Stymied in your bid to climb the social ladder? Blame Mom and Dad

Let’s face it, the older we get, the harder it is to resist the invisible force that turns us all into our parents.

From the slope of the nose to the way the corners of our eyes crinkle when we laugh, it’s impossible to avoid many of the genetic quirks we see in Mom and Dad, like it or not.

Thank goodness, then, we have the freedom to influence everything else in our lives, like the wealth, income, education and occupational status we can achieve.

Not so fast, say economists at the University of California and London School of Economics.

Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins combined forces to produce provocative new research indicating that the family we are born into has more power to shape our social trajectory than it does our height, weight or hair colour.

Yes, the researchers acknowledge, it is possible to achieve social mobility (that is the movement between one class to another). But, after analyzing the trajectory of thousands of families from 12th-century England to modern day, we should count on that transformation taking hundreds of years.

That’s true whether we’re moving up the social ladder or down towards the middle from the privileged 1 per cent.

“There really are quasi-physical ‘Laws of Inheritance’,” the researchers write in their technical paper, Surnames and Social Mobility in England, 1170 to 2012.

“Individuals have very little control over what is going to happen,” Clark adds in an interview with Yahoo Canada Finance from Davis, California.

“There is not much evidence that you can somehow defy these laws,” he says.

The research isn’t the first to connect familial ties with wealth, status and decision-making influence.

Sociologist John Porter wrote in his ground-breaking work in 1965 about what he called the “Vertical Mosaic” — that certain groups, namely those of British origin, had better incomes, education and health than those whose families hailed from eastern and southern Europe. First Nation and Inuit people were the most disadvantaged.

More recently, University of Ottawa economist Miles Corak, drawing inspiration from the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, found strong connection between social mobility and economic equality. Corak determined Americans, Brits and Italians, where the gap between rich and poor is greatest among developed nations, were most likely to inherit the social standing of the previous generation. The correlation between parental economic status and adult outcomes was less of a factor for residents of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.

In a recent blog post, Corak called Clark and Cummins efforts (summed up in Clark’s book, A Son also Rises) to advance the idea that social position is determined by innate inherited abilities “an exercise in historical scholarship.” But, ultimately, it was “scholastic overreach” that “serves neither good public policy nor good parenting,” he writes.

Clark and Cummins based their research on the analysis of surnames of students who attended Oxford and Cambridge universities between 1170 and 2012, rich property owners between 1236 and 1299, as well as the national probate registry since 1858. The database includes surnames first adopted by the upper classes in the 11^th century, including Baskerville, Darcy, Madeville, Montgomery, Neville, Percy and Talbot.

It also included a list of rare surnames such as Atthill, Bazalgette, Brooshooft, Bodgett and Conyngham.

They found that social status is consistently passed down among families over multiple generations.

The trend is so consistent, parents needn’t worry about their children’s future.

“As long as you are above average (in status), you can take some comfort in knowing that your children are going to be above average,” Clark says.

“Look at your parents, cousins, uncles and aunts and your spouse. The information is contained there.”