【纽约时报 20140221】你的祖先，你的命运

满仓

【中文标题】你的祖先，你的命运
【原文标题】Your Ancestors, Your Fate
【登载媒体】纽约时报
【原文作者】GREGORY CLARK
【原文链接】http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/your-fate-thank-your-ancestors/?ref=china


美国的收入和财富不平等现象从70年代开始加剧，但是近期一项大规模调查显示，社会的流动性（译者注：指一个社会成员或社会群体从一个社会阶级或阶层转到另一个社会阶级或阶层，从一种社会地位向另一种社会地位，从一种职业向另一种职业的转变的过程）在这段期间并未发生大的变化。为什么会是这样？

哈佛大学和伯克利大学进行的这项研究仅仅揭露了问题的一部分。社会流动性没有降低这的确是事实，但是更值得关注的是，流动性一直以来就不高。

纵观几个世纪，如果用广义的社会地位来衡量——不仅仅是收入和财富，还包括职业、教育和寿命——社会流动性要比我们所认为的，或者试图说服自己相信的程度要慢很多。调查结果证实了这个观点，无论是在福利制度国家瑞典、工业资本主义发源地英国、历史上最多元化的社会美国，还是在新的民主制度与传统种姓制度发生碰撞的印度。资本主义制度并没有带来大规模的、快速的流动性，民主进程、大规模的教育普及、裙带制度的衰败、再分配性质的税收制度、妇女解放，甚至中国的社会主义革命都没有起到明显的作用。



更加令人吃惊的是，你一生中所有的机遇，不仅仅可以通过你父母的社会地位来预测，还可以通过你曾曾曾祖父母的社会地位来预测。近期的研究显示，收入变化的10％可以通过父母的收入水平来预测，而我和我的同事认为，整体社会地位的50％到60％都由你的家族来决定。高端家族的财富必然会缩减，低端家族的财富必然会上升，从而趋向平均——这就是社会科学家所谓的“均数回归”。但是这个过程需要花费10到15代的时间（300年到450年），比以前的社会科学家估算的时间要长很多。

我们得出这种结论的方式，是在8个国家——智利、中国、英国、印度、日本、韩国、瑞典和美国——跨越几个世纪检索大量的姓氏数据，这是令人吃惊的强大社会地位指标。整体来看，几代人之前的那些精英家族的罕见或特殊的姓氏，依然以压倒性的趋势霸占着今天的精英阶层。

这是否代表个人无法掌控自己的命运呢？并非如此。在现代社会的精英阶层中，成功依然取决于个人的努力。但是我们的研究发现，奋斗的动力、成功的天份和克服困难的能力，在很大程度上都来自遗传。我们尚不知晓这种遗传的原理具体是怎样的，但是我们的确知道基因起了非常大的作用。其它一些当今社会流行的说法——文化特征、家庭经济来源、社交网络——都经不起推敲。

由于我们的发现与人们的直觉相反，而且与当今社会，尤其是资本主义社会所灌输的人类世袭因素所造成的生活境遇影响有比较大的差异，所以我需要解释一下这样的结论是如何得出的。

让我们先从瑞典开始。与丹麦、芬兰、冰岛和挪威一样，瑞典是世界上收入最平等的社会之一。但令我们吃惊的是，我们发现今天瑞典的社会流动性并不高于英国和美国，甚至不高于18世纪的瑞典。

瑞典依然有贵族存在，这些贵族不再掌握实际上的政治权力，但他们的家族记录都保存在成立于1626年的贵族院。我们估计，大约有5.6万名姓氏比较稀少的瑞典人与历史上的瑞典贵族有关系。（《哈姆雷特》中悲催的Rosencrantz和Guildenstern演化姓氏也在列。）

另外一个瑞典精英群体是新兴的牧师、学者和商人，在17世纪和18世纪把他们的姓氏拉丁化（就像植物学家Carolus Linnaeus的父亲）。瑞典在1901年立法禁止外族使用精英阶层的姓氏，所以目前拥有这些姓氏的人基本上都是贵族家庭的后裔。

由于瑞典社会的平均主义性质，人们或许认为拥有精英姓氏的瑞典人不比其他瑞典人更加富有。但情况并非如此。以2008年斯德哥尔摩周边的6个或富裕或贫穷的城市来举例，我们发现，拥有贵族姓氏的瑞典人的税前收入要比普通姓氏Andersson的瑞典人税前收入高出44％，拥有拉丁化姓氏的瑞典人税前收入比姓Andersson的瑞典人高出27％。

有称号的贵族的姓氏（伯爵和男爵）出现在瑞典律师协会中的数量，是出现在其它群体中数量的6倍（没有称号的贵族和拉丁化姓氏的数量是3倍）。瑞典的医生群体也是如此。在2000年到2012年完成乌普萨拉大学研究生课程的人群中，拥有贵族姓氏的瑞典人比其它普通姓氏前缀——比如Lund-和Berg-——的瑞典人多60％到80％。



几个世纪以来，的确出现了均数回归的趋势，但极为缓慢。在三个瑞典皇家学会中，从1740年到1769年，一半的会员拥有我们给出的例子中的贵族姓氏。到2010年，这个比例降到了4％——但是拥有这些姓氏的人在所有瑞典人中只占0.7％，所以他们还是有极强的代表性。简言之，瑞典在经历了100年的民主制度之后，尽管创造了一个平均主义的社会，但未能加速社会流动性。

让我们走得再远一点，到中世纪的英国看看会怎样。

我们估计，在当代英国有十分之一的姓氏可以追溯到中世纪祖先的职业上——比如Smith（美国、英国和澳大利亚最常见的姓氏）、Baker、Butler、Carter、Chamberlain、Cook、Shepherd、Stewart和Wright。纳税记录显示大部分姓氏到1300年都是可以继承的。

我们比较这些常见姓氏在一个人口整体规模中和贵族群体中分别出现的频率。贵族群体有几个来源，包括1170年牛津和剑桥大学的会员，以及1384年之前的遗嘱记录等。

我们发现，中世纪晚期英国的社会流动性不比现在更低，这与传统思想中静止的封建社会阶层大相径庭。1300年的文盲农村技工的后代，只需要7代人的时间就可以跻身1500年的教育精英阶层。也就是说，他们的姓氏出现在牛津剑桥名册中的频率与当今社会的频率相当。根据遗嘱记录，到1620年，姓Butcher和Baker的人几乎和高阶层姓氏的拥有者——比如Rochester和Radcliffe——一样富有。

让我们拿Chaucer来举例，这个名字或许来源于法语的“鞋匠”。他是一个侍臣、外交官，后来成为一名议员，他的玄孙在查理三世当政的时代甚至被考虑作为王座继承人。

当然，无论是中世纪还是当代，流动性都是双向的。正如Chaucer的子嗣兴旺发达，其他富裕的家族也会没落。中世纪的贵族姓氏Cholmondeley在19世纪被很多农民拥有。

在任何一代人中，幸运的事件（包括超凡脱俗的天才）都会产生新的贵族家庭。我们不大可能预测具体哪个家族将会兴旺发达，但可以预测通往精英阶层和穷困潦倒的道路是怎样的。不管怎样，这个过程都是极为缓慢的。

资本主义引发的创造性革新是工业革命，但它并未加速社会流动性。在研究过19世纪中期英国和威尔士最富有的15％人口中比较罕见的姓氏之后——明确一点，这些姓氏和中世纪贵族的姓氏不同——我们发现，死于1999年2012年之间的拥有这些姓氏的人，比普通人富裕3倍。

如果你的姓氏比较罕见，而且某个拥有这个姓氏的人曾经在1800年左右在牛津或剑桥读书，那么你进入这些学校的概率就是普通人的4倍。尽管对中学和大学的公共支持资金规模在不断膨胀，而且精英教育越来越开放，但社会流动性依然缓慢。



美国这个自称机遇沃土的国家又如何呢？

我们选择了一些高等和中等阶层的美国人姓氏样本。精英阶层的姓氏拥有者是1850年之前常青藤大学毕业生的后裔、1923年到1924年之间姓氏罕见的富豪，以及德系犹太人。低阶层姓氏都与美国黑人有关，他们的祖先大多是奴隶，还包括1763年之前法国在北美殖民者的后裔。

我们只选择了这些群体中最具代表性的姓氏，比如美国犹太人中的Rabinowitz和美国黑人中的Washington。

我们用两个指标来衡量社会地位：美国医疗协会的注册医生和正式注册的律师，按注册日期排序，调查覆盖了25个州、74％的人口。

在20世纪初期到中期，我们看到所有群体都出现了意料之中的均数回归，除了犹太人和黑人——这反映了当时的现实状况：犹太人被禁止进入很多精英学校；种族隔离直到60年代才被宣布为非法。

从70年代开始，犹太人的社会地位开始整体下滑，黑人则有相应的上升，至少注册医生的记录显示了这样的趋势。但这两个趋势都极为缓慢。按目前的速度来看，300年之后德系犹太人才会退出美国医生界的主流地位，200年之后非裔美国奴隶的后代依然处于医生界的非主流地位。

姓氏还揭示了很多的现象，其中有好有坏。拥有典型犹太姓氏Katz的美国人的平均寿命是80.2岁，带有强烈美国本土色彩的姓氏Begay（或Begaye）拥有者的平均寿命是64.6岁。出身于新法国白人的姓氏Heberts平均寿命比爱尔兰白人姓氏Dohertys的平均寿命少3年。

但是要明确一点，我们并没有发现这些特定的种族群体比其它人具备更多的内在优势。美国最高社会阶层的群体包括德系犹太人、埃及科普特人、伊朗穆斯林、印度教、印度基督教和西非人。法裔加拿大移民的后裔并未遭到任何种族歧视，但他们向上攀升的动力与黑人一样极为缓慢。

“陈”（极为普通的中国姓氏）的社会地位高于“丘吉尔”；Appiah（一个加纳姓氏）高于Olson（或Olsen）——一个普通阶层的白人姓氏。最常见的美国姓氏中几乎总结不出任何社会地位的信息，排名前5位的常见姓氏是Smith、Johnson、Williams、Brown和Jones，它们全部源于英格兰，因为这些姓氏的持有者既有白人也有黑人。

这些发现在智利、印度、日本和韩国都得到了印证。最令人吃惊的是，中国也展示了社会地位强大的抗拒性——即使在经历了共产主义革命无与伦比的残暴、阶级仇恨和大量人口流离失所之后。

数十万相对富裕的中国大陆人在40年代末跟随国民党逃到台湾。在共产党的土地改革中，43％的土地被没收、再分配。在1966年到1976年的文化大革命中，学者和原社会精英被当作“阶级敌人”遭到清算。

中国共有大约4000个姓氏，其中100个最常见的姓氏拥有者占总人口的85％。我们识别出其中13个罕见的姓氏，它们在19世纪帝王所举办的殿试中，占据了应试者的大部分。更值得注意的是，这13个姓氏的拥有者在当今社会的名校教授、学生、政府官员、公司高管中也占据了非常大的比例。共产主义时代的社会流动性的确有所增长，但幅度实在太小了。毛没有成功。

这些发现或许会让在政治上对立的两个群体都非常吃惊：一方相信“文化”战胜一切；另一方认为成功来源于家族关系和社交网络。

文化是一个相对模糊的概念，他不能解释家族社会地位持续衰败的原因——从顶层一直到底层。美国的高端群体相当多样化，几乎世界上所有的主要宗教和种族群体都有出现，除了那些坚决主张文化是社会成功基础的群体，比如欧洲白人新教徒。穆斯林在印度和欧洲是低阶层社会群体，但是伊朗穆斯林却跻身美国的顶级精英阶层。

家族关系和社交网络并非没有关联。有迹象显示，在儿童早期进行社会经济学和课堂种族一体化的教育可以让贫困儿童持续受益，但是这些教育对于改变社会整体流动性的贡献微乎其微。大力投资对贫困儿童帮扶教育的国家，比如北欧国家，的确产生了巨大和效果，但是这并没有改变他们相对的社会地位。

有关“社会竞争力”——混合了动力和能力——可以遗传的概念或许会让我们坐立不安。但是对于收养这种或许是最戏剧性的社会干预方式的研究，结论比较支持这个观点。在美国和北欧国家进行的针对被收养儿童的一系列研究，令人信服地显示他们的生活轨迹更容易通过他们的亲生父母来进行预测，而不是他们的养父母。例如，美国被收养儿童的智商在幼年时期更加接近于他们的养父母，但是成年之后他们与养父母智商之间的关联几乎为零。被收养儿童的收入和教育水平与他们的养父母之间的关联性也非常低。

这些研究，再加上对不同类型兄弟姐妹（同卵双胞胎、异卵双胞胎、同父异母、异父同母）之间关联性的研究，都发现遗传是社会地位的主要载体。

如果我们对于先天胜于后天，以及社会流动性非常低的结论是正确的，那么这是否算是天降悲剧呢？这要取决于你的视角。

处于社会底层的祖先会让接下来的几代人都无法翻身，这个观点让秉持公平理念的人实在无法接受。但与此同时，那些超级富豪对孩子教育大手笔的投入——比如那些曼哈顿对冲基金的经理人斥巨资对孩子进行学前教育——恐怕也无法逆转未来社会地位持续向下的大趋势。

我们的研究认为，跨越社会阶层的通婚有助于提升社会流动性。我们发现印度的社会流动性极低，主要原因就是宗教和种姓制度妨碍跨阶层通婚。只要交配的双方门当户对——无论其种族、国籍和宗教背景的差异，都具有类似的社会地位——社会流动性就会维持低速。

正如政治理论家John Rawls在他的名著《正义的理论》（1971年）中所说，天资和内心动力之间固有的差异意味着，为了创造一个公平的社会，应当限制低社会阶层人口的数量。我们并不是说社会流动性低就说明所有帮扶贫困的政策和努力都是白费，恰恰相反。瑞典就是一个比美国更适合穷人居住的国家，这是件好事。让人有机会展示他们最优秀的能力才是问题的关键。

大规模、快速的社会流动性不可能通过立法来实现，政府能做的是改善人们生活中固有的不公平所带来的效果。我们所生活的社会阶层大部分在出生时就被注定，所以我们必须要决定，对于这种反复无常、主观断定、抓彩式的世袭因素所造就的人生，我们应当给予多少的奖励和惩罚。



原文：

Inequality of income and wealth has risen in America since the 1970s, yet a large-scale research study recently found that social mobility hadn’t changed much during that time. How can that be?

The study, by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley, tells only part of the story. It may be true that mobility hasn’t slowed — but, more to the point, mobility has always been slow.

When you look across centuries, and at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many of us believe, or want to believe. This is true in Sweden, a social welfare state; England, where industrial capitalism was born; the United States, one of the most heterogeneous societies in history; and India, a fairly new democracy hobbled by the legacy of caste. Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution.

To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents’. The recent study suggests that 10 percent of variation in income can be predicted based on your parents’ earnings. In contrast, my colleagues and I estimate that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage. The fortunes of high-status families inexorably fall, and those of low-status families rise, toward the average — what social scientists call “regression to the mean” — but the process can take 10 to 15 generations (300 to 450 years), much longer than most social scientists have estimated in the past.

We came to these conclusions after examining reams of data on surnames, a surprisingly strong indicator of social status, in eight countries — Chile, China, England, India, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the United States — going back centuries. Across all of them, rare or distinctive surnames associated with elite families many generations ago are still disproportionately represented among today’s elites.

Does this imply that individuals have no control over their life outcomes? No. In modern meritocratic societies, success still depends on individual effort. Our findings suggest, however, that the compulsion to strive, the talent to prosper and the ability to overcome failure are strongly inherited. We can’t know for certain what the mechanism of that inheritance is, though we know that genetics plays a surprisingly strong role. Alternative explanations that are in vogue — cultural traits, family economic resources, social networks — don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Because our findings run against the intuition that modernity, and in particular capitalism, has eroded the impact of ancestry on a person’s life chances, I need to explain how we arrived at them.

Let’s start with Sweden, which — like Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway — is one of the world’s most equal societies in terms of income. To our surprise, we found that social mobility in Sweden today was no greater than in Britain or the United States today — or even Sweden in the 18th century.

Sweden still has a nobility. Those nobles no longer hold de facto political power, but their family records are stored by the Riddarhuset (House of Nobility), a society created in 1626. We estimate that about 56,000 Swedes hold rare surnames associated with the three historic tiers of nobles. (Variations on the names of the unfortunate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of “Hamlet” are on the list.)

Another elite group are Swedes whose ancestors — a rising educated class of clerics, scholars, merchants — Latinized their surnames in the 17th and 18th centuries (like the father of the botanist Carolus Linnaeus). Adopting elite names was limited by law in Sweden in 1901, so a vast majority of people holding them are descended from prominent families.

Given the egalitarian nature of Swedish society, one would expect that people with these elite surnames should be no better off than other Swedes. That isn’t so. In a sample of six Stockholm-area municipalities in 2008, rich and poor, we found that the average taxable income of people with noble names was 44 percent higher than that of people with the common surname Andersson. Those with Latinized names had average taxable incomes 27 percent higher than those named Andersson.

Surnames of titled nobles (counts and barons) are represented in the register of the Swedish Bar Association at six times the rate they occur in the general population (three times the rate, for untitled-noble and Latinized surnames). The same goes for Swedish doctors. Among those who completed master’s theses at Uppsala University from 2000 to 2012, Swedes with elite surnames were overrepresented by 60 to 80 percent compared with those with the common surname prefixes Lund- and Berg-.

Over centuries, there is movement toward the mean, but it is slow. In three of the Royal Academies of Sweden, half of the members from 1740 to 1769 held one of the elite surnames in our sample; by 2010, only 4 percent did — but these surnames were held by just 0.7 percent of all Swedes, so they were still strongly overrepresented. In short, nearly 100 years of social democratic policies in Sweden, while creating a very egalitarian society, have failed to accelerate social mobility.

What if we go back even further in time — to medieval England?

We estimate that one-tenth of all surnames in contemporary England can be traced to the occupation of a medieval ancestor — names like Smith (the most common surname in the United States, England and Australia), Baker, Butler, Carter, Chamberlain, Cook, Shepherd, Stewart and Wright. Tax records suggest that most surnames became heritable by 1300.

We compared the frequency of these common surnames in the population as a whole against elite groups, as drawn from several sources, including membership rolls at Oxford and Cambridge, dating as far back as 1170, and probate records from 1384 onward.

We found that late medieval England was no less mobile than modern England — contrary to the common assumption of a static feudal order. It took just seven generations for the successful descendants of illiterate village artisans of 1300 to be incorporated fully into the educated elite of 1500 — that is, the frequency of their names in the Oxbridge rolls reached the level around where it is today. By 1620, according to probate records, people with names like Butcher and Baker had nearly as much wealth as people with high-status surnames like Rochester and Radcliffe.

Take Chaucer. A commoner by birth — his name probably comes from the French word for shoemaker — he became a courtier, a diplomat and a member of Parliament, and his great-great-grandson was even briefly considered heir to the throne during the reign of Richard III.

Of course, mobility, in medieval times as now, worked both ways. Just as Chaucer’s progeny prospered, other previously well-off families declined. The medieval noble surname Cholmondeley was, by the 19th century, held by a good number of farm laborers.

In any generation, happy accidents (including extraordinary talent) will produce new high-status families. It is impossible to predict which particular families are likely to experience such boosts. What is predictable is what the path to elite status will look like, and the path back to the mean. Both happen at a very slow pace.

For all the creative destruction unleashed by capitalism, the industrial revolution did not accelerate mobility. Looking at 181 rare surnames held by the wealthiest 15 percent of English and Welsh people in the mid-19th century — to be clear, these were not the same elite surnames as in the medieval era — we found that people with these surnames who died between 1999 and 2012 were more than three times as wealthy as the average person.

If your surname is rare, and someone with that surname attended Oxford or Cambridge around 1800, your odds of being enrolled at those universities are nearly four times greater than the average person. This slowness of mobility has persisted despite a vast expansion in public financing for secondary and university education, and the adoption of much more open and meritocratic admissions at both schools.

What about America, the self-proclaimed land of opportunity?

We selected a sampling of high- and low-status American surnames. The elite ones were held by descendants of Ivy League alumni who graduated by 1850, exceptionally wealthy people with rare surnames in 1923-24 (when public inspection of income-tax payments was legal) and Ashkenazi Jews. The low-status names were associated with black Americans whose ancestors most likely arrived as slaves, and the descendants of French colonists in North America before 1763.

We chose only surnames closely correlated with these subgroups — for example, Rabinowitz for American Jews, and Washington for black Americans.

We used two indicators of social status: the American Medical Association’s directory of physicians and registries of licensed attorneys, along with their dates of registration, in 25 states, covering 74 percent of the population.

In the early to mid-20th century we found the expected regression toward the mean for all of these groups, except for Jews and blacks — which reflects the reality of quotas that had barred Jews from many elite schools, and of racial segregation, which was not fully outlawed until the 1960s.

Starting in the 1970s, Jews began, over all, a decline in social status, while blacks began a corresponding rise, at least as measured by the doctors’ directory. But both trends are very slow. At the current rate, for example, it will be 300 years before Ashkenazi Jews cease to be overrepresented among American doctors, and even 200 years from now the descendants of enslaved African-Americans will still be underrepresented.

Family names tell you, for better or worse, a lot: The average life span of an American with the typically Jewish surname Katz is 80.2 years, compared with 64.6 years for those with the surname Begay (or Begaye), which is strongly associated with Native Americans. Heberts, whites of New France descent, live on average three years less than Dohertys, whites of Irish descent.

But to be clear, we found no evidence that certain racial groups innately did better than others. Very high-status groups in America include Ashkenazi Jews, Egyptian Copts, Iranian Muslims, Indian Hindus and Christians, and West Africans. The descendants of French Canadian settlers don’t suffer racial discrimination, but their upward mobility, like that of blacks, has been slow.

Chen (a common Chinese surname) is of higher status than Churchill. Appiah (a Ghanaian surname) is higher than Olson (or Olsen), a common white surname of average status. Very little information about status can be surmised by the most common American surnames — the top five are Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown and Jones, which all originated in England — because they are held by a mix of whites and blacks.

Our findings were replicated in Chile, India, Japan, South Korea and, surprisingly, China, which stands out as a demonstration of the resilience of status — even after a Communist revolution nearly unparalleled in its ferocity, class hatred and mass displacement.

Hundreds of thousands of relatively prosperous mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan with the Nationalists in the late 1940s. Under Communist agrarian reform, as much as 43 percent of all land was seized and redistributed. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 saw purges of scholars and other former elites and “class enemies.”

In China, there are only about 4,000 surnames; the 100 most common are held by nearly 85 percent of the population. Yet we were able to identify 13 rare surnames that were exceptionally overrepresented among successful candidates in imperial examinations in the 19th century. Remarkably, holders of these 13 surnames are disproportionately found now among professors and students at elite universities, government officials, and heads of corporate boards. Social mobility in the Communist era has accelerated, but by very little. Mao failed.

These findings may surprise two groups that are often politically opposed: those who believe that certain “cultures” are higher-achieving than others and those who attribute success to family resources and social networks.

Culture is a nebulous category and it can’t explain the constant regression of family status — from the top and the bottom. High-status social groups in America are astonishingly diverse. There are representatives from nearly every major religious and ethnic group in the world — except for the group that led to the argument for culture as the foundation of social success: white European Protestants. Muslims are low-status in much of India and Europe, but Iranian Muslims are among the most elite of all groups in America.

Family resources and social networks are not irrelevant. Evidence has been found that programs from early childhood education to socioeconomic and racial classroom integration can yield lasting benefits for poor children. But the potential of such programs to alter the overall rate of social mobility in any major way is low. The societies that invest the most in helping disadvantaged children, like the Nordic countries, have produced absolute, commendable benefits for these children, but they have not changed their relative social position.

The notion of genetic transmission of “social competence” — some mysterious mix of drive and ability — may unsettle us. But studies of adoption, in some ways the most dramatic of social interventions, support this view. A number of studies of adopted children in the United States and Nordic countries show convincingly that their life chances are more strongly predicted from their biological parents than their adoptive families. In America, for example, the I.Q. of adopted children correlates with their adoptive parents’ when they are young, but the correlation is close to zero by adulthood. There is a low correlation between the incomes and educational attainment of adopted children and those of their adoptive parents.

These studies, along with studies of correlations across various types of siblings (identical twins, fraternal twins, half siblings) suggest that genetics is the main carrier of social status.

If we are right that nature predominates over nurture, and explains the low rate of social mobility, is that inherently a tragedy? It depends on your point of view.

The idea that low-status ancestors might keep someone down many generations later runs against most people’s notions of fairness. But at the same time, the large investments made by the super-elite in their kids — like those of the Manhattan hedge-funders who spend a fortune on preschool — are of no avail in preventing long-run downward mobility.

Our findings do suggest that intermarriage among people of different strata will raise mobility over time. India, we found, has exceptionally low mobility in part because religion and caste have barred intermarriage. As long as mating is assortative — partners are of similar social status, regardless of ethnic, national or religious background — social mobility will remain low.

As the political theorist John Rawls suggested in his landmark work “A Theory of Justice” (1971), innate differences in talent and drive mean that, to create a fair society, the disadvantages of low social status should be limited. We are not suggesting that the fact of slow mobility means that policies to lift up the lives of the disadvantaged are for naught — quite the opposite. Sweden is, for the less well off, a better place to live than the United States, and that is a good thing. And opportunities for people to flourish to the best of their abilities are essential.

Large-scale, rapid social mobility is impossible to legislate. What governments can do is ameliorate the effects of life’s inherent unfairness. Where we will fall within the social spectrum is largely fated at birth. Given that fact, we have to decide how much reward, or punishment, should be attached to what is ultimately fickle and arbitrary, the lottery of your lineage.

reader11

看来中国的一句古话，生死有命富贵在天还是有道理的。

世纪轮回

中国有高阶层姓氏吗？谁的姓氏高贵？胡JB扯。自新中国成立，人与人之间法律意义上基本就是平等的

fukgm

骨子里的种族主义还好意思写新闻，美国人算是真完了

感谢LZ孜孜不倦的翻译

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