4 ms·

The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. The head of state is the ch

by JCM9 2y ago

The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. The head of state is the child of the previous head of state. The House of Lords is still a thing. Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal. In the US and other parts of Europe it’s very different. People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are and, with some exception, nobody cares who your parents were. If you have a rich daddy most people don’t care. If you’re rich because you inherited wealth vs earning it that’s see as “less” than those who are self made. While there are certainly exceptions, most of our richest people are in the self-made category and that’s a source of pride. “The American Dream” while a bit of a glossy story is generally a very real thing. Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up. Until the UK truly does away with its still quite hereditary ways and focuses a lot more on valuing individual achievement it will likely only continue to stagnate against other economies that have long since broadly moved on from such archaic mental models.

hkon 2y ago
The same last names are mentioned in the context of many US elections. US is not as far removed as you might think.
gmac 2y ago
> Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal Are you in the UK? The monarchy and House of Lords are an obvious anachronism and they need abolishing [1], but I would say it's a very small minority who care who you parents are/were (mainly people who think their own parents are/were a big deal) — and a similar small minority who might also ask "which school did you go to?". [1] e.g. https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/ https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/
- flir 2y ago
  I suggest this exercise: Pick a random person from Queen Victoria's court. Look up where their descendants are today. Chances are, they're still running the country in some capacity. (The example I'm thinking of was a Duchess. Her descendant was a beak at Eton who taught Boris and the haunted pencil).
  - gmac 2y ago
    That's probably true, but it's a quite separate problem (it's about power rather than attitudes). Also, Victoria is only about 100 years ago. I suspect power and wealth are pretty strongly hereditary over that time span in many other democracies.
  - gadders 2y ago
    Try Norman times: People with Norman names wealthier than other Britons People with "Norman" surnames like Darcy and Mandeville are still wealthier than the general population 1,000 years after their descendants conquered Britain, according to a study into social progress. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8424904/People-with-Norman-names-wealthier-than-other-Britons.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/842...
    - flir 2y ago
      If you read that paper carefully (it's been a while so I might have this wrong), I think you'll see that while they're using Norman vs not-Norman surnames, the comparison is between Victorian and contemporary wealth and life expectancy data. (Obviously the discrepancy has to start with the Conquest, I'm just saying that strictly speaking you can't use that paper to support that conclusion).
    - bloak 2y ago
      Also surnames like d'Urberville? (Alec d'Urberville in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is a nouveau riche person who adopted the name rather than a descendent of the original d'Urbervilles. Probably that happens in real life, too, though I expect the people who did the study have taken that into account and have done the best they can in the absence of reliable public ancestry data.)
      - gadders 2y ago
        Like Anton Du Beke? (Real name Tony Beke) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Du_Beke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Du_Beke
- gadders 2y ago
  I don't think people care what school you went to, but the fact remains that the UK has one of the lowest rates of social mobility in Europe.
  - dukeyukey 2y ago
    I don't think that's actually a fact. I don't know what figures you're using, but eyeballing the Global Social Mobility Index puts the UK as pretty middling in Europe. Less mobile than France or Germany, more so than Italy, Spain, or Poland.
    - gadders 2y ago
      It's below average, and lower than all of Scandinavia, Austria etc. Yes, it beats Southern Europe and ex-communist countries. My source was the Sutton Trust and Oxera.
      - jamespo 2y ago
        well, that's not one of the lowest really is it
        gadders 2y ago
        "One of"
        dukeyukey 2y ago
        If your point is the UK is just about in the lowest 50% of European countries by social mobility (keeping in mind Europe is pretty good on a global scale for social mobility), it's basically a non-point altogether. If the UK were at the end of the scale it might, but it's not, so it doesn't.
  - gramie 2y ago
    I think that if you look at the people in positions of control in political and economic sectors (and mass media, which is a key element), the vast majority came from just a few schools.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up. In Japan there's an old saying that the success of a family is determined with the third generation. The first builds the family empire. The second grows up seeing the first build it up and thus knows how to maintain it. The third grows up already having the empire and doesn't know how to maintain it, whether he can pass it on is essentially a dice roll. The fourth generation onwards, if the third succeeded, can refer to the family records and keep things going mostly indefinitely or realizes it's time to hand it off to different blood at that point.
docdeek 2y ago
One of the exceptions in the US seems to be around the White House. For a while, when Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2008, it was possible that the US would have had a member of the Bush or Clinton families as either VP or President every year from 1981 thorough to 2017. Such political families are not unique to the US, of course, and the UK has a fair few, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_family
- nine_k 2y ago
  With that, Bill Clinton has very humble ancestry, as does Hillary; both trace back to traveling salesmen, small business owners, coal miners, such kind of folks. Parental families of, say, Nigel Farage or Margaret Thatcher were somehow more sophisticated, even though not tracing back to some nobility. Not that coming from a well-off family is bad; I just would like to emphasize that the "American dream" of coming to high social positions based in merit, not lineage, worked for Clintons.
- relaxing 2y ago
  Hillary is not linked hereditarily to Bill, so really you’re talking about 3 people- Bush Sr and his 2 kids. Political dynasties in the US are notable because they’re uncommon, rather than part of the law as in the UK.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
matthewmorgan 2y ago
Not sure who could be down voting you, because you're right. If your parents didn't send you to the right school to learn the right plummy accent, you don't stand much chance.
- dukeyukey 2y ago
  I mean, depends on the field. Journalism, possibly. Tech, wat?
widdershins 2y ago
I don't think that's really true, outside some niche cultural arenas. Sure, if you're at a posh member's club or a party of aristocrats people might be impressed by your lineage. I would concede that in politics a degree from Oxbridge has an outsized cachet, and those universities traditionally recruited from elite private schools. However, this is diminishing over time, both because those institutions are proactively recruiting from a wider base, and because people are pointing out the unrepresentitive composition of political parties, which then self-correct to stay politically relevent. The hereditary parts of the House of Lords are increasingly unimportant, and the Lords is of minor importance to the political process anyway. Royalty has been politically vestigial for more than a century. But in industry and most business spheres your lineage is unimportant. Just like those other parts of the world you mentioned, it's personal accomplishment that matters. Britain has big problems, but I think archaic veneration for family lineage is only a small force within them.
inglor_cz 2y ago
"People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are and, with some exception, nobody cares who your parents were." Maybe on individual level, but as far as economy goes, mainland EU is still stuck with very old corporations and rarely generates some interesting startup (not just in IT). There has been a notable dearth of new European corporations since the 1970s at least. The old guard controls everything. And London is full of European youngsters who came there to study and do some business, because the possibilities are broader there, including some VC culture. Try founding a new company in Germany; you will be met by a merciless paper storm that can only be weathered with help of a professional specialized in dealing with bureaucracy, and may take several months to overcome. The UK is too complicated to fit into one neat box. It has its peers in medieval gowns, but at the same time, London is a very modern 21st century city, more modern than many metropolises on the continent. Perhaps Warsaw is more modern than London.
emmet 2y ago
I've been here for 5 years and am almost thirty years old. I still have people regularly asking me where I went to secondary school. They are obsessed with class.
- dukeyukey 2y ago
  I've been here for 30 years, and am 30 years old, and I don't think anyone has ever asked me where I went to secondary school. What kind of people ask you that?
  - emmet 2y ago
    I somehow keep ending up working at places where 90% of the employees grew up with staff in the house. Dozens of people with wikipedia pages about their families.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      So, people who grew up with staff in the house are obsessed with class. That's perhaps disappointing, but not really surprising. I'd bet, in the US, you'd find the same among people who grew up with staff in the house. The difference may be that, in the US, it's a lot harder to find people like that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  I've never been asked that and I'm in my sixties.
csomar 2y ago
Revolutionary France never made it across the channel... On the other hand, this significantly dismiss the UK contributions to the world on global trade and during the industrial revolution.
- card_zero 2y ago
  Britain had multiple revolutions earlier on. There was The Anarchy, Magna Carta, Cromwell, and 1688 when Britain decided to be Dutch for a while. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, and a lot of that was English (or Scottish). The general mood was to look at the French as latecomers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17th_and_18th_centuries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
michaelt 2y ago
> The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. I think this statement's accuracy depends heavily on how you're defining things. If I go up to the average Brit and tell them my father is the deputy editor-in-chief of some newspaper? They won't be impressed, they'll think I'm a prick. On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers. Does "UK culture strongly value" who my father is, if 99.99 % of brits don't care, but the remaining 0.01 % can have an outsized impact on my career? (Of course if I've inherited a hundred million quid some people will think I'm important / suck up to me due to the power such wealth confers - but there's nothing uniquely british about that)
- gadders 2y ago
  >> On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers. It also helps to get an internship if your Dad is literally the editor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Mackie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Mackie
dash2 2y ago
Isn't socio-economic status more heritable in the US than the UK? In the UK, inheritance tax is 40% and there's probably more redistributive taxation in general.
shortrounddev2 2y ago
Sometimes I'll read a biography of a famous British person and the first chapter is dedicated to the full family lineage of them. You won't even hear the subject's name until chapter 2 because it was more important to discuss what his grandfather did in India in 1895. I think biographies of Americans tend to start at the childhood of the subject and will mention their family life and parents when relevant
thorin 2y ago
To a certain extent I agree, however the head of state is only token position (albeit well paid!). It's not very different in the US, the "name" - Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, Bush, etc takes you most of the way there... Trump too I guess!
dukeyukey 2y ago
Worth pointing out that not only is the UK more American-style entrepreneurial than the rest of Europe (London gets about as much VC investment as France and Germany together), but that UK wealth inequaslity is low by European standards. Like, there's work to do here, but by European standards the UK is doing pretty well.

by JCM9 2y ago

hkon 2y ago

The same last names are mentioned in the context of many US elections. US is not as far removed as you might think.

gmac 2y ago

> Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal Are you in the UK? The monarchy and House of Lords are an obvious anachronism and they need abolishing [1], but I would say it's a very small minority who care who you parents are/were (mainly people who think their own parents are/were a big deal) — and a similar small minority who might also ask "which school did you go to?". [1] e.g. https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/ https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/

flir 2y ago
I suggest this exercise: Pick a random person from Queen Victoria's court. Look up where their descendants are today. Chances are, they're still running the country in some capacity. (The example I'm thinking of was a Duchess. Her descendant was a beak at Eton who taught Boris and the haunted pencil).
- gmac 2y ago
  That's probably true, but it's a quite separate problem (it's about power rather than attitudes). Also, Victoria is only about 100 years ago. I suspect power and wealth are pretty strongly hereditary over that time span in many other democracies.
- gadders 2y ago
  Try Norman times: People with Norman names wealthier than other Britons People with "Norman" surnames like Darcy and Mandeville are still wealthier than the general population 1,000 years after their descendants conquered Britain, according to a study into social progress. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8424904/People-with-Norman-names-wealthier-than-other-Britons.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/842...
  - flir 2y ago
    If you read that paper carefully (it's been a while so I might have this wrong), I think you'll see that while they're using Norman vs not-Norman surnames, the comparison is between Victorian and contemporary wealth and life expectancy data. (Obviously the discrepancy has to start with the Conquest, I'm just saying that strictly speaking you can't use that paper to support that conclusion).
  - bloak 2y ago
    Also surnames like d'Urberville? (Alec d'Urberville in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is a nouveau riche person who adopted the name rather than a descendent of the original d'Urbervilles. Probably that happens in real life, too, though I expect the people who did the study have taken that into account and have done the best they can in the absence of reliable public ancestry data.)
    - gadders 2y ago
      Like Anton Du Beke? (Real name Tony Beke) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Du_Beke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Du_Beke
gadders 2y ago
I don't think people care what school you went to, but the fact remains that the UK has one of the lowest rates of social mobility in Europe.
- dukeyukey 2y ago
  I don't think that's actually a fact. I don't know what figures you're using, but eyeballing the Global Social Mobility Index puts the UK as pretty middling in Europe. Less mobile than France or Germany, more so than Italy, Spain, or Poland.
  - gadders 2y ago
    It's below average, and lower than all of Scandinavia, Austria etc. Yes, it beats Southern Europe and ex-communist countries. My source was the Sutton Trust and Oxera.
    - jamespo 2y ago
      well, that's not one of the lowest really is it
      - gadders 2y ago
        "One of"
        dukeyukey 2y ago
        If your point is the UK is just about in the lowest 50% of European countries by social mobility (keeping in mind Europe is pretty good on a global scale for social mobility), it's basically a non-point altogether. If the UK were at the end of the scale it might, but it's not, so it doesn't.
- gramie 2y ago
  I think that if you look at the people in positions of control in political and economic sectors (and mass media, which is a key element), the vast majority came from just a few schools.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up. In Japan there's an old saying that the success of a family is determined with the third generation. The first builds the family empire. The second grows up seeing the first build it up and thus knows how to maintain it. The third grows up already having the empire and doesn't know how to maintain it, whether he can pass it on is essentially a dice roll. The fourth generation onwards, if the third succeeded, can refer to the family records and keep things going mostly indefinitely or realizes it's time to hand it off to different blood at that point.

docdeek 2y ago

One of the exceptions in the US seems to be around the White House. For a while, when Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2008, it was possible that the US would have had a member of the Bush or Clinton families as either VP or President every year from 1981 thorough to 2017. Such political families are not unique to the US, of course, and the UK has a fair few, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_family

nine_k 2y ago
With that, Bill Clinton has very humble ancestry, as does Hillary; both trace back to traveling salesmen, small business owners, coal miners, such kind of folks. Parental families of, say, Nigel Farage or Margaret Thatcher were somehow more sophisticated, even though not tracing back to some nobility. Not that coming from a well-off family is bad; I just would like to emphasize that the "American dream" of coming to high social positions based in merit, not lineage, worked for Clintons.
relaxing 2y ago
Hillary is not linked hereditarily to Bill, so really you’re talking about 3 people- Bush Sr and his 2 kids. Political dynasties in the US are notable because they’re uncommon, rather than part of the law as in the UK.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

matthewmorgan 2y ago

Not sure who could be down voting you, because you're right. If your parents didn't send you to the right school to learn the right plummy accent, you don't stand much chance.

dukeyukey 2y ago
I mean, depends on the field. Journalism, possibly. Tech, wat?

widdershins 2y ago

I don't think that's really true, outside some niche cultural arenas. Sure, if you're at a posh member's club or a party of aristocrats people might be impressed by your lineage. I would concede that in politics a degree from Oxbridge has an outsized cachet, and those universities traditionally recruited from elite private schools. However, this is diminishing over time, both because those institutions are proactively recruiting from a wider base, and because people are pointing out the unrepresentitive composition of political parties, which then self-correct to stay politically relevent. The hereditary parts of the House of Lords are increasingly unimportant, and the Lords is of minor importance to the political process anyway. Royalty has been politically vestigial for more than a century. But in industry and most business spheres your lineage is unimportant. Just like those other parts of the world you mentioned, it's personal accomplishment that matters. Britain has big problems, but I think archaic veneration for family lineage is only a small force within them.

inglor_cz 2y ago

"People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are and, with some exception, nobody cares who your parents were." Maybe on individual level, but as far as economy goes, mainland EU is still stuck with very old corporations and rarely generates some interesting startup (not just in IT). There has been a notable dearth of new European corporations since the 1970s at least. The old guard controls everything. And London is full of European youngsters who came there to study and do some business, because the possibilities are broader there, including some VC culture. Try founding a new company in Germany; you will be met by a merciless paper storm that can only be weathered with help of a professional specialized in dealing with bureaucracy, and may take several months to overcome. The UK is too complicated to fit into one neat box. It has its peers in medieval gowns, but at the same time, London is a very modern 21st century city, more modern than many metropolises on the continent. Perhaps Warsaw is more modern than London.

emmet 2y ago

I've been here for 5 years and am almost thirty years old. I still have people regularly asking me where I went to secondary school. They are obsessed with class.

dukeyukey 2y ago
I've been here for 30 years, and am 30 years old, and I don't think anyone has ever asked me where I went to secondary school. What kind of people ask you that?
- emmet 2y ago
  I somehow keep ending up working at places where 90% of the employees grew up with staff in the house. Dozens of people with wikipedia pages about their families.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    So, people who grew up with staff in the house are obsessed with class. That's perhaps disappointing, but not really surprising. I'd bet, in the US, you'd find the same among people who grew up with staff in the house. The difference may be that, in the US, it's a lot harder to find people like that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tonyedgecombe 2y ago
I've never been asked that and I'm in my sixties.

csomar 2y ago

Revolutionary France never made it across the channel... On the other hand, this significantly dismiss the UK contributions to the world on global trade and during the industrial revolution.

card_zero 2y ago
Britain had multiple revolutions earlier on. There was The Anarchy, Magna Carta, Cromwell, and 1688 when Britain decided to be Dutch for a while. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, and a lot of that was English (or Scottish). The general mood was to look at the French as latecomers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17th_and_18th_centuries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...

michaelt 2y ago

> The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. I think this statement's accuracy depends heavily on how you're defining things. If I go up to the average Brit and tell them my father is the deputy editor-in-chief of some newspaper? They won't be impressed, they'll think I'm a prick. On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers. Does "UK culture strongly value" who my father is, if 99.99 % of brits don't care, but the remaining 0.01 % can have an outsized impact on my career? (Of course if I've inherited a hundred million quid some people will think I'm important / suck up to me due to the power such wealth confers - but there's nothing uniquely british about that)

gadders 2y ago
>> On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers. It also helps to get an internship if your Dad is literally the editor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Mackie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Mackie

dash2 2y ago

Isn't socio-economic status more heritable in the US than the UK? In the UK, inheritance tax is 40% and there's probably more redistributive taxation in general.

shortrounddev2 2y ago

Sometimes I'll read a biography of a famous British person and the first chapter is dedicated to the full family lineage of them. You won't even hear the subject's name until chapter 2 because it was more important to discuss what his grandfather did in India in 1895. I think biographies of Americans tend to start at the childhood of the subject and will mention their family life and parents when relevant

thorin 2y ago

To a certain extent I agree, however the head of state is only token position (albeit well paid!). It's not very different in the US, the "name" - Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, Bush, etc takes you most of the way there... Trump too I guess!

dukeyukey 2y ago

Worth pointing out that not only is the UK more American-style entrepreneurial than the rest of Europe (London gets about as much VC investment as France and Germany together), but that UK wealth inequaslity is low by European standards. Like, there's work to do here, but by European standards the UK is doing pretty well.