Inmovable Objects and Unstoppable Forces
Say it loud and say it proud - we're all nepo babies now
I guess it's true that some people really got to fight to survive / And some people are white guys in 1985
A million internet years ago, everyone was talking about “nepo babies” (short for nepotism babies), a group of high-profile media, entertainment, and fashion figures whose parents are also high profile in related fields. The issue was covered in the New York Times and (most famously) on New York Magazine. You can find a list of all your favorite nepo babies at NYMag too. So with all the interest, why not talk about them?
Recently, I wrote an article for Liberal Currents about housing and inequality, which is relevant to this one. It’s also very good. I also touched on a lot of this on an older article for Seúl Magazine, in Spanish.
Profession: offspring
The debate, per those two articles, appears to have started in February, but I only really became aware of the term in October, because of a huge controversy in fashion TikToK. In an interview, model Lily-Rose Depp (offspring of domestic abuser/actor Johny Depp, and French supermodel/singer-songwriter Vanessa Paradis) said she had earned everything she had through hard work. Italian top model Vittoria Ceretti (here’s what’s in her bag!) fired back on Instagram, saying (TL; DR) that if you owe your entire career to your last name you should at least have the humility to not pretend you worked for it.
And the thing is, Vittoria Ceretti is like unarguably right here: Lily-Rose Depp is 5’3 or 5’4, and to be a runway model you need to be at least 5’8. So she 100% verifiably would not have the career she has if she didn’t have rich, famous, influential parents. Modeling in general is full of stories like this: Bella and Gigi Hadid, Lila Moss, Kaia Gerber, etc. My point here isn’t that modeling, a profession based on being attractive and tall, is supposed to be an exemplar of the meritocratic world-spirit - it’s just so clearcut that it gives you a good idea of the extent.
This isn’t uncommon: 42% of the total workforce, and 70% of the Gen Z workforce, got their jobs through nepotism. In fact most people, especially from wealthy or professional parents, are “nepo” in this way:
The key takeaway here is that it’s very common to be initially employed by your parent’s employer, but it is much more common at both very blue-collar industries AND at high income levels, and that those career tracks are also more commonly associated with contacts and connections in ways that actually allow children to increase their lifetime earnings. Similarly, you’re 24 times more likely than the average person to become a doctor if your parents are doctors, and you’re 17 times more likely to become a laywer - both professions have more “nepo babies” than the media, in fact.
So while it’s especially egregious in media, entertainment, and fashion, it’s remarkably common across professions too. Levels of nepotism vary across countries, but it’s very much a stylized fact that children are disproportionately likely to work at the same employers as their parents in certain industries, in ways that shape lifetime earnings.
Apples falling close to the tree
Last November, I attended the Mercatus Center’s Program for Pluralism Civil Exchange’s “Forum on Obstacles to Socioeconomic Mobility”. It was a fascinating experience, with attendants and speakers having a large range of viewpoints, backgrounds, and fields of study. The key question was: how does one restore socioeconomic mobility, given that it is down?
In the US, socioeconomic mobility is low, has been falling for decades, and is lower for non-whites than whites. In fact, few people are socioeconomically mobile - basically everyone remains at the income level of their parents, on a relative scale. It’s very rare for the children of the poorest Americans to become rich, or the converse. This is negatively related to economic inequality writ large - and there’s a relationship between low mobility and low economic growth, as well as high inequality and low growth (this was one of the core Piketty findings).
Why socioeconomic mobility is low is an extremely complicated question, but given its relationship to (growing) wealth inequality, then you can start pulling some threads. Education, of course, is a big one: the more resources a family has, the more it can invest in their children’s education (from kindergarten to college), an investment that, more often than not, pays off massively for the tots. Higher education in particular is seen as an equalizer, but it is in fact a stratifier: entry is extremely disparate, resulting in unequally distributed benefits from attending. These accrue to the highly educated, one of the richest and least downwardly mobile groups in society; lawyers, doctors, and dentists are among the most overrepresented professions in the top 1% of income. And there’s a race angle, of course - just ask Chris Rock about his neighbors.
The one exception to low socioeconomic mobility, per the amazing Streets of Gold by Leah Boustan and Ren Abramitzky, are the children of immigrants. For basically every single nationality, the children of immigrants at the bottom of the economic scale performed better than their parents, unlike native-born Americans. The one exception are the sons of West Indian immigrants; the West Indies are in the Caribbean, and most people there are Black (or what Americans would call Black, at least); in consequence, while West Indian Americans outperform other Black Americans, they perform especially better when it comes to women (who are also the most upwards mobile group) - because Black men specifically have very high exposure to extremely unpleasant interactions with the police, among other instances of discrimination based on race but not national origin.
The most interesting thing about immigrants is that their astonishingly high socioeconomic mobility persists after controlling for education, income, occupation, etc - meaning that immigrants are mobile even when they’re completely equal on the relevant metrics to natives. If you take out most qualities that explain people’s income, immigrants still do much better - meaning it has to be something you can’t observe. People who move countries are very different, personality wise, than people who don’t; they might have substantially different values that they pass on to their children - for example, an emphasis on academic achievement (which doesn’t actually pan out on results in statistically observable ways, but whatever) Research by the economist Raj Chetty (and others) points to communities being really important: having friends of a different social class results in higher mobility. So immigrant communities being clustered by nationality could mean that doctors, nurses, and janitors from the same country all know each other from growing up, leading to more opportunity. This pairs nicely with the fact that immigrants tend to cluster in certain industries and in certain locations—meaning they do have the kind of “interclass networks” everyone else lacks.
It seems that a really big component of mobility, then, are culture and community, wich economists tend not to pay much attention to because they’re hard to measure (unless you’re Raj Chetty, then you’ll get a well-deserved Nobel Prize out of it in like 20 years). But there’s also other stuff like race and gender playing a role, so how do those influence mobility? Do they do so separately or jointly from economic issues?
Ingroup psychodrama
A paper that really changed how I think about certain kinds of issues is “White Psychodrama” by Liam Bright (you can also read a summary, accompanied by other points, by Matt Yglesias, or one by philosopher Emile Torres). When it comes to US racial discourse, Bright says there’s three non-racist factions: white people who feel guilty about racism, white people who don’t want to feel guilty about racism but feel guilty about not wanting to feel guilty, and Black people. The first group will engage in self flagellation to show off how progressive they are; the second will find weird excuses to say that actually racism isn’t real anymore, and Black intellectuals respond “With a dextrous entrepreneurial spirit! Which is to say, by cashing in.”
Bright’s takeaway is that the central issue is material inequality between Blacks and whites, so resolving it is the only way to end all the annoying discussion about which races to capitalize or how to call them. But I would say that, as seen in the West Indian case, there’s both a race-specific component and an economic component. Black people are poorer than whites on average, yes, but most Black people are middle class and live in the suburbs, and most poor people are White and live in rural areas.
This isn’t exclusive to race either. I follow a deaf girl on TikTok, and she talks about stuff she goes through, such as most people not knowing sign language or not having acommodations in college. And it’s really interesting, because the only disability-related discourse I’d heard was about whether the word disabled was offensive or not. It’s basically the same for any other group: trans people care about things like healthcare access and employment discrimination, but people like to talk about pronouns and sports. Immigrants would like to not be shackled to a single job for 25 years until they get a green card and then get deported if they get fired and can’t find one within the month, but pundits would rather discuss “chaos at the border” or how to call undocumented people. For basically every group, discussion is on whatever keeps more discussion going. This is because nobody would read a magazine that said that actually the take on trans rights is that employment discrimination should be harder so they can afford hormones, or whatever the equivalent is for any hot topic.
Overall, then, almost all minority groups would benefit from a stronger economy, because lack of employment opportunities means that bosses get more bandwidth to be dicks to everyone, and they don’t when the alternative is nobody else. And this extends to things like welfare policy and whatnot: more resources for poor people overall benefits marginalized groups the most because they’re disproportionately much poorer than everyone else. Though, this doesn’t really eliminate the need for aggressive anti-discrimination action: racism is, after all, real (see this study on stereotypically Black and white names to lose faith in humanity for the day). So is sexism, in fact, and they’re both economic phenomena.
Either way, I don’t think all politics is distributive politics - antisemitism isn’t rooted in economic disparities, unless you’re stupid or an antisemite. The much maligned “identity politics” (throwback to 7 years ago) are actually relevant and full of content; minority-specific and outgroup-specific disadvantages do exist, and they do affect economic status on top of disproportionate burdens of poverty. The material component is real too, and its importance cannot be understated: a stronger economy and a larger welfare state would benefit minorities and outgroups disproportionately (unless there’s some New Deal-tier exclusion of who gets what), since a truly rising tide would lift all boats. And this is all barrelling towards, obviously, a housing angle.
Not in my back yard
I wrote an article for Liberal Currents that elaborates on this issue much further
For both raw inequality, and for overall prosperity, housing is the biggest issue.
Regarding growth, the case is simple: not enough housing in the most productive areas of the economy is a gigantic bottleneck for the rest of the country. The most productive and innovative individuals, with the most skills, cannot afford to live in the most productive and innovative cities - meaning lower productivity in companies, and lower innovation overall. Because of this, moving from “poor” to “rich” areas (or from small to big cities) markedly improves incomes, and the younger, the bigger the effects. The poorest US states stopped catching up with the rich ones because people could not move elsewhere. This kind migration raises incomes for both those who leave and for those who stay: if place X has a lot of jobs, and place Y has fewer, then you can profit by going from X to Y, which also benefits place Y because there’s not a ton of unemployed people pushing wages down for Y-ers.
At the same time, equality and mobility are highly affected by housing policy. Firstly, because lower growth is associated with higher inequality and lower mobility. But also, wealth inequality itself is overwhelmingly driven by inequality in homeownership, to the point that homeownership inequality accounts for the vast majority of overall wealth inequality; and locations with the more serious housing crises have higher inequality. And in terms of mobility, location is key: educational quality is highly tied to location, and access to location is obviously determined by housing costs. Poor areas have their issues, but rich areas have better schools, better job opportunities, and better networks. Naturally, this ties into racial inequality as well - some places end up with fewer opportunities, and surprise surprise, it’s not where the whites live.
Thee history of housing policy is pretty interesting: now, it is mostly a tool for rich people to remain rich, but originally it was designed to enforce regressive social norms. In fact, basically all US housing policy was designed to enforce racial segregation until pretty much the 90s, when it was instead used to enrich old white people who already owned houses. And land regulation was pretty successful at achieving those aims, because the more stricly zoned cities like Boston are also the most segregated in the entire United States. Of course, I’ve written about this previously in some aditional detail.
Conclusion
What if Picasso had been born a girl? Would Señor Ruiz have paid as much attention or stimulated as much ambition for achievement in a little Pablita?
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971)
It’s nobody’s fault they’re privileged. I think I just mean my dad in 1985. But at the very least you have to own up to it. Not to devalue your own merits or accomplishments, but to recognize that some things are just based on luck. And having such a luck-based component in life is not especially good. Of course, everyone has something they owe to luck - being at the right place at the right time - but pretending it’s fair that the luck of the accidents of your birth to be determinant for such big parts of life is just not a case that’s easy to make.
Equality of opportunity is harder, and more radical, than equality of outcome - the latter just involves taxes and subsidies, crutches and shackles, a Rawlsian Harrison Bergeron. The former involves a different, more fair, more open society, with access to norms and resources. That’s hard. But it’s better, we’d all agree.
Socioeconomic mobility might be about housing and welfare, but ultimately, it’s also about building a society that can address racism, sexism, homophobia, and other isms and phobias we haven’t even come up with - because, historically, the isms and phobias have also had economic counterparts. Stay woke I guess.
Note: this wasn’t an endorsement in the Phoebe Bridgers/Paul Mescal/Bo Burnham situation. But this is: I’m Team Paul (he’s so dreamy).