Lineage, and the answer is that more than half of your outcome in life is already determined at the point that you were born. Host how did you get intoed in this . Guest social mobility is a topic in a longterm interest to economists sociologists, and the thing that actually got me interested in looking at personal mobility is a conversation with a journalist for the New York Times who actually said, couldnt you measure personal mobility by looking at surnames . Because a surname from our father, and if theres a high rate of mobility, what will happen is that very quickly all surnames will become average, and what actually occurred to me was, its very hard to measure social mobility because you need to know the father and children and that kind of information has only become available recently. We do know about the going back to england and middle ages, and so what actually led me on this path was just an idea of measuring what a persons mobility is like in old england compared to modern england. Host what are the methods to measure this. Guest all you need to know is what is the distribution of surnames in a society, and what is the distribution of surnames amongst elite groups and underclass groups. If you know those two simple facts and you know it over subsequent generations, for any society you can measure the underlying rate of social mobile. Host lets look at the surname clark. Guest one thing i did discover personally is that the surname clark should be a high status surname. Clark was the name for attorneys, and also for anyone who could write. And thats one percent of the society. So the clark should be the elite of the society but unfortunately the name was also tied to the servants of the clerks, and turns out to not be a particularly elite name. Turns out that in medieval england the names are names that name you after a place that are elite. A name like berkley, for example, now the name of a university and the name of a philosopher, that is from a village and theonomy of the bank barclays. Thats a derivation of that name. The rope these are the high status names in england you were given that name because thats where your house was, and if im in london and im a lord, everyone calls john, but im john the berkeley, and so the high class names in medieval england are the named that located people by place. Ive im a peasant in a village like berkeley, no one call mist John Berkeley because everybody was berkeley. So they would get names that were jones, or else after occupations, cowered is cow herd in medieval england or lane, where your has was so you can measure how too measure an elite . We know who went to oxnard and cambridge back to 1200, and we know the names of everyone from then to now who tabbedded oxford and cambridge and that repped the top 1 of english society, and so what we can then do is look another how overrepresented are these elite names in the university over time, and that is going to measure the rate of social mobility, and turns out the nice thing about social mobility you can measure that with a number between zero and one and thats the correlation of your status with your parents. If its one no social mobility, everything is predictable at birth if its zero, its complete social mobility and nothing is predicted. Thats a nice simple measure for all societies and the answer you get for medieval he can england is and most of what is going to happen is known at the time of birth. But for oxford and cambridge now we can do actually the same procedure except now we have to find a new class of elite surnames because all the medieval guys who are average, and you look at the surnames in cambridge,. 8. Theres been no change in social mobility in england over hundred years. And so the interesting thing the book finds is that social mobility is always there, it is pervasive phenomenon but always very slow. And the other bizarre thing is it is not affected by social institutions. So some people expect that america the land of liberty, will be a society with very high rates of social mobility, and that sweden, the land of socialism, will be a society of very low rate of social mobility. We use can that method. What we find is that social mobility in modern america is a little higher than in medieval england. Its. 75. What is the number sweden . Its about. 75. And again, we can look at inning friend from the 19th century where theres no taxes essentially, theres no public education, and so you would think, well, in 19th century inning land the way you get to oxford and cambridge you have to go to special schools and learn lattin. You need the background. Now anyone can get into oxford and cambridge if they do well on the Standard High School exam. And you think we would be moving from a world of slow social mobility to one of moisture more Rapid Mobility now. The answer again is, no. Its exactly the same. And so one of the big conclusions of the book is that social theres a social physics that determines social mobility. Just like the force of gravity is everywhere on the planet. The force of social mobility seems to operate the same way across all the societies we can observe. One element we can observe is communist china. It has roughly the same rate of social mobility and thats one of the startling findings of this book is so i want to emphasizes there is always social mobility. If youre on elite now in the future your deaccident dents are going to on average be perfectly average. The interesting thing is that takes 300 years, ten generations. If youre at the bottom of society now in the future you will have descendents who actually get to the average. That process takes ten generations. And the amazing thing is while its always there, it doesnt seem to alter across society, and so that is one of the big conclusions. The book is concerned another looking at different examples in society and saying what is it here . What is it in other places and since the book was publish evidence i gathered other data. One we look at is russia, and russia after the communist revolution and then with the restoration of quasicapitalism in recent years, looking at multiple state universities as our marker is did that bring a period of enhanced social mobility and have we then seen a period of declining social mobility once you return to the oligarchs in russia. We have not done that yet but if the rest of the book is correct, the predisk will burkite doesnt matter. The argument here is that whatever the social system is, there are people who have ability and energy and theyre going to figure out how to get to the top of the pile here. And in medieval england the social system is very different. But there are people who figure this out. And so the example you may not know that jeffrey chaucer, the name means shoemaker. His ancestors ancestors were shoemakers. Then his grandfather and father became wine merchants help obviously had talent and basketball and ascended the social ladder and his daughter married the duke of lancaster, and so you always always see people proceeding in society and the mechanism is very different. What is happening is that people figure it out, and so if im under communism, a high status family, figure out how to do well. If people are going to call for x, im going to call for x more vigorously than anyone else and place my kids in the right occupation, the right places, and so that is the interesting fact it, whatever social system you set up, people figure out a certain how to do well, other people will do better. Host professor clark, what does all of your Research Many to the socalled American Dream . Guest i have to say that im afraid that there is no special American Dream. America is not a special society. Its not an immobile society. Its just not any better than medieval england so i think that does imply an end to the American Dream, and the way we can see that within america is that there are actually names in america that are distinctive off the rich of the 1920s, and so what we can do is simply say, do not take the records of the American Medical Association as an elite, very big elite now in American Society. What is happening over time to these highclass names . The answer is, theyre still heavily overrepresented, amongst modern doctors, and theyre declining in their representation at a very modest rate that means that the elite of the 1920s is still going to be an elite 100 or 200 years from now, and we can interestingly in america most european names, names of european origin are the germans, irish, english, theyre all roughly privileged status. With one exception. French names are low status in the United States. The names like thing names are systematically youre less likely to be a doctor if you have one of these names. Thats three doctors per thousand with a regular name. Two per thousand if you have a french name. Those people have lived in north america for 300 years. But they have always been an underclass within the American Society, and what has been revealed by the names is that they are actually moving towards the average but its still going to take another couple hundred years before they become completely average. This is a group that a lot of them are concentrated in new england which is not a low status part you look at the cajun names of louisiana. Again, low status, moving at a very slow rate. Other names we can look at in the United States are, for example, names of latino origin, low status, moving towards the mean but moving at very slow rate. So the basic conclusion is that america may offer many things. It doesnt offer an alchemy that says if youre at the bottom of your home society you can come to america and now youre free. What is going to happen is if youre at the bolt of your home status and come at the america youll be at the bottom of the american societior, at the top of your home societior, come to america and be the top of American Society for example in america now the most elite of all names and groups are hindus from india, and the average group in america that are theres three doctors per thousand for elite hip due him in hindu names its 40re thousand. This is supposed to be the new upper class of the United States but if you look at the names of the people, those are the names of the braman calf in india. Theyre moving from india now to the United States, but theyre the very top elite of Indian Society that have School Skills and are doing well in america. The book is called the son also rises the awe their, gregory clark. Nasa recently announced the discovery of lisk witness salt water on mars, lending credence to hypothesis there was once life on at the planet and could be present. Marc kaufman looked at the Curiosity Mission which placed a rover on mars. Heres the program now on booktv. [inaudible conversations] good evening. Welcome to the Manhattan Branch library. Tonights program is an illustrated talk based on the book titled mar that