Comment by pjc50
1 day ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sovereign_Individual : 1997, since I had to check.
> Interesting how often you meet the same people if you just start digging a little.
Endemic problem in UK politics, and a lot of other countries.
I think it's lost on people outside of the UK - perhaps even to many inside the UK - just how strongly there is a class divide and a ruling elite. The old money is very old indeed
Indeed. You are literally likely to be in a better social class today if your ancestors were Normans conquerors rather than the Anglo-Saxon conquered.
https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60593/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRAR...
Thanks that sounds fascinating. Will take a look
Actually, that 0.7 intergenerational correlation only tracks surnames—i.e., the male line. It completely ignores the fact that ~50% of the population changes status by marriage, which is invisible in surname analysis. Think about it: when a blacksmith’s daughter marries a baron, her social mobility doesn’t show up anywhere in the data. She just becomes part of the baron’s lineage going forward. So Clark has discovered that patrilineal dynasties persist with 0.7 correlation, and then presented this as if it were a measure of social mobility. It’s not. It’s a measure of surname mobility. If assortative mating across 500 years averaged something like 0.5 (plausible—people married outside their exact status all the time), the actual population-wide status persistence might be closer to 0.4 than 0.7. That’s… a completely different story about how stratified society actually was. But sure, “elites persist for centuries” makes for better book sales than “we measured half the mobility and ignored the other half.”
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