The Son Also Rises
by Gregory Clark · first published 2014
23mentions
3recommended by
17HN commenters
2014–2025first – last mentioned
18% recommend82% neutral
xii, 364 pages : 25 cm
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> Wealth does not pass three generations. - Chinese proverb Not true. Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises. Social status has a heritability of 0.7ish in every society he measured it in. That's almost as high as the upper bound estimate for IQ. To give an idea of how powerful heritability of social status/roles…
on “Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care” ↗…require additional materials. Here are some titles of that kind I enjoyed. Anabasis by Xenophon Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Antifragile by Nassim Taleb Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman The Son also Rises by Gregory Clark
on “Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?” ↗…preindustrial times. Thus there are indications of an underlying social physics surprisingly immune to government intervention.* Gregory Clark, co-author of the above article wrote an excellent book, The Son Also Rises, the topic of the linked article about his research into social mobility. It's basically invariant across societies.
on “Social mobility of the English and Chinese elite classes” ↗…find much the same pattern even across say the cultural revolution, which I hear was rather rough on inherited nest eggs. The rec. book on this (as in one of the old comment threads below) is Clark, "The Son Also Rises" ( http://amzn.to/2jFnUmZ ).
on “The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)” ↗…controlling for parents) has already been found to be robustly true in Europe and some eastern countries. Gregory Clark wrote a book on it that was widely discussed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for strong persistent effects on economic success, and it's almost certainly not money (which…
on “New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited” ↗…careers), then you were likely to follow a similar path. How much of that was socially determined and how much based on psychological and other heritable traits I don't know. Gregory Clark's book, The Son Also Rises looks at family status trends in Europe, which is related but not the same though has similarities. The classifications I posted above show that how specialized you see work depends much on how the classifications…
on “Archaeologists find 12,000-year-old pictograph at Gobeklitepe” ↗Gregory Clark's work on tracking English class mobility in the 1700s-1900 (The Son Also Rises & A Farewell to Alms) indicates that this isn't the first time this has happened (ie, the obsolescence of a large portion of the labor force), and that it's possible to manage the transition with a fairly…
on “As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income” ↗Intergenerational social mobility is basically invariant across human societies. See The Son Also Rises, Gregory Clark. Sweden, Britain, China, almost identical. Note, China, communism, cultural revolution and all didn't have any lasting effect on social mobility.
on “The Guilt of the Video-Game Millionaires” ↗[I've revised this comment several times now, but I don't actually know where we disagree. I'm just leaving it as is for now.] > Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises. I haven't read Clark's book personally. But a passage via SSC [1] (a link which I cited for you to follow and actually read): > efforts to democratise education and eliminate discrimination over the…
on “Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care” ↗This is particularly interesting in combination with Gregory Clark's ("The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility") research into social mobility and relative fecundity by social strata.
on “The Loss of Skill in the Industrial Revolution” ↗There's actually pretty strong evidence to suggest very long-term family trends in wealth. See Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/the_Son_Also_Rise... Related: "The cruel key to individual prosperity: choosing the right ancestors" http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/cruel-key-individua...…
on “The Unexotic Underclass” ↗Related: Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises https://www.worldcat.org/title/son-also-rises-surnames-and-t... (And yes, Clark's got a thing for very bad Hemmingway puns.)
on “Do jobs run in families?” ↗Social mobility is basically invariant across societies, with a heritability of about 0.7 according to Gregory Clark’s research (A Farewell to Alms, The Son Also Rises, the upcoming For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls). The difference is explained by the number of generations covered.
on “U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year” ↗The book The Son Also Rises makes a fairly compelling (albeit contested) case that extreme wealth continues to have beneficial impact for hundreds of years. The author shows numerous examples but one of the most striking for English-speakers…
on “Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke” ↗Surprised there's no mention of the book "The Son Also Rises" by Gregory Clark that dives into the same topic and compares multi-generational earnings and achievement across multiple societies, drawing similar conclusions. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18730716-the-son-also-ri...
on “Intergenerational mobility over six centuries (2016)” ↗