A few months ago, Freddie deBoer went off on the desire to build “generational wealth,” a term apparently gaining in popularity according to Google Trends. He writes:
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.
He has a point, and I can’t help but laugh when I read it. At the same time, I feel like there’s something important missing here.
I get not wanting to raise entitled trust fund babies and that learning to work and earn money is important. But that doesn’t mean we should do away with the practice of passing down inheritances.
Are your descendants more likely to develop a sense of entitlement if they inherit wealth? Sure. But part of what deBoer seems to be saying is that the more generations between you and your posterity, the less you should care about them anyway. You’ll never meet them, he says.
Of course, you should probably care about your immediate family more than your great-great whatever, but there are good reasons to care about both and leave them a material inheritance. The reasons may not be immediately obvious, but I think they are deep and compelling once understood. What follows is my attempt to explain some of them, starting with the preservation of family identity.
It’s no secret that many today have lost their sense of purpose. The modern individual is experiencing a kind of identity crisis. Sociologist Anthony Giddens attributes this to the “rapid reflexivity” of modernity. Basically, our foundations of knowledge have been pulled out from under us. In the past, assurances about who we are were supplied by things like tradition, religion, community, and family. Now, we’re left only with the ephemeral “self” as a basis on which to form our identities. Consequently, forming an identity has become a “reflexive project” that you must constantly work at.1
But here’s the thing. Your self-identity is fragile. People change, and they need something greater than themselves of which they can feel a part. They need to feel they are tied down to something. Otherwise, you’re bound to feel existential anxiety. Your self simply isn’t a stable source of meaning. As Sam Ashworth-Hayes writes,
We cannot make something of ourselves alone. We need a context against which to define ourselves, and ours offers us little meaning beyond the individual, leaving us to approach life with no more purpose than the day that is lived because it is there. We need myths that give us guidance, and we need a purpose beyond the self—spreading the gospel, living within the faith, continuing the tribe, building for the glory of the country—to give us meaning. In short, we need narratives, collectively and individually.
The primary context from which humans have derived meaning and identity for most of history is not the self. It’s things outside the self. And of all the contexts mentioned (religion, tradition, community, and family), the family seems to me the most universal and basic. We all come into this world through a parent, which means our first and foremost identity is that of a child. Perhaps it has become too obvious a fact to elicit much consideration. However, the basic parent-child relationship can and should provide a powerful sense of identity for both children and parents.
And yet, the importance of family identity is consistently downplayed. Just recently, the U.S. Public Health Service released an advisory on “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation” complete with policy solutions related to things like “workplace design” and “community programs” but not one promoting family formation. Jim Dalrymple II rightly points out that this is an odd omission given the advisory itself acknowledges that declining rates in marriage and household formation are part of the problem. Then again, this isn’t the first time experts have proposed replacing the meaning found in family with things like more libraries …
My point is that a sense of family identity is far more powerful than it gets credit for.
What do physical inheritances have to do with all of this? One of the simplest ways to instill a sense of family identity is via legacy. Legacy gives family identity physical form. It makes it concrete and tangible. The first place I encountered this idea was in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, from which others like Dalrymple have made basically the same argument I’m about to make. Tocqueville explains that,
Among nations whose law of descent is founded upon the right of primogeniture landed estates often pass from generation to generation without undergoing division, the consequence of which is that family feeling is to a certain degree incorporated with the estate. The family represents the estate, the estate the family; whose name, together with its origin, its glory, its power, and its virtues, is thus perpetuated in an imperishable memorial of the past and a sure pledge of the future.
In other words, passing down an estate that remains intact across generations creates a certain “family feeling.” Of course, the inheritance system Tocqueville describes here (primogeniture) requires parents to favor their eldest son over other children. Not exactly a fair way to treat your kids. This is why the U.S. abandoned the European tradition of primogeniture in favor of a more egalitarian inheritance system, in which each child receives an equal portion of their parent’s estate regardless of birth order or gender. Interestingly, however, when estates are divided this way, the family feeling they help preserve is eventually lost. Tocqueville explains,
When the equal partition of property is established by law, the intimate connection is destroyed between family feeling and the preservation of the paternal estate; the property ceases to represent the family; for as it must inevitably be divided after one or two generations, it has evidently a constant tendency to diminish, and must in the end be completely dispersed.
This makes sense. If you keep dividing an inheritance with each generation, it will keep getting smaller and smaller until it eventually disappears. And if your family identity is connected to the estate, it, too, will fade. So for Tocqueville, partible inheritances just don’t cut it: “Either a man gives up the idea of perpetuating his family, or at any rate he seeks to accomplish it by other means than that of a landed estate.”
How to preserve family identity without resorting to primogeniture is a fascinating question that I think a lot about. But for now, I only want to highlight one of the underlying ideas embedded in Tocqueville’s argument—that family identity is not only best preserved in connection with something physical (such as an estate) but something physical that will last (such as an estate that never undergoes division). So an inheritance isn’t just a way to allocate leftover money when you die. It can also be a vehicle for connecting family across generations—a means, not an end.
I was listening to a Tyler Cowen podcast with Ann Keay recently, and something she said about why monarchs wear crowns struck me:
When you trace [monarchies] back to a time when monarchs were actually in charge and had executive power, always the challenge was, how did you pass it on to your children? How did you make sure that on your death . . . Although you might be a powerful and successful king, as soon as you die, all your enemies [don’t] come in and grab everything.
You have to create this sense that somehow it isn’t just about you and your body, and when you are dead, it’s over. There’s some continuity. There’s some kind of heredity that carries your aura and power and ability to command down through the generations.
The problem for monarchs is that they are mortal like everyone else but still want to perpetuate their family’s right to rule somehow. Those who want to pass on a family identity have a similar problem. How do you preserve it over generations? Well, you need to infuse it into something more permanent than any one person involved. Hence, a crown or an estate—physical symbols with the potential to last a very long time. Other material inheritances can perform the same function.
Now, you might say this all makes sense assuming you care about your posterity. If inheriting a family identity helps them and it’s something you can provide, sure. Why not pass down a material inheritance of some sort? But this still doesn’t answer the more fundamental question of why you should care about them in the first place.
This gets at the heart of one of deBoer’s objections to the pursuit of generational wealth. It’s not just that it can breed entitled trust fund babies. It’s that, with the exception of your kids and maybe your grandkids and great-grandkids, you’re never going to meet them anyway. So why care?
Caring about your indefinite posterity lets you be part of something greater than yourself. You become a link in a chain that extends into the past and future. Instead of letting what you’ve inherited from your ancestors stop with you, you pass it on. Even if you’ve inherited nothing, you create something to pass on.2 I think there’s a primal urge in all of us to do this. It may be hard to justify from a modern, individualistic worldview, but it’s a real longing. Humans want and need to feel like they belong to something greater than themselves.
At the end of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men, the protagonist Tom Bell reflects on an old stone water trough he saw while fighting in France in World War II. He imagines the man who, centuries ago, hewed it out of solid rock day after day and wonders why he did it:
What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothing would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that. I’ve thought about it a good deal. I thought about it after I left there with that house blown to pieces. I’m goin to say that water trough is there yet. It would of took somethin to move it, I can tell you that. So I think about him setting there with his hammer and his chisel, maybe just an hour or two after supper. I dont know. And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that’s what I would like most of all.
I think we all want to make that kind of promise, and leaving behind something that transcends generations is one way how.
For more on this, check out Anthony Giddens’s book The Consequences of Modernity (1990)
Just imagine how your descendants will feel knowing they have something you created with them in mind.
Thanks for the shoutout, and I loved this line:
"Caring about your indefinite posterity lets you be part of something greater than yourself."
I think that's the problem with de Boer's take; if you have idle trust fund kids, your wealth will basically be depleted in one generation. imo only works if people have a sense of mutual obligation to each other, so that each generation building on, not wasting, the resources of future generations. In other words, a mindset built around a sense of purpose not around riches for their own sake.