Washington: A new study has revealed that having the right surname, which reveals that you descended from the "in" crowd in the England of 1066, will help you get good things in your life socially.
Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis, in the US and Neil Cummins of the London School of Economics in the UK, said that to a surprising degree, the social status of your ancestors many generations in the past still exerts an influence on your life chances.
The study shows that social mobility in England has always been slow and today is not much greater than it was in pre-industrial times.
Social status is generally seen as a ranking of families across such aspects of status as education, income, wealth, occupation, and health.
Clark and Cummings used various databases to calculate the social trajectory of families with rare English surnames over the past 28 generations.
The researchers analyzed the surnames of students who attended Oxford and Cambridge universities between 1170 and 2012, rich property owners between 1236 and 1299, as well as the national probate registry since 1858, including rare surnames such as Atthill, Bunduck, Balfour, Bramston, Cheslyn, and Conyngham.
Clark and Cummins found that social status is consistently passed down among families over multiple generations-in fact, it is even more strongly inherited than height. This correlation is unchanged over centuries, with social mobility in England in 2012 being little greater than in pre-industrial times.
Their analysis further shows that the rate of social mobility in any society can be estimated from the knowledge of just two facts: the distribution over time of surnames in the society and the distribution of surnames among an elite or underclass.
The study was published in journal Human Nature.
