Dynasties in the making: Family wealth and inheritance for the first-generation ultra-wealthy and their wealth managers

Abstract

The inheritance practices of the ultra-wealthy play a key role in reproducing socio-economic inequalities across generations. Given this role, we need a better understanding of the individuals and families who own, accumulate and pass on substantial amounts of wealth. This article asks two questions: first, how do parents with profound ownership or control over capital reconcile cultivating dynastic wealth with beliefs in meritocratic achievement? And, second, how do wealth managers justify their commercial value to first generation wealthy clients? The answer to both of these questions involves what I call a pedagogy of inherited wealth. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with first-generation ultra-wealthy parents and their wealth managers, it documents how wealthy parents and wealth managers construct risky futures around inheritance, and their strategies to manage those risks through the control of access to the family’s wealth. In doing so, it explores how they produce two roles, termed here the ‘good inheritor’ and the ‘good client’. Through examining various strategies to manage family wealth and inheritance, the article reveals the legitimating and enabling pedagogy surrounding this process and the paradox at the heart of this pedagogy – which promotes both the value of work among the next generation of inheritors and the preservation of dynastic wealth that will preclude their dependence on income-generating work.

Better Than the Markets: Mutual Fund Managers’ Perceptions of the Rich

“…As professionals, fund managers are supposed to increase the wealth of their clients, but they are not dedicated to serving specifically the rich. In this they differ from wealth managers and private bankers, who have recently attracted scholarly attention (Beaverstock et al, 2013; Harrington, 2016; Higgins, 2021). Unlike wealth managers, the interviewees in this study do not have a direct professional interest, nor specific bonds of loyalty, to the wealthy, but they are nevertheless an important part of the institutions that create revenue for asset owners in general.…”

Class, affect, margins

“…Moreover, globalised assets in the form of property function in social reproduction, enabling children of asset and property rich parents to have a head start. Higgins (2022) extends this analysis to inherited, dynastic, wealth, which the state is directly implicated in, allowing beneficial taxes and ushering in a 'property-owning democracy' that often transforms into multiple homeownership for some and a rentier generation for others. Here a relational affective approach is useful to understanding what happens when unequal class cultures meet, mix and interact in everyday space, and how these interactions and relations can be emotionally fraught and extend across affective registers, yet also endure (Strong, this issue).…”

“…Though Bourdieu's framework of habitus, field, social space and multiple capitals contributed greatly to analysis of class relations, it does lend itself to a reification of class formation as an exclusive club that inculcates from birth, with cultural capital often assigned as the preserve of the educated middle-classes and realised (and convertible) dependent on a form of distinction from those below (Bourdieu, 1979(Bourdieu, /1984. This neo-Bourdieusian view is apparent in everyday class identifications -unmoored from the contemporaneity of jobs, work or economic position -that allow, for example, 'selfmade' billionaires (and their children) to continue claiming working-class status (Higgins, 2022).…”

Inheriting a dynasty: Family succession dramas and the moral economy of Downton Abbey

“…Such understanding and representation of dynastic wealth obscure the fact that the caretaking families are not only stewards but also immensely wealthy owners, and that even today a cross-generational outlook is a key element in the accumulation of dynastic wealth (Kuusela, 2018; Glucksberg and Burrows, 2016; Higgins, 2022).…”