Status Persists Across Centuries

Greg Clark’s new, data‑rich book marshals records from 1600–2026 (wedding registers, wills, matriculation rolls, guilds, cadet lists) to show significant social‑status correlations across nine generations, suggesting status persistence that survives industrialization, wars, and institutional change. The work reframes the nurture vs. nature debate by treating long‑run archival harmonization as an empirical test bed for theories of social mobility. — If status persistence at centuries scale is robust, it changes how policymakers and institutions justify interventions aimed at equalizing outcomes and reframes debates over education, inheritance, and social policy.