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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Slavery. White supremacy. Privilege.

I don't think that this is a serious response but it deserves a rebuttal anyway. 80% of millionaires in the USA are first generation. Of that other 20% basically none goes back to slavery. Slavery made some people quite wealthy but it doesn't scale the way a modern corporation does so we are talking multi millionaires not billionaires. That level of wealth just doesn't last that long. One side of my family were slave owners in north Carolina and that money didn't even make it to my grandfather. Anecdotal but that's usually how it goes.

Good lord

I think it was a reasonable point. Inter-generational wealth transfer is very durable over time. Whether or not someone inherits "house money" (and can plan their lifestyle and tolerance for risk according to that expectation) still corresponds to closely to race in the US.

A family history of slavery might not necessarily be the cause, but having ancestors who were allowed into the property club, at a time in the past when there was still headroom to pump appreciation faster than inflation, makes a difference in what people inherit.

> Inter-generational wealth transfer is very durable over time.

You're going to need a citation for this because every article I've ever read about it says that within 2-3 generations most family fortunes (excluding those truly massive billion+ fortunes) are gone. Social mobility between upper-middle and upper class across multiple generations is incredibly high/fluid.

Even today Norman surnames (compared to Anglo-Saxon/Celtic) are massively overrepresented in the wealthy in the UK, from an event that happened nearly a thousand years ago. Individuals might rise and fall through social/economic classes, but families as a whole are pretty sticky.

Last time I read about this, social mobility is actually quite low right now no matter where you look.

Where do rich non-white families come from?

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