Your Ancestors, Your Fate? The surprising immobility of the rate of social mobility in history.

Good NYT piece on research that finds that social mobility in a wide range of cultures over many hundreds of years is slow and the rate of change hasn't budged even for communist revolutions or socialist egalitarianism.  Apparently the damned little DNA wrigglies really are dispositive.  Maybe we should ban them.

It has an awesome chart on the difference in the number of physicians per 1000 adults with different family names in the US.  Really fascinating and deflating of our  pretensions to 'save', 'rescue', 'elevate' the poor or to 'fold', 'shred' and 'spindle' the affluent.

Of course it's generally been members of the affluent class who made the class warfare promises in return for getting the weak and the poor's political support.  The fact that their promises may be scientific and moral crap - well that's just another piece of evidence of the persistence of social status - the smart cats screwing the weak ones whether up front via capitalism our out back via socialism.

Reality turns out  to truly be a first class Bitch, doesn't she?