The Shadow of Peasant Past: Seven Generations of Inequality Persistence in Northern Sweden

The authors use administrative data linked to parish records from northern Sweden to study how persistent inequality is across multiple generations in education, occupation, and wealth, going from historical to contemporary time. The data cover seven generations and allow the authors to follow ancestors of individuals living in Sweden around the new millennium back more than 200 years, covering the mid-18th century to the 21st century. In a sample of around 75,000 traceable descendants, they analyze (a) up to fifth cousin correlations and (b) dynastic correlations over seven generations based on aggregations of ancestors' social class/status. With both approaches, the authors find that past generations structure life chances many generations later, even though the results align with traditional stratification research in that mobility across multiple generations is high. The results imply that today's inequality regime may have been formed many generations back.