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A comment on The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016). Parent comment

Re:The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the ri... by credit_guy on Thursday January 10, 2019 @05:58AM (#18872962)
Here's a few things that produce such a phenomenon, pretty much universally:

1. Everyone alive has a lot of ancestors who lived 600 years ago. Let's say there are about 4 generations per century, so 24 in 600 years. In the extreme you could find about 2^24 = 16 million ancestors from those times. In reality there's some recombination, but you could easily have tens of thousands of (24 times grand)-parents. Some of those were beggars, some were princes.

2. Some societies had mechanisms to preserve wealth concentration within "the family", such as primogeniture [1]. With this arrangement, the majority of the wealth of a family was transferred to only one descended. The outcome was that if you were rich, a few generations down the line one single descendant would be rich, and pretty much all your others will be poor. Just look at Prince Charles in the UK who will one day inherit the crown, and Prince Harry who will be a nobody. Sure, they both have royal weddings, and people follow their various affairs in tabloids, but at the end of the day, Harry's grandsons will have inherited from their queen grand-grand-grand-grand-mother something around zilch compared to one of Charles's grand-sons who will be king.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primogeniture

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Re:The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the ri... by mprovost on Thursday January 10, 2019 @10:18AM (#18874410)
That reminds me of the story when a reporter asked Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor (the Duke of Westminster) if he had any advice for young entrepreneurs and he replied “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror.”
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Re:The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the ri... by paganel on Thursday January 10, 2019 @10:39AM (#18874581)
In a similar vein, I remember reading Proust’s novels some time ago and one of the protagonists was explaining to some other protagonist that you could be seen as a very respected member of the society of that time (think France of the 1800s - the 1900s) only if some of your ancestors had taken part in the crusades as noted (meaning non-anonymous) individuals, ~700-800 years before.
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Re:The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the ri... by iguy on Thursday January 10, 2019 @08:48AM (#18873756)
These points are true. And note that 2^24 is larger than the population of Italy at that time.

But you should be extremely cautious about presuming that these 2^24-minus-duplications ancestors were anything like uniformly distributed. Top-10% Florentines today may easily have a majority of their descent from top-10% ones 600 years ago. Because the rich had more kids, in a time of very slow overall population growth.

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Re:The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the ri... by credit_guy on Friday January 11, 2019 @08:09AM (#18883281)
Well, my guess is that 100% of the Florentines today have easily a majority of their ancestors in the top 10% of the Florentines 600 years ago. Survival of the fittest and stuff ...
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Re:The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the ri... by iguy on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:14AM (#18901741)
Could be, I was trying to be cautious!

But many, many, people are extremely surprised to think that survival of the fittest has any relevance within historical time. Let alone between us and Dante.

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