Научный семинар ИНИИ "New Approaches to Social Mobility"

New Approaches to Social Mobility
Научный семинар Института институциональных исследований

20 марта 2017; 15:00 - 18:00
Мясницкая ул. 20, ауд. 101

Рабочий язык: английский.

Nature Versus Nurture in Social Outcomes. A Lineage Study of 65,000 English Individuals, 1750-2016
Gregory Clark* (University of California, Davis, USA)

Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are all dominated by the belief that while physical traits like height are mainly determined by genetics, child social outcomes are principally created by parental investment and community socialization. This paper shows that with just observational data of social outcomes and knowledge of the degree of relatedness of people in an extensive lineage, we can test whether additive genetic inheritance of social traits can be rejected. Using a lineage of 65,000 people born in England 1750‑2016, we show that the pattern of correlations between people in the lineage is mainly consistent with additive genetic inheritance of social status, as is seen with height. The high persistence of status over multiple generations requires a high degree of assortative mating. We show evidence that marriage in the lineage indeed does show a high degree of assortment based on some underlying trait.

* co-author - Neil Cummins (London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)

Social Mobility in the Russia of Revolutions, 1910-2015: A Surname Study
John Nye (George Mason University, USA; National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia)

In The Son Also Rises, Gregory Clark shows that social mobility rates can be measured parsimoniously for past societies using surname distributions, and that so measured social mobility is both slow, and invariant to social institutions. Here we apply this method to Russia, using a rich dataset, students enrolling at Moscow State University, 1910-2013. Russian surname types pre-1917 did indeed vary in average social status, as measured by the shares enrolling at the university relative to the population shares in 1910. In this preliminary paper we estimate social mobility rates for birth cohorts 1889-1995, and the effects of the Communist Revolution and the end of Communism 1991. But in future work we hope to estimate social mobility rates by decade 1880-2016.