Are the Nepo Babies exploding our Democracy?
And this is one of the reasons we have the Ultimate nepo-baby — Donald J. Trump — bestriding the political scene like a giant-assed colossus.
The greatest wealth transfer is here. Can you feel the burn? Or, rather, the burning? "(I)n '89, total US family wealth was (upwards of) $38 trillion. (N)ow? $140 trillion. $84 trillion will be inherited by 2045, $16 trillion of it in a few years.” Tweeted Talmon Joseph Smith, Economics Reporter for the NY Times. “‘The amounts are just staggering," James Jack, a managing director at UBS, largest wealth manager in the world, told Smith. He concludes, “(F)or those in wealth mgmt, Succession (minus the raunchy satire) is real life.”
It certainly puts Tom Wambsgans of Succession’s felt need for a life of microwaved milk, ginger shots, spaghetti and olive oil with American bottled water into some perspective. The poor fool is stressed, navigating between steering a US Presidential election election for a right-wing nihilist and his collapsing marriage to a member of the overclass. He’s trying to outgrow his corporate boxy suits and “agricultural walk,” as Roman reminded us in another season, before he went completely feral.
Of the below graph, James Medlock Tweeted, sagely, “Yea, people point out that millennials are on roughly the same trajectory as boomers were — maybe so, but I think the bigger point is that this trajectory is not a great way of structuring wealth distribution in a society.”
And can we talk for a second about the insane distribution of “White Boomer Wealth”?
The median wealth gap between white and black families is almost surreal. “In the second quarter of 2020, white households—who account for 60 percent of the U.S. population—held 84 percent ($94 trillion) of total household wealth in the U.S.” write Emily Moss, Kriston McIntosh, Wendy Edelberg, and Kristen Broady for Brookings. “Comparatively, Black households—who account for 13.4 percent of the U.S. population—held just 4 percent ($4.6 trillion) of total household wealth.” It is increasingly evident in schools, like the Specialized Schools in New York, allegedly one of the most progressive cities in the country. Still, President Biden deserves some credit for facing the problem, however obliquely.
How will AI impact — and/or exacerbate — this uncomfortable reality? Do we even have the will to do something about this? Or is this all just so much chatter before inequality increases by another order of magnitude?
This is mostly about the huge, almost cataclysmic difference between augmenting existing wealth versus generating wealth. Our entire system, in fine. For the wealthy have put in place ways in which it is almost impossible for them to fail even as it is almost impossible to move from poverty to wealth. And this is one of the reasons we have the Ultimate nepo-baby — Donald J. Trump — bestriding the political scene like a giant-assed colossus. How can one fail with an over $400 million inheritance? Why isn’t this already a gigantic campaign issue? Oh — right. “Honest liar.”
I come by this question — Are the Nepo Babies exploding our Democracy? — by way of last night’s episode of Succession, where the fictional Logan kids appear to be about to end the America of their multiverse through their own fundamental brokenness.
Where did the term nepo baby even come from, anyway? Nate Jones writes in Vulture:
You can trace the origins of the modern backlash to two pivotal events. First, the Girls wars of 2012, in which nepotism allegations became tangled up in discourses around race, misogyny, and privilege, prompting unanswerable questions like “Aren’t they actually satirizing people with zero Black friends?” Second, the Operation Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, which revealed the underhanded methods by which celebrities like Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman sought to get their children into high-ranking universities. By exposing the inner workings of the process in humiliating detail, down to staged photos of the applicants posing on rowing machines, it stripped them of their mystique. Nepotism became funny. Nobody exemplified this better than Loughlin’s daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli, a YouTube personality seemingly uninterested in the expensive education her mother had risked prison to help her obtain.
Incidentally, two wealthy parents in the “Varsity Blues” college admissions probe got their fraud convictions overturned by a federal appeals court recently. It was all sort of quiet, far quieter than the initial scandal, of course, except to those of us that were looking to see how it would all conclude. And for us there were no surprises. More overturns, I suspect, to come.
Because the system is indeed rigged towards generational wealth. And not just generational wealth, per se, but massive, almost absurd generational wealth.
Further, as evidenced in the instance of Trump, the nepo baby way of life is practiced by right-wing authoritarians around the world. “It is curious how right-wing authoritarian types like Erdogan and Museveni feel no shame at unethically utilizing and undemocratically increasing the advantages of incumbency as elections approach,” I tweeted this weekend. It is such a powerful force — an animal force — in, ironically, human nature. Such behavior can only be properly construed under the category of evolutionary biology. One almost has to look to the Great Apes, with whom we share the most recent common ancestry, for clues as to the origins of our own thoroughgoing reliance on cumulative cultural achievements. It is perhaps through this prism that we can gain a proper understanding of the unconscious power that the infinite increase of generational wealth has over human beings …
On a lighter note: Not all Nepo babes are so— how does one say this politely? — shameless. Some are politely embarrassed by the birth lottery and the general misery of so much human life, particularly among their fellow citizens. “The Giving Pledge,” founded by the Gates family and Warren Buffett, aims to close the yawning gap between the rich and the poor with regards to generational wealth. At least 115 billionaires have already pledged to give half or more of their wealth to targeted philanthropies, not directly to their children. Of course, the nepo babies will all inherit millions, even hundreds of millions. But even Warren Buffett acknowledges that the vast inheritance of wealth is bad for anything remotely resembling a democracy. As he told CBS News in 2016:
Warren Buffett: Adding to the wealth they have now has no real utility. But that wealth has incredible utility to other people. It can educated children, it can vaccinate children, it can do
Charlie Rose -- of course -- gave the devil's argument in favor of the evolutionary biology of primates.
Rose: I want to give it to my children. That's what I want to do. What's wrong with that?
Warren Buffett: I don't really think that as a society we want to confer blessings on generation after generation who contribute nothing to society simply because someone in the far distant past happened to amass a great amount of wealth.
I’m not sure Buffett’s altruistic argument changed Charlie’s mind, or what passes for it. Rose has yet to rise above the kingdom of the apes. But at least he listened, as any good courtier must, and delivered a message via his platform that was as important then as it is now today.
Not that it will change much. But acknowledging the problem, at least, by the principals is a beginning.
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