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The Son Also Rises - Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Gregory Clark

3.94 · Rating details · 203 Ratings · 29 Reviews

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does it influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. Using a novel technique- ...more

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Hardcover, 384 pages

Published February 18th 2014 by Princeton University Press (first published January 1st 2004)

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The Son Also Rises - Surnames and the History of Social Mobility by Gregory Clark

The Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker

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Mar 05, 2014 Brad Foley rated it really liked it

[major edit: I spent a couple days working through the math, and checking it with my own simulations, and have convinced myself that my earlier mathematical reservations were completely wrong. I've changed the review to reflect that]

The "Son Also Rises" was a fascinating read that seems likely to provoke controversy, but also to advance evidence-based discussions of equality and social mobility. Clark makes two major (somewhat separable) arguments in "Rises". First, that social mobility is much [major edit: I spent a couple days working through the math, and checking it with my own simulations, and have convinced myself that my earlier mathematical reservations were completely wrong. I've changed the review to reflect that]

The "Son Also Rises" was a fascinating read that seems likely to provoke controversy, but also to advance evidence-based discussions of equality and social mobility. Clark makes two major (somewhat separable) arguments in "Rises". First, that social mobility is much lower, and consistent across societies than anyone would have predicted. Second, that this low-mobility is biologically (in fact genetically) based. The first argument is better supported than the second. Clark's strong genetic conclusions seem rely on unassailable modelling (I tried) but some shakier genetic conclusions. They can't be dismissed entirely, however. Clark's evidence and reasoning is strong enough that the burden of proof is squarely on those who disagree with him. The implications the modern reader is left to draw are unsettling.

Clark's conclusions about the facts of mobility are astonishing. Typically, studies of mobility showed that intergenerational correlations (parent-offspring, typically father-son) in wealth are on the order of 0.4. This suggests ancestor-descendant correlations in wealth should be unobservable after about 4 generations. Across many cultures and times, and many different measures of status, Clark notes that identifiable elite or low-status groups regress to the mean at a rate between 0.75-0.85. This means that in fact differences in status persist for more than 10 generations.

Technically, Clark here models status as a single order Markov process, with three major components: time, [measurement] error, an underlying [latent] "social inertia" (my name) term. By this he emphasises we can model inheritance of social status from one's parents in exactly the same way we do height or eye color based on genetics. He notes that if we do so, we don't need to invoke any more complicated processes to explain the observed data (such as the status of extended family).

It turns out he's completely right about the models. I checked. If you model the inheritance process without the underlying latent term, you fail to match the data he's presented. If you model the process in the same way you would model additive genetic inheritance you get exactly the right answer. (I did this assuming a heritability of 0.4, parental-midpoint genotypes for the kids, renormalised mean and SD every generation, and a modelled range of assortative mating based on phenotype. I took beta and b vales from a number of the examples presented in the book.)

But here is where we begin to need to exercise caution. As a colleague is fond of quoting, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." We shouldn't let the simplicity of the model force us into a hasty overinterpretation of the underlying mechanisms. Clark jumps to a much less-cautious genetic interpretation of his results than almost any behavioural geneticist would (or at least should). Inheritance can be both genetic and epigenetic. Epigenetic is just a term that describes inheritance by any means but DNA (this isn't a magical thing: think language or religion). For instance, some primates and hyaenas inherit rank from their mothers. Fetal nutrition, maternal stress, early-life stress, and even languages and dialects, have effects on status and all have effects that are known to be transmitted across generations. Famously, maternal grooming in rats has profound (non-genetic) transgenerational effects on a range of personality measurements. It is extremely difficult to separate epigenetic and genetic effects when studying heritability.

Clark claims that because he can model inheritance of status as a first order Markov process, it actually is a first order Markov process based on transmitted characteristics inherent in the parents. Therefore, he claims, status is a deterministic product of a genetic "social competence" (his term). This is a strong claim. To his credit he discusses possible objections (such as inheritance of social networks). He also tries to quantify the non-genetic component of status in the best way possible, by examining adoption studies. Two studies, one on Korean adoptees in America, and another on adopted vs biological offspring in Sweden, seem to show a genetic heritabilty of income or education (here proxies for status) many times higher than conferred familial status.

The magnitude of these results is certainly far too high, as any number of factors (such as differences in the way parents and society treat adopted and biological children---see Hannah Williams) will bias these numbers. But at the very least we can find no reason to reject Clark's model, and I was persuaded that there is likely to be a higher effect of genetics on status metrics than I would ever have previously expected. Clearly more, and better, studies need to be conducted in this area.

At this point, any reasonable modern reader will be squirming. Raised under the spectre of the effects of early eugenics, racial determinism, and Manifest Destiny, we are rightly disturbed by attempts to reify social differences with biology. I'm reminded of the unproductive furor around "Sociobiology" and "The Bell Curve" (and Gould's error-filled attempt to rebut "The Bell Curve"). Clark spends much time demonstrating that there are no simplistic racial superiority claims to be taken from his data. His biologizing of hereditary class is inescapable, however. He tries to sugarcoat these interpretations with bland liberal prescriptions and platitudes, but they still rankle.

There have been notable failures in trying to increase social mobility (like Head Start in the US). But other recent studies have shown that good urban planning (access to public transport, and jobs, and good schools) can dramatically increase social mobility. Even if there is a genetic component to social status, Clark has almost certainly exaggerated it. Genetics certainly doesn't preclude other measures to increase social mobility. Then too, as Clark notes, inequality and mobility are different things, and we shouldn't confuse them.

In the end, "The Son Also Rises" was a thought provoking book, and one I'll read carefully again. I'd recommend it, as long as the reader doesn't accept any of the major conclusions without consideration. ...more

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Jul 05, 2014 Peter Mcloughlin rated it liked it

Shelves: 1960-to-1989, politics, 1890-1959, mathematics, psychology, general-science, general-history, economics, biology, american-history, european-history, asian-history, latin-american-history, intellectual-history, 0500-to-1500-ce, world-history, nonfiction, 1701-to-1800, 1801-to-1900, 1990-to-present, 1500-to-1700, fringes-of-science

Left-liberals will agree with the prescription but be disgusted by the diagnosis. The diagnosis is much the same kind of argument you would find in the bell curve. Social stratification is largely biological and even in the best of meritocracies social mobility will be limited as more (socially) talented will be a part of the elite and the underclass will stay the underclass. Studying surnames historically Clark finds social mobility is much slower than hoped in modern societies. In one of his ...more

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Mar 22, 2017 Aloke rated it really liked it

Shelves: money, history, non-fiction, science, deal

Mobility is much slower than previously thought: elites and underclasses can persist through ten to fifteen generations! And this is mostly impervious to even the most massive social upheavals (the industrial revolution, the cultural revolution, the welfare state, etc). To me this makes sense. Even in a revolution the social order isn't inverted; elites probably end up suffering less and they scramble out of the wreckage faster than the underclasses. The more things change... But on the flip sid ...more

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Mar 01, 2015 Roslyn Ross rated it did not like it

I recently read: The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Both argue the nature/nurture question and side with nature. I thought both books were pretty bad (too long, extremely uncreative in the exploration of possible reasons for their findings, and not convincing) but they did provide some fun food for thought--hence this post.

First, a summary: In Surnames, Gregory C ...more

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Jul 15, 2015 Nick Klagge rated it really liked it

Shelves: economics

This is an extremely interesting and provocative book, and I think it's worth reading for anyone interested in social stratification with a mildly quantitative bent. It has much in common with Piketty's "Capital in the 21st C.", but has received much less in the way of press coverage. Ultimately, I found the arguments and evidence presented partially convincing, but very thought-provoking.

I would distill Clark's argument down to a number of positive and normative claims.

Positive claims:
1. Social This is an extremely interesting and provocative book, and I think it's worth reading for anyone interested in social stratification with a mildly quantitative bent. It has much in common with Piketty's "Capital in the 21st C.", but has received much less in the way of press coverage. Ultimately, I found the arguments and evidence presented partially convincing, but very thought-provoking.

I would distill Clark's argument down to a number of positive and normative claims.

Positive claims:
1. Social mobility, when correctly measured, is much slower than most statistical analyses would indicate; this is due to regression dilution and is only visible when looking at very long time-series.
2. When analyzed correctly, social mobility is highly invariant to differences in culture, government, and time. In particular, estimated rates of social mobility are not appreciably different in egalitarian and non-egalitarian societies, and were not noticeably disrupted by apparent disruptions such as the cultural revolution. They have not been appreciably changed by universalization of education, the franchise, etc.
3. The observed invariance is due to something that is indistinguishable from genetic heritability.

Normative claim:
4. Taking 1-3 together, liberal social policy should focus not on encouraging social mobility per se, but on narrowing the range of variation in outcomes.

Briefly, I am convinced by 1, partially by 2, not by 3, and mostly by 4.

I won't get deeply into the statistics here, but the argument in (1) is a fairly straightforward one that I think most econometricians would buy. Regression dilution occurs when the explanatory variable in a regression is only a noisy signal of the true item of interest; in this case, the relationship between the explanatory variable and the outcome variable is estimated to be weaker than it truly is. Clark's argument is that most statistical studies of social mobility necessarily look at partial outcomes such as income, education level, etc., when what they are really interested in is some unobservable level of underlying social class that determines likely outcomes for these observable variables. (Someone of high class may drop out of Harvard to start Facebook, demonstrating a low education level, or may decide to be a poorly paid professor of art history, demonstrating a low income level.) The estimated persistence of these variables between parents and children is an underestimate of the true persistence of social class. This is observable if you look at persistence of observable characteristics over many generations, using last-name frequencies in very long time series such as attendees of Oxford or British MPs--the level of multi-generation persistence is much higher that standard estimates would indicate. (Note that noisy measurement of the outcome variable doesn't cause a similar statistical problem.)

For (2), Clark basically looks at a wide variety of available long time series across countries, and shows that the best-fit persistence parameter is reliably in the range of 0.7-0.8, indicating that something in the range of 50%-65% of social class is inherited. This is true across countries and across long time spans. As I mentioned above, I think this is partially convincing. I do buy that there is less variation than we might like to think. The history of revolutions is filled with reversals, and I think it's fair to say that most liberal policy reforms have had the effect of compressing the class distribution without upending it. On the other hand, Clark's use of long time series is also a liability. When you are fitting a time series from 1200 to the present with a single parameter, of course there will be one best-fitting parameter. When you fit the curve, all of the variations in the series will appear to be "noisy" variations around that constant line, by construction. However, I think this "noise" can obscure real variation at that kind of time scale. In particular, a lot of Clark's negative argument centers around there being little effect from the social and political reforms of the 20th century. But in these cases, we only have a handful of generational datapoints to go on. It may sound funny to say that it's "too soon to tell" if, for example, the Civil Rights Act made a difference, but in the context of 800-year time series, I think it's true. There may be a little "wiggle" at the end of your time series; is it "just a wiggle"? Statistically, I also wonder what the confidence bands on Clark's parameter estimates look like.

I think Clark's case for (3), that the invariance is due to genetic heritability, is extremely weak. (He is careful not to make this claim outright, but I would say it is what his arguments amount to.) Clark is an economist, not a natural scientist. We all know that it is extremely hard to disentangle nature from nurture. For some reason, Clark gives nature privileged position as his "null hypothesis"--he essentially says that the data he has can't identify the cause as something other than genetic heritability. He references one or two studies of adopted children, but it's very half-hearted and little enough that it could easily be cherry-picked. Given the charged nature of the question, I think Clark would have been wiser to stay away from it altogether, particularly since the answer is almost certainly "some of both." The majority of his argument stands just as well without it.

Even if I disagree with (3), I think (4) is still largely sound--the primary objective of egalitarian social policy should be to compress the range of outcomes rather than to encourage mobility across widely divergent outcomes. We know that the former is possible, and Clark's research suggests that the latter is very difficult. But more basically, we don't want people having crappy lives because of random factors. Significantly, especially to the extent that "social competence" (as Clark calls it) is heritable, it is itself a random factor. I would also argue that compression of the distribution and increased mobility are to some extent complements. The more policy compresses the distribution, the less worthwhile it is to try to maintain your position in it.

I think Clark is probably intentionally provocative, but at any rate, I thought the book was very worthwhile. ...more

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Jun 28, 2014 Brian Asquith rated it it was ok

What was great about this book was that Dr. Clark has clearly found an innovative way of tracking the status of families over time, and has applied this method of analysis to a wide variety of illuminating cases. I think he's shed some real light on the transmission of wealth and social status intergenerationally. The central premise alone will attract many readers.

That said, there are some very significant weaknesses. He reaches a very strong conclusion (it's all genetics!) on the basis of just ...more

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Jun 05, 2017 Emre Sevinç rated it it was amazing

A book that made me say "Oops! I didn't know it was that bad! Really?".

Apparently, regardless of inequality levels in a society, and the time period you and your family live in - be it a much nicer place such as Sweden, or in a society in USA where there are huge levels of inequality between people, or medieval England for a totally different scenario - once you are at the top of society, or at the bottom of it, it takes many many generations to regress to the mean. So, the good news is, at lea A book that made me say "Oops! I didn't know it was that bad! Really?".

Apparently, regardless of inequality levels in a society, and the time period you and your family live in - be it a much nicer place such as Sweden, or in a society in USA where there are huge levels of inequality between people, or medieval England for a totally different scenario - once you are at the top of society, or at the bottom of it, it takes many many generations to regress to the mean. So, the good news is, at least, there's some regress to the mean, it is not that fixed. The bad news is, it takes so long for so many families, that you can practically take it for granted that your immediate generations will not be much better off (of course, that's only bad news if you are stuck towards the bottom).

The book definitely will lead to more research for economists, sociologists, and even biologists (after all, if it's really a fact, then there must be some biological component that lead to similar results in so many different societies, economical systems, and time periods, right?).

For the rest of us, the lessons learned from this book will probably lead to a good political debate: if indeed the social mobility simply doesn't happen as much as we'd liked, independent of many parameters; then we'd better strive for less unequal societies, because as the book shows, once a family is closer to the bottom, then it'll take many many generations to get rid of this. And if "life is not fair", then we'd better make it much less painful because we can, and well, why would you even want the opposite?

I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about "why such and such groups of people can't 'make it' after so much time", as well as to the people who believe "if you really work hard, you'll make it, and so will everyone, there's this thing called social mobility". Finally, people who believe "social mobility used to be great, but it regressed in the last few decades because of policies employed by neoliberal governments and institutions" will be disappointed by this book that very strongly shows that social mobility was never at that nice level to begin with.

Note to researchers: I'd love to read a similar analysis based on data of Turkey as well as the Ottoman Empire, who knows, maybe we'll come across a surprise? ...more

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Dec 18, 2015 Dan Allosso rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: oligarchy, history

Edit: it finally occurred to me: this is a book written by someone who has never seen the movie Gattaca.

This is a book that claims social mobility in modern America is basically the same as in modern Sweden, and that both are in fact just about the same as in sixteenth-century England. Everywhere, Gregory Clark says, persistence of social status is much higher than we normally suppose. Where most sociologists estimate persistence in the range of 40%, Clark puts it between 75% and 80%. And as men Edit: it finally occurred to me: this is a book written by someone who has never seen the movie Gattaca.

This is a book that claims social mobility in modern America is basically the same as in modern Sweden, and that both are in fact just about the same as in sixteenth-century England. Everywhere, Gregory Clark says, persistence of social status is much higher than we normally suppose. Where most sociologists estimate persistence in the range of 40%, Clark puts it between 75% and 80%. And as mentioned, he says it has never really changed throughout history and that it's the same pretty much everywhere. As a result, the descendants of the victorious Normans of 1066 are still disproportionately represented in the British Parliament, and the famous but tiny Pepys family has sent many more than its share of young men to Oxford and Cambridge.

First, I've gotta say that it doesn't really come as a surprise to me that the elite stay elite or that it can take 20 or 30 generations for a family at the top of the heap to "revert to the mean." Although Clark says it's statistically improbable for the Pepys clan to have continued to send more than its share to the best British schools, I don't think it's socially improbable at all. In fact, it's the outcome I expected.

The interesting thing about this book, though, is that Clark posits (without ever really coming right out and saying it) a genetic component to elite status and persistence. Rather than saying that the Pepys boys were accorded special privileges at elite British schools or that the sons and grandsons of hereditary MPs were more likely to be elected to Parliament, Clark says there's something called underlying social competence, and that it is inherited.

Hang on, what? Clark says that elite status is in the genes? Well, not exactly. What he says is that there's an unknown cluster of characteristics that, taken together, make a person socially "competent," and that these characteristics seem to be inherited. Although Clark's equation has a term built in for dumb luck, he thinks the randomness is much less than we normally believe it to be. If you're looking for a marriage partner, Clark says, don't trust the status of the individual alone. It might be luck. Look at the status of the whole family, and you'll get an indication of your potential partner's "competence" genes.

I haven't been able to find any reviews of this idea by historians (and just a couple by economists), possibly because the book was only published in 2014 and the glaciers of academic reviewing haven't ground it down yet. However, Richard V. Reeves of the Brookings Institution wrote a three-part take-down called "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" in March 2014. Reeves, who also recently wrote a long essay supporting the rags-to-riches perspective of Horatio Alger, says Clark's perspective is racist. Or at least genetically deterministic, which he suggests is basically the same thing. Clark responded that he wasn't being racist, some of the elite groups he tracks in the book are in fact of African descent. But Reeves has a point. "Racism is not History," he says. Yeah, the guy from Brookings is saying the effects of slavery and the rest of America's racist history are still being felt. Wow.

Clark's main point isn't really about race, though. He uses adoption and twin studies to suggest that there's an element to life success that isn't explainable by nurture. Even if that effect isn't as complete as Clark implies (I think he brushes by some of the caveats and exceptions in the studies he cites a little to quickly), it's a challenging idea.

The problem is, there's not enough to grab onto. The 11 herbs and spices remain secret -- we never find out what mental, emotional, physical, or other characteristics make a person "socially competent." And it's hard to believe that the factors that made people successful in the sixteenth century are all the same as those that make people successful today. Nor is there any real explanation of how particular families got to the top of the heap in the first place. The mobility equation takes center stage, and we don't really get to look under the hood at the social factors that could have led to success and then sustained it. This is unfortunate, because since Clark hasn't really identified the machine working behind the scenes, it's entirely possible that the effects he's measuring to derive the equation are in fact social rather than biological.

When Clark says the social mobility in Sweden is as low as in America or early-modern England, he's not saying that inequality is the same. The penalty of being at the bottom in a welfare society like Sweden is obviously much lower than it was in England or is in the US (I wonder if the lesser downside of low social mobility in Sweden doesn't have something to do with it continuing?). Clark does suggest that in a society like the US where Reeves's Horatio Alger dream is pretty much an illusion, we ought to think harder about our safety net.

Clark's numbers suggest that a person's status at birth can predict a lot about their life chances. That's a slap in the face to the American Dream. But let's think about it. If he's right at all -- even if we have no idea why he's right and disagree with the theory he advances to explain it -- then we really ought to be doing more to make it less painful to be average or poor in America.
...more

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Mar 24, 2014 Tim rated it really liked it

Now this is an interesting book! I hope the book becomes a seminal work where others research and write on the topic, because it's utterly fascinating and enlightening.

I've read Charles Murray's Coming Apart. I enjoyed the read and believe Murray describes a social phenomena fairly well. The Son Also Rises takes direct issue with a main thesis of Coming Apart and sheds significant light on what's really happening. Further, this book elucidates other social phenomena discussed in books such as Th ...more

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May 12, 2017 Andrea Dumont rated it did not like it

Shelves: nonfiction

Started this book on audiobook. Found it was too boring to continue.

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Mar 16, 2014 Jonathan Jeckell rated it liked it

Shelves: economics, political-science, advisor

Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of the Political Order" and Peter Turchin's "War and Peace and War" both cited the role of social mobility in their theories, so this seemed to provide important insight into how this really works. This volume seemed to thoroughly explain the methodology and statistics to back up the author's assertions. He tested his model against data from Medieval England, modern England, the US, Sweden, China, India, and Chile. Social mobility was lower in almost all cases fro Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of the Political Order" and Peter Turchin's "War and Peace and War" both cited the role of social mobility in their theories, so this seemed to provide important insight into how this really works. This volume seemed to thoroughly explain the methodology and statistics to back up the author's assertions. He tested his model against data from Medieval England, modern England, the US, Sweden, China, India, and Chile. Social mobility was lower in almost all cases from conventional measures, and does not seem to have declined or improved with time. The author based this assertion by tracking surnames over time and used various measures of their social status to watch how fast they regress to the mean. Poor families should improve, and wealthy families should decline over time. However, higher status families tend to persist more than predicted. The author did not seem to consider the far greater human aversion to loss over opportunity seeking. He also identified several outlier groups and explained their unusual persistence (intra-group marriage or selective admission to the group, for example). His conclusion seems to be that your station in life is determined quite a bit by your genetics, although he qualified that by saying individual effort makes use of what nature provides. Education and other ways families prepare their child seem to make only a marginal difference. He demonstrated that social policies to improve social mobility and equality have had negligible effect. However, in his conclusion he bafflingly suggests more redistributive social policies.

His methodology relied heavily upon using rare surnames to track elite and poor families, but I cannot help but wonder if the very fact that the surnames are rare that they are outliers in other regards as well.

The takeaway from this should be that poverty and wealth are not permanent--even if the process is slow, talent emerges from the poorest families and brings them up, and elite families can't hang on to their position for long without merit. What's important is equality of opportunity and before the law, not outcome.

Update: I'm concerned that some people will take away ideas that reinforce and justify associating with and marrying within their class to preserve their children's advantages. Worse, they could revive eugenic ideologies and accelerate the race to genetically engineer our offspring. ...more

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Jun 21, 2015 Luis rated it really liked it

Shelves: economía, desigualdad-y-pobreza

El punto fuerte del libro es la original e innovadora idea de medir la movilidad social a través de los apellidos. Lo que hacen es observar que tan comunes son ciertos apellidos dentro de las élites o las clases bajas a lo largo del tiempo comparando con qué tan comunes son esos apellidos dentro de la población en general. Este enfoque permite hacer estudios de mucho más largo aliento (remontándose hasta la edad media para el caso de Reino Unido) y observar cómo se van moviendo dentro de una soc ...more

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Mar 26, 2014 Chris rated it really liked it

If you thought social mobility was larger in Sweden than in the USA, think again. Unlike most of what we read about social mobility, which focuses on income of parents and their children, this book focuses on social status, which takes into account wealth, income, occupation, health, and longevity. The book's analysis is done mainly through looking at how quickly surnames with high and low social status regress to the mean social status. The results raise questions about the extent to which soci ...more

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Jul 02, 2014 Peter Murray rated it it was amazing

Gregory Clarke concludes that the social persistence rate in the United States to be about 0.75, which means he can pretty much tell you how American newborns are going to end up in life, on average, based on parents' social status. In fact, it takes about 15 generations for the social status of families to not have predictive power of the future of newborn babies in capitalist United States.
But here's what's interesting: the same persistence rate exists for people in socialist Sweden (universal ...more

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Jul 11, 2014 The American Conservative added it

Shelves: reviewed-books

"So is this belief in the persistence of familial advantage just a popular delusion? That is the question that U.C. Davis economist Gregory Clark takes up in his new book, and the answer he found surprised even him. He set out thinking the social-science consensus was correct, intending only to extend those findings further into the past. But the evidence changed his mind: social scientists have been measuring mobility the wrong way, and in fact the popular intuition is on target."

Gene Callahan ...more

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May 21, 2016 Nick rated it really liked it

Incredibly well researched and written, the book suggests that socioeconomic moblity is very slow irrespective of government policies. While everyone ultimately regresses to the mean over time, those that come from higher socioeconomic strata (the author's research uses surnames) and marry well and have good luck--consistently reproduce and generate income--can maintain higher socioeconomic status for centuries. The author cites examples: Ashkenazi Jews and Brahmin Indians.

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Mar 17, 2015 Benjamin rated it really liked it

Very clever use of surname data to estimate the rate of social mobility across societies.

Goes to show why the welfare states of Western-Europe are most in line with the nature of human nature by somewhat levelling the unequal outgrowths of the lottery called life. Or why only mediocre people tend to whine about high taxes and an empathic state, talented people tend to realize talent is its own reward.

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Aug 17, 2014 Seth Benzell rated it liked it

Shelves: economics

A book which asks all the right questions, I wish I could give "The Son Also Rises" 5 stars. However, there are serious issues with the books core methodology. I tend to side with those who, like Chetty, contend that what Clark is mostly measuring is the rate of group convergence rather than family convergence. Look forward to my forthcoming paper for more on how to reconcile Clark's measures with he measures of more traditional intergenerational researchers!

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Jun 15, 2014 Santino Maguire rated it liked it

Had some fascinating insights into social mobility (there's not a lot of it, and that is maybe a good thing), but the best part of the book to me was that it was a case study in good experiment design.

I wouldn't recommend it, but if you are going to anyway, you can skim it -- the conclusions keep being the same.

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Oct 18, 2016 Jong Kim rated it it was amazing

A difficult subject to investigate. However, surname based data mining was well conducted. Sounds like the single most important decision in one's life is finding a good spouse according to this book. (It's not a spoiler. The book (kind of) starts with the conclusion and explains the process of the analysis, which is fascinating.)

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Jun 26, 2014 Vaidotas rated it really liked it

Correlation part for social immobility is incredible, but causation is questionable and needs more studies.

Need to read "Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else" again after such a demotivating book :)

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Jan 27, 2015 黃逸杉 rated it really liked it · review of another edition

運用追蹤姓氏的新方法，指出了世界各國社會階級低流動的證據，優勢或劣勢家族往往要三四百年的時間才能迴歸平均數，「翻身」對於窮人來說是少見的機會。統計亦顯示流動率呈常數，政治經濟社會的不同對此影響並不大。

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May 03, 2014 Brian rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: Anyone who doesn't mind books containing lots of data

Recommended

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Dec 30, 2014 Skylar Lee rated it really liked it

very interesting read.
will have to be very cautious on who to recommend this book to.
some may abuse the conclusion of the book

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Aug 26, 2014 Tahrana rated it really liked it

Very academic approach to the idea of social mobility by looking at census, doctor, and lawyer registrations in various countries over the last two centuries. Interesting argument and conclusion.

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Sep 28, 2015 Abu Dhabi rated it really liked it

Shelves: mainstream, history

Not as interesting as Alms, but also very good.

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Jan 03, 2015 Mjcox12 rated it really liked it

Audible

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Paul Johannesson rated it it was amazing
Jan 17, 2015

Ariel-David Lactaoen rated it really liked it
Mar 17, 2016

Yukietea rated it really liked it
Jul 24, 2015

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About Gregory Clark

Clark, whose grandfathers were migrants to Scotland from Ireland, earned his B.A. in economics and philosophy at King's College, Cambridge in 1979 and his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1985. He has also taught as an Assistant Professor at Stanford and the University of Michigan.
Clark is now a professor of economics and department chair until 2013 at the University of California, Davis. His areas of research ...more

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“the good society would have a low rate of inheritance of social status and correspondingly low variations in income and wealth.” — 1 likes

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