Oh, dear. Affiliative networks, personal choices and behaviors once again seem causally determinative

 Another drop of information added to the pool.  From The Wealth of Parents: Trends Over Time in Assortative Mating Based on Parental Wealth by Sander Wagner, Diederik Boertien and Mette Gortz.  From the Abstract:  

This article describes trends in parental wealth homogamy among union cohorts formed between 1987 and 2013 in Denmark. Using high-quality register data on the wealth of parents during the year of partnering, we show that the correlation between partners’ levels of parental wealth is considerably lower compared with estimates from research on other countries. Nonetheless, parental wealth homogamy is high at the very top of the parental wealth distribution, and individuals from wealthy families are relatively unlikely to partner with individuals from families with low wealth. Parental wealth correlations among partners are higher when only parental assets rather than net wealth are examined, implying that the former might be a better measure for studying many social stratification processes. Most specifications indicate that homogamy increased in the 2000s relative to the 1990s, but trends can vary depending on methodological choices. The increasing levels of parental wealth homogamy raise concerns that over time, partnering behavior has become more consequential for wealth inequality between couples.

 The Danes and Swedes tend to have pretty excellent longitudinal data.  The first couple of paragraphs give some good context.

Partnering behavior is a key determinant of various aspects of well-being (Schwartz 2013). From an economic point of view, marriage and cohabitation are a foundation for sharing many public goods, specialization, risk pooling, and the coordination of domestic labor among partners (Browning et al. 2014). Therefore, it is unsurprising that couples do not form at random or irrespective of partner’s characteristics and that marital sorting is a key feature of marriage models (Becker 1973, 1991; Lam 1988). Social scientists have long documented patterns of assortative mating based on ascribed characteristics, such as parental occupation and ethnicity (Kalmijn 1998; Schwartz 2013), as well as on acquired characteristics, such as education and earnings (Blossfeld 2009; Pencavel 1998; Rosenfeld 2008; Schwartz 2010; Schwartz and Mare 2005).

 Besides the impact of partnering on individual well-being, assortative mating has been of interest for research on social stratification because it potentially impacts the distribution of resources across households and shapes boundaries between social groups (Kremer 1997; Schwartz 2010, 2013). In this article, we study partner selection based on parental wealth, a characteristic that is of particular interest for social stratification research for several reasons. First, a substantial amount of own wealth is the result of inheritances. These transfers can be observable in the wealth of individuals if parents have deceased, but they are generally a latent expectation of future transfers that are not measurable at the moment of couple formation given that most parents are still alive. Kopczuk and Lupton’s (2007) review of the literature estimated bequests to account for approximately 35% to 45% of the overall wealth of an individual in the United States. Therefore, high levels of parental wealth homogamy may contribute to wealth inequality between households. Second, wealth homogamy can shed light on important questions about intergenerational mobility processes. The extent to which families reproduce their accumulated wealth across generations through dynastic wealth is bound to depend on partnering choices.

35-45% of overall wealth arising from inheritances?  That sounds too high to me, except perhaps at the 5% or 1% level of the population.  Most studies show, in the US, a lot of dynamism as to who are on the Fortune 400 list or among billionaires.  People move in and out of these lists at a relatively high rate and family fortunes tend to dissipate across three generations.  Not that they go from riches to rags but Gilded Age robber baron families, three generations on are merely middle class or upper middle class. 

At a decadal level there seems to be a lot of movement but at the century level, Gregory Clark's work seems to indicate that across countries and cultures and across several centuries, the same families tend to keep appearing in the upper reaches of a society, come famine or war or civilizational collapse or invasion or what not.  They keep bubbling up.

Then there was the study out of Sweden within the last five years or so, looking at how lottery winnings change life outcomes of families.  My recollection is that basically it does not other than the rate of consumption goes up.  Education attainment, family formation rates, adherence of the law, work patterns all remain the same to what they were before the windfall.  If they were diligent, hard working, maritally stable, educated before, those behaviors continued.  Likewise with those who had broken labor patterns, high divorce rates, brushes with the law, low education attainment.

Access to resources does not determine behaviors, it merely amplifies them was the broad conclusion.

In sum, across these three studies we have a reality much more shaped by longterm conditions than we might otherwise wish.  It would be nice if every generation started afresh and everyone rose to their meritocratic desserts.  In much of the developed West, we are not far from that vision.  

But the closer we get, the more choices people have, and the more the underlying hardwiring becomes apparent.

These three research paths suggest that 1) choices around marriage are material and somewhat determinative of future wealth outcomes, and 2) that there is a substantial genetic component that drives familial life outcomes across multiple causal mechanisms including physical condition, cognitive capability and behavioral attributes.  

Much of this evidence cuts directly against contemporary academic ideologies (critical theory, postmodernism, feminist theory, etc.), at least those within the humanities.  It is no wonder there is such factionalism.  Personal experience, evidence, history and scientific research point in one direction and theoretical ideologies passionately believed point another.