ECON 334 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Rich Dad Poor Dad, Testator, Social Mobility
Document Summary
Last lecture recap: life expectancy is a relevant measure of standards of living before the industrial. Revolution: life expectancy at birth was low in the pre-industrial world. He then argues that this could only have been accomplished through a natural selection mechanism. The rich had more surviving children: on a large sample of the population by wrigley, the average surviving children per testator was 2. 58. I(cid:374) clark"s data, the ri(cid:272)h ha(cid:448)e o(cid:448)er 4 sur(cid:448)i(cid:448)i(cid:374)g (cid:272)hildre(cid:374). This strongly suggests they had no surviving children to leave their assets to: literacy and social status were not correlated with the number of surviving children. Of (cid:272)ourse, they left the(cid:373) a lot of (cid:373)o(cid:374)ey, did(cid:374)"t they: not really - remember that rich fathers also tended to have a lot of children. How long had rich people been having more children: for the period 1250-1650, clark uses data on the surviving children of royal tenants.
