We inherit our "social competences." Social mobility is low in the USA (and everywhere else).The shadow of past poverty/prosperity lingers for 10-15 generations. Your surname says a lot about your prospects (which is a truly surprising conclusion). Gregory Clark does not say it explicitly but his surname test is implicitly a caste test, whereby people are classified by the work they do and the status they carry in society (nobles, artisans, shopkeepers).
....new research from Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez indicating that social mobility in the United States is not falling, offering the not-so-reassuring news that the reason it isn't falling is that it's been low for a long time.
.....
.........a different research program, associated with UC–Davis economic historian Gregory Clark, which argues that economic mobility is low almost everywhere. He reaches this conclusion with a different research method that lets
him explore much longer-term trends than most of the research you see
on this. .......if you have a noble surname in Sweden today, we know that
your father's father's father's father's father's father's father (or
whatever) was a member of the Swedish elite more than 300 years ago. By
contrast, if you have the last name "Andersson" then that means that
your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather
wasn't a nobleman and probably didn't practice a skilled trade either.
That's why he wound up with the generic surname. So we can look at the
present-day incomes of people with noble surnames and compare them to
the present-day incomes of people named "Andersson" and get a picture of
the long-term persistence of the noble/Andersson class gap.
And it's all the more striking precisely because this identification strategy is rather crude. A person with a noble surname could still be of mostly lower- or middle-class ancestry and vice versa, so the surname thing should underestimate the long-term persistence of the class gap in Sweden.
.....
According to a new book, The Son Also Rises, by academic Gregory Clark, our chances of getting on in life are largely down to what our family did 300 years ago. Contrary to brighter estimates, which suggest that past prosperity or poverty can be erased in three to four generations, Clark reckons it takes 10 to 15.
"Social mobility rates are similar across societies that vary dramatically in their institutions and income levels. Cradle-to-grave socialist Sweden and dog-eat-dog, free-to-lose America have similar rates. Communist China and capitalist Taiwan have similar rates.
regards
....new research from Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez indicating that social mobility in the United States is not falling, offering the not-so-reassuring news that the reason it isn't falling is that it's been low for a long time.
.....
And it's all the more striking precisely because this identification strategy is rather crude. A person with a noble surname could still be of mostly lower- or middle-class ancestry and vice versa, so the surname thing should underestimate the long-term persistence of the class gap in Sweden.
.....
According to a new book, The Son Also Rises, by academic Gregory Clark, our chances of getting on in life are largely down to what our family did 300 years ago. Contrary to brighter estimates, which suggest that past prosperity or poverty can be erased in three to four generations, Clark reckons it takes 10 to 15.
"Social mobility rates are similar across societies that vary dramatically in their institutions and income levels. Cradle-to-grave socialist Sweden and dog-eat-dog, free-to-lose America have similar rates. Communist China and capitalist Taiwan have similar rates.
regards
You are aware that economic mobility and caste system are two different animals, correct? You can be as rich as you can be, but as an SC or Muslim, your chances of outmarriage or fining an apartment is rather minimal. Using American research to quantify Indian sociological paradoxes , is like, lame.
ReplyDeleteThis, comment,somehow appears on the wrong post.
Greg Clark of UC davis has studies ECONOMIC Mobility of India here "http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/The%20Son%20Also%20Rises/India2013.pdf". His conclusion is the opposite. "a recent study suggests the Indian intergeneration income elasticity is 0.58 (Hnatkovska et al., 2012) This would indeed classify India on an international scale as one of the world’s more immobile societies, as is shown in figure 2. However, since the estimated intergenerational income elasticity for the UK is 0.5, and the US 0.47, this also implies that social mobility rates in India are not too much lower than in the UK or USA (Corak, 2012). Since (.58)2
= 0.34 measures the share of income variance in the next generation explained through inheritance from parents it also implies that even in India the majority if people’s position in the income ranks is not derived from inheritance."
The new Greg Clark book "the son also rises" also says "This suggests that even in India, an individual’s position in the income ranks is not primarily derived from inheritance. Thus, by conventional estimates, modern India has become a society of rapid social mobility, where three to four generations might see the elimination of all traces of millennia-old patterns of inequality "
This does not mean that the caste system is broken; simply stratification is forming inside each caste.
To be honest, Greg clark, an a number of other people (Munshi, Rosenszweig, Hnatskova) have studied and illustrated that economic mobility is high, and social mobility is low. Meaning, economic mobility without social mobility results ins stratified castes with a strong caste identification. This explains PMK, The various RPIs,a and BSP. The poor in a particular caste follow the rich in their caste, but the rich in the caste. e.g., Khobragade, align with rich in other castes.
ReplyDeleteI found this quote on twitter which is a very succinct argument against caste system... “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” (Thucydides)
ReplyDeleteNo wonder, liberals everywhere rail against war and argue for multilateral institutions to sort out issues :-)