Summary
The “Bank of Mum and Dad” drives modern inequality, fostering an “inheritocracy” where family wealth shapes opportunities over individual merit. This safety net often undermines social mobility, tying success to inheritance rather than personal effort.
Rising housing costs, wage stagnation, and unequal inheritance have entrenched this dynamic, with parental support shaping life milestones like homeownership, career paths, and education.
While early inheritances advantage some, the burden of social care costs threatens others’ expectations.
This growing reliance on family wealth exacerbates inequality within and across generations, highlighting the need for a broader societal conversation about privilege and fairness.
Remember, it is not the super wealthy billionaires driving inequality, it is the middle class parents who (checks article) let their kids stay at home when saving money. It is not speculative real estate investors driving up home prices, it’s your friend getting help on a down payment from family.
Everyone around you who has something you want but cannot afford is clearly the beneficiary of a corrupt system of inequality of which you are a victim…
I think that not being able to get ahead without parental help is explicitly a symptom of that.
That’s the symptom, but the middle class isn’t the disease.
Correct. I’m not sure the article writer would disagree.
Upward mobility with the help of family has generally been viewed as common or normal in any family that could afford to do so IMO. Doesn’t matter if it was a car, used or new, to get a young person on the way to independence, paying for some or all of college, or chipping in for a first house.
Must be a slow news day to attack that.
The problem is the rising costs making that family assistance more exclusive while the rest get loans from banks.
Correct. But it’s easier to assemble and publish an editorial about discrete symptoms than a manifesto on core societal ills.
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Did the article say it’s “not the super wealthy billionaires driving inequality” or did you just add that?
It’s good to talk about ALL drivers of inequality, don’t you think? The article is correct to point out that in today’s economy, if you don’t have your parents support, you have many fewer opportunities. That is a systemic issue that society should try to rectify.
The article is correct to point out that in today’s economy, if you don’t have your parents support, you have many fewer opportunities.
That sounds more like a symptom of inequality than a driver of it. That people with sufficient family support aren’t yet as under water as people without doesn’t mean they’re driving inequality. If anything “people with support survive better” is too basic to write an article about.
Similar to how BP popularized a personal carbon footprint to distract from systemic problems with the oil industry, focusing on the people that still manage to eke out a middle class living as “part of the problem” is like myopically studying why a particular tree hasn’t burned yet during a forest fire.
It is both. It is a symptom of the inequality that my parents suffer and a driver of mine. Generational poverty is terrible for a society.
I think some people are reading an attack where none is meant. The article isn’t chastising people for helping their kids. It’s pointing out that that help is necessary now in ways that it was not before.
The article is “people cannot excel without support and if we like to imagine ourselves as a meritocracy we need to fix that”.
My parents were quite wealthy and they wasted almost all of it in a nasty 8-year long divorce battle.
They sold most of their belongings in estate sales because they couldnt stop fighting about who owned what so the court decided no one owned anything and they all sold everything for cheap. Infrared sauna sold for $200.
Now both parents are retired, one has fuck you money that they hid away on an offshore account and fled the country so spousal support doesn’t garnish from their retirement funds, and the other is very broke with virtually nothing to their name.
Guess who needs to support them?
I guess I’m just a lil salty. I’m not entitled to anything but just sucks thinking about what would happen if I came from a happy home instead.
It’s not just a happy home, it’s a Goldilocks thing. So many things have to go exactly right. I came from a happy home, with parents who were upper middle class. Perfectly positioned for what the article describes. My parents were even able to give me a couple hundred dollars for my rent for a few years. But because they sold houses as they moved around they didn’t have the level of wealth that would mean they could straight up bankroll me buying a house. Or give me a stable place of my own with no rent at all.
The fact that we are dependent on intergenerational wealth to even get started on the classic American dream stuff is ridiculous and worth a political fight.
And the hell of it is, the government can force you to. They have full authority to garnish your wages and give it to your parents, even if you don’t want to support them.
What in the hell? Where on earth is that legal?
Filial responsibility laws. There are some ways to get around them, but it requires having good parents that care about your future and a good elder law attorney.
Not the USA, but several countries including China make elderly care the legal responsibility of their children.
Nope, USA does it too.
I have never heard of this happening in the USA. The closest I’ve heard of is some states enforcing grandparents’ rights to visit their grandchildren, but I’ve never heard of any American government entity forcing children to take care of their parents.
Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or doesn’t happen. Another poster already linked the Wikipedia article, but they’re called Filial Responsibility Laws. The states that have them are:
Alaska Arkansas California Connecticut Delaware Georgia Indiana Kentucky Louisiana Massachusetts Mississippi Nevada New Jersey North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oregon Pennsylvania Puerto Rico Rhode Island South Dakota Tennessee Utah Vermont Virginia West Virginia
Iowa used to but they got rid off them in 2015.
Any clue how those laws work if parent and child live in different states?
Unless I move to Alberta, where filial responsibility laws don’t exist.
*Feudal System with a rigid caste
🌍👩🚀🔫👨🚀
this is what Gary Jules meant
Yeah I get that but there have been three notable times where there was a great opportunity to pull yourself and your family out of the bottom economic stratas. Just after the Plagues in Europe when 1/3rd the population was effectively erased. The colonial eras where you were allowed to massacre some natives and take their land. And the post world war 2 era in the US and countries that were hit very hard (mainland Europe and China/Japan mostly).
What we’re seeing now is the end of one of these incredibly rare eras when the economic mobility is so great you can actually work your way up the ranks.
The good news is we’ve got the ability now to recognize it and try to pull it back the other way. We don’t have to bow to the church and news travels at the speed of light.
Jokes on you, my parents don’t have anything to leave me… If anything I’ll have to pay for their care bills as they age
Just tell them no. (Unless they were good parents)
(Unless they were good parents)
And then it’s a very polite no.
I feel you.
Rant:
I have a vaguely ok life only because of my parents and my grandmother. Help from my family has helped pay for car parts(repairs), some exercise stuff, French classes, and hell I only finished the third “optional” part of my education because I was able to not work while I did it. I haven’t been able to buy a single one of my instruments myself, they’ve all been from parents or my grandparents and I don’t have expensive instruments(ok one was $50, that was a good feeling but I got real lucky there). If it wasn’t for the family plan phone I’ve got no idea how I’d pay for a phone on top of everything.
I’m do a bit to save, still. I fix my car myself almost every single time, even if it’s big stuff, but I can only do that because my dad has loads of tools and my parents’ driveway is large enough. I built my own computer, modified one of my basses instead of buying a more expensive one, have learned basic luthier skills to get my instruments playing out of their price range, and a lot of my home stuff is actually either on a longterm loan or was handed down. And you can forget buying clothes all that often; I’ll go a year not buying anything and when I do finally grab a nice new shirt I feel guilty. My place makes me look way richer than I really am and there are times I’m embarrassed by it given how vocal I am about our low pay problems.
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I can’t imagine how hard it must be for people have serious challenges and no support system. They don’t have tools or space to fix their vehicles cheaply, or parents to give them kitchen supplies, or friends who move away and leave their furniture behind for indefinite periods of time. They don’t get to stop working to go to school and further their education, and there is no one to save them if they get slapped by a huge bill out of nowhere. It is so GODDAMN expensive to be poor and if I can feel that then those with less…well that is no way to live.
It’s fucking disgusting how we treat the poorest among us and how we’ll turn around and act like someone like me is some wonderful hard worker while my classmates who get bad marks are dumb or lazy but no one accounted for the fact that they work nearly fulltime and help support a family while trying to also do school. Life gets easier the more money you have and yet we collectively choose to believe that people without it are lazy or not trying hard enough.
Without all this support and privilege and luck I’d be nothing and I’m not so insecure that I won’t admit that.
Kinda similar here. My partner and I have a bit of savings, but due to a chain of deaths in her family and retirement, her mom has fuck you money. She’s supportive of us and is willing to tap into that money to help us get to a safe location.
But there’s a real sense of survivors guilt there because virtually everyone else we know is struggling to just pay rent. I see friends asking mutual aid groups for $20 almost daily. I try to help my friends however I can but no one has a job that pays a liveable wage, everyone is living off of scraps.
Exactly! It’s hard to help when a lot of the help would be technically coming from someone else’s pocket and it doesn’t feel right to be spreading around. I help my friends with any mechanical stuff and only ask that they stay, help, and learn something new(also hoping that some new confidence will help them take care of themselves better). Sharing skills and time is the best way I’ve found so far.
The estate tax should be absolished in favor of treating inheritance as income and gifts to children should also be taxed as income.
That’s not the problem. The problem is while the parents and grandparents are still alive. They act as the younger generations’ bank. Giving them financial freedom to get set up properly. Even if you completely delete that inheritance when the “bank” dies, the younger generations already have a house, a good 401k, and possibly other investments going. So they’re now setup to do the save thing for their kids.
This sounds like great family financial planning but the fact that we have to rely on this means anyone whose parents fall out for whatever reason, (addiction, medical debt, market flub, etc) is fucked through no fault of their own. And of course, anyone whose parents didn’t receive the message to build wealth through never selling a house is also fucked.
It’s really fucking complicated and we don’t really assign purchases in a way that’d fully solve the problem - but if taken to a logical extreme I think simply taxing gifts as income sort of fixes all the loopholes.
If we’re talking about the US the minimum income threshold for taxation is 13,850 - most personal expenses children incur wouldn’t sum up to exceed that threshold (outside of medical bills which it’s insane you have privatized in the US). So if gifts were treated as an income source then the first time kids would probably be hit with any owed taxes would be being gifted a car or being gifted college tuition.
I think the standard exemption should probably be higher than it is but it’s still high enough to cover what we generally consider common expenses when raising a child. Using a rule like this would really even out the playing field for kids.
Then Mom and Dad just include taxes. I want to destroy this, not just make more revenue for the government. Either that or we admit we don’t live in a country of individual merit and we change our culture. But letting this submarine of privilege sit here while we blame all of the poor people and pull up ladders isn’t going to work in the long run. It’s just going to cause massive political unrest like that during the French Revolution.
What is a gift though? Is it a gift for your parents to feed you, clothe you, and let you live with them rent free?
Yea, it is.
Yeah so you’re not really serious.
How so? Living expenses for children often fall below exempt income levels. Taxation would only kick in for large wealth transfers.
Having to file income taxes for their children is a burden the poor do not need.
Income taxes in general are regressive, even with all the exemptions and credits. If you want progressive taxation you should be looking at land value taxes and other forms of wealth taxation that rich people can’t avoid.
Call it what it is, a Neo Aristocracy. A class of landed wealth is forming that is harder to join every year and will only pay off generationally as your land accrues value.
I’m waiting with baited breath for laws to officially enshrine the already existing double standard for wealth and justice. Some American conservatives have already started including land in their idea of voting restrictions.
Calling parents who can afford to help their kids out as the new “aristocrat” class is a bit of a stretch.
I got a huge help with my down payment from my parents. But they are by no means “landed” wealthy class people. Years later they barely had enough to retire and i’m trying to help them where i can.
Dont let the 0.1% distract you by shifting blame to other working class people. Yes, people who got big help from their parents, but we’re not old money.
The aristocracy actually extended a lot further down than people realize. And if we’re getting rid of all the supports outside generational wealth then we are instituting an aristocracy system by default. Because at that point anyone without generational wealth will only be able to advance by being chosen by someone with generational wealth.
I’m not trying to say parents shouldn’t help their kids out. I’m saying we need that to be the cute little thing it used to be, not the main means of pulling oneself into the middle class. The big problem is we keep electing people who seem to think everyone just draws a bit of credit off their stocks when they want to buy something big. They don’t realize how hard it is for the lower class. And the other people we elect get caught talking about shit like making a man with kids have more votes, or the Christian nationalist movement which openly calls for white landed Christians to be the only voters.
See what I mean? It’s a nice thing in a robust economy with plenty of chances to pull oneself out of the lower classes. It’s much less nice when those other avenues are getting shut down and people are talking about making it the centerpiece of society.
