BORN TO IT

Climbing from poverty to success is no easier in the U.S. than it is in China, England, or many other countries. It’s also no easier today than it was 200 years ago. Those are the surprising conclusions of researchers who used international historical records to track the wealth, education, and life expectancy of people with the same family names from 1800 to the present. (click below to read more)


In this study of “social mobility,’’ researchers expected the average family’s fortunes to have shifted dramatically in 200 years, but they found the opposite. Whether you’re from Chile, China, England, Japan, Sweden, or the U.S., if people with your surname in 1800 were members of the elite, you’re likely to be elite, too; if your family name was linked to poverty back then, odds are it still is. “As much as 60 percent” of our social status “is determined at the time of conception,” economic historian Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis, tells NPR.org. What’s really shocking about this finding, says Northwestern University economic historian Joseph Ferrie, is “that the number is as constant as it is.” In fact, when researchers looked even farther back in the record books, they found that the speed of social mobility hasn’t changed since the Middle Ages.