The rich should leave their wealth to their children, not to charity

Don't use your failings as a parent as an opportunity for virtue signaling

Mick Jagger’s announcement that he would not leave his fortune to his children caused much controversy. He joined a chorus of celebrities who have announced their intention to do the same:

I've told them the same thing my dad told me. My dad says, “When I die, you can expect that I'm going to die broke, and you're going to be paying for the funeral”.

— Guy Fieri (net worth ~$100m)

I just think all an inheritance does is breed laziness and entitlement. I worked hard and I'm gonna spend it all and have fun with my husband.

— Marie Osmond (net worth ~$20m)

There won't be much money left because we are spending it! We have a lot of commitments. What comes in we spend, and there isn't much left… They have to work.

— Sting (net worth ~$550m)

I am determined that my children should have no financial security.

— Nigella Lawson (net worth ~$20m)

My basic reaction to these statements is disgust.

Many of these celebrities are keen to announce to the world that their wealth will go to charity. What is left unsaid, however, is that they intend to spend the rest of their lives living as some of the wealthiest people on earth. They will not release their riches; death will release their riches for them. Their children will experience the change; they will not - but it is of course the parents who secure the applause.

These parents are keen to emphasize that they are giving their children the gift of work - it’s for their own good! The parents are, of course, past the need to work - they have already morally ascended, leaving menial work far behind. No: they can relax.

Other celebrity parents will tell you that they’re actually continuing to work themselves (…as stewards of their fame and fortunes - ie. things that are enjoyable to work on). The suggestion that their children inherit this stewardship is, of course, ridiculous: young adults must spend years working in meaningless bottom-tier jobs, or else they will be morally ruined. Far better to disperse the estate and to leave the children to fend for themselves.

This notion that everything must be broken apart every generation and thrown into the market to churn has a long history in the liberal tradition. Adam Smith - the so called ‘Father of Capitalism’ - railed against entails (legal structures designed to keep estates intact across generations).

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Entails are disadvantageous to the improvement of the country, and these lands where they have never taken place are always best cultivated. Heirs of entailed estates have it not in their view to cultivate lands and often they are not able to do it. A man who buys land has this entirely in view and in general the new purchasers are the best cultivators.

— Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence

Like our celebrities, Smith’s view was predicated on the notion of the importance of the work. Continuously breaking inter-generational structures ensured maximum productivity as hungry new generations sought to secure a fortune for themselves.

In Smith’s view, nothing should be sacred or spared from this churn. The market should extend into all domains; productivity is held in higher regard than ‘absurd’ and outdated traditions.

Olivia Hussey as Juliet (1968)

Royal forests - wild environments preserved for the excellence of hunting across generations - were a prime example of something that must be destroyed in order to unlock productivity.

…in all the great monarchies of Europe there are still many large tracts of land which belong to the crown. They are generally forest… a mere waste and loss of country in respect both of produce and population. In every great monarchy of Europe the sale of the crown lands would produce a very large sum of money…

When the crown lands had become private property, they would, in the course of a few years, become well improved and well cultivated.

— Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

Gone are the royal forests, but think of the agri-businesses that could replace them!

I regard this view as entirely autistic. Hopefully this is self-evident, but to this I will return.

Many celebrities reassure us that although they are not giving their children their inheritance, they are giving them the gift of a first-class upbringing and education.

Let’s play out the consequences of this. Now, instead of a young adult with a first-class upbringing and education gradually taking stewardship of the family estate - a position of influence from which they could positively affect the lives of many people - they will be forced to pursue a lucrative career in order to continue their family lifestyle. Fantastic! The world just gained another financier, lawyer, or management consultant.

It is often asked where all the great academic geniuses - the philosophers and scientists whose names echo in history - have gone. Why are we no longer producing them? Part of the answer is surely that our generation’s geniuses design algorithmic trading technologies and social media attention-maximization tools. They have (logically) chosen to maximize the production of the wealth that they were not given.

Gone are the gentlemen polymaths. Instead, academia is a desperate, all-out war for funding, with dubious proposals and grant manipulation taking more time and energy than self-funded inquiry pursued for its own sake.

The notion that the moral quality of our elites is improved by laundering them through the job market is absurd. A lifetime of spreadsheet work does not make you a better person. Especially if you feel resentful at being robbed of your inheritance.

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In fact, what is often happening is that bad celebrity parents are attempting to outsource the cultivation of the virtues of discipline and ambition to the job market, rather than succeeding in inculcating these virtues as a parent. The false virtue of ‘work-for-work’s-sake’ is an attempt at mitigating bad parenting.

Deep down, celebrity parents realize their failure to raise children worthy of power, who can be trusted to be good stewards of their inheritance, and so the parents cut the children off in the bud.

But society will always have elites. If one generation hamstrings their children from taking its place - someone else will fill the elite vacuum. The actual effect of this hamstringing is to ensure that our societal elites are perpetually first-generation wealth - ie. the latest obsessive fund manager or entrepreneur to take his morally-dubious tech product to IPO. The tyranny of the nouveau riche.

Would Britain be a better place if the royal family sold everything they owned and gave the proceeds to a climate charity? Buckingham Palace could serve as a museum for hordes of half-interested Spanish schoolchildren to visit, or perhaps a nice second home for a Ukranian oligarch who earned his wealth!

Yes, the British people would lose one of the cornerstones of their culture, identity, history, and place in the world - but think of the solar panels we could build! Prince William could go and become an optician and become a better person.

In fact, why stop there? Why should the British people benefit unjustly from their cultural inheritance and enjoy the sight of lavish, unnecessary palaces which occupy huge parts of valuable real estate in Central London? If we level them, we could sell that land and build a second financial district (which could meritocratically employ the next generation of self-made men) and give the proceeds to the Gates Foundation, so they can do whatever it is that they’re doing (I’m told it advances ‘human flourishing!) 

Unfortunately, this kind of faceless ‘charity’ removes the donating celebrities from any kind of personal contact with the needy, and any kind of personal responsibility, privation, or work. Wealth is just vaguely diffused after death, a last self-satisfied gasp.

Ultimately: do you trust a faceless organization more than your child? If so - what does that say about the family you have built?

One of the key drivers of this process is the modern ‘capitalization’ of wealth. The very rich now hold the majority of their wealth in intangible financial assets rather than land. This has significantly warped how these families think about wealth, driving detachment from personal ties and responsibilities.

If the end goal of wealth generation is to end up with liquid, fungible assets (stocks, shares, investment portfolios), then the nature of the business you build does not matter: it is just being built to be sold. It will not be a multi-generational family business, determining the competencies and destinies of your descendants - it will be sold on the secondary markets within half a decade of being founded. Who cares if it’s fundamentally meaningless or unhealthy?

Conversely, if this wealth was held in land, and a single family was tethered to that land across generations, it becomes natural to consider definite, physical, local, personal projects to meaningfully improve the beauty and health of the society around oneself. A landed inheritance is not just wealth, it is history, responsibility, leadership, and the dependence of the surrounding community.

Anything that requires multi-generational education to appreciate and support, like the fine arts - ballet, music, etc. - wither and gradually disappear. Nurturing the heights of civilizational refinement is a non-trivial responsibility. What cannot wholly disappear, like the buildings of the great estates, becomes lifeless and ossified, becoming museum pieces rather than elements of a living culture.

But no: our celebrities choose discontinuity between father and son, between one generation and the next. No shared responsibility and destiny, just a total reset to individualization.

At the deepest level, the issue is that our society no longer has a conception of what an elite man or family is supposed to do; what their values, responsibilities, roles, and teleology are. What aging celebrities are really conceding is that they have built nothing of substance, nothing that is worth keeping together, nothing worth protecting. They have made no contribution to what Burke called the ‘ballast of the commonwealth’.

Burke’s defense of the preservation of the estates of the great families of the 18th century illustrates how far we have fallen and how much we have lost. Contrast the following to today’s elites:

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction which attends hereditary possession (as most concerned in it) are the natural securities for this transmission.

Let those large proprietors be what they will, and they have their chance of being amongst the best, they are at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth.

— Edmund Burke, Reflections on The Revolution in France

Instead, we have abstracted all agency away from humans and into a depersonalized system - and that system is failing.

Our society deserves a better class of elite. Please join us as we examine what they should be and how they will arise. For my wealthy readers - get in touch, and I’ll advise you. I want to see ‘Becoming Noble’ dynasties arise!

Society is indeed a contract… It is to be looked on with other reverence… As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place…

The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles.

— Edmund Burke, Reflections on The Revolution in France

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann