Remarkably, the wealthiest families in Florence today are descendants of the wealthiest Florentine families from the Renaissance, according to two Italian economists from the Bank of Italy, Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The economists compared tax data from 1427 and 2011 and found that, about 25 generations later, the wealth, occupation and income of the Renaissance families could reliably predict the same factors in their descendants today.
Italian surnames are often different from one another and are highly concentrated in one region, and Barone and Mocetti found that 900 of the surnames from the 1427 tax data are still claimed by about 52,000 Florentines today. With the safe assumption that most of those Florentines are descended from the same families that existed almost 600 years ago, Barone and Mocetti found that the upper class’s socioeconomic status had little variation over the centuries. As a condition of the study, they did not publish these surnames, but found that people who had the surnames in the 1400s were members of wool, shoemaking and silk guilds, or attorneys.
On VoxEU, a European economics website, Barone and Mocetti wrote, “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 did not focus on the elite 1%, but rather on the top 33% of earners, including not only dukes and princes such as the Medicis with estates and treasures to inherit through the generations, but also leatherworkers and bankers without material possessions to pass on.
They also found “some evidence of the existence of a glass floor that protects the descendants of the upper class from falling down the economic ladder.”
By Kathy McCabe
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