It’s easy to look at the child of a celebrity or power couple and see the leg up their family’s wealth, power, and connections got them in their own separate venture or company. And it’s even easier to label them a nepo baby when they benefit from their parent’s money and clout. But the nepo baby trend may extend beyond Hollywood, touching the lives of everyday Americans.
In other words, it’s increasingly obvious that who your parents are has become a more reliable predictor of your wealth than what you actually do for a living.
According to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, there’s a growing rift between income and wealth generation. For decades, the American Dream was predicated on the fact that hard work and a decent income would lead to homeownership. But the research finds that high earnings no longer correlate directly with wealth generation. Rather, it matters more so today what assets your family owns.
“Those that come from wealthier families that are maybe able to achieve those other economic goals—wealth building, homeownership—I think also could play into a sentiment of a sort of unfairness in the economy,” Max Risch, one of the study’s co-authors and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told Fortune.
Even as Wall Street hits successive record highs, Americans are feeling worse and worse about the economy. An April Ipsos poll found that 61% of Americans today feel the economy is on the wrong track. Meanwhile, the May consumer sentiment index hit the lowest level since the University of Michigan started tracking the metric in 1952, lower than during the COVID pandemic and aftermath of the Great Recession. And that may be because even when workers secure steady if not high-paying jobs, they’re increasingly locked out of securing assets to generate wealth.
The resilient value of the ‘Bank of Mom and Dad’
The researchers leveraged a dataset of 3.4 million families and their wealth and income records across multiple generations to track how money moves geographically and cross-generationally. One of the most surprising findings, Risch said, was that earnings were only able to explain about half of the intergenerational inequality in housing.
The data shows that even with identical incomes, a child of wealthier parents is substantially more likely to own a home than one without wealthy parents. Of course, there are other ways Americans amass wealth outside of homeownership. But Risch notes that for the bottom 95% of earners, nearly all wealth is tied to housing and pensions.
“It’s very consistent with the parents being able to help overcome these financial barriers,” Risch said, “maybe through direct asset transfers, co-signing a loan, putting a down payment.”
This tracks with the findings of a recent Northwestern Mutual report. More parents today are stepping in, or thinking about helping their kids secure keys to a home. The study also found that some parents are even prioritizing saving for a down payment than for a college degree.
Homeownership becomes a fading dream
Higher incomes simply aren’t able to make the cut. A recent report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that home prices have surged to five times the median income nationally, nearing historic highs. In some metros, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, home prices are more than 10 times the median income.
Risch looks west to illustrate why, even with a steady income today, it’s harder to climb up the wealth generation ladder. The study found California has some of the highest upward mobility in terms of income, meaning there’s ample opportunity for workers to move up a tax bracket or two thanks to the jobs offered in the state. But it turns out moving west to strike gold has its limitations. The state is one of the worst parts of the country for upward mobility of homeownership. Even with a high-paying job, most are locked out of homeownership in the Golden State, except those with wealthy parents. Americans in other metro hubs face the same barriers in turning a paycheck into property, from New York to Chicago to Houston.
Those stark geographical differences are something Risch said parents may consider when thinking about their kids’ future well-being.
“There are these sort of tradeoffs that families have to make either when they’re thinking about where to live, when they’re thinking about how to set up their children for economic success,” he said.
