To Have and Have Not: The Determinants of Social Status in England, 1600-2026

Abstract

In this manuscript, Gregory Clark investigates the determinants and persistence of social status in England from 1600 to 2026, extending the comparison to contemporary Denmark and Sweden. Utilizing a genealogical database of more than 436,000 English individuals alongside 1.7 million marriage records from 1837 to 2022, Clark applies ratio-based estimations across extended kinship ties down to fourth cousins to eliminate attenuation from measurement error. He finds that the underlying intergenerational correlation of social status is approximately 0.8 and has remained constant across four centuries despite industrialization, female emancipation, and the expansion of the welfare state. Clark argues that this persistence reflects an additive genetic model of inheritance characterized by strong assortative mating (phenotypic correlation of 0.8; genotypic correlation around 0.6), whereas social causation and “genetic nurture” appear negligible. In support, he demonstrates that mothers and fathers predict offspring outcomes symmetrically, family size and birth order exert virtually no impact on adult attainment, early parental loss and the absence of living grandparents do not diminish child outcomes, accidental wealth shocks dissipate within three generations, and regional disparities stem from selective migration rather than institutional barriers. Clark concludes that English and Nordic societies function essentially as meritocracies, contending that compulsory educational expansions have failed to foster upward mobility or raise earnings for lower-ability students, and that population-level distributions of social ability shift primarily through selective migration, class-differentiated net fertility, and marital sorting. – AI-generated abstract.