{"id":16932,"date":"2016-05-20T17:01:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T21:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16932"},"modified":"2016-05-20T17:01:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T21:01:00","slug":"the-remarkable-persistence-of-social-advantage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16932","title":{"rendered":"the remarkable persistence of social advantage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew Yglesias draws<\/a> attention to a study<\/a>\u00a0showing that if you were\u00a0wealthy in Florence in 1427, there is a statistically significant greater chance that your descendants\u00a0are wealthy in Florence today (where “wealth” is defined as your relative<\/em> standing atop\u00a0the economic hierarchy of your own\u00a0time). I’ve had the chance to live in Florence and have observed that the\u00a0local aristocracy of the present bear\u00a0the same names that grace the elegant chapels and palaces of\u00a0the 1400s. This\u00a0persistence\u00a0should surprise us, however, because\u00a0Florence has gone through tremendous\u00a0political, economic, demographic, and technological change over\u00a0the past six centuries.<\/p>\n

Yglesias\u00a0also cites evidence<\/a>\u00a0that people who have noble surnames in Sweden have above-average wealth today, even though Sweden stopped ennobling families in the 16o0s\u00a0and has now had a century of\u00a0democratic socialism. Yet\u00a0you’re still likely to be wealthier in Sweden today if your paternal ancestor was an aristocrat in 1650.<\/p>\n

I’d add\u00a0this passage from Peter Brown’s\u00a0The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000<\/span><\/em>\u00a0(p. 110):<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

You would think that after barbarian invasions, the collapse of civilization as it was known, the replacement of aristocratic paganism with a radical religion of equality, and the rise and fall of barbarian kingdoms, the old pagan Roman landowning families would have slipped\u00a0a notch or two. On the contrary, they seem to have morphed into powerful and wealthy bishops in\u00a0Merovingian\u00a0Gaul. Brown doesn’t trace the story after that, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the provincial gentry of today’s France descend from these bishops’ families.<\/p>\n

We needn’t\u00a0be fatalistic. Societies change, often for the better. But it’s interesting that neither a radical Millenarian religion nor socialism–nor invasions and civilizational collapse–necessarily interrupts the transmission of advantage from one generation to the next. I\u00a0presume that social and cultural capital can survive immense disruptions of physical capital, or–to put it more bluntly–people who know how to play one system make sure that their kids do well in the next one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthew Yglesias draws attention to a study\u00a0showing that if you were\u00a0wealthy in Florence in 1427, there is a statistically significant greater chance that your descendants\u00a0are wealthy in Florence today (where “wealth” is defined as your relative standing atop\u00a0the economic hierarchy of your own\u00a0time). I’ve had the chance to live in Florence and have observed that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16932"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16944,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16932\/revisions\/16944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}