The Son Also Rises

Den amerikanske ekonomihistorikern Gregory Clarks bok ”The Son Also Rises” kommenteras i senaste The Atlantic av Benjamin M Friedman, ekonomiprofessor på Harvard. Såhär dagarna inför Thomas Pikettys ankomst till Visby kan det finnas skäl att påpeka att det finns rader av tolkningar av hur det egentligen ser ut med rikedomsfördelningen och dess orsaksamband. Friedman:

Clark argues that mobility is always the same—in all societies, and in every era. Mobility, he claims, is “a universal constant”; over time we thrive or not according to a “social law of motion,” a “social physics of intergenerational mobility.” And to make matters worse, the universal speed at which families and groups change their social position is slow—a lot slower than everyone thinks on the basis of previous research.

The implications are profound. If mobility is constant, then the ability of social institutions to affect it must be negligible. Clark points to such changes as the movement from feudalism to democracy and then the expansion of the franchise, as well as free public education and redistributive taxation. But if modern America and modern Sweden have the same rate of mobility, and that rate is the same as what prevailed in medieval England and in 19th-century China, then none of those changes mattered. And if the journey from unusually high or low status to the middle can, as Clark claims, “take ten or fifteen generations (300–450 years),” the mobility-based defense of inequality becomes strained, here and everywhere else. (—) Clark’s book is not merely intellectually clever, it’s profoundly challenging. Especially for Americans, it calls into question our sense of ourselves as individuals, as well as our long-standing image of our society. Let’s hope he’s wrong.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/whats-in-a-name-everything/372271/