The Percentage of Men Working for the Same Employer as Their Father in 2010, by Earnings Decile

U.S. Census Bureau

A recent New York Times analysis quantified the sometimes astronomical advantages that the offspring of the famous and powerful have over those with less distinguished parents. The sons of senators, for instance, were roughly 8,500 times more likely to become senators than the average American man. Sons of famous CEOs and Pulitzer Prize-winners had similarly outlandish edges over their non-famous, non-Pulitzer-winning competition. This is interesting, but it says more about how impenetrable (and name-brand-driven) certain echelons are than it does about a phenomenon that is pervasive at all levels of American society—not just rarefied ones. (Daughters are oftentimes secondary to son in studies like these, perhaps because not as much historical data is out there on working women and perhaps because the theories explaining women’s social mobility are more complicated.)

How exactly are these job-inheritance patterns perpetuated? One answer—an incomplete one, but still an important one—is household culture. An auto mechanic will instill different interests in her children than will an architect, and a child exposed to, say, tinkering, might be more prone to spending time in the garage than at the drafting table. “In the aftermath of the World Trade Center collapse,” wrote David Grusky, a professor at Stanford, with three other sociologists in a 2011 article, “we can imagine the engineer’s family talked mainly about why the building failed structurally, whereas the sociologist’s family talked mainly about why there is terrorism.” Generational torch-passing takes place gradually, and is folded into daily routines. It’s about watching Shark Tank as a family. It’s about talking mergers and acquisitions at the dinner table.

But household culture has another important effect that runs deeper than just skill sets and hobbies. Sociologists have argued that a parent’s class and occupation can shape what his or her child hopes for in a job, and in life. For example, the daughter of an entrepreneur is more likely to seek autonomy in her professional endeavors, just as the son of a cubicle-dweller will fantasize about stability.

Taken as a whole, is this nepotistic system acceptable, or something to be resisted and dismantled? Grusky and his fellow sociologists end their article by discussing the moral implications of processes that pass jobs down through generations:

“[They] are problematic because they imply that human choice has been circumscribed, a circumscription that is wholly determined by the accident of birth. We care, in other words, that the truck driver is fated to become a truck driver at birth because that amounts to a stripping away of choice, and most of us would embrace an open society in which choices are expanded, not stripped away. … [This matters because a job] determines the texture and content of a human life.”

More than a decade ago, Adam Bellow (son of Saul), wrote in The Atlantic about why he thought differently, arguing that the current incarnation of nepotism contained a sufficient amount of meritocracy. “The new nepotism operates not from the top down but from the bottom up: It is voluntary, not coercive; it springs from the initiative of children, not the interest of parents,” he wrote.