Agency

The Hungarian Surname Study

The study

This page summarises the findings of Pétri & Révész (2021), "Social mobility in Hungary from the 18th century to the present day", published in the Journal of Population Economics. The paper is peer-reviewed and uses a surname-based methodology to track intergenerational status persistence across political regimes.

Researchers tracked social status across generations in Hungary using surnames as a proxy — specifically surnames ending in "..y", which were historically associated with the Hungarian noble class as far back as the 18th century. In the 1767 census of landowning aristocracy, 40% had this name pattern; among petty nobility in 1755, it was 25%.

This gave researchers a way to trace the fortunes of noble-descended families across two and a half centuries — and across two radically different political systems.

Two systems, same result

Hungary went through two fundamentally opposed regimes in the study period:

  • The Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) — a communist regime with an avowed aim of favouring the working class, redistributing wealth, and dismantling the old aristocratic order
  • A modern liberal democracy (1989–2017) — a free-market economy with open competition and democratic governance

If any political transformation could reset the social hierarchy, communism should have been it. The explicit goal was to eliminate class privilege. Land was confiscated. Titles were abolished. Education and employment were redirected toward working-class advancement.

It didn't work.

The findings

Despite communism actively trying to level the playing field, the study found that the descendants of the 18th-century noble class in Hungary were still significantly privileged in 1949 and later.

Even more surprising: social mobility rates under communism were the same as in the subsequent capitalist regime. The system of government made essentially no difference to how well elite families retained their status, or how hard it was for lower-class families to climb.

The underlying intergenerational status correlation was measured at 0.6–0.8 — a very high number, meaning your parents' status is a very strong predictor of yours, regardless of which regime you live under.

What this means

This finding is deeply challenging to most political narratives:

  • For the left: redistributive policies and structural reform, while valuable for other reasons, do not meaningfully increase social mobility. The families that were elite before communism were elite after it.
  • For the right: free markets and meritocracy do not create meaningfully more mobility than command economies. Competition doesn't reset the hierarchy either.
  • For individuals: the system you live in matters far less than you think. Something else — something internal to families and individuals — is doing most of the work.

The Agency interpretation

If neither communism nor capitalism can disrupt intergenerational status transmission, what can?

The Agency hypothesis proposes that what's being transmitted is not wealth (that can be confiscated), not connections (those can be severed), and not formal education (that can be equalised). What's being transmitted is a mindset — a set of dispositions that enable people to accumulate status in any system:

  • Long-term orientation — sacrificing present comfort for future position
  • Strategic awareness — reading the system you're in and finding leverage points
  • Self-efficacy — the deep belief that your actions determine your outcomes
  • Tolerance for discomfort — willingness to do what others avoid
  • Adaptive ambition — adjusting goals to the landscape without abandoning the drive to rise

These dispositions are culturally transmitted within families. They work under feudalism, communism, and capitalism alike. They are the common factor that the research points toward.

Source

Pétri, B. & Révész, S. (2021). Social mobility in Hungary from the 18th century to the present day. Journal of Population Economics, 35, 993–1025. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-021-00875-w

Further reading