Bank of Mum and Dad: why we all now live in an 'inheritocracy' (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Bank of Mum and Dad: why we all now live in an 'inheritocracy' (2024)

theguardian.com

26 pointsherbertl28 comments

Tangential point:

With two kids, my wife and I still need one or other of our parents to ferry the kids back and forth to school and sports at various, sometimes regular, times. We're lucky / privileged enough to have both sets of parents and one bro/sis in-law all within a 15 minute drive. My MIL is ferrying one or other of her grandkids somewhere at least twice a week. Truly, these kids have been raised by the village / extended family.

I had a (just lovely person) colleague who was a relatively recent migrant from Malaysia who had three kids, and her husband also worked and relatively long hours. They had no familial support network and I don't know how she / they managed. (everyone manages their own situation, it's just more gets sacrified, but you know what I mean).

Family roots make a huge difference in not just money, but time (and availability), and yes it's an immense privilege to have that support network available - but it feels like a different kind of privilege to that of pure monetary support or the kind of privilege that breeds arrogance, corruption, and superiority complexes.

It's also a privilege that I am actually looking forward to having the opportunity to provide to my children.

Immigrants survive because their children have more independence. In one karen helicopter parent town I had police called on me because my child was crying so a law must have been broken. They looked up my license, saw I came from <Immigrants dominant city>. They called my city and asked if the child was kidnapped and were essentially told to fuck off by my hometown police. I later got the body cam and these pathetic beasts were shocked my local police would not entertain their claims or even really give them the time of day as it were.

So you can see the difference -- in karentown you must shuttle the smiling children everywhere or have them taken by CPS because God forbid they bike to a playground and entertain themselves. Meanwhile in immigrant town no one is entertaining even fraudulent kidnapping claims.

It’s not inheritocracy, it’s family units working as intended.

In America we’ve had this fantasy of rugged individualism where you could just say fuck you to mom and dad and your elders and just go off and do your own thing and prove everyone wrong and be wildly successful and owe nobody anything.

That dream should now be thoroughly eradicated. It makes people way too selfish and it’s not good for society as a whole. We must see life as a team effort.

The keyword there is could. America is the land of opportunity, the Declaration of Independence calls the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right.

Nowhere is happiness or success promised or guaranteed. You have an opportunity, the same (equal) opportunity as everyone else; whether you will succeed is an entirely different matter and can come down to sheer dumb luck.

Freedom is power, power is responsibility, responsibility is hard. Obtaining success is hard, living in a free society and country is hard, but the fruits are unparalleled if you win.

I think by in large the other side is redemption and second chances. The stereotypical American parent (which isn’t a rule by far) helps their kids launch - and is there to catch them and relaunch them when it doesn’t work out. Many parents don’t live up to this but that’s what I grew up believing the goal is. It’s a two way thing - the parents help to their means and the kids strive to their ability. Neither work out sometimes as adequate, and that’s when we take care of family.

I'm not sure who's "intending" this, certainly not me. We should be working towards a society where "who your father is" isn't the strongest predictor of one's standard of living. This isn't about saying fuck you to your parents, it's about working towards a level playing field, where the winners and losers aren't pre-determined by who their families are.

So family members should not be allowed to help each other is what you’re basically saying. Doesn’t that sound insane?

That's not what he's saying. He is saying that your father and my father shouldn't be supremely unequal. Ie your father being a CEO and earning 10s of millions every year and my father working a product manager role at a small company.

Very often there is a huge factor of pay difference between roles like these.

Let's ignore CEOs.

In my parents' generation it would not be absurd to buy a small house here to raise the kids in, with a single parent working and the other caring for the kids, even if you don't have a well-paying job. A decent job will do.

Compare to now, double income, no kids, both earning above average wages. Buying a house before you are 50, or at all? Forget it.

Just that those people who inherited the house now basically have enough to buy 2 houses out somewhere on the countryside if they decide to move.

What if the CEO wants to make 10s of millions to ensure he can support his family for generations to come??

Not sure if you're trolling but otherwise genuinely perplexed by how you could draw this conclusion from the above post.

I think it’s pretty clear, a system where a family can’t guarantee their offsprings success is one where the family is unable to do anything to improve their children’s fates.

This is, in a significant part, the flip side of the housing crisis coin. Some of these mums and dads saved up but many, many more of them grew their wealth alongside their home values.

Zoning policy, building regulations, and interest rates are a massive gate guarding generational wealth, for better or worse. Having personally suffered a lot for my parents poverty and homelessness, I have my biases, but then again don't we all.

I recently read a piece of local news on housing policies (Austin, TX) and the journalist made the observation that affordable housing is inevitably tied to reducing property values, which is a major source of wealth for older generations. It made me realize why some folks would be against zoning changes and other pro-housing policies, because it might actually impact their personal wealth. I don't know why I never correlated the two before.

"Inheritocracy" is a complicated way of saying "class system".

Or is it a subversive way of saying a supportive nuclear or extended family that invests and takes care of subsequent generations is one of the success paths?

And if you are not born into a family that can "invest and take care of", too bad.

Yeah--and that's the trouble. To kickstart things, apparently you have to follow the "success sequence" (get high school diploma, get job, get married, then have kids), but if your society, peers, and home life make that a difficult struggle, then what could we expect?

> Or have I just fed you a “working-class done good” tale, because that’s how I attempt to justify my own exceedingly privileged position?

Oh just get over yourself with the materialism-breeding-guilt nonsense.

Live modestly; eschew debt; raise a family; find joy.

The emphasis on "moi" and "muh stuff" is the bugaboo here.

Especially so with land. My ancestors that came to America just claimed homestead land or bought it for a song and everyone back to a couple generations back just used what was passed on. The boomers sold off the land and I started the way my Nth great grandparents did with fuck all, except after boomers passed a gazillion regulations to stop anyone else from building the inherited properties they sold off. I spent decades getting back to square one including having to take raw desert land to a house with my bare hands, which was sabotaged at every step by codes zoning and licensing.

In my family history more or less every generation had to acquire their wealth simply because there was more than one child. It’s not like every child’s family all crowded into some generational family home. Given branching since my family first came to America 150 or so years ago there would be nearly a thousand children squeezed into a 1200sqft 150 year old house. By quirk of fate I ended up moving across the country about 2 miles away from that house. I’m not sure when it left the families control but my relatives are spread over the entire country, and every one of us worked hard and bought our homes. Most of the family homes when the parents die have ended up being sold because the kids left to college and careers and their own homes. Very few homes physically stay with a family branch, especially because the estate is shared and a home isn’t easily divisible.

I’m sorry you feel ripped off and I have seen a lot of this mentality on HN over the years - that somehow we are entitled to own property and it’s our ancestors that deprived us, and in current times safety codes and zoning drove the nail in. My generation - gen x - had no illusions we would get jack shit from anyone. I know I never did. But I bought my first home as a total junk fixer upper far from anything and commuted a lot and fixed it by myself into a nice place to live, sold it and moved into a tiny dilapidated studio in an unfashionable part of Brooklyn, committed a lot and fixed it by myself into a nice place to live, etc etc. Now I have a place that’s quite nice due to luck in my life and career and a lot of living in crappy places and fixing them up, saving 80% of my take home to invest, etc. I hope my daughter doesn’t have to work and struggle as hard as I did, but I never blamed my family for not giving me everything on a silver platter and I’ll never understand people that do. Even if my life hadn’t been so lucky and I was living in a crappy apartment, the idea of blaming my parents for not giving me an easy path would never occur to me, and I suspect that’s the case for most people of my generation.

I think every human is entitled to build a home on their own property. Not entitled to property, but entitled to be able to use their property without a dead boomer crawling out the grave to enforce practically unrevokable covenants like not allowing starter homes (which was the actual case with >50% of land I found even in bumfuck Egypt). This is what angers me immensely as I spent years finding a way to unfuck these roadblocks.

What i will never forgive the boomers for are passing zoning, covenants and codes they didn't subject themselves to, then playing with monetary policy to game the real estate values. They are supremely entitled thinking they can take from others property to sabotage the youth from housing. The damage they did is immense, and if you first bought a place 3+ years ago you have no idea how much they've sabotaged those starting at zero, and calling wanting to be able to build a starter home yourself on your own land ( lol i am maybe 0.1% of the population who has done this since it is all but outlawed in most the US, sure am lazy!) as wanting everything on a silver platter makes you the problem.

And with due respect, if you started with even a dilapidated house you are not even close to understanding what it's like to get legal water/well+electric+septic+house permitted on virgin builds which are direly needed now that the affordable dilapidated home path you availed yourself of has been largely closed off circa covid when flippers with access to near 0% loans bid them to infinity and got them locked up in negative real rate mortgages that no one wants to give up since it is a money printing inflation machine that transfers wealth from non owners to owners via central bank induced inflation.

What kind of capitalism-apologist hot take on parents/families caring for the well-being of their children/members is this? Surely the world is not frequent with Tom-like Oxford-educated actors feeling bad about how good they have it. If some people arrived to the conclusion that they don't have to work because their parents provide for them, then I would argue their parents have failed them in other ways, but not because of what they provided.

Should we decide on a different social contracts where people return things when they die? Sure. But start with the wealthiest please.

>But start with the wealthiest please.

(Very) wealthy families already face stiff inheritance and/or estate taxes at both Federal and State levels. Important note, most middle class and all lower class families and individuals will never face inheritance/estate taxes.

I understand your point and thank you for raising it. The article mainly discussed the UK where a similar steep 40% estate inheritance tax exists for values above a certain threshold. There is also the 7 year rule that completely avoids inheritance tax. Elsewhere in Europe the situation is not as "progressive" and it's more frequent to face inheritance taxes. At the same time, it feels like there are many loopholes around these for the truly wealthy.

Though, the perspective of the article reads like it's accusative of upper middle class families (and not higher).

Minor note, on the federal level and most states, the “estate” is taxed, not the inheritance which has some subtle differences and loopholes. Also, very very wealthy families can pass much of their wealth through family office funds, blind trusts and company share transfers while living, that are taxed differently.

Between the very high caps before an estate tax is used and the loopholes, extremely few dollars are taxed this way.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-many-people-pa...

Indeed! Estate taxes are subtly different from inheritance taxes.

My dad and I got a crash course introduction when my mom passed; he inherited everything being the survivor so it was all very simple with next to no paperwork, but all the debtors (banks) my mom owed money to when she passed graciously explained to us that any such debts were the responsibility of my mom's estate and not us.

In practical terms the difference meant little, debts are supposed to be repaid and we were happy to clean up her financial affairs as estate executors, but it's a good fact to know now rather than later.

Play the cards you’re dealt.

For everyone that had some obstacles removed that made it easier to apply themselves, there are dozens of other people with the same privilege that didnt apply themselves at all.

For everyone that is told to “check their privilege” there are dozens of other people that do check, and realize they weren’t using nearly enough of it, more vastly accelerating inequalities as their previously humble integration into society was considered to be in vain.

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