Evidently, the results reported by Clark do not reflect a universal law of social mobility. Quite to the contrary, other studies based on group-average data, even surnames data, frequently produce intergenerational coefficient estimates much smaller than Clarkâs.
If you are interested in the issues raised by Clark, read the whole thing. Solon’s interpretation of Clark’s thesis as involving errors-in-variables is similar to mine.
Weyl and Possony did surname analyses back in the early 1960s and came up with findings generally aligned with Clark’s a half-century later.
I first noticed this when I was a teenager reading Adam Smith. Everybody wrote “Adam Smith” rather than just “Smith” on the assumption that there were a lot of famous Smiths out there, but there really aren’t. I know a lot of people named Smith, my grandmother was named Smith, but there aren’t that many famous Smiths proportional to how common the name is. Hamilton, Freeman, and Wilson are higher achieving Anglo names.
I suspect, though, that social-climbers’ name changes might play a larger role, however, than Clark assumes. For example, the Sailers used to be the Seilers until one ambitious Seiler got to be mayor of a small town in Switzerland and decided that being named Ropemaker was not befitting of his new dignity. This kind of thing