Why is Everyone Suddenly Obsessed with "Generational Wealth"?
my descendants can get a job
There’s a version of this post which is bound up in my particular lefty politics and that perspective on the accumulation of wealth. But today I’m really coming at this from a more general point of view. These days I keep hearing about “generational wealth,” meaning “wealth that will persist for generations.” YouTube videos promise to show you how to build generational wealth. Athletes pursuing large contracts are said to be seeking generational wealth. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are trying to accumulate generational wealth. And I have two questions. One, why did this term and concept suddenly explode, and two, why do people care about ensuring that their descendants will be wealthy?
Even with lefty politics, it’s easy to see why people would want wealth; I certainly want wealth. And while I don’t like inherited wealth (and would ban monetary inheritance if it were politically and practically feasible), I can understand wanting to ensure that your children don’t struggle financially. But this idea of making multiple generations of your progeny wealthy is just totally bizarre to me. Your grandkids can’t get a job like everyone else? You want to create more idle rich? The world doesn’t have enough trust fund babies already? You really give a shit that, say, your great-grandchildren will enjoy a life of privilege and sloth their entire existence? Why? Look, we’re trying to have a kid. I will love my kid. I will ensure that they aren’t materially deprived in their youth. But the idea that I should feel pressure to keep them from ever feeling financial strain is nuts. Financial strain is a part of life. Daddy’s not gonna be there cutting checks whenever things get tough. And my great-great-grandchildren? They can kick rocks! I’m never even going to meet them.
I enjoyed a middle-class existence as a child, for which I’m very grateful. Then the twists and turns of my biography left my siblings and I quite broke. And sometimes things were really tough. But that’s what I was, broke, rather than poor. I have experienced having very little money, sometimes for years at a time, but I would never say I experienced poverty. And I think that I gained something and learned something from the experience of having no money. I would not want to deprive my children of that knowledge and the influence on character that comes with it.
Having no idea of how you’re going to make the rent for a given month, and facing down that feeling and that experience - if everyone in our society experienced that at least once, I think we’d have a more humane culture, and a political society more ready to create government structures that ensure that everyone have housing. I understand that this might sound like a contradiction, but I think there’s a clear space where you can both want basic needs (food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education) to be guaranteed for all while also thinking that, in the world we have now, people who have those things should otherwise learn how the other half lives a little bit. It’s politically useful if everyone struggles at some point in their lives. I also think that you can tell when people have never really ever wanted for anything, materially, and while I prefer a future where everyone’s basic needs are met, I believe that people who have never wanted for anything are in some sense spiritually deprived.
Far be it from me to inflict that status on my great-grandchildren. No generational wealth for me or for them. If I strike it rich I’m spending it all.
Admittedly there's some confusion in my attitudes here (which I admit in the post), but perhaps this will help people a bit - remember that I think labor is a good thing, that work is ennobling: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-left-is-a-labor-movement-the
I'm very much not an anti-work movement type of leftist
As with many things, I think this idea is not new but rather the resumption of something quite old after an anomalous pause in the 20th century. Generational wealth used to look like serious landholdings for fancy people, but it also looked like a house and a trade or way of life for almost all regular people for almost all of time. It is historically a very uncommon approach to have kids start from scratch at 18—those kids would not only have the privilege of some legwork done for them by advance generations, but would also have the duty of maintaining that “wealth” (which may have literally looked like a job! skills and access to guild labor positions *was* a form of generational wealth) for future generations. The idea is that you are working to build something in conjunction with those that came before you and those that came after you.
The important question is what is the point of building that thing? Beyond a guarantee of sustenance and survival and basic comfort, why bother building/passing down/keeping up some intergenerational project? This is a bigger question about whether wealth is supposed to be an end in itself, where you stop working once you’ve obtained it (as your post sort of assumes—the idle trust fund kid, people who don’t understand hard work, etc.) or whether wealth is the beginning of something, a foundation which would allow you to work *harder*, in a sense, and make contributions others can’t. “To whom much is given much is expected” type vibe. Admittedly there are depressingly few examples of this in modern culture, but my view is that there is a place for pursuits which can only really be understood as aristocratic—studying ancient Greek, becoming a painter, learning the cello, whatever. Whether you are yourself the aristocrat that performs these activities or whether you are patronized by an aristocrat to do so, I think this is a possible defense of surplus wealth that’s simply not possible if everyone is individually trying to make rent by the end of the month. In some ways I am even more offended by the super wealthy kids I went to school with who are cosplaying status anxiety about getting a 6-figure job to grind it out at McKinsey for 12 hours a day. Why? You’ve already made it; you are uniquely capable of dedicating yourself to projects that our market economy won’t justify (or, if lacking the requisite talent to perform these projects yourself, finding and supporting others who can). I find this grotesque; an abdication of the duty that follows the privilege. If you have something others don’t, you are meant to do something others can’t (which doesn’t mean a life of wasteful self-indulgence).
Anyway. I mainly wanted to point out that intergenerational cooperation in the pursuit of stability and prosperity (as prerequisites for doing great works, should your family attain them!) is by far the historical norm, not a modern aberration.