The Mismeasure of Man:

The Mismeasure of Man: Why Intergenerational Occupational Mobility is Much Lower than Conventionally Measured, England, 1800-2021

Gregory Clark, Neil Cummins, Matthew Curtis

Abstract

Using a new database of 1.7 m marriages in England 1837-1939, and a genealogy of 414,000 people in England 1700-2021, we estimate two independent new occupational status indices for England 1800-1939. These new indices show that there was much less social mobility 1800-1939 than previous indices, such as HISCAM, imply. The performance of these two new indices, however, illustrates a general problem with comparing social mobility across time and place using status indices. All such indices embody unknown and varying degrees of error. The more error, the more apparent mobility. So in the paper we develop a way of measuring intergenerational occupational status mobility which eliminates all measurement error. This suggests that intergenerational occupational status persistence in England 1800-2021 was always much greater than conventionally measured, and was largely unchanged over time.