Agency
Why do some people rise and others don't?
The conventional answers — education, connections, wealth, political system — explain less than you'd think. Research tracking elite families across centuries and regime changes finds a stubbornly high intergenerational status correlation of 0.6–0.8. Communist revolutions, free-market reforms, welfare states — none of them move the needle much.
Something else is at work. Agency is the hypothesis that a specific mindset — a cluster of internal dispositions — is the primary driver of social mobility. Not luck. Not the system. Not who you know. A way of seeing the world and acting in it that compounds across generations.
This project explores that hypothesis: what the research actually shows, what the mindset consists of, and what it means for anyone trying to improve their position in life.
What is social mobility? — a plain-language definition and why it matters to you personally.
The Hungarian surname study — the research that sparked this project: elite status surviving communism intact.
About this project — the hypothesis, its origins, and where it's going.
Follow the log — progress, new findings, and open questions.