29 The measure here of the social status of groups correlates well with other measures, such as average household income by country of origin, where these surname groups can be identified with nationalities. See U.S. Census Bureau 2010.
30 Feliciano 2005, 140.
31 The Cajun community of Louisiana originated in groups expelled in 1763 from Acadia by the British. Many of their surnames overlap with those of other New France groups, but some are distinct. Here they are identified as names ending in -eaux, an ending common in Louisiana but generally uncommon elsewhere in North America, of which less than 10 percent of holders in 2000 were black. The most prominent such name is Boudreaux, which is twenty times more common in Louisiana than in any other U.S. state or Canadian province, and sixty times more common in the United States than in France.
32 These were identified as surnames whose greatest concentration was in the six main centers of Hmong settlement: Fresno, Merced, and Sacramento, California; Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
33 Moraga 2011. The average male migrant in the period 2000–2004 had 7.2 years of schooling, compared to 8.5 for the average nonmigrant, and on average earned only 71 percent of nonmigrants’ earnings. Women migrants had 8.4 years of schooling compared to 7.9 for nonmigrants but earned only 77 percent of average nonmigrants’ earnings. Since four-fifths of migrants were male, the net effect is one of strong negative selection (p. 76).
34 Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson 2012.
FOURTEEN
Mobility Anomalies
The same Norman nobility which surrounded the throne of the Conqueror, continues, in its remote posterity, to occupy the same place in the reign of the Conqueror’s latest descendant, our present sovereign—continues to occupy its baronial place in Parliament—continues to preside on the judicial bench—continues to lead our armies and navies in battle, and continues generally to control and direct the affairs of the English empire.
The Norman People and Their Existing Descendants in the British Dominions and the United States of America, 1874
THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER LISTED SOME seeming deviations from the social law of motion that can be explained by processes of selection, selective affiliation to groups, or differential fertility within groups. There are some other anomalies that are not so easy to explain and that violate the idea that there is one underlying rate of persistence for all social groups.
One of these anomalies concerns the composition of the English and Welsh Members of the Westminster Parliament. We have records of the composition of Parliament since 1295. It is a small group: until the seventeenth century, MPs numbered between two and three hundred, expanding to 513 by 1678. The England and Wales membership of the U.K. Parliament has remained in the range 485–573 down to the present. MPs represent a tiny fraction of the population, and their social status is somewhat unclear.
Parliaments began to assemble regularly in the reign of Edward I (r. 1272–1307), who engaged in significant numbers of expansionary military campaigns against the Welsh and Scots and needed parliamentary approval to raise the taxes required to fund them. Before the 1832 Reform Act, the Parliament contained two sorts of representatives. First, there were two knights from each county, 74 MPs in all. Second, there were variable numbers of representatives of boroughs, the burgesses, with 170 towns in England at various times having the right to send representatives to Parliament.
The county knights seem to have had higher status: in the fourteenth century they were paid forty-eight pence per day for attending Parliament and burgesses only twenty-four pence. However, given that the day wage of a laborer was no more than threepence per day, these were clearly all high-status individuals. The representatives came from the most influential commoners in each town and county. Absent better evidence, it is assumed that Parliament represented the top 0.5 percent of society throughout these years.
Based on the evidence of social mobility in education and for wealth, as illustrated by surname groups (see chapters 4 and 5), artisan surnames would be expected to have had a proportional representation among MPs in England. But that is not the case. Figure 14.1 shows the share of artisan surnames in Parliament compared to their share among Oxford and Cambridge students. There is a lot of variation, because of the small size and infrequent meetings of early Parliaments, but artisan surnames are systematically underrepresented until the late nineteenth century.
The absence of a representative share of people with artisan surnames before 1900 is reflected in a surprising abundance of the surnames of medieval elites. Figure 14.2, for example, shows the relative representation of locative surnames and Norman surnames in Parliament.
The Norman surnames are the most striking anomaly. Until 1800, Norman surnames were eight times more likely than the typical surname to appear among MPs. This implies an astonishing persistence of political status for the descendants of the determined band of adventurers who triumphed on the bloody battlefield of Hastings on October 14, 1066. More than seven hundred years later, their descendants were still heavily overrepresented in Parliament.
FIGURE 14.1. Percentages of artisan surnames among MPs and among Oxford and Cambridge students, 1300–2012.
FIGURE 14.2. Relative representation of Norman and locative surnames among MPs, 1300–2012.
High-status locative surnames from the medieval period also show unusual persistence in Parliament. By 1700 their relative representation was still about twice the expected rate. By the eighteenth century, the persistence rate for both the locative and the Norman surnames had declined to the levels we find for surname groups in general. Thus, as figure 14.3 shows, the intergenerational correlation for locative surnames between 1700 and 2012 is 0.84. By the twentieth century, the overrepresentation of locative surnames among MPs had declined to a mere 10 percent. But even in the twentieth century, Norman surnames remained overrepresented among English and Welsh MPs in Parliament.
The persistence among MPs of the surnames of the medieval elite remains something of a mystery. Moreover, it seems to have been unaffected by changes to the composition of Parliament in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As can be seen in figure 14.3, the parliamentary and voting reforms of 1832, 1867, and 1918 are not associated with any sudden changes in the surname composition of MPs.
FIGURE 14.3. Social mobility rate of locative surnames among MPs, 1680–2012.
Norman surnames are also significantly overrepresented in English armies in the years 1369–1453, more than three hundred years (ten generations) after the Norman Conquest. This was the period of the Hundred Years’ War, the long struggle between the French and English crowns for control of the English-held territories in France. The evidence on the composition of armies comes from surviving muster rolls, which list soldiers engaged in English armies in France, Scotland, Wales, and elsewhere.1
Table 14.1 shows the numbers of those serving at various ranks in the English armed forces and also the percentage of their surnames that come from the Norman-derived surname sample discussed in chapter 4. Norman surnames clearly still represented an elite. The higher the social status of the person in the army, the greater the share of Norman surnames. At the top level—earls, barons, and bishops—approximately a fifth of those recorded have Norman surnames, as opposed to less than 0.3 percent of the general population in England who bore such surnames.
What is surprising, however, is the heavy concentration of Norman-derived surnames at all ranks of the armed forces. Even among the lowest ranks of the army, the archers, Norman surnames still show up at three or four times the frequency predicted by their population share. Archers were skilled workers, with wages comparable to artisans, but did not rank particularly high on the social scale. The preponderance of Norman surnames among them thus does not stem from the relatively high social status of these names: to the contrary, this should have led to Norman surnames’ being underrepresented in these ranks. Instead it seems to suggest that even ten generations after th
e conquest, the descendants of the Norman conquerors still had a taste and facility for organized violence. This hypothesis is supported by the share of knights and esquires in these armies with Norman surnames. This was 3–11 percent, much greater than the share of Norman surnames found in the more pacific realm of Oxford and Cambridge at the same time.
TABLE 14.1. Norman surnames in English muster rolls and universities, 1369–1453
Rank
Number
Percentage with Norman surname
Earl
56
39.3
Baron, bishop
153
13.1
Knight
1,729
10.6
Gentleman
47
0.0
Esquire
8,463
3.0
Man-at-arms
17,742
2.5
Archer, crossbowman, hobelar
58,220
1.0
Oxford and Cambridge students
12,640
1.0
This particular concentration of Norman surnames in the realm of violence is not contemplated in the general theory of social mobility advanced here and thus represents an unexplained anomaly.
1 The database is available online at www.medievalsoldier.org/index.php. The details of its construction are given in Bell et al. 2013.
PART THREE
THE GOOD SOCIETY
FIFTEEN
Is Mobility Too Low?
Mobility versus Inequality
REPORTS IN EARLIER WORKING PAPERS that the true persistence rate of social status is on the order of 0.75, even in the United States and Sweden, were greeted by many commentators with dismay.1 And indeed, even with the earlier reports of persistence rates of 0.5, many people already regarded U.S. society as mired in unfairness. Thus James Heckman, the eminent economist, states in a recent essay titled “Promoting Social Mobility”: “While we celebrate equality of opportunity, we live in a society in which birth is becoming fate. … This powerful impact of birth on life chances is bad for individuals born into disadvantage. And it is bad for American society. We are losing out on the potential contributions of large numbers of our citizens. It does not have to be this way. With smart social policy, we can arrest the polarization between skilled and unskilled.”2
This general dismay has multiple sources. First, the American Dream, embodied in the phrase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, has been believed to hold only if social mobility rates are high. America may be a violent society and one with scant safety nets for those on its bottom margins. But to many, rapid social mobility is the proof that Americans live in a country of equal opportunity, no matter the circumstances of their birth. It is the proof that however great the disadvantages of birth—and however indifferent the polity to the plight of the poor—talent, hard work, and enterprise will be rewarded. It is the evidence that the talentless or idle children of the upper classes cannot secure their status in life merely through inherited wealth and social connections.
The conditions for those at the bottom of U.S. society, in terms of material wealth, health, and personal safety, may be grim. But with rapid mobility, no one with desire and determination is condemned to live forever in that squalid netherworld. However, the surname-mobility estimates seem to imply that the founding document of the United States should instead read: “All men are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”
The second source of unease is the ability to predict so much about the general social prospects of any individual at birth. This capacity appears to deny the importance of human agency and free will. That so much is knowable at birth seemingly implies that there are people whom we can instruct at age 5, “Don’t bother with education, for we can be confident that you will spend your life at the lower margins of society.”
A third source of discomfort is the perceived waste of potential. It is assumed that if social mobility rates are low, there are people who, if born into other families, would have had very different life outcomes. This is Heckman’s major point in the passage quoted above. Even in the modern United States or Sweden, people with potentially great contributions to make to society are trapped in unskilled jobs well below their capabilities.
A fourth source of disquiet comes from the fact that a century of redistribution, public education, and social policy seems to have done nothing to improve the social mobility rates. Social mobility is no higher in modern Sweden than in the United States or even preindustrial England.
The response to the first concern is that it is true that the absence of rapid social mobility means that we lack proof that America is a meritocracy. But slow mobility does not itself prove the opposite—that America is rife with nepotism and privilege. As is discussed below, a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility. Slow mobility does not, in itself, imply a rigidly hierarchical society.
The second concern, the worry about the elimination of human agency, is misdirected. Even with an intergenerational correlation of 0.75, more than two-fifths of variation in outcomes in generalized social status is still unpredictable. True, for those at the bottom, the chance of making it to the top in one generation is dauntingly small. But there is still plenty of room for people to improve their social position compared to their parents’. And indeed, the prediction for those people at the bottom is that their prospects, while limited, are generally better than those of their parents.
The second reason that this concern with agency is misdirected is that although we may be able to predict to a high degree your success in life, whatever success you do attain will still be achieved only through struggle, effort, and initiative. We can predict only that you are likely to be the type of person who can make the effort and endure defeats along the way in order to succeed socially and economically in the end. Predicting social success, even if that success comes from genetics, is not like predicting height. In high-income societies there is very little that individuals can do to change their preordained, genetically determined final height. But social and economic outcomes are determined by the agency of the person.
The response to the third concern, waste of potential, is more complex. The simple law of social mobility detailed in chapters 6 and 7 assumes that mobility is driven by the strong inheritance of underlying abilities. If existing rates of social mobility imply a loss of potential for society, then it must be possible to improve underlying abilities through transfers to families of money or other resources. Conversely, if it is impossible to significantly improve the next generations’ outcomes through any intervention, then there is no waste of potential, and social mobility rates are optimal. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
In his recent book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Charles Murray documents the many ways in which the white underclass differs in behavior from the white upper class.3 Satisfaction with marriage is lower, divorce is more common, and children live more frequently with just one parent and much less frequently with both biological parents. Both men and women work less. Criminal behavior—both violence and theft—is more common. Church attendance is lower. Voting is less common. Trust in the fairness and integrity of others is lower. Murray’s message is simple: as long as the behaviors and values of the white underclass differ from those of the white upper class, the outcomes will differ substantially.
Another important part of Murray’s message is that in the years 1960–2010, the behaviors of the white upper class and underclass steadily diverged, increasing the inequality in outcomes in modern America and entrenching the positions of the privileged and deprived groups. But the examination of social mobility in the United States above finds no sign that social mobility rates have in fact declined in recent decades (see chapter 3).
But is there evidence to support the views of such thinkers as Heckman and Murray th
at smart social policy, or a reeducation in the Protestant ethic of the Founding Fathers, would greatly improve the outcomes for low-status families and hence rates of social mobility? One way to test such claims is to look at the outcomes for adoptees. If status outcomes are heavily socially determined, then adoptees will resemble their parents as much as biological children do, and they will also significantly resemble their genetically unrelated siblings.
The research on adoption outcomes, however, implies strongly that most of the variation in outcomes for adopted children stems from their biological parents or from chance, not from their adoptive parents. Biology may not be everything, but it is the substantial majority of everything. However, the adoption studies do leave open the possibility that social interventions could change outcomes for children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.
Studies of the inheritance of intelligence, for example, find that adoptive parents matter a lot for outcomes among younger children, but that as children approach adulthood, their intelligence more closely matches that of their biological parents. Thus one long-running study in Colorado, which compares adopted children with a control group of children from nonadoptive families, finds that at age sixteen the correlation of the IQ of adopted children with that of their adoptive parents is effectively zero, whereas it averages 0.3 for the matched control families. Figure 15.1 shows how the pattern varies with age.4
One limitation of adoption studies, however, is that the range in variation among adoptive parents does not include “the environmental extremes of disadvantage, neglect, and abuse.”5 Adoptive parents are subject to screening by adoption agencies that biological parents do not face. Thus when we compare the effects of nature and nurture in these studies, we exclude some of the variation in nurture that occurs in practice. But the authors of a series of papers on the Colorado Adoption Project note that adoptive families “are reasonably representative of the middle 90% of the population.”6
The Son Also Rises Page 26