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A Schumpeter Hotel? Surname Status Persistence in Sweden 1880-2016

Elien van Dongen, Lund University
Martin Dribe, Lund University
Björn Eriksson, Lund University

This study addresses long-term equality of opportunity in Sweden since 1880. Conventional social mobility research, which measures family social class background as parental social class, misses substantial inequalities of opportunity. This article demonstrates that to capture intergenerational persistence of family class background we need to move beyond parent-child SES associations. Models that incorporate surnames and surname group belonging show that families do not regress to a population mean at the speed implied by parent-child SES associations. Their mobility is further constrained by their ancestors’ pre-modern social strata as operationalized through surname group belonging. We study this inheritance of surname status as a group-level process. By failing to include such group-level processes, summary measures such as intergenerational elasticities overestimate the relative importance of individual effort and ability on SES outcomes. Surname status persistence is as high in the modern Swedish welfare state as in pre-modern times. The class structure of surname groups converges at a slow rate, with differences persisting over at least six generations. Modernization is not associated with lasting increases in surname mobility. As a group, families with an agricultural surname background (patronyms) experience a persistent disadvantage; surname status persistence is not an elite phenomenon.

Keywords: Intergenerational relations, Big data / Social media, Inequality, Family demography

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session 198. Disadvantage, Opportunity and Inequality