Who's your daddy?

Read this interview about analyzing historic social mobility using surnames..

Even slaughtering the old bourgeoisie and elite in China hardly moved the social mobility needle.   Social mobility in 'chock full 'o progress' Sweden is what it was in medieval times. In both cases the surnames that dominated then dominate today.  I guess human beings are a bit too complicated to be 'saved'. But our rulers make a great living pretending to help (see 'war on poverty' or 'war on drugs' for how to play government pretend help.  First, you need looooots of somebody else's money...come to think if it, all salvationist projects start with liberal amounts of the sweat of other people's brows...then you need lots of guns and shackles and small concrete boxes to coerce righteousness. )

It turns out that inequality is driven far more by social and biological factors than economic ones (see my othe recent post on social mobility here).  Pre revolution China was a very different place than Maoist China yet the same families were on top.  Ditto Medieval and 21st Century Sweden.  And are you really 'fixing' inequality if you interventions can have no (positive, I'm sure there are many negative) impact on social mobility?  Is it just another more elaborate version of 'alms for the poor' extended to the middle class to buy more votes?

As I've argued before: appeals to fix inequality are just gussied up demands for 'more power (and therefore wealth, status,and sex) for me' in the pursuit of a goal that can never ever be reached and therefore can be used forever by the unethical to drive division, hatred and fear in fulfillment of their narrow interests.

But of course pretty much every appeal to empower the state can be boiled down to self seeking. Not every intervention is wrong but they should always be suspect.