You know the Bank of Mum and Dad when you see it: it’s your friend who seems broke, but always has a safety net, or who suddenly (but discreetly) acquires the deposit for a home. It’s those who stayed with their parents while they saved for a flat, or stuck it out in a profession they were passionate about even though the wages are chronically low. It’s those who do not need to consider the financial costs of having children. It’s those whose grandparents are covering nursery or university fees, with the Bank of Grandma and Grandad already driving an economic wedge between different cohorts in generations Alpha (born between 2010 and 2024) and Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2000s).
This is the picture we know, but the Bank of Mum and Dad is not just a luxury confined to the 1% – it is also evident in families like mine. I grew up in a working-class household and was the first person in my family to get a degree, but it was the fact my parents had scrimped in the 1980s to purchase properties in London (and allowed me to crash in one throughout my 20s) that has arguably been the true source of opportunities in my life.
In recent years, we have rightly widened the conversation about privilege in society. And yet how honest are we about one of the most obvious forces shaping anyone under 45: the presence or absence of a parental safety net? The truth is that we live in an inheritocracy. If you’ve grown up in the 21st century, your opportunities are increasingly determined by your access to the Bank of Mum and Dad, rather than by what you earn or learn. The economic roots of this story go back to the 1980s, but it accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, as private wealth soared and wage growth stalled. In the 2020s, rather than a meritocracy – where hard work pays off – we have evolved into an inheritocracy, based on family wealth.
Bear in mind the person I was replying to was advocating equal outcomes. I was questioning the practically of seeing it that way.
The idea that the economy would still remotely function if you make people’s material outcome absolutely the same irrespective of what they’ve worked on is insane.
So in some ideal world people just all do whatever they feel inwardly motivated to do? How in that world do you signal that maybe the village doesn’t need another artisan baker, what it could really do with is someone to fix the sewers all day.
How do you do that other than compensate the sewer worker more for a job?
“Pay them a higher (fair) wage?”. Well, ok. But that means they’re paid more than the bakers are. And now you’ve sowed the seeds for inequality and we’ve barely started.
While 2/3rds of the town occupy themselves with art (and good enriching art by the way, art is essential), the “Smith” family decide for three generations to take on the sewer work and for that they’re paid more.
But by the time we get to grandson Smith, he had about 30% more savings than his baker friends and although everyone has a house, Smith is able to pay more for that house by the nice trees with a particularly nice view.
Etc. You get the idea. There is too much of human existence that still needs to be motivated by compensation. And as soon as you do that some people will think the sacrifice worth it in order to improve their lot and others won’t be so bothered.
If you took everything Mr Smith earned extra from spending all day in sewage and gave it to the bakers children instead so that there isn’t any kind of generational inequality. You don’t see how that’s fundamentally never going to work with humans? Maybe you’ll get one or two people who see the social need of cleaning the sewers. But the whole point of compensating some jobs more is that the needs of human society don’t neatly line up with what humans are inclined to do, so some sort of personal enrichment is needed to motivate the essential task of wading in shit all day rather than inhaling the amazing aroma of freshly baked bread.
And part of that compensation, what people value, is being able to give some of your sacrifice to your children.
(Although I make it clear at the top what I’m responding to let me also be clear that I in no way think the current exploitative model of capitalism seen in the West is the “best” or “inevitable”. No way, it’s awful. There are millions of ways it can be improved and the disadvantaged helped. But this idea of current human society being able to function with enforced equal outcomes is delusional)
Wealth accumulates sure, that’s why at a certain point taxes should put a brake on that and above an even higher point it should be predominantly taxed. Inheritance tax should allow for some generational transfer but capped at a sane point. And fuckery using foundations etc etc should result in all of it being forfeit.
Added to that is idea of Scandification, where Nordic nations consistently do better in almost every metric compared to other forms of governing, economic viability and systemic equality. All because their citizens fundamentally believe that caring for the whole is better than than the “feudal economic model, in which a handful of lords got very very rich while the vast majority of the populace scraped by” source .