This is a very interesting article. Particularly commendable is the complete listing of the source papers, so that readers can delve more deeply into the materi

This is a very interesting article. Particularly commendable is the complete listing of the source papers, so that readers can delve more deeply into the material. I wonder, however, whether the surname analysis took into account the effects of the changes in surname frequency over time -- as I recall, it was Galton who investigated statistically how the surname distributions change with time, and the point is that the number of unique surnames goes down over time, because each child usually has only one of their parents' surnames. So it's not clear to me that we would expect the wealth distribution of uncommon surnames to become more equal over time. Maybe that would explain the disparity between the surname analysis and other measures of social mobility?