Stayin’ Elite: Wealth, Multigenerational Persistence, and Political Power Among the US Hyperwealthy, 1875- 1950

Understanding the persistence of inequality at the top requires examining not just parent-to-child wealth transmission, but the broader family strategies that sustain elite status across generations. This paper investigates how America’s wealthiest families maintained their position through strategic kinship formation and family network diversification, revealing mechanisms of elite persistence that extend far beyond direct inheritance.
Combining historical wealth lists from 1875-1950 with crowd-sourced genealogical databases, we reconstruct comprehensive family networks of America’s economic elite. Our findings demonstrate that wealth persistence operates primarily through extended kinship networks and strategic assortative mating. While 21% of top hyperwealthy individuals have direct descendants appearing on wealth lists 25 years later, this hides substantial inequality. The top 100 wealthiest individuals produce offspring who are three times more likely to retain their wealth status than the rest of the hyper-wealthy. Furthermore, extended kinship networks reveal dramatically stronger persistence: 48% of wealthy individuals connect to future wealthy individuals through broader family ties, forming an interconnected web of dynasties that transcends individual economic fortunes.
We provide evidence of strategic family formation. Rather than relying on a single heir, wealthy families strategically marry into different powerful lineages, creating a hedge against economic or social decline. To identify the causal effect of diversification on persistence, we exploit exogenous variation in extended kinship composition while controlling for close-kin characteristics including number of children their gender composition and the size of the extended kinship. Wealthy individuals who marry their children into a diversified portfolio of elite, well-connected, families experience greater persistence in terms of wealth, even after controlling for the size of extended kinship.
Beyond economic diversification, we document that approximately 27% of wealthy individuals eventually connect to U.S. Congress members through extended kinship, revealing that some elite families diversify into political spheres. These wealth-politics connections form strategically: Congress members linked to wealthy families disproportionately come from political dynasties themselves and hold office for significantly longer terms.
Our findings highlight how structural inequality at the top perpetuates through deliberate kinship strategies that create reinforcing networks of economic privilege. The interconnected nature of elite families, sustained through strategic marriage patterns and family diversification, creates barriers to mobility that operate beyond market mechanisms alone, with implications for understanding inequality persistence and social stratification in democratic societies.