Will the monumental wealth transfer over the next few decades (“Would you leave your children out of your will?”, FT Money, February 1) follow the pattern of a 20-year study conducted by The Williams Group, a US-based wealth consultancy? It found that seven out of 10 families tended to lose their fortune by the second generation.
The question posed in your headline calls to mind the story of an 18-year-old Protestant Irishman who in 1789 left Bailieborough, County Cavan, “with a little money and a Latin grammar” and by dint of a lifetime in real estate died in 1832 bequeathing his heirs $3mn, at the time the largest fortune in New York State after John Jacob Astor.
It allowed his son, leisured for life, to travel and to write extensively on Swedenborgian theology and for one of his grandsons to gleefully assert that “the rupture with my grandfather’s tradition and attitude was complete; we were never in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of business”.
The grandson took to England, attended copious luncheons and dinner parties, which widened his girth while emptying his pockets, and wrote fat labyrinthine novels that sold poorly in his lifetime. The novelist happy to fritter away granddad’s inheritance on writing materials was Henry James.
Joe Keaney
Manchester, UK