Getting started
Why now
This has been sitting in the back of my mind since LEF. The research on intergenerational social mobility kept surfacing a pattern I couldn't ignore: political systems — even radical ones like communism — barely move the needle on who ends up where in society. The correlation between parents' status and children's status holds at 0.6–0.8 regardless of regime.
If the system doesn't explain it, what does?
The hypothesis
There's a mindset — a cluster of dispositions — that enables social mobility. It gets transmitted within families, not genetically but culturally. Long-term orientation, strategic awareness, self-efficacy, tolerance for discomfort, adaptive ambition. These work under any system because they're about how you operate, not what the rules are.
I didn't get to explore this properly at LEF. This project is that exploration.
What's here so far
- A definition of social mobility written for people who've never encountered the term but think about the concept every day
- The Hungarian surname study — the piece of research that makes the hypothesis most vivid
- An about page laying out the hypothesis and where I plan to take this
What's next
- More evidence: the Gregory Clark surname studies (England, Sweden, China, Japan)
- Defining the mindset components with more precision
- Looking for disconfirming evidence — cases where the pattern breaks
- Practical implications: can these dispositions be deliberately cultivated?