda. In a rhetorical flourish, he refers to the bottom of a society as a “squalid netherworld.” If incomes and educational opportunities up and down the rungs of the social ladder were fixed, then social mobility would be a cause for great concern; that a person could be mired in a squalid netherworld through nothing more than an accident of birth offends many people’s sensibilities.
Incomes and educational opportunities are not fixed, however, and there is no reason the bottom of the income status distribution should be squalid or a netherworld. In a growing economy, people up and down the income distribution will have more and better opportunities for flourishing and self-authorship even if we hold the income distribution fixed and completely eliminate social mobility. If people are confronted with ever-expanding opportunities to obtain food, clothing, shelter, and enlightenment, I don’t see why we should treat social mobility as an issue that requires corrective public policy even if we could do something about it. This isn’t to say that people should accept that they are like George Lucas’s droids or Akira Kurosawa’s peasants—“made to suffer”—but it isn’t clear that desire for status is a morally praiseworthy trait or a legitimate demand upon society.
Our demand for status raises another important issue that was not necessarily germane to medieval English peasants and lords, but that is becoming more important with the rapid improvement and diffusion of communications technology. We get to choose our own “societies” in ways that were impossible to previous generations. This isn’t just because we can sort into political jurisdictions that best match our preferences with our constraints. The Internet has given us the ability to join or even form an infinite array of new societies. At the margin, the physical, material, and political societies in which we live become less relevant when we can choose to spend less time interacting with a society centered around geography (say, people who live in the United States) in order to spend more time interacting with a society centered around common interests.
Here’s an example: Andrew Reams is one of my 6‑year-old son’s heroes. To most people, Reams is just a guy who lives in Roanoke, Va. To people like my son who love elevators, though, he is YouTube celebrity “DieselDucy,” who takes followers on tours of landmark elevators, carwashes, arcades, and other mechanical marvels. People have always had hobbies and have always sought out others with common interests, but the Internet has made it much easier for people to craft their own societies centered around common interests or common networks. For instance, Reddit contributors who earn more “upvotes” than “downvotes” for their submitted links and comments earn “karma” that cannot be redeemed for anything, but that measures one’s standing within that community. The caption on one of my favorite xkcd cartoons reads, “Human subcultures are fractally nested. There is no bottom.” As better communications technology makes it easier for new subcultures to emerge, it will be interesting to see the degree to which people value status within the different “societies” to which they belong. And in 2115, I expect that one of Clark’s academic descendants will write a dissertation about it.
In fact, I anticipate that a lot of future dissertations—probably from Clark’s academic home at the University of California, Davis—will extend his insights and methods to other cultures, contexts, and data sets. Clark-inspired investigations of the former Soviet Union and African countries, for example, would be extremely useful complements to this book. And some interesting debate about the minutiae of his data and methods will find homes on the specialized pages of journals like the Journal of Economic History, Economic History Review, and European Review of Economic History (which Clark edits).
