In 2014, the economist Thomas Piketty warned in his bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century that patrimonial capitalism, wherein inheritance is the dominant form of wealth acquisition, was making a comeback. The book is best remembered for the formula r > g, where r is return on capital and g is economic growth.

The basic idea was that we risked recreating the wealth aristocracy that prevailed throughout Europe prior to the twentieth century. In that world, an ambitious young man of limited means (in those days it was always a man) stood virtually no chance of getting rich through his own labors. If he wanted wealth, he had to marry it or inherit it because money made money faster than people did.

The United States isn’t there yet. The top 10 slots in the Forbes 400 are still dominated by self-made men (these days it’s almost always a man), and, according to Forbes, the proportion of “bootstrappers” among all 400 rose from less than half in 1984 to 70 percent in 2023.

But it’s reasonable to doubt that trend will hold in 2063, given the growing concentration of wealth in the U.S. Indeed, during roughly the same period cited by Forbes, the 27 U.S. families that made both the 1983 and the 2020 Forbes 400 lists saw their net worth increase more than 1,000 percent, according to a report led by Chuck Collins at the Institute for Policy Studies.

That didn’t happen in a vacuum. For a couple of generations now, government policy has encouraged and exacerbated this trend. States have been tripping over each other to eliminate the Rule Against Perpetuities, which limits to three or four generations the period during which you can shelter wealth from taxation in a family trust. At the federal level, estates of up to $14 million are now exempted entirely from the estate tax, and the “angel of death” loophole, which at death resets to zero the capital gains tax on real estate and securities—and which President Joe Biden, when he tried to scale it back, couldn’t even get Democrats to sign on—reigns supreme. (For more detail on how, as Piketty put it, “the past tends to devour the future,” see my December 2021 piece, “

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