我的祖先是貴族:社會地位由家族遺傳決定?

When I was a child growing up in England three decades ago, I was confronted with the visual evidence of social mobility every day – but of the downward, not upward, type.
30年前，當我還是個孩子的時候，我住在英格蘭，每天都目睹表明社會流動性的“視覺”證據，不過流動方向是向下的，而不是向上的。

We lived in a suburban, middle-class home. On the walls, however, hung the portrait of an 18th-century Anglo-French aristocrat, a maternal ancestor. In the intervening centuries, my aristocratic forebears had lost their status and wealth due to drink, gambling and poor decisions. Thus, my only link with royalty was that portrait and the fact that I have the same unusual middle name – Romaine – as the noblewoman in the picture.
我們是生活在郊區的中產階級之家。但家裏的牆上掛着一幅18世紀英法貴族的畫像，她是我母親家族的一位祖先。從她往後的幾個世紀裏，我的貴族祖先們由於飲酒、賭博和一些糟糕的決定而失去了地位和財富。因此，我與貴族僅有的聯繫就是那幅畫像，以及我有一個不同尋常的中間名羅曼(Romaine)，與畫像中的貴婦一樣。

A rare example of social mobility or a widespread pattern? Today, that is a very politically charged question, particularly in countries such as the US. But it is also a very hard question to answer definitively.
這是社會流動性的一個罕見例子，還是一種普遍模式？如今，這是一個充滿政治意味的問題，尤其是在像美國這樣的國家。但這個問題很難明確回答。

Social mobility is an issue about which politicians love to pontificate but about which we actually know surprisingly little. Economists have generally tracked mobility by looking at surveys on wealth, jobs and educational attainment over two or three generations. This has typically shown that mobility is highest in the Scandinavian countries and lowest in places such as Latin America, with the US and UK lying halfway in between.
社會流動性是政治人士喜歡誇誇其談的一個問題，但實際上我們對它的瞭解出奇地少。經濟學家一般通過考察兩、三代人的財富、就業和教育程度來追蹤社會流動性。這些研究一般表明，斯堪的納維亞國家的社會流動性最高，拉美等國最低，美國和英國介於二者之間。

Interestingly, these surveys tend to show that more mobile societies such as Sweden are also more equal, as determined by the Gini coefficient, the most commonly used measure of inequality, and vice versa. The idea that you can justify high levels of inequality in some nations because there is plenty of mobility – as US politicians are apt to do – does not ring entirely true, based on the economic numbers.
有趣的是，這些調查往往表明，瑞典等社會流動性較大的國家也更爲平等，與基尼係數（Gini coefficient，最爲常見的衡量不平等程度的指標）所顯示的一樣，反之亦然。有人認爲，可以把一些國家的高度不平等說成合理的，因爲它們的社會流動性很大——美國政客就經常這麼說。但根據經濟數據，這種看法並不完全正確。

The problem with this widely cited economic data are that they are very limited: it typically only tracks families over a generation or two and cannot capture subtle social patterns. So Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, has recently attempted to use another innovative approach that blends sociology, economics and history. In a new book, The Son Also Rises, he has analysed surnames in historical databases around the world to work out how families have risen in terms of wealth and status over multiple generations. In the US he looked at doctors; in the UK, at elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge; and in Sweden, land records.
這些被普遍引用的經濟數據的問題在於，它們非常有限：它們對家族數據的追蹤通常僅限於一、兩代人，無法捕捉微妙的社會模式。因此，美國加州大學戴維斯分校(University of California, Davis)經濟歷史學家格里高利•克拉克(Gregory Clark)最近嘗試運用另一種創新方法，把社會學、經濟學和歷史學結合在一起。在其新書《虎子崛起》(The Son Also Rises)中，他對全球歷史數據庫中的姓氏進行了分析，考察家族財富和地位是如何在好幾代人時間內上升的。在美國，他考察了醫生；在英國，他考察的是牛津(Oxford)和劍橋(Cambridge)等精英大學；在瑞典，他考察的是土地記錄。

This approach – like the econometric one – has its limits. Historical lists of surnames or elite jobs can be patchy, particularly since they are dominated by the paternal line. (My story of maternal downward mobility, for example, would have been missed.) But Clark reaches some thought-provoking conclusions. First, he argues that if you look at multiple generations, social mobility is lower than widely presumed in most nations. Second, there is less difference between nations than usually thought. Those “egalitarian” Swedes are not as mobile as presumed. But in America, Clark rejects the idea that mobility has recently declined sharply as social polarisation has grown – an idea posited, for example, in Coming Apart, an influential book published last year by the political scientist Charles Murray. Clark argues that mobility is indeed low in America but insists it has always been thus.
這種方法（類似計量經濟學方法）有其侷限性。姓氏或精英職業的歷史清單可能是不完整的，尤其它們主要是父系數據。（例如，我母親家族的向下流動會被遺漏。）但克拉克得出了一些發人深省的結論。首先，他主張，如果從好幾代人的數據來看，多數國家的社會流動性低於人們普遍的想象。其次，國家間的差異小於人們通常的想象。“主張平等”的瑞典人的社會流動性並不像人們想象的那樣大。但對美國，克拉克並不同意以下觀點：由於社會兩級分化現象加劇，社會流動性最近大幅下降——這是政治學家查爾斯•默裏(Charles Murray)去年出版的頗具影響力的著作《分化》(Coming Apart)中的看法。克拉克指出，美國的社會流動性確實很低，但他堅持稱，該國一直如此。