/Clark_Cummins_1800-2011.pdf

  • Same names have attended Oxbridge since the Norman Conquest - Telegraph
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/universities-and-colleges/10413798/Same-names-have-attended-Oxbridge-since-the-Norman-Conquest.html

    Despite the upheavals of the last 800 years, there have been Darcys, Mandevilles, Percys and Montgomerys at the two elite institutions for 27 generations.

    Researchers found the same names which were associated with great wealth and privilege under William the Conqueror are still found at the top echelons of society today.
    Family names which signalled poverty 150 years ago, such as Boorman, Defoe, Goodhill and Ledwell, also tend to remain low on the social scale, the team from the London School of Economic (LSE) concluded.

    The researchers, Dr Neil Cummins and Professor Gregory Clark, claim their findings suggest social mobility in England has not improved much since the Middle Ages, with people continually inheriting their status from their parents.

    #inégalités

    • La présentation des 2 études sur le site de la LSE
      http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2013/10/SocialClasses.aspx

      Les deux papiers :
      Intergenerational Mobility in England, 1858-2012. Wealth, Surnames, and Social Mobility., http://neilcummins.com/Papers/Clark_Cummins_1800-2011.pdf

      To what extent do parental characteristics explain child social outcomes? Typically, parent-child correlations in socioeconomic measures are in the range 0.2-0.6. Surname evidence suggests, however, that the intergenerational correlation of overall status is much higher. This paper shows, using educational status in England 1170-2012 as an example, that the true underlying correlation of social status is in the range 0.75-0.85. Social status is more strongly inherited even than height. This correlation is constant over centuries, suggesting an underlying social physics surprisingly immune to government intervention. Social mobility in England in 2012 is little greater than in pre-industrial times. Surname evidence in other countries suggests similarly slow underlying mobility rates.

      Intergenerational Mobility in England, 1858-2012. Wealth, Surnames, and Social Mobility., http://neilcummins.com/Papers/Clark_Cummins_2013.pdf

      This paper uses a panel of 21,618 people with rare surnames whose wealth is observed at death in England and Wales 1858-2012 to measure the intergeneration elasticity of wealth over five generations. We show, using rare surnames to track families, that wealth is much more persistent over generations than standard one generation estimates would suggest. There is still a significant correlation between the wealth of families five generations apart. We show that this finding can be reconciled with standard estimates of wealth mobility by positing an underlying Markov process of wealth inheritance with an intergenerational elasticity of 0.70-0.75 throughout the years 1858-2012. The enormous social and economic changes of this long period had surprisingly little effect on the strength of inheritance of wealth.

    • il me semble avoir vu la même étude portant sur Boston ; et bien sûr “La Noblesse d’État” de Bourdieu, sur normale sup’, qui montre aussi comment cette sélection continue de fonctionner à l’intérieur même de l’institution.