The Son Also Rises (book)

The Son Also Rises is a 2014 non-fiction book on the study of social mobility by the economist Gregory Clark.

The book follows relatively successful and unsuccessful extended families through the centuries in England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile.

Clark finds that the persistence of high or low social status is greater than would be expected from the generally accepted correlations of income between parents and children, conflicting with virtually all measures of social mobility previously developed by other researchers, which Clark claims are flawed.

[1][2] The book attempts to explain the difference between Clark's estimates of social mobility rates and estimates by other researchers by noting that the effects measured by other researchers are based on only a few generations, and argues that Clark's posited hidden variable of inherited "underlying social competence" is swamped by chance variations in status from generation to generation - variations which Clark says are smoothed out in his longer-term study.

From his finding that ethnically homogeneous societies, such as Japan and Korea, had similar rates of social mobility to ethnically diverse societies, such as the United States, Clark infers that racism may not be a significant factor affecting social mobility.