Keeping the Family Fortune: How Bureaucratic Practices Preserve Elite Multigenerational Wealth
通过对顶级财富管理者的民族志观察和访谈，研究揭示了富裕家庭如何通过会议、演示和签署文件等官僚实践来跨代保持财富，而不仅仅是依赖法律实体。
How do wealthy families preserve their fortunes across generations? A historic peak in wealth inequality in the United States has inspired research on how economic elites benefit from markets, tax rates, and legal entities. However, the ongoing practices through which families maintain their fortunes across generations are less understood. Using six months of ethnographic observations at a wealth manager for the top 0.1 percent, as well as interviews with the manager’s clients and a wider sample of managers, I argue that wealthy families adopt what I call “bureaucratic practices”—activities like meetings, presentations, and signing documents—to preserve wealth intergenerationally. After erecting legal entities such as corporations, trusts, and foundations, wealth managers help wealthy families implement bureaucratic practices. These practices, which privilege bureaucratic form over substance, constitute a crucial behavioral layer atop the legal infrastructure, facilitating a greater degree of wealth preservation compared with using entities alone. Thus, preserving wealth at the top should be understood not merely as a set of discrete transfers from parents to children, but as an enduring multigenerational process of professional socialization that introduces new behaviors into family life.