Surnames and a Theory of Social Mobility - University of Chicago ...

dominance and genic interactions which are not additive. In general if V P is the
variance of outcomes,
,
where V A is variance from additive genetic effects, V D is variance from dominance
and genic interaction effects, V E is variance from the shared environment, and V U is
variance from random effects and non-shared environment. Since in these families
(V A + V E ) typically accounted for less than 15 percent of the variance of outcomes,
there is plenty of room for genetics to play an even more important relative role in
explaining outcomes.
Further there is every reason to expect that the family environment is itself in
part a product of the parents’ genetic endowment, so again magnifying the potential
contribution of genetic transmission of social status. So the question arises about
whether we are largely seeing a genetic process at work in the intergenerational
persistence of social status The experience of similar slow rates of social mobility in
modern Sweden, pre-industrial Sweden, the modern USA, medieval England and
modern England, very different institutional environments, is at variance with the
human capital account of intergenerational mobility. Instead it seems that social
status is transmitted within families independently of the resources available to
parents. This raises the possibility that nature, much more than nurture, is what
propagates social status so persistently across the generations.
Genes Versus Culture/Human Capital
While nature may triumph nurture, the question is to what extent is this because
the transmission of status is genetic, as opposed to stemming from some family
culture that passes down the generations How could we test if genes were the most
important carriers of social competence
One argument for the importance of genetic transmission is that with genetics
we know there will be the regression to the mean that we observe for underlying
status. If instead what is being transmitted is a cultural formation then why would
there be such a consistent tendency for regression to the mean Even if family