That is not quite what your article says. The researcher found that if you look at the period of time after 1850, people with rich surnames earn about 10% more

That is not quite what your article says. The researcher found that if you look at the period of time after 1850, people with rich surnames earn about 10% more than people without, although the differences narrow rapidly each generation. He then observed that if you go back to the Mid-ages and before, such convergence to the mean took a comparable amount of time. The example he uses is "Smith", which tended to be the last name of blacksmiths from simple villages in the 14th century. Yet by 1450 the share of "Smiths" at Oxford University was equal to their proportion across the general population (suggestive of upward mobility). And by 1650, there were as many Smiths in the top 1% of wealth holders as in the general population. So his big discovery is that social mobility in modern times is, more or less, comparable to social mobility in ancient times, which most people would not guess. Personally I view this discovery as framing the past in a more positive light, rather than framing the present in a more negative light.