Social mobility in England has been frozen for centuries: now science says so

Among the achievements of which we are most proud, as far as i democratic government systems of our modern era, there is the idea that, in principle and barring malfunctions due to specific problems, this system is the one that guarantees greater possibilities for the individualregardless of its origins.

Until today, this assumption has rarely been put to the test from precise, large-scale experiments, for lack of suitable data; however, the collaborative efforts of millions of individuals around the world, they’re mapping ancestry and descent of the maximum number of individuals possible, together with information about their lives, allow for the first time to ask a precise question, which can be solved experimentally.

The question is: how much has the correlation between status and family originprogressing over the centuries from highly classist and stratified systems of government to modern democracies?

Using a broad genealogical databasedetailing the family ties of 422,374 people with rarer surnames in England, and examining the period from 1600 to 2022, an article recently published in PNAS examines patterns of inheritance of social status in both pre-industrial and contemporary England. Social status was measured by six indexes: employment status, higher education status, literacy, home value, managerial functions in private companies and an index linked to the prestige of the place of residence.

In particular, the correlations between these indicesmeasured in a certain household, and those of relatives up to fourth cousins.

The results of this evaluation are somewhat surprising.

The first is that, in the considered sample of British citizens who lived for four centuries, the status strongly persists even among very distant relatives, for all six indices considered. Even fourth cousins, who shared a common ancestor just five generations earlier, typically show statistically significant status correlations.

The second result is that the decline in status correlations with each step outward in the lineage is constantfor all status indices and for different periods from 1600 to 2022. It therefore seems that the size of the “social barriers”, due to the distance from a family nucleus with prestigious status, have essentially remained unchanged over the centuries, regardless of the government system , by the culture of the period and also by variables such as the overall educational status of the society.

The third interesting result is that the correlations found closely conform to those predicted by Ronald Fisher in 1918, for familial correlations between genetic traits in the presence of a strong mating assortment. In other words, it social statusmeasured using the six indices above, appears at least in England transmissible as a genetically determined phenotype. Of course, and all the more so since these are observational data, there is no evidence that genetic transmission causes social status. All that can be determined is that whatever social process is producing the observed outcomes has a form of transmission that mimics that of additive genetic effects, in the presence of the important social institution of strong assorted matching (i.e., essentially, a barrier to incest and mating between close relatives).

Even if in England, from 1600 to 2022, social status is strongly correlated with genetic inheritance, this does not in itself imply that social interventions cannot change social outcomes. However, it is plausible, as the authors and previous studies argue, that the genotype and cultural and social status of the parents create a social environment for the child that favors better or worse outcomes for him, depending on the case. Genetics is correlated with social outcomes, partly directly, but essentially through the indirect route of family environment.

In the light of the results described, the constant persistence of status in the interval from 1600 to 2022 suggests that, at least in the United Kingdom, social interventions they have had surprisingly modest effects as regards the composition of the various social strata and access to it from strata other than that of origin. For example, in pre-1870 Britain there was little public provision of education, health care or income support. Families were largely dependent on their own resources. Since 1920, there have been increasing levels of public provision of education, health care and basic needs. These services they should have helped, in particular, the poorest families. In reality, the data of this latest extensive work do not show an increase in social mobility rates corresponding to expectations, but on the contrary a dynamic unchanged over the centuries (and basically plastered).

If what is observed in Great Britain were to apply widely, and for the moment there is no reason to doubt it, at this point it is obligatory, at least as far as the scientific community is concerned, identify what the unchanged barriers to social mobility are, whether or not these are dependent on other variables such as income and if, finally, there are better measures than those implemented so far to promote social mobility; because otherwise it will be impossible to deal with the growing social pressure for a redistribution of status, which is rightly perceived as too tied to birth, even in modern democracies.