Hereditarian Fallacies? Inheritance of Social Status in England, 1600-2022

Gregory Clark
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Gregory Clark: University of Southern Denmark

No 285, Working Papers from European Historical Economics Society (EHES)

Abstract: A recent article in PNAS “The Inheritance of Social Status in England, 1600-1822” (Clark, 2023) argued that social status in England throughout these years showed a strong and stable pattern of inheritance. This pattern was consistent with the additive genetic inheritance of social abilities, in the presence of strong genetic assortment in these characteristics in parenting. This article has induced criticism that it committed “Hereditarian Fallacies” (Benning et al., 2023, 2024, 2025). Similar criticism also appeared in blog postings by the geneticist Sasha Gusev, and in Lala and Feldman, 2024, and Lala et al., 2025. This paper offers additional evidence for why patterns of status inheritance in England 1600-2022 are consistent with direct genetic inheritance, but not with cultural transmission of status.

Keywords: Intergenerational mobility; status inheritance; cultural transmission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2025-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-his and nep-inv
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hes:wpaper:0285

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