我的祖先是贵族:社会地位由家族遗传决定?_BEC初级作文

我的祖先是贵族:社会地位由家族遗传决定?

The problem with this widely cited economic data are that they are very limited: it typically only tracks families over a generation or two and cannot capture subtle social patterns. So Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, has recently attempted to use another innovative approach that blends sociology, economics and history. In a new book, The Son Also Rises, he has analysed surnames in historical databases around the world to work out how families have risen in terms of wealth and status over multiple generations. In the US he looked at doctors; in the UK, at elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge; and in Sweden, land records.

这些被普遍引用的经济数据的问题在于，它们非常有限：它们对家族数据的追踪通常仅限于一、两代人，无法捕捉微妙的社会模式。因此，美国加州大学戴维斯分校(University of California, Davis)经济历史学家格里高利•克拉克(Gregory Clark)最近尝试运用另一种创新方法，把社会学、经济学和历史学结合在一起。在其新书《虎子崛起》(The Son Also Rises)中，他对全球历史数据库中的姓氏进行了分析，考察家族财富和地位是如何在好几代人时间内上升的。在美国，他考察了医生；在英国，他考察的是牛津(Oxford)和剑桥(Cambridge)等精英大学；在瑞典，他考察的是土地记录。

This approach – like the econometric one – has its limits. Historical lists of surnames or elite jobs can be patchy, particularly since they are dominated by the paternal line. (My story of maternal downward mobility, for example, would have been missed.) But Clark reaches some thought-provoking conclusions. First, he argues that if you look at multiple generations, social mobility is lower than widely presumed in most nations. Second, there is less difference between nations than usually thought. Those “egalitarian” Swedes are not as mobile as presumed. But in America, Clark rejects the idea that mobility has recently declined sharply as social polarisation has grown – an idea posited, for example, in Coming Apart, an influential book published last year by the political scientist Charles Murray. Clark argues that mobility is indeed low in America but insists it has always been thus.