Just because it is unpleasant doesn't mean it is untrue

A worthwhile piece from The Atlantic, What's in a Name? Everything by Benjamin M. Friedman.  He is wrestling with the findings from the work of Gregory Clark which suggest that social mobility (achievement of social status however defined) is about the same worldwide, is exceptionally slow, and is not affected by government policy or social customs.  

Friedman starts with:

Who gets ahead is always a topic of intense interest, especially in a society like America’s, without a legally established aristocracy at the top of the pile. As Tocqueville observed after visiting the new republic, the widespread perception that anyone can get ahead creates a presumption that everyone has an obligation to at least try. Nearly two centuries later, both the perception and the sense of obligation that follows are still firmly in place. According to the World Values Survey, while 60 percent of Europeans say they think “the poor are trapped in poverty,” only 29 percent of Americans think so. Instead, 60 percent of Americans think “the poor are lazy,” compared with just 26 percent of Europeans.

[snip]

Mobility is hard to measure, however, turning not just on who earns what today but on how what people earn—and what they have—relates to their parents’ income and wealth, and their grandparents’ and prior generations’ too. Economists, to their credit, are increasingly stepping up to this difficult empirical challenge. Some are tackling the politically touchy question of whether mobility is greater in America than in western-European countries. (Our traditional civic myth notwithstanding, the answer is no.) Others are investigating whether mobility in America has declined in recent years. (Contrary to President Obama’s recent statements, it apparently hasn’t.)

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California at Davis, has looked at these questions through a different lens. Clark, too, finds that mobility here is no greater than in Europe, and that U.S. mobility hasn’t declined. But he comes to a more fundamental, far more powerful conclusion. Clark argues that mobility is always the same—in all societies, and in every era. Mobility, he claims, is “a universal constant”; over time we thrive or not according to a “social law of motion,” a “social physics of intergenerational mobility.” And to make matters worse, the universal speed at which families and groups change their social position is slow—a lot slower than everyone thinks on the basis of previous research. 

Four obvious issues:

• Is social mobility as defined by Clark (more than income and wealth, encompassing education attainment, political office, etc.) a better definition on which to examine social mobility than the simple notion of income?
• Is it really the same worldwide?
• Is it really as slow as Clark estimates?
• Could it really be true that government policy and social customs have little impact over time.

I am familiar with Clark's work and have been intrigued by it but have always had a niggling concern whether his approach is better.  I agree with his wider definition of social status over simple income. 

Crudely, what Clark does is look at the prevalence of distinct names among the social elite and social dregs at any point in the past and in any country and then determines whether their descendants now have remained at, dropped, or risen in the intervening decades or centuries.

But how does Clark get at the persistence of his all-encompassing concept of status? His method relies on the tendency, in most societies, for a son to bear his father’s surname (hence his book’s title: The Son Also Rises). Specifically, Clark measures the persistence of status by looking at what has happened over time to groups of people bearing names that, at some point in the past—generations or even centuries ago—indicated socioeconomic status either well above or well below that of the general population.

It’s fascinating how many such groups he has managed to round up. In America, his examples include people with the same last names as those who attended Ivy League universities in the early 19th century and people with identifiably Jewish names (in both cases groups with higher-than-average status); he also looks at those with names that suggest people who are black, or Native American, or the descendants of immigrants from French Canada (all lower than average). How he measures these groups’ socioeconomic status over time is quite specific as well: their educational attainment, their representation in elite professions like medicine and law, and, conversely, their representation in generally low-status occupations like farming and domestic service.

It has the advantage that the records are more extensive and deeper in time than those for income which are really mostly available in a few countries, primarily western, and primarily in the past century. 

The results are remarkably consistent. In these and more than a dozen other examples, Clark again and again finds evidence of far less mobility—a much slower rate of convergence toward the society’s general population, from either above or below—than what researchers using conventional methods have concluded.

The disadvantage of Clark’s surname method is its lack of precision about the parent-child link. The name De Belcamp, for example, wasn’t common in England in Norman times, and its modern equivalents, Beauchamp and Beacham, aren’t now. Even so, according to Clark, 3,352 Brits bear those names today. He doesn’t know who is really descended from whom. This is a far cry from the directly connected information about parents’ and children’s incomes on which most other researchers today rely.

I am really happy to see someone of such intellectual achievement as Friedman looking at Clark's work.  I haven't been able to find a clear flaw in it, despite my nagging doubts.  Nor does Friedman.

Over time, the results of Clark's research has been driving him towards a conclusion that many, including myself, are uncomfortable with.

Otherwise Clark’s is indeed a discouraging story—as, inevitably, is just about any account of human existence in which heredity is the dominant factor governing our individual destinies. As he did in his earlier book, Farewell to Alms (the annoying Hemingway puns come without explanation), Clark mostly maintains a studied ambiguity about whether our “general social competence” can be traced to genetics: “By and large, social mobility has characteristics that do not rule out genetics as the dominant connection between the generations.” And elsewhere: “This is not to say that social status is determined genetically. But whatever drives it is, on the tests performed here, indistinguishable from genetic inheritance.” As the book moves on, however, it becomes ever clearer that Clark has our genes in mind.

In the same couple of decades Clark has been producing his work, we have made enormous strides in genetic research, both in mechanisms and in historical genetics.  The findings there have been paralleling those of Clark.  In other words, what Clark is seeing in the name/social status record is mirrored by the mechanism revealed in genetic transmission.  

As a specific example, IQ is not due to a singular IQ gene, it is polygenetic in nature.  Many genes, to varying degrees, contribute to an overall IQ outcome.  It is also becoming more and more clear that behaviors are both genetic in origin, polygenetic in nature, and heritable.  

If you have high (inferred) IQ people five hundred years ago with high social status practicing (often unconsciously) high assortative mating where they marry within a high IQ/Social strata, there is likely to be a strongly persistent force within the family.  At the margin there will be some geniuses rising (and disproportionate to the population at large) and some dimwits sliding down the social status ranks but on average most will persist and over time there will likely be a regression to mean.

You also see this in countries who suffer catastrophic events such as plague or military invasion/defeat, or other reverses.  High ranking rich people become poor, as does everyone else.  They have to abandon their lands or professions.  But eventually, within a generation or two, the same families, regardless of the persistence and extent of the reverses, come back.  

Friedman is appalled by the implications of Clark's work because it goes against both the American creed as well as many of our Age of Enlightenment classical liberal assumptions.  I am both excited that it seems we are beginning to get a line of sight on the causal mechanisms of life achievement but am also concerned about the genetic aspect of it.

In some respects, the US has delivered on its aspirational goal of rule of law, equality before the law, due process, property rights, natural rights, human universalism, individualism, etc.  We have built an edifice of fairness in which anyone with talent can rise, subject to the slings and arrows of random exogenous fortune, to the height of their capabilities regardless of race, religion, national origin, or native culture.

At the same time, we are discovering that individuals are shaped by their heritage in a way we did not earlier know and that genetic luck of the draw plays a bigger role than we anticipated.

There is nothing wrong with this.  It merely makes clearer something we have been comfortable overlooking.  

There is nothing wrong with this in the sense that any society is only as safe and resilient as it is productive.  Our system maximizes the prospect of everyone being as productive individually and collectively as they wish to be.  We foster growth and risk taking.  

Inherently though, per our genetic research and Clark's findings, those with the best genetic mix of talents and desires and capabilities are those most likely to rise on a purely Darwinian basis.  

The disappointment is that as Classical Liberals we have viewed this achievement with great pride.  Anyone with talent will have an equal opportunity to rise and we can see in the data that indeed high IQ people with a desirable package of behaviors (such as work ethic, self-control, pro-sociability, etc.) do rise to the top.

But the implication is mathematically necessary that those with fewer of those attributes will fall or remain low in the distribution even if the tide is rising for everyone in terms of prosperity.

It makes sense.  And it is better than any other alternative.  All other places which have tried to enforce equal outcomes regardless of origin and ability has relatively quickly failed and usually brought catastrophe with that failure.

Fascinatingly, we see assortative mating occurring across race, religion and cultural origin.  The successful marry the successful.   But we have much less mating across class lines.  This is a new danger to us which we still do not discuss and don't have clear scenarios to address.  

All this makes a Classical Liberal of Age of Enlightenment values markedly uncomfortable.  But reality, if it is indeed that, does not exist for any particular age or particular class's comfort.

The social justice warriors, BLMers, Antifa fascists, critical race theorists, socialist and communists all want to fundamentally transform our fair system (all rules apply to all people with equal opportunity for all) into a Harrison Bergeron dystopia which makes everyone equal in misery and mediocrity.  That is no viable alternative to the Age of Enlightenment vision and success.

But what, if anything, should we do to ensure that not only does everyone have an equal opportunity but that the less gifted are not in some way disadvantaged.  The historical answer has been to gloss over the issue with the observation that as long as the rising tide is raising everyone, even if it is due to the best being the most productive, then that is at least a good outcome.

And to some extent that might the additional truth we have not grappled with.  The household consumption of America's poorest quintile is, in 2021, higher than the average or high income quintiles in almost every country in the world.

But we are still not talking about any of this and certainly have no social comfort with some of the implications.