Here is a question that social scientists have been pondering for years: How much of your success in life is tied to your parents, and how much do you control?
The academic term used for this is "social mobility." And a striking new finding from economic historian Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis claims your success in life may actually be determined by ancestors who lived hundreds of years ago. That means improving opportunities across generations might be a lot harder than anyone imagined.
Clark did not set out to study social mobility; he was trying to study how the British elite formed in the lead-up to the Industrial Revolution. Someone suggested he trace surnames, because there is a long record of elite names in British society.
"For example, in England, we know the names of most people who went to Oxford or Cambridge from about 1200 right up until the present," Clark says.
But he didn't believe these names would tell him much about the status of families over time. A surname is just one branch in a vast family tree. And all the previous work on social mobility suggests that the status of a name would change in three or four generations. That's what social mobility means — families move up, families move down.
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Six Things Surnames Can Say About Social Mobility MR