Castes, Estates and Classes: How Societies Have Ranked People Through History

Follows: The Pecking Order and Class, Status and Power (Society 1–2), and El Virreinato: Cómo Se Gobernaba un Imperio (Español)

In this deep dive
1. Born into it: estates, castes, classes, and Europe's three orders
2. Varna and jati: caste in India's history, and an argument about the census
3. Caste in India today
4. Samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants: Tokugawa Japan
5. Ranked by bondage and by "blood": slavery and the casta
6. From birth to merit, and the satire that named it

In 1363 the Parliament of England passed a law about clothes. The Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel set out, rank by rank, what people were allowed to wear. The Black Death had killed so many workers that wages had risen, and some ordinary people could now afford the kind of fine fabrics and furs that had marked out their betters. Parliament's answer was not to celebrate their good fortune. It was to tell them to dress according to their station.

That law sounds absurd today. It made perfect sense to the people who passed it. In their world, your rank was not a result. It was who you were, and it should be visible at a glance.

The earlier pieces in this series looked at why humans form hierarchies and at the thinkers, from Marx to Bourdieu, who tried to describe modern class. This one is a historical tour: medieval Europe's three estates, India's varna and jati, Japan's Tokugawa order, slavery as a status system across cultures, and the casta labels of Spanish America. It ends with the shift to class societies and with a word, "meritocracy," that was coined as a warning.

Two of these systems are not history. Caste is part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, and descendants of Japan's old outcaste communities still face prejudice. Those sections are written descriptively and with the debates among scholars, and among the people concerned, laid out rather than settled.

Part 1 — Born into it: estates, castes, classes, and Europe's three orders

Sociologists distinguish three broad ways of ranking people. Real societies mix them, but the ideal types help.

Max Weber, as the previous piece explained, called groups ranked by honour and lifestyle Stände, which is also the German word for estates. That's no coincidence. Translators sometimes leave Stand in German precisely to keep its roots in view: medieval guilds, professions and feudal ranks.

The key difference between the first two columns and the third is what we might call the story a society tells about rank. In an estate or caste system, inequality is supposed to be built into the order of things, often with religious backing: you are where you belong. In a class system, everyone is formally equal and inequality is supposed to come from what people do. Whether that second story is true is one of the oldest arguments in sociology, and one we'll come back to at the end.

In a society of estates, rank is who you are. In a society of classes, rank is supposed to be what you've done. The fights start in the gap between the story and the reality.

Those who pray, those who fight, those who work. Early in the eleventh century, Adalbero, bishop of Laon in northern France, wrote a poem addressed to King Robert II. In it he described society as divided into three orders: oratores, bellatores, laboratores — those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Each served the others: the clergy prayed for everyone's salvation, the warrior nobility protected everyone, and the labouring majority fed everyone. His phrasing became the classic statement of an idea that would shape Europe for the next seven centuries. The French historian Georges Duby later devoted a whole book, Les trois ordres (1978; in English The Three Orders, 1980), to how this model of society took hold.

Over time, the model hardened into the estates of the realm. In France, which offers the clearest case:

• The First Estate was the clergy, from wealthy bishops to poor parish priests.
• The Second Estate was the nobility, which included both old warrior families ("nobility of the sword") and families ennobled through royal office and the law courts ("nobility of the robe").
• The Third Estate was everyone else: peasants, artisans, merchants, lawyers, bankers.

Membership mattered in law. French nobles were exempt from forced labour on the roads and from most direct taxes, including the taille, the oldest of them, and laws like England's 1363 statute tried to make rank visible. By the eve of the French Revolution, the first two estates together are commonly estimated at about 2 percent of France's population, and the Third Estate at around 98 percent.

The estates were also political bodies. When the French king, desperate for money, summoned the Estates-General in 1789 for the first time since 1614, a bitter dispute broke out over whether votes would be counted by order, one vote per estate, which let the two privileged estates outvote the rest, or by head. That January the clergyman Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès published a pamphlet that became one of the most famous in history. It began with three questions:

"What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire? To become something." — Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (1789)

On 17 June 1789 the deputies of the Third Estate broke away and declared themselves a National Assembly. On the night of 4 August, noble members of the Assembly proposed abolishing feudal rights and privileges, and the Assembly agreed. On 26 August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen set out the principle of a new kind of society. Its first article: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."

Notice what that sentence does not say. It doesn't say there will be no social distinctions. It says they must be justified by the common good. That idea, that inequality needs a reason, connects the end of the estates directly to the Davis–Moore debate and to Rawls's difference principle, both covered earlier in this library.

Part 2 — Varna and jati: caste in India's history, and an argument about the census

The English word "caste" comes from the Portuguese and Spanish casta, meaning lineage. Europeans applied it to two quite different Indian ideas, and much confusion comes from mixing them up.

Varna is a fourfold scheme found in ancient Sanskrit texts. Its best-known source is a hymn in the Rigveda (10.90), the Purusha Sukta, which describes the cosmos being created from the sacrifice of a primordial being, Purusha. From his mouth, arms, thighs and feet came four groups: Brahmins (priests and scholars), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), Vaishyas (traders and farmers) and Shudras (labourers and servants). Scholars generally consider the hymn a relatively late addition to the Rigveda, and it is the only hymn in it to name all four varnas. Later law books, above all the Manusmriti, elaborated the scheme at length, but historians stress that these texts provide "models rather than descriptions" of how society actually worked.

Jati (literally "birth") refers to the actual groups people belong to, of which there are thousands, not four. A jati is typically endogamous (people marry within it), often historically linked to an occupation, and rooted in a region. Jatis are far more varied and flexible than the tidy varna scheme suggests, and the relationship between a given jati and a varna has often been disputed, even by its own members.

Purity, or power? One highly influential account was that of the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, whose Homo Hierarchicus (1966) argued that caste is organised around a religious opposition between purity and pollution. Others countered that caste is a social phenomenon driven by economics, politics and sometimes geography as much as by religion. The Sanskrit scholar Patrick Olivelle has argued that ancient and medieval texts don't support a purity-impurity ranking as the basis of varna, and Dumont himself later acknowledged that ancient varna hierarchy wasn't built on that principle. The Indian sociologist M. N. Srinivas, meanwhile, showed in the 1950s that caste was not static: under what he called Sanskritisation, a lower or middle-ranked group could adopt the customs of high castes and, over generations, claim a higher place.

The census argument. Here is one of the liveliest debates in the field. Under British rule, the decennial census recorded caste for the whole population. The census commissioner Herbert Hope Risley, a believer in the race science of his day (he classified Indians partly by measuring the width of their noses), tried to rank castes within the varna scheme. Groups lobbied to be recorded in a higher varna, and caste associations formed in response. Some historians argue that the censuses of 1901 and 1911 in particular hardened caste identities.

The historian Nicholas Dirks, in Castes of Mind (2001), building on his teacher Bernard Cohn, made the strongest version of this case: that caste as we know it today, as the single, all-defining category of Indian society, was in large part a product of colonial rule. Bayly offered a related point: until well into the colonial period, she wrote, much of the subcontinent was populated by people for whom formal caste distinctions were of only limited importance.

Then genetics entered the argument. A 2013 study led by Priya Moorjani, analysing 73 groups, found that the ancestral populations of India mixed extensively between about 4,200 and 1,900 years ago, and that after this India shifted to a pattern in which mixture "even between closely related groups became rare." A 2016 study dated the shift to endogamy, especially among upper castes, to about 70 generations ago. And a 2017 study of more than 260 South Asian groups found 81 with "founder events" (descent from a small number of ancestors, followed by marrying within the group) stronger than those of Ashkenazi Jews or Finns. The geneticist David Reich has used these results to argue that the colonial-invention thesis is wrong: long-term endogamy is ancient.

The genes say Indians have married within their groups for well over a thousand years. The archives say the colonial state reshaped how those groups were named, ranked and mobilised. Both can be true.

The two findings are not necessarily in conflict. Endogamous groups can be very old, while the colonial state's categories, rankings and record-keeping still changed how caste worked, especially its role in politics. Much of the remaining argument is about how much weight each deserves.

Part 3 — Caste in India today

Modern India's constitution was drafted by a committee chaired by B. R. Ambedkar, a jurist and economist born into a community then treated as "untouchable." In 1936 he had published Annihilation of Caste, a fierce attack on the caste system and its religious justifications. The constitution that came into force in 1950 abolished untouchability: Article 17 forbids its practice "in any form," and it is punishable by law. Nepal legally abolished caste discrimination in 1963.

India also built one of the world's largest systems of affirmative action, called reservation. Places in central government jobs and public higher education are set aside for the groups below, and Scheduled Castes and Tribes also have reserved seats in legislatures:

Reservation is debated intensely inside India, and both sides have serious arguments. Supporters say it is a remedy for centuries of exclusion, that it has created Dalit and tribal doctors, officials and legislators who would otherwise not exist, and that formal equality alone cannot undo inherited disadvantage. Critics say benefits flow mostly to the better-off within each group, that selection should rest on individual merit or economic need rather than birth group, and that the system keeps caste identity politically alive. The courts have tried to hold a balance: the Supreme Court has excluded the "creamy layer" of better-off OBC families, and in August 2024 it ruled 6 to 1 that states may create sub-quotas within the SC and ST categories. Mass protests have come from both directions, against reservation in 1990 and 2006, and from groups demanding to be included.

What surveys show. The largest recent survey, by the Pew Research Center, interviewed 29,999 Indian adults face to face between November 2019 and March 2020. It found that nearly all Indians identify with a caste, whatever their religion: caste is shared by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and others. Thirty percent identified with "General Category" castes; just 4 percent as Brahmin. The results pointed two ways at once:

• 82% said they had not personally faced caste discrimination in the past year, and most did not feel there was a lot of caste discrimination in India.
• Yet 62% said it was very important to stop men in their community from marrying into another caste, and 64% said the same for women. That figure varied hugely by region: about 82% in the Central region, about 35% in the South.

Other data agree that marriage is where caste is most persistent. Analyses of the India Human Development Survey find that only about 5 percent of married women are in inter-caste marriages. A phone survey in several Indian states and cities between 2016 and 2018 found that roughly 70 percent of women and 60 percent of men would object if a relative married a Dalit.

Caste is also back at the centre of national data. India's delayed census includes a question on caste, the first full caste enumeration since 1931. Its first phase, listing every house, ran state by state between April and September 2026; the head count itself, where caste is asked, is due in February 2027 (as of October 2026). It's a hard thing to count. The 2011 census round's attempt at a socio-economic and caste count recorded people's own descriptions, and ended up with hundreds of thousands of caste and sub-caste names. Supporters argue that policy needs accurate numbers; critics worry it will deepen caste politics. Both sides will be arguing over the results for years.

Part 4 — Samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants: Tokugawa Japan

From 1603 to 1868, Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns, and its society is often summarised by four characters: shi-nō-kō-shō, warriors, farmers, artisans and merchants. The scheme came from Chinese Confucian thought, where the four occupations were scholar-officials, farmers, artisans and merchants, with merchants, in theory, at the bottom. In Japan, the top place went not to scholars but to the hereditary warrior class, the samurai.

The groundwork was laid before the Tokugawa took power. In 1588 the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered his famous sword hunt, confiscating weapons from commoners. It had several aims at once: to prevent peasant uprisings, to deny weapons to his rivals, and to fix a clear line between the armed warrior class and everyone else. Under the Tokugawa, samurai made up only about 5 percent of the population, while peasants were around 80 percent. Samurai rank was inherited; they were entitled to surnames and swords; and many of them, in two centuries of peace, became salaried administrators rather than fighters.

Here the textbooks have changed. Older accounts presented the four orders as a strict ladder, with merchants at the bottom. Research since about 1995 has found that, below the samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants were not formally ranked against each other in that way, and the old ladder diagram has been removed from Japanese history textbooks. In practice, merchants became creditors to a debt-ridden samurai class, which turned the official order upside down in a very visible way.

Below and outside the four orders were groups treated as outcastes. Those labelled with the slur eta (roughly "abundance of filth") were associated with work considered polluting, such as butchery, tanning and handling the dead; their status was hereditary. Hinin ("non-persons") included beggars, the sick and the destitute; their status was not always hereditary, and some could return to commoner life. Hinin communities often formed near temples and graveyards, under their own leaders, and lived by begging and by duties such as guarding, cleaning temple grounds and even arresting criminals. Both groups were segregated into their own hamlets and neighbourhoods, and the later name for their descendants comes from that separation.

The Meiji government that overthrew the shogunate dismantled the old order quickly. Former court nobles and feudal lords were merged into a new peerage, the kazoku. The samurai became a registered class called shizoku, with no special privileges; their stipends were converted to government bonds, and in March 1876 an edict banned them from wearing swords in public. Everyone else became heimin, commoners. A Liberation Edict in 1871 abolished the outcaste labels. Several samurai rebellions followed. The largest and last, the Satsuma Rebellion led by Saigō Takamori, needed 65,000 imperial troops and eight months to suppress, and its defeat effectively ended the samurai as a class. The shizoku category itself lingered on family registers until 1947.

Legal freedom did not end prejudice. People who wanted to keep the old boundaries invented new labels, such as shin-heimin, "new commoners." From the 1880s, the language of eugenics and public hygiene was turned against buraku communities. Popular myths about the outcastes' supposedly foreign origins were after-the-fact rationalisations: as a whole they are ethnically Japanese. Descendants of the old outcaste communities, now called burakumin (people of the hamlets), continued to face discrimination in marriage and work. Their number today is estimated at between 1.5 and 3 million. They organised early: the National Levellers Association (Suiheisha) in the 1920s and the Buraku Liberation League after the Second World War campaigned for equal treatment, and living conditions in many buraku communities have improved greatly, though discrimination has not disappeared.

Abolishing a status in law takes a day. Removing it from people's minds can take generations.

Part 5 — Ranked by bondage and by "blood": slavery and the casta

Slavery as a status. Slavery has existed in societies as different as ancient Athens and Rome, Joseon Korea, the medieval Islamic world and the plantation Americas. The sociologist Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death (1982), argued that slavery is best defined not by the kind of work the enslaved did, but by three elements: domination backed by violence; natal alienation, being cut off from one's ancestors and descendants, with no recognised claims of kinship; and general dishonour. The enslaved person, in his phrase, suffered a "social death." Slavery, on this view, is the extreme form of status hierarchy: a rank below which no one could fall.

The scale could be enormous. In Joseon Korea, the enslaved nobi made up by some estimates more than 30 percent of the population at their peak. The transatlantic trade carried off an estimated 12.5 million captives from Africa, of whom about 10.7 million survived the voyage. In the Americas, slavery fused with an invented idea of race, so that status was read off the colour of a person's skin and passed on to their children.

But slavery's relation to hierarchy could also be startlingly paradoxical. In parts of the Islamic world, enslaved soldiers called mamluks became an elite. In Egypt and Syria, mamluks ruled their own sultanate from 1250 until the Ottoman conquest of 1517. The Ottoman Empire's devshirme system took Christian boys, aged roughly 7 to 20, from its European provinces, converted and trained them, and sent the most talented into the palace and the highest offices; the system produced a considerable number of grand viziers between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the most powerful post after the sultan. Here legal unfreedom and great power went together: men taken from their families depended on the sultan alone, and served as a counterweight to the hereditary nobility.

Abolition came slowly and late. Mauritania was the last country to abolish slavery officially, by decree, in 1981, and made it a crime only in 2007. And unfree labour has not vanished. The latest global estimate, from the International Labour Organization and partners, found 50 million people in modern slavery in 2021: 28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage.

The casta in Spanish America. The library's Spanish piece El Virreinato describes how the Spanish Crown divided its American subjects into a república de indios and a república de españoles, and how eighteenth-century Mexican artists painted the famous cuadros de castas: sets of often sixteen panels, each showing a couple of different origins and their child, labelled with a term for the "mixture." The ideas behind it had roots in Spain's doctrine of limpieza de sangre, "purity of blood," originally a religious test aimed at families descended from converts to Christianity, which travelled to the Americas and came to be applied to ancestry.

The labels had real consequences. Indigenous people paid tribute but were exempt from the Inquisition; Spaniards and mestizos paid no tribute but could be tried by it. People sometimes tried to move into whichever category served them better. That fluidity is the heart of the modern debate. For a long time historians described a rigid "caste system" (sistema de castas). Archival research, as the Spanish piece notes, has shown that individuals were labelled differently in different records and contexts, that economic position mattered as much as origin, and that the word casta was used much less by colonial authorities than the paintings suggest. The anthropologist Joanne Rappaport, in The Disappearing Mestizo (2014), rejects the "caste system" framework for colonial New Granada altogether. Many historians now see the paintings as an elite attempt to impose order on a society that was already very mixed and fluid, rather than a picture of how it worked.

Part 6 — From birth to merit, and the satire that named it

How did class societies replace estates and inherited orders? Not all at once, and not only in Europe.

Exams as an escape from birth. China's imperial examinations, with roots in the Sui dynasty around 605 CE, became the main path to high office by written examination and lasted about 1,300 years, until they were abolished in 1905. The principle was revolutionary: office by tested ability, not by lineage. Europeans noticed. In Britain the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854, influenced by the Chinese example, recommended that entry to the civil service be by competitive examination on merit.

The legal end of the orders. In France the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) proclaimed that all citizens are "equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents." Japan's Meiji reforms, India's constitution, and the abolition of slavery across the Americas did the same work in their own ways. Legal ranks gave way to formal equality, and what was left was class: differences of property, occupation and education that the law no longer recognised but did not erase.

Meritocracy, a word coined as a warning. In 1958 the British sociologist and politician Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy. It is a satire set in a future Britain that has come to be run by the clever. In Young's imagined society, merit is defined as "IQ plus effort," schools sort children ruthlessly, and the old class system is replaced by one in which the winners believe they deserve everything and the losers have no excuse left. The book ends in 2034 with a revolt against the meritocratic elite by "Populists." It was turned down by the Fabian Society and by eleven publishers before it found one.

Young is usually credited with coining "meritocracy," but the sociologist Alan Fox had already used the word, also pejoratively, in the journal Socialist Commentary in 1956. Young popularised it, and to his dismay the word lost its irony. Politicians began to use it as a goal. In 2001 Young wrote in The Guardian, criticising the Labour government's embrace of the idea:

"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." — Michael Young, "Down with meritocracy," The Guardian, 2001

The modern argument. The debate Young started is now one of the biggest in political philosophy and social science, and it has strong positions on several sides:

The data add complications of their own. In the United States, the share of children who grow up to earn more than their parents fell from about 90 percent for those born in 1940 to about 50 percent for those born in the 1980s, according to a 2017 study led by Raj Chetty. Across rich countries, the economist Miles Corak has documented what's been called the Great Gatsby Curve: countries with more income inequality tend to have less mobility between generations. And a 2019 study by Per Engzell and Felix Tropf found that where mobility between generations is higher, genetic differences account for a larger share of differences in education. That is roughly what Young predicted: in a society that removes barriers of birth, what remains of inequality looks more and more like a judgement on the individual, which is exactly what made his satire so uncomfortable.

Young's warning was not that merit is bad. It was that a society which believes its hierarchy is perfectly deserved will stop asking whether it is fair.

So the long story told in this piece is not a simple march from injustice to justice. Estates and castes justified rank by birth and divine order. Class societies replaced that with formal equality and the promise of rising by talent and work, which has opened doors for vast numbers of people. But they have created their own justification for hierarchy, and their own ways of passing advantage down. The last word belongs to the Declaration of 1789, which has never stopped being a test: social distinctions "may be founded only upon the general good." Every system in this piece, including ours, can be asked whether it meets it.

The takeaway

Societies have ranked people by legal order (Europe's three estates), by birth group (India's jati and Japan's outcaste groups), by bondage (slavery, from Korea's nobi to the Atlantic trade), and by ancestry labels (Spanish America's castas, more fluid in practice than the paintings suggest). Scholars still debate how far the colonial census shaped caste, while genetics shows endogamy in India is ancient. Caste remains part of life for many in South Asia, especially in marriage. Class societies replaced legal rank with formal equality and the promise of merit, a word Michael Young coined as a warning about a new hierarchy that believes it deserves its place.

Try this: list five things that shaped where you stand today: your parents' jobs, where you were born, your schooling, your health, your own effort, a lucky break. For each, ask whether a medieval peasant, a Tokugawa merchant or a citizen of Young's imagined meritocracy would have had it. Then ask the Declaration's question of your own society: which of its distinctions are founded on the general good?

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- England's 1363 Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel and medieval sumptuary laws: Wikipedia, "Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel 1363" and "Sumptuary law."
- Adalbero of Laon's three orders: Wikipedia, "Adalbero of Laon." Duby, G. Les trois ordres (1978; English, The Three Orders, 1980). French estates and population shares (estimates): Wikipedia, "Estates of the realm" and "Estates General of 1789." Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (1789). The night of 4 August: Wikipedia, "Abolition of feudalism in France." Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), articles 1 and 6, Avalon Project, Yale Law School.
- Varna, jati, the Purusha Sukta, Dumont, Olivelle, Bayly, Risley and the colonial census: Wikipedia, "Caste system in India," "Purusha Sukta," "Homo Hierarchicus," "Sanskritisation," "Castes of Mind." Bayly, S. Caste, Society and Politics in India (1999). Dirks, N. Castes of Mind (2001).
- Moorjani, P. et al. "Genetic evidence for recent population mixture in India." American Journal of Human Genetics, 2013. Basu, A. et al. PNAS, 2016. Nakatsuka, N. et al. "The promise of discovering population-specific disease-associated genes in South Asia." Nature Genetics, 2017.
- Ambedkar, Article 17, reservation shares, the 2019 EWS quota and the 2024 sub-quota ruling: Wikipedia, "B. R. Ambedkar," "Fundamental rights in India," "Reservation in India." SC and ST population shares, 2011 census: Wikipedia, "Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes." 2027 census and caste enumeration: Wikipedia, "2027 census of India" (as edited October 2026); Ministry of Home Affairs schedule (houselisting April–September 2026, caste in the second phase) as reported by Deccan Herald and The Wire.
- Pew Research Center, "Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation" and "Attitudes about caste," 29 June 2021. Thorat, A. et al. "Persisting Prejudice." CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion 1(2), 2020 (IHDS and SARI data).
- Tokugawa status order and textbook revisions, the 1588 sword hunt, the 1871 Liberation Edict, shizoku and the 1876 sword ban, and the burakumin: Wikipedia, "Four occupations," "Sword hunt," "Burakumin," "Shizoku," "Haitōrei Edict."
- Patterson, O. Slavery and Social Death (1982). Nobi: Wikipedia, "Nobi." Transatlantic estimates: Wikipedia, "Atlantic slave trade," citing Anderson et al. (2013) and the Slave Voyages database. Mamluks and devshirme: Wikipedia, "Mamluk," "Mamluk Sultanate," "Devshirme." Mauritania: Wikipedia, "Slavery in Mauritania." ILO, Walk Free & IOM, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery (2022), via the ILO news release.
- Casta and casta paintings: Wikipedia, "Casta"; Rappaport, J. The Disappearing Mestizo (2014); Katzew, I. Casta Painting (2004); and this library's El Virreinato.
- Imperial examinations: Wikipedia, "Imperial examination." Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1854): Wikipedia. Young, M. The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958); Alan Fox's 1956 use and Young's 2001 Guardian article: Wikipedia, "Meritocracy" and "The Rise of the Meritocracy." Chetty, R. et al. "The fading American dream." Science, 2017. Corak, M. Journal of Economic Perspectives 27(3), 2013. Engzell, P. & Tropf, F.C. "Heritability of education rises with intergenerational mobility." PNAS, 2019.

Go deeper
- 📘 Annihilation of Caste — B. R. Ambedkar (the classic critique of caste, by the man who chaired the drafting of India's constitution)
- 🌐 Pew Research Center — "Attitudes about caste" (2021) (the best large survey of how Indians themselves experience caste today)
- 📘 Slavery and Social Death — Orlando Patterson (a comparative study of slavery across many societies, and the idea of "social death")
- 📘 The Three Orders — Georges Duby (how medieval Europe imagined its own hierarchy)
- 📘 The Rise of the Meritocracy — Michael Young (short, funny, and more unsettling now than in 1958)
- 📘 The Tyranny of Merit — Michael Sandel, read with The Aristocracy of Talent — Adrian Wooldridge (the case against and the case for, side by side)