Abstract

Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are all dominated by the belief that while physical traits like height are mainly determined by genetics, child social outcomes are principally created by parental investment and community socialization. This paper shows that with just observational data of social outcomes and knowledge of the degree of relatedness of people in an extensive lineage, we can test whether additive genetic inheritance of social traits can be rejected. Using a lineage of 263,000 people born in England 1750-2017, we show that the pattern of correlations between people in the lineage is mainly consistent with additive genetic inheritance of social status, as is seen with height.  The high persistence of status over multiple generations requires a high degree of assortative mating.  We show evidence that marriage in the lineage indeed does show a high degree of assortment, based on some underlying trait.