精華論文版
Surnames and a Theory of Social Mobility
Gregory Clark, University of California, Davis
http://economics.uchicago.edu/workshops ... hicago.pdf
Conclusion
The experience of long persistent social groups at high and low status in various
societies would seem to be a contradiction to the simple quasi-biological Law of
Motion for social status laid out above. However, we see that in the anomalous
cases discussed above there are factors at play that can make even extreme
persistence consistent with the universal pull of the mean on families across time.
Elites and underclasses seem to be created by mechanisms that select them from the
top or bottom of the established status distribution. They can also be created, as we
see in modern England and the Gypsy/Traveller community, by differential fertility
of the poorer members of a community.
The maintenance of these differences in social status,
once established, can be
by complete marital endogamy by social groups, as seems to have happened with
Christian and Jewish minorities in the Muslim world. Or they can be maintained by
selective movement between social groups, as we observe in the case of Catholics
and Protestants in Ireland.
Thus there seems to be no obvious contradiction between the simple quasi-biological Law of Motion
observed for social mobility, and the observed pattern of elites and underclasses.