Your Ancestors, Your Fate

   

     In this article, Your Ancestors, Your Fate, it talks about how social mobility has not changed much over the years despite the fact that society thinks it has. A study conducted by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley suggest that social mobility hasn't slowed but has always been slow. This fact seems to be consistent across different nationalities and sociopolitical systems. The recent study suggests that you can predict your social status based on the lineage of your family and that it takes somewhere between 10-15 generations for a families status to merge towards the mean (high status families fall and low status families rise). This conclusion comes from examining data of surnames across the globe. The article provides examinations of several different countries with similar conclusions to include; Chile, China, England, India, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the United States.The article also talks about how adoption and siblings studies show that biological factors are the main determinant of social status. Due to the aforementioned factors in this article, the authors than talk about how "policies to lift up the lives of the disadvantaged" should be enacted.
     I am not sure how I feel about the findings in this article. Sure, it is more likely if your family is rich you will be rich and vice versa. However, the point that we should push public policies "to lift up the lives of the disadvantaged" is controversial to me. At some point public policies to lift up the disadvantaged will pull down the so-called "privileged" in possibly an unfair manner. The article concludes by saying "What governments can do is ameliorate the effects of life’s inherent unfairness" and I think we can all agree on that but how this is done "fairly" is a much more difficult task, in my opinion.
     For more on the subject of social mobility see the link http://www.verisi.com/resources/prosperity-upward-mobility.htm