"Families of England is a project to reconstruct the economic and social position, and the demography, of a representative set of English families from 1750 to the present. It looks at the determination of social outcomes over multiple generations, and the role of inheritance, family size, geography, and assortative mating".
The researchers are Greg Clark from UC Davis and Neil Cummins from the LSE.
One of the links from the project website is to a short BBC video item The generational wealth divide. It makes the point that social mobility is almost static, "glacial", over generations.
The item was shot at the EPIC Centre in Dublin giving an opportunity to see that as well as learn the research findings.
Other findings from the project include:
- less than half of wealth is inherited; wealth correlates strongly across generations mainly because of the inheritance of educational and occupational status, and not because of wealth transfers themselves. <http://neilcummins.com/Papers/cctlr.pdf>.
- status is inherited more strongly than height. <http://neilcummins.com/Papers/Clark_Cummins_Science_2013.pdf>.
The project is seeking information from surname and other studies that could help elucidate multi-generational social mobility, with a focus on England but not excluding families who migrated. Contact through the links at http://familiesofengland.com/.
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