Nomencracy名门望族的天下 2013.docxVIP

Nomencracy名门望族的天下 2013-08-15 20:01 阅读(928)评论(5)编辑删除Nomencracy名门望族的天下Surnames offer depressing clues to the extent of social mobility over generationsFeb 9th 2013 |From the print edition THE “Great Gatsby curve” is the name Alan Krueger, an economic adviser to Barack Obama, gave to the relationship between income inequality and social mobility across the generations. Mr Krueger used the phrase in a 2012 speech to describe the work of Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa, who has shown that more unequal economies tend to have less fluid societies. MrCorak reckons that in some places, like America and Britain, around 50% of income differences in one generation are attributable to differences in the previous generation (in more egalitarian Scandinavia, the number is less than 30%).Even that may paint too rosy a picture. MrCorak’s work draws on recent studies that compare income levels between just two generations: fathers and sons. That is out of necessity; good data covering three or more generations are scarce. But reliance on limited data could lead to overestimates of social mobility.Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California, Davis, notes that across a single generation some children of rich parents are bound to suffer random episodes of bad luck. Others will choose low-pay jobs for idiosyncratic reasons, like a wish to do charitable work. Such statistical noise makes society look more changeable than it is. Extrapolating the resulting mobility rates across many generations gives a misleadingly sunny view of long-term equality of opportunity. Mr Clark suggests that family history has large effects that persist for much greater spans of time. Fathers matter, but so do grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Indeed, it may take as long as 300-500 years for high- and low-status families to produce descendants with equal chances of being in various parts of the income spectrum.Mr Clark confronts the lack of good data by gleaning information from rare s