The name says it all : multigenerational social mobility in Switzerland, 1550-2019

Social mobility is a key element of meritocratic societies. We analyze multigenerational social mobility with a hand-collected yearly Swiss dataset from 1550 to 2019. With our surname-based approach, we measure the Swiss society's overall permeability over more than 450 years. Furthermore, we can provide insights into the distinct influence of the respective parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. We measure an average persistence rate of 0.42 over 15 generations and show how close the different social status indicators match with each other. A cyclical pattern indicates that social mobility was lowest in wartime generations with a spreading afterwards. Furthermore, we measure a significant influence of the grandparental generation but not for earlier generations. A purely two-generation view thus overestimates persistence. This reveals the importance of multigenerational social mobility analyses to examine equal opportunities in society. Overall, we conclude that our surname-based approach is suitable to investigate society's multigenerational permeability.