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This article uses a panel of 18,869 people with rare surnames whose wealth is observed at death in England and Wales 1858–2012 to measure the intergenerational elasticity of wealth over five generations. We show, using rare surnames to track families, that wealth is much more persistent than standard one generation estimates would suggest. There is still a significant correlation between the wealth of families five generations apart. We show that this finding can be reconciled with standard estimates of wealth mobility by positing an underlying first order Markov process of wealth inheritance with an intergenerational elasticity of 0.70–0.75 throughout the years 1858–2012.

It is widely believed that women value social status in marital partners more than men, leading to female marital hypergamy (“marrying up”), and more female intergenerational social mobility. Using evidence from more than 33 million marriages and 67 million births in England 1837–2021 we show that within this era there was never significant hypergamous marriage by women. The average status of women’s fathers equaled that of their husbands’ fathers. For marriages 1912–2007 the average social status of female surnames equaled that of male. This was true also for parent surnames of children. Consistent with this, there was no differential tendency in England of men and women to marry by family status. There is also ancillary evidence that physical attraction cannot have been the significant determinant of matching in marriages in any period 1837–2021, based on the very strong correlation observed in underlying social status for marital partners throughout these years.

Using educational status in England from 1170 to 2012, we show that the rate of social mobility in any society can be estimated from knowledge of just two facts: the distribution over time of surnames in the society and the distribution of surnames among an elite or underclass. Such surname measures reveal that the typical estimate of parent–child correlations in socioeconomic measures in the range of 0.2–0.6 are misleading about rates of overall social mobility. Measuring education status through Oxbridge attendance suggests a generalized intergenerational correlation in status in the range of 0.70–0.90. Social status is more strongly inherited even than height. This correlation is unchanged over centuries. Social mobility in England in 2012 was little greater than in preindustrial times. Thus there are indications of an underlying social physics surprisingly immune to government intervention.

This article analyzes a newly constructed individual level dataset of every English death and probate from 1892–1992. This analysis shows that the twentieth century’s “Great Equalization” of wealth stalled in mid-century. The probate rate, which captures the proportion of English holding any significant wealth at death rose from 10 percent in the 1890s to 40 percent by 1950 and has stagnated to 1992. Despite the large declines in the wealth share of the top 1 percent, from 73 to 20 percent, the median English individual died with almost nothing throughout. All changes in inequality after 1950 involve a reshuffling of wealth within the top 30 percent. I translate the individual level data to synthetic households; the majority have at least one member probated. Yet the bottom 60 percent of households hold only 12 percent of all wealth, at their peak wealth-holding level, in the early 1990s. I also compare the new wealth data with existing estimates of top wealth shares, home-ownership trends, wealth survey distributions, aggregate wealth, and the wealth Gini coefficient.

I analyze the adult age at death of 115,650 European nobles from 800 to 1800. Longevity began increasing long before 1800 and the Industrial Revolution, with marked increases around 1400 and again around 1650. Declines in violent deaths from battle contributed to some of this increase, but the majority must reflect other changes in individual behavior. There are historic spatial contours to European elite mortality; Northwest Europe achieved greater adult lifespans than the rest of Europe even by 1000 ad.

Overturning a generation of research, Cinnirella et al. Demography, 54, 413–436 ( 2017 ) found strong parity-dependent fertility control in pre-Industrial England 1540–1850. We show that their result is an unfortunate artifact of their statistical method, relying on mother fixed effects, which contradicts basic biological possibilities for fecundity. These impossible parity effects also appear with simulated fertility data that by design have no parity control. We conclude that estimating parity control using mother fixed effects is in no way feasible. We also show, using the Cambridge Group data that Cinnirella et al. used, that there is no sign of parity-dependent fertility control in English marriages before 1850.

It has been long established that the demographic transition began in eighteenth-century France, yet there is no consensus on exactly why fertility declined. This analysis links fertility life histories to wealth at death data for four rural villages in France, 1750-1850. For the first time, the wealth-fertility relationship during the onset of the French fertility decline can be analysed. Where fertility is declining, wealth is a powerful predictor of smaller family size. This article argues that fertility decline in France was a result of changing levels of economic inequality, associated with the 1789 Revolution. In cross-section, the data support this hypothesis: where fertility is declining, economic inequality is lower than where fertility is high.

Overturning a generation of research, Cinnirella et al. Demography, 54, 413-436 (2017) found strong parity-dependent fertility control in pre-lndustrial England 1540-1850. We show that their result is an unfortunate artifact of their statistical method, relying on mother fixed effects, which contradicts basic biological possibilities for fecundity. These impossible parity effects also appear with simulated fertility data that by design have no parity control. We conclude that estimating parity control using mother fixed effects is in no way feasible. We also show, using the Cambridge Group data that Cinnirella et al. used, that there is no sign of parity-dependent fertility control in English marriages before 1850.