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title: "The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)"
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# The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

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The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) [Clark, Gregory, Cummins, Neil, Hao, Yu, Vidal, Daniel Diaz] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

Review: Will make you rethink a lot - This book is so simple and clear, and yet so important. Whether it stands the test of time is yet to be seen, but Clark's analysis is among the most thought-provoking and challenging books I've read in a long time.
Review: A new approach to looking at social mobility - Social mobility seems to be the hot topic today with Piketty's book being the center focus currently. Gregory Clark has a totally different approach to the subject and its analysis is insightful and unique. Gregory Clark approaches the topic of social mobility by looking at rare last names and analysing their relative frequency in high social status professions like law and medicine and uses the frequency data to see how much social mobility is implied by the relative frequency over long periods of time. The methodology is clever and the results are surprising. The book is split into three parts. The first is titled Social Mobility by Time and Place. As the section titled alludes, this section is about social mobility accross a variety of places that are assumed to have different mobility as well as different times in which most are taught that social mobility was very different from today. Social mobility via surname alaysis is undertaken in Sweden, the US, the UK and medieval England. The author then provides the framework for which the rest of the book is benchmarked against. In particular the author provides a framework for looking at social mobility, rather than typical analysis of income mobility. The author then looks at various social models and does similar surname analysis. The author looks at India and the caste system and the persistence of surnames in India among different professions and different regions and religious subgroups. India is considered a society with extreme social stratification due to its caste system and the evidence supports the lack of mobility. The author then looks at China and Taiwan. China is always a fascinating example due to the total levelling of society through Mao's revolutionary regime and Taiwan was a country for which the Nationalists only moved to post the Communist victory. The authors also discuss Korean and Japan, societies which are percieved to be very level among the citizens and also Chile a society that is very divided, like most of South America. The author also discusses Gypsy populations in the UK. The author discusses how all the various regimes can be embedded within his framework. The author then concludes with his final section The Good Society. This summarizes the material and the author discusses social policy as a function of his results. The author concludes that social mobility is biologically limited and should not be the focus of policy makers; he focuses on some factors which can be partially adressed by policy like whether groups are endogamous our exogamous. But for the most part the author lays out the repurcussions of his results which support the fact that a surname analysis is evidence of social darwinism being true. The Son Also Rises is definitely an interesting take on social mobility and the difference between social mobility and income generational income distributional shifts. In particular that income might have a distribution implied by gini coefficients but that social mobility is in effect much more mean reverting that social mobility is much more constrained than gini coefficients imply. The author shows throughout the book whether one is focused on pre industrial revolution or inclusive modern Sweden the correlation within higher social standing and lower social standing families on a multi generation basis for profession is in the .7-.85 range. The author's data set is focused on rare names analysis and as a result is a partial analysis of society and one has to assume that rare names are a representative subset of society at large (which seems a reasonable assumption). Perhaps the next step is an analysis based on mitochondrial DNA (sounds like Gattica). The author does at the end also look at families with adopted children and studies the explanatory power of adopted parents influence, which shows they have influence over educational attainment but less on social mobility. This is an interesting work and will be contentious, it is hard to read this and not think there is an element of truth to the underlying principles but there are many assumptions in this and the method of analysis is not an unbiased statistical one as it has to be based off of particular small subsets of society and their dispersion, or lack of over time, rather than larger pockets of society (like the last name Smith for example).

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #655,737 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #796 in England History #949 in Economic History (Books) #3,919 in Sociology Reference |
| Customer Reviews | 4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars (155) |
| Dimensions  | 5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches |
| Edition  | Reprint |
| ISBN-10  | 0691168377 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0691168371 |
| Item Weight  | 11 ounces |
| Language  | English |
| Part of series  | The Princeton Economic History of the Western World |
| Print length  | 384 pages |
| Publication date  | August 25, 2015 |
| Publisher  | Princeton University Press |

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Will make you rethink a lot
*by J***L on March 12, 2014*

This book is so simple and clear, and yet so important. Whether it stands the test of time is yet to be seen, but Clark's analysis is among the most thought-provoking and challenging books I've read in a long time.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A new approach to looking at social mobility
*by A***N on June 23, 2014*

Social mobility seems to be the hot topic today with Piketty's book being the center focus currently. Gregory Clark has a totally different approach to the subject and its analysis is insightful and unique. Gregory Clark approaches the topic of social mobility by looking at rare last names and analysing their relative frequency in high social status professions like law and medicine and uses the frequency data to see how much social mobility is implied by the relative frequency over long periods of time. The methodology is clever and the results are surprising. The book is split into three parts. The first is titled Social Mobility by Time and Place. As the section titled alludes, this section is about social mobility accross a variety of places that are assumed to have different mobility as well as different times in which most are taught that social mobility was very different from today. Social mobility via surname alaysis is undertaken in Sweden, the US, the UK and medieval England. The author then provides the framework for which the rest of the book is benchmarked against. In particular the author provides a framework for looking at social mobility, rather than typical analysis of income mobility. The author then looks at various social models and does similar surname analysis. The author looks at India and the caste system and the persistence of surnames in India among different professions and different regions and religious subgroups. India is considered a society with extreme social stratification due to its caste system and the evidence supports the lack of mobility. The author then looks at China and Taiwan. China is always a fascinating example due to the total levelling of society through Mao's revolutionary regime and Taiwan was a country for which the Nationalists only moved to post the Communist victory. The authors also discuss Korean and Japan, societies which are percieved to be very level among the citizens and also Chile a society that is very divided, like most of South America. The author also discusses Gypsy populations in the UK. The author discusses how all the various regimes can be embedded within his framework. The author then concludes with his final section The Good Society. This summarizes the material and the author discusses social policy as a function of his results. The author concludes that social mobility is biologically limited and should not be the focus of policy makers; he focuses on some factors which can be partially adressed by policy like whether groups are endogamous our exogamous. But for the most part the author lays out the repurcussions of his results which support the fact that a surname analysis is evidence of social darwinism being true. The Son Also Rises is definitely an interesting take on social mobility and the difference between social mobility and income generational income distributional shifts. In particular that income might have a distribution implied by gini coefficients but that social mobility is in effect much more mean reverting that social mobility is much more constrained than gini coefficients imply. The author shows throughout the book whether one is focused on pre industrial revolution or inclusive modern Sweden the correlation within higher social standing and lower social standing families on a multi generation basis for profession is in the .7-.85 range. The author's data set is focused on rare names analysis and as a result is a partial analysis of society and one has to assume that rare names are a representative subset of society at large (which seems a reasonable assumption). Perhaps the next step is an analysis based on mitochondrial DNA (sounds like Gattica). The author does at the end also look at families with adopted children and studies the explanatory power of adopted parents influence, which shows they have influence over educational attainment but less on social mobility. This is an interesting work and will be contentious, it is hard to read this and not think there is an element of truth to the underlying principles but there are many assumptions in this and the method of analysis is not an unbiased statistical one as it has to be based off of particular small subsets of society and their dispersion, or lack of over time, rather than larger pockets of society (like the last name Smith for example).

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Pick your partner wisely
*by R***R on December 26, 2017*

The social sciences and humanities are in trouble. They are largely predicated on the erroneous idea that social forces divorced from genetic endowments are responsible for producing the broad social patterns we observe. Professor Clark has been challenging this view for years, and devising hypotheses that will prove to have much better explanatory and predictive power as the science of genetics matures. Due to the technicality of its subject, the chapters of The Son Also Rises are difficult to read. But the chapter introductions and conclusions are a gold mine of insight. Among the many things you'll learn from Clark's book is the importance of distinguishing the social phenotype (the sum of one's observed characteristics) from the social genotype (one's underlying genetic characteristics). According to Clark, in order "to discover the likely underlying social genotype of your potential partner, you need to observe not just their characteristics but also the characteristics of all their relatives... This social *genotype*, rather than the observed social *phenotype*, is what your children will inherit” (p. 283). To take a simple example, “Suppose you are faced with a choice of two marriage partners, both of whom have a high-status phenotype. They are both graduates from elite colleges and have PhD’s in philosophy, for example, or both are board certified in rhinoplasty. But one partner is of Ashkenazi Jewish background [group average IQ of 110] and the other of New France descent [group average IQ of 85]. Then the predicted status of your children will be higher if you select the Jewish partner” (p. 285). Eventually, the kind of sophisticated behavioral genetics in Clark's work will be more widely incorporated into the social sciences -- at least if they're going to successfully predict and explain social phenomena in a deeper way than they currently do. This book will represent one of the first matches that starts the conflagration that will revolutionize social science.

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