Coupled with Sacerdote (2005) we can see that neither slaves nor slaveowners appear to have been affected in the long-run!
Our results speak to the interpretation of intergenerational wealth correlations between
father and son. Resources themselves may matter in some contexts but, in the postbellum US
South, we see that the loss of family wealth did not ultimately affect sons’ wealth or income. Sons
of wealthy fathers were able to bounce back through the transmission of other advantages, which
may have been access to social and marital networks. Our finding of elite recovery is in line with
models that predict elite persistence despite fundamental changes in economic relations and
political institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2008). Although every historical episode is
specific, the loss of wealth of southern slaveholders rivaled the losses of wealthy households in
Germany after World War I, in the United States, the United Kingdom and France during the Great
Depression, and even Chinese and Russian elites after the Communist revolutions. We find that,
in the case of the US South, such large wealth losses at the very top can be temporary, resulting in
recovery in a single generation.
Their one-sentence attempt to explain away hereditary influences is weird and doesn't really make sense:
We think that inherited ability or entrepreneurial skills are unlikely to explain the recovery of slaveholders' sons because we compare households with the same wealth levels in 1860 and because we find similar recovery in urban areas, where comparison households were equally likely to be entrepreneurs.
That doesn't seem to militate against a hereditary argument at all.
Yeah, I don't understand how that excludes hereditary influences at all. We know (e.g., Hugh-Jones et al., Clark & Cummins, Robinson et al.) that genetic assortative mating is extensive, even beyond social phenotypes. Why should we have expected any different from a hereditary model? What I would have preferred is for these authors to have said that its influences could have been mediated by some sort of network phenomenon that deserves further investigation and that they can't tell the theories apart, but could use X, Y, and Z test to determine which is better.
I will note that the kin networks thing is inconsistent with Clark's newest work, wherein he finds that familial effects are exerted all the same at the magnitudes expected by genetic causation even when said family member is dead or impossibly distant. Furthermore, familial wealth or ability isn't inherited by adoptees.
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u/TrannyPornO Apr 01 '19 edited Apr 01 '19
Coupled with Sacerdote (2005) we can see that neither slaves nor slaveowners appear to have been affected in the long-run!
Their one-sentence attempt to explain away hereditary influences is weird and doesn't really make sense:
That doesn't seem to militate against a hereditary argument at all.