The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago
Researchers compared data on Florentine taxpayers in 1427 against tax data in 2011 and found about 900 surnames still present in Florence
By Josh Zumbrun May 19, 2016 8:53 am ET
New research from a pair of Italian economists documents an extraordinary fact: The wealthiest families in Florence today are descended from the wealthiest families of Florence nearly 600 years ago.
The two economists — Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti of
the Bank of Italy — compared data on Florentine taxpayers in 1427
against tax data in 2011. Because Italian surnames are highly regional
and distinctive, they could compare the income of families with a
certain surname today, to those with the same surname in 1427. They
found that the occupations, income and wealth of those distant ancestors
with the same surname can help predict the occupation, income and
wealth of their descendants today.
As they wrote for the economics commentary website VoxEU, “The
top earners among the current taxpayers were found to have already been
at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago.”
Their research was made possible by a fiscal crisis. In 1427,
Florence was near bankrupt from an ongoing war with Milan and so the
Priors of the Republic conducted a tax census of about 10,000
citizens. They took stock of the name and surname of the head of
household, their occupation and their wealth.
About 900 of those surnames are still present in Florence, with about
52,000 taxpayers having those names. The authors note that Italian
surnames are especially good for this effort, because they are highly
regional. While not every person with a certain surname in Florence
today will be a descendant of the people with that name in 1427, it’s a
good bet that most are. To see how these “families” had fared over the
intervening six centuries, they compared the surnames against Florence’s
2011 tax records. (As a condition of access to this data, the authors
did not publish the surnames.)
They find strong evidence that socioeconomic status is incredibly
persistent. The wealthiest surnames in Florence today belong to families
that, in 1429, were members of the shoemakers’ guild — at the 97th
percentile of income. Descendants of members of the silk guild and
descendants of attorneys — both at the 93rd percentile in 1427 — are
among the wealthiest families today.
But this also points to what "upper income" consists of, contrary to popular perception. It's an economically heterogeneous group. The average income of someone in the top 1% of income earners in the US today is $700,000, and the minimal income is $400,000 (and this is combined family income, not individual income). So the top 1% is not just billionaires, but also dentists (as well as, say, a top police official and his wife who is an executive secretary).
And this is what is so remarkable: This study is not tracking the ancient aristocracy and its modern descendants, but relatively prosperous ordinary people whose family status has remained amazingly consistent for over half a millennia of tumultuous change.
It’s no surprise that wealth can be inherited or that one’s parents
play a large role in determining your social status. Other research has
found that descendants of Japan’s samurai – 140 years after the end of the order — remain elites in Japan. The economist Gregory Clark at the University of California, Davis, has written a book “The Son Also Rises” showing how wealth and status can persist for centuries.
Still, the length that Florentine families have remained high status
remains remarkable. Consider, in 1427, the Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo had not been born. Florence would go from rule under the Medici
family, to a Republic, back to the Medici.The city would fall to the
Holy Roman Empire following the 10-month Siege of Florence. The Medici
line would go extinct, the city would be taken over by Napoleon. It would lose its role as the head of a city-state to become part of the Kingdom of Italy, under Rome. The fascist dictator Benito Mussolini
would rule from 1922 to 1943, followed by a Nazi occupation of
Florence. Following the war, the city would undergo a period known as
the “miracolo economic italiano” — the Italian economic miracle — with
GDP growing more than 8% a year. Per capita GDP would grow more in this
period than in the entire five centuries from 1400 to 1900.
In the US, there has been an emphasis on Equality of Opportunity, also labeled 'income mobility'. Americans have typically been concerned with barriers to "moving up the ladder", not with the existence of a hierarchy itself. 'Fairness' for Americans means a lack of discrimination in competition, not with the need for an enforced sameness.
Europeans have typically been more concerned with Equality of Condition, or 'class stratification' or 'socioeconomic polarization'. The great project of European modernity was to tear down an entrenched ancient caste system, primarily through government action, by either subsidizing government programs to redistribute income (socialism) or promoting meritocratic competition within the public realm, in areas such as education, the military and the bureaucracy (e.g., Napoleon).
Such a caste system never existed in the United States (outside of the South). Moreover, when great, wealthy families did emerge in the US (Gates, Rockefellers, Kennedys, etc.), rather than forming a new aristocracy, these concentrations of wealth seemed to fade into relative mediocrity on their own through economic competition over several generation. Capitalist competition, rather than socialism, was seen by Americans as having a leveling effect.
(Britain is a special case, and comprises a certain persistence of a hybrid aristocracy. The Industrial Revolution created new business elites, and led to the relative impoverishment of the British aristocracy. But the new elites married into the old aristocracy, and sent their offspring to elite boarding schools where they would become assimilated into the ancient aristocratic culture. Public institutions like elite universities and government offices, rather than promoting new talent as they did in France and Germany, consciously discriminated against "uncouth" outsiders. In Britain, the ancient caste system dissolved, but a hybrid class system took its place.)
Although the authors of this study are Europeans, their focus has been on income mobility, not stratification.
One might be quick to draw parallels to the research of Thomas Piketty, the French economist who documented the rise of income inequality, especially at the top 1%. The authors resist that link.
“The paper is about economic mobility (or persistence), that is
whether the rich remain the rich,” the economists wrote in an e-mail
from Mr. Mocetti, “But this does not necessarily imply that they are
getting ever richer. Therefore there is not a direct relation with the
Piketty argument (increasing inequality over time).”
The economists say their evidence suggests persistence is somewhat
highest for the wealthiest, which they interpret as evidence for “the
existence of a glass floor that protects descendants of the upper class
from falling down the economic ladder.”
But they note their research is not focused on the super elite at the
top 1% of income. Their finding is for the overall population. The
entire top 33% of the income distribution in 1427 is likely to be
wealthier today. This is a far broader group than Medici princes and
dukes, with castles and estates to hand down through the centuries. This
suggests that some 25 generations later, the hundreds of descendants of
comfortable — but far-from-regal — leathermakers are likely to be doing
quite well, and it’s not because they inherited great(x25)-grandpa’s
shoes and belts, let alone his palaces.
This evidence suggests social class persists up and down the scale,
for wealthy families and middle-class and poor, through renaissance and
economic boom, through busts and upheavals, through military occupations
and overthrows, through republics and kingdoms and dictatorships and
for centuries and centuries.
