I think it's lost on people outside of the UK - perhaps even to many inside the UK - just how strongly there is a class divide and a ruling elite. The old money is very old indeed
Actually, that 0.7 intergenerational correlation only tracks surnames—i.e., the male line. It completely ignores the fact that ~50% of the population changes status by marriage, which is invisible in surname analysis.
Think about it: when a blacksmith’s daughter marries a baron, her social mobility doesn’t show up anywhere in the data. She just becomes part of the baron’s lineage going forward.
So Clark has discovered that patrilineal dynasties persist with 0.7 correlation, and then presented this as if it were a measure of social mobility. It’s not. It’s a measure of surname mobility.
If assortative mating across 500 years averaged something like 0.5 (plausible—people married outside their exact status all the time), the actual population-wide status persistence might be closer to 0.4 than 0.7. That’s… a completely different story about how stratified society actually was.
But sure, “elites persist for centuries” makes for better book sales than “we measured half the mobility and ignored the other half.”
It was just marriages fueled by a pretty daughter. It was actual social advancement.
Sir Thomas More’s grandfather was a butcher - a highly stigmatized occupation. More rose to be Chancellor.
The fact that the British conquered a third of the world created many opportunities for advancement- military, commercial, artistic.
Sir John Major came from a family of musicians. When he ran for PM, his enemies said as a child he “ran away from the circus to become an accountant.”
Part of the issues is that people copy elites. A blacksmith from Birmingham would marry his daughter off to a banker, and the granddaughter off to a Baron. The family would spend money supporting artists, and build cathedrals. And eventually become “posh.”
A good example are the Rothschilds, who are currently at the height or British aristocracy, but were once grubby merchants.
I think you're overestimating how far families married outwith their class. Given the scandal of Mrs Simpson or Ms Markle, how often do you think Barons married commoners? It's the stuff of fairy-tales.
You’re looking at the 0.00001% as an argument why the lower 99.99999% cannot marry into that class - when, in fact, it’s just a matter of math that they cannot do. The marriages of Markle and Simpson have always been more accepted than a peasant marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant in 1950s Germany - just to put your claim into perspective.
Edit: or to put it differently, which of the two scenarios has been more likely in the past 500 years: the daughter of a blacksmith marrying a baron, or the son of a blacksmith becoming a baron through merit?
