Surname-Based Mobility Analysis

Surname-based mobility analysis estimates how strongly social status is inherited across generations without linking a single parent to a single child. Developed by Gregory Clark, it exploits the fact that surnames cluster: certain names were borne disproportionately by elites, others by the poor. By tracking how over-represented or under-represented a surname group is among elites, university graduates, physicians, attorneys, the wealthy, across successive generations, one observes how fast that group's relative status regresses toward the population mean. The speed of regression yields an estimate of underlying intergenerational persistence, conventionally denoted b. Clark's striking and contested finding is that this group-level b is far higher, around 0.7 to 0.8, than the 0.3 to 0.5 typically found by conventional parent-child studies, implying that the deep, latent component of social status is far stickier than single-generation correlations suggest. The method extends mobility measurement into eras and places where individual linkage is impossible.