Ayer empecé The Son Also Rises de Gregory Clark. Al abrir la tapa me sorprendió un recorte de periódico que no recordaba haber dejado allí. “Hillary, Madonna y Jolie son primas”. Eso sí, muy lejanas. Las dos primeras en décimo grado, en “noveno grado y por partida doble” es el parentesco que comparten la política y la actriz. El recorte, de 2007, no está en este libro por casualidad. Leo en el prefacio:
The original intent of the Project was to extend conventional mobility estimates from the modern world into the distant past in countries like England and India. Thus, in the early stages of the research, I gave sunnily optimistic talks about the speed and completeness of social mobility. Only when confronted with evidence of the persistence of status over five hundred years that was too glaring to ignore was I forced to abandon the cheery assurance that one of the joys of the capitalist economy was its pervasive and rapid social mobility. Having for years poured scorn of my colleagues in sociology for their obsessions with such illusory categories as class, I now had evidence that individuals’ life are predictable not just from the status of their parents but from that of their great-great-great grand-parents. Indeed there seems to be an inescapable inherited substrate, looking suspiciously like social class, that underlies the outcomes for all individuals. [1]
El suelto no es una prueba, no demuestra nada, es tan sólo una conexión. Por ejemplo, el éxito de estas tres mujeres bien pudiera ser en alguno de los casos una cima genealógica que sería el principio de la regresión a la media, que en este caso debe entenderse como el índice que mide “the average rate at which families or social groups that diverge from the mean circumstances of the society move toward that mean in each generation” [2], lo que en España, tuteo, podría llamarse un «Rodrigo Rato».
[1] Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises, Princeton University Press, 2014, p. X.
[2] Gregory Clark, óp. cit., p. 3.
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