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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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If we had proof that intermarriage between class was as infrequent as intermarriage between races, that marriage throughout the class was common (that is, that the "class" was not made up of much smaller groups which only bred internally), that there was little social mobility, and that this had been going on for many generations, then we would be in the situation of having genetic castes, which HBD could look at. We are not in that situation. Some aspects of that situation exist -- for instance, there's generational welfare recipients. But though there are black and non-Hispanic white generational welfare recipients, they're largely separate groups.

The whole paper is here. But even if I was convinced by the tower of assumptions made there, I don't live in England; the US has long been reputed to have a much weaker class system.

So he's got direct measures of social mobility, but rejects that in favor of a surrogate measure based on correlations of surnames?

He has (from other studies) direct measures of intergenerational income correlation, found by sampling members of different generations. He starts off with those. He rejects them in favor of his technique of measuring surnames in various professions, a very indirect measure.