The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022

Abstract

A lineage of 422,374 English people (1600 to 2022) contains correlations in social outcomes among relatives as distant as 4th cousins. These correlations show striking patterns. The first is the strong persistence of social status across family trees. Correlations decline by a factor of only 0.79 across each generation. Even fourth cousins, with a common ancestor only five generations earlier, show significant status correlations. The second remarkable feature is that the decline in correlation with genetic distance in the lineage is unchanged from 1600 to 2022. Vast social changes in England between 1600 and 2022 would have been expected to increase social mobility. Yet people in 2022 remain correlated in outcomes with their lineage relatives in exactly the same way as in preindustrial England. The third surprising feature is that the correlations parallel those of a simple model of additive genetic determination of status, with a genetic correlation in marriage of 0.57.

Confounding Fuels Misinterpretation in Human Genetics

“…To provide an illustration of this line of work and its limitations, we focus on a recent publication (30) as a case study. We identify the failure to account for confounding and two other core flaws in this study.…”

“…(30) analyzed familial correlations in a dataset of socioeconomic measures (e.g., occupational status, house value, literacy) from a selection of English relatives spanning the 18th to 21st centuries. From analyses fitting these observed correlations to a quantitative genetic model of trait inheritance [(31, 32); Supplementary Note 1 ], (30) infers that social status persists intergenerationally because parents mate assortatively on a status-determining genotype (or “social genotype” as used by the author in previous work (33)).…”

“…(30) analyzed familial correlations in a dataset of socioeconomic measures (e.g., occupational status, house value, literacy) from a selection of English relatives spanning the 18th to 21st centuries. From analyses fitting these observed correlations to a quantitative genetic model of trait inheritance [(31, 32); Supplementary Note 1 ], (30) infers that social status persists intergenerationally because parents mate assortatively on a status-determining genotype (or “social genotype” as used by the author in previous work (33)). (30) then argues that because mates share the genes underlying social status to such a high degree, the persistence of social status within families—and persistence of differences in status among families—have been largely unaffected by changes in social policy in the last four centuries.…”

“…From analyses fitting these observed correlations to a quantitative genetic model of trait inheritance [(31, 32); Supplementary Note 1 ], (30) infers that social status persists intergenerationally because parents mate assortatively on a status-determining genotype (or “social genotype” as used by the author in previous work (33)). (30) then argues that because mates share the genes underlying social status to such a high degree, the persistence of social status within families—and persistence of differences in status among families—have been largely unaffected by changes in social policy in the last four centuries. In a recent commentary about this work (34), the author presents the results of (30) as providing strong support for a hereditarian interpretation.…”

“…Here, we discuss three core flaws regarding these claims (see our discussion of other misinterpretations, errors, and incongruencies in (30) in Supplementary Notes 2-7 ; Tables S1-S3 ; Figs. S1-S13 ).…”