In this analysis, we explore why wealth in the modern era is so often ephemeral, corrosive, and incapable of translating into lasting beauty — and what all families (wealthy or not) can do to create a lasting footprint…
An Ephemeral Age
In their 2023 book “The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions, Wiley Editions,” Victor Haghani and James White noted that today’s wealthy are failing to retain the one thing you might expect: their wealth.
The super-rich appear and disappear from history with astonishing speed, leaving behind little substance. We live in an ephemeral age.
If the 1,000 richest American families of 1900 had reproduced at a normal rate, achieved basic investment returns, and spent sensibly, they would have produced 16,000 billionaire families today — but there are only 700, and almost none can trace their wealth back further than the 1980s.
Equally surprising is the increasing choice of elites to disinherit their children, spending or donating their wealth. They seem to feel that they have failed to impart the necessary virtues for their children to manage their wealth wisely.
Rejecting Eternal Values
What we build is a reflection of what we believe.
The rich are not lazy—indeed, average work hours in elite professions are longer than ever before, and the richest man in the world sleeps on his office floor.
But the worldview of the oligarchs is that our age must transcend itself. The technological elite believes that our suffering and sorrows—our limited capabilities and short lives—can be transcended. Accelerating technological development will save the human condition.
Anything that delays this transcendence is considered immoral. Design choices that imply permanence, tradition, and “burden” are instinctively rejected.
Subconsciously, they prefer buildings that are aerodynamic and utilitarian. Materials are light: stone is replaced by glass. Decoration — seen as unnecessary weight — is removed. Mass production is efficient, so it is acceptable for cities to resemble each other.
Disconnection from Eternal Time
This preference for lightweight materials contrasts with the benefactors of the past, who lived in “eternal time.” Kings believed that their experiences, struggles, and hopes were part of a divine plan that would be repeated until the end of time—and therefore had eternal significance.
When William I, Duke of Aquitaine, founded the Abbey of Cluny in 910, he spoke of his desire to transform “the temporal goods bestowed upon me” into “permanent” goods. He donated generously to the Abbey. His only request was that the monks pray unceasingly for him and his descendants.
The monks built one of the most valuable libraries in Europe, preserving important texts. Their architectural practices inspired Christianity for centuries. Cluny stands to this day as a marvel.
Beauty and Eternity Are Connected
The lack of beauty and the rejection of permanence in modern society are closely linked. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell believed that a healthy society is one in which elites balance between “new” and “old” money.
The existence of new money indicates healthy social mobility—that talent and hard work are rewarded. The existence of old money indicates stability and families that think in genealogical terms.
The complete dominance of new money—as it does today—is a problem. While capable of “maximizing shareholder value,” such figures are poor leaders in the areas of aesthetics, faith, taste, and culture.
It takes one set of skills to create financial wealth, but another to create a truly beautiful society. The latter requires a broad, aristocratic, and intellectual education that first-generation wealth has rarely received.
Realizing their ignorance, many wealthy people are afraid to become patrons of the arts.
Does Wealth Always Bring the Ephemeral?
A saying has become popular in the last century: “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” The idea is that leading families should expect collapse and plan accordingly.
Has it always been like this? Does wealth guarantee the ephemeral? No.
There is a remarkable study by Matthew Bond and Julien Morton called “Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth,” which traces the trajectories of Britain’s leading families over the centuries.
They found something fascinating. Around 1900, titles of nobility were given to wealthy industrialists — but within a century, those generations had died out, and once again the “old money” families were the richest and most powerful.
There’s something special about these families. Hugh Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster, inherited Britain’s largest trust in 2016. His family traces its aristocratic lineage back almost a thousand years, to Gilbert le Grosveneur, who came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066.
What is it that sets these families apart? What is it that the ‘thousand-year families’ know that escapes our oligarchs? The stories of the great men of the West, supported by contemporary interviews with their descendants, point to the same five principles.
Together, these principles allow families to raise wealthy children without corrupting them, enabling them to transcend the ‘shirtsleeves’ phenomenon and carry a family legacy deep into the future, creating beauty at the same time.
All families — regardless of their status — can learn from them…
1) Never neglect the “basics”
Lacking the basic foundations for raising a healthy family is a mistake that many of the newly rich make. They convince themselves that by dedicating their time to work and creating ever greater wealth, they are doing their children a favor. This is not the case.
Without adequate spiritual and psychological training against temptation, children’s increasing wealth harms them. Building these defenses begins with the most basic actions that all parents should undertake.
Be present with your children, eat with them, play with them, listen to them. Trust that if you give them a beautiful upbringing (with truth, beauty, play, prayer, sports and adventures) they will set out on a virtuous path. Think of the simple family table. As Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen — Archduke Eduard of Austria — says in his history of the noble family ‘The Habsburg Way’:
“Ultimately, it is around a table with many siblings that children absorb virtues… children who see their parents together, and witness the love and respect they have for each other, gain strength and security and are indirectly told that they are worth growing up and participating in society. You know that your parents (and your siblings) will always be by your side.”
Similarly, every upper class has always been trained in a noble and dangerous sport: boar hunting, horse riding on the polo field — even ceremonial duels in the aristocratic practice at elite German universities.
Tough sports build the discipline to joyfully embrace hardship and pain. The child who tames his body against laziness, gluttony, and cowardice is well prepared to tame his spirit later against lust, greed, and corruption.
2) Implement family traditions
Build a “family protected by traditional rituals.”
What are rituals? They are not just routines. They transcend routines when they acquire symbolic content; when they are given special meaning and aesthetics.
Traditions declare a break with conventional existence. They stand out and become unforgettable. The transition from the everyday to the sacred is strongly felt: Christmas Eve, the joining of hands before prayer, the lights going out before the candles on the birthday cake are lit.
Traditions declare “this is who we are.” By repeating both backward and forward in time, they convey stability, structure, a sense of belonging, and a sense of “rightness.” They define a boundary between right and wrong, between family and stranger.
Drawing from the French aristocrat Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, philosopher Byung Chul Han noted that while houses are dwellings in space, traditions are dwellings in time. They are a statement of continuity—you act as your ancestors did before you. They move the family from the moment to eternal time.
3) Make sure your family has faith and knows its duties
Rich children should not feel that they are invulnerable. It is necessary to impose on even the most privileged children that they are not, in fact, at the top of all hierarchies.
They should not be left without a goal that requires great effort to achieve. They must know that there are goods that their wealth cannot buy, and punishments from which their wealth cannot save them. You must teach them faith.
Their faith must be genuine and intense, and must be strengthened early. The only king of France to be made a saint—Louis IX—had heard from his mother, Blanche of Castile, that she would rather see him dead at her feet than commit a single mortal sin. Louis IX built perhaps the most beautiful chapel in Europe.
For those children who have the financial freedom to do anything, true freedom comes from the power to say “no” to the endless temptations that will besiege them.
4) Claim Your Identity, Mission, and Values
It is not wealth itself that is spiritually poisonous, but the sense of futility that can arise in a life where one desires only what one can easily buy. This breeds nihilism, hedonism, and destruction.
Addressing this lack of purpose requires cultivating ambitions and responsibilities so great that money cannot buy them. This is a multigenerational task that larger families must undertake. It is ultimately a manifestation of the pursuit of the virtue of magnanimity.
Magnanimity by its very name denotes the extension of the mind toward great things… a person is called magnanimous primarily because he has in mind to do something great. St. Thomas Aquinas
Children must be trained to stretch their minds to order the world around them and to take up their mantle as spiritual and physical guardians of their people.
An essential part of this is to convey to children that this is what the great men of our family do and have always done.
Children must have heroes, and the fact that they are the heirs of these heroes gives young people a sense of responsibility to carry on their legacy, and a belief that they have what it takes to do so.
Research and tell stories of family members of whom you are proud. Commission portraits and statues of great members of your family. Pass down family heirlooms, treating them with such respect that a sense of awe is cultivated in your children.
5) Invest in land to bring about strong commitments
Complement your approach to raising children with a wealth that is structurally oriented toward virtue.
One of the key findings of the ‘Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth’ study is that landed families — those with significant and historic natural assets — were the most resilient across generations.
As the great Comte Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the centrality of land:
“In aristocratic societies, since families remain for centuries in the same situation, often in the same place, all generations become in a way synchronic. A man almost always knows his ancestors and respects them; he thinks he already sees his distant descendants and loves them. He willingly imposes duties upon himself to the first and the last; and often sacrifices his personal pleasures to those who have gone before and those who will come after him…”
The inheritance of children should be inelastic, and take the form of land, business, and art—objects of value beyond abstract monetary value, and which bring duties as well as privileges. The present owner knows that he is merely a trustee for the generations to come, to whom he has a duty.
