The Enrichment Loop
Peter Buffett had the closest possible seat to one of the largest fortunes ever assembled, and his father famously declined to hand it to him. Warren and Susan Buffett's youngest son built a career...
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Peter Buffett had the closest possible seat to one of the largest fortunes ever assembled, and his father famously declined to hand it to him. Warren and Susan Buffett's youngest son built a career...
In 1967, two young psychologists named Martin Seligman and Steven Maier ran an experiment that would be cited for the next half century by nearly everyone who worries about what comfort does to...
Harper is 27, a social worker at an inner-city health clinic, living carefully on a public servant's salary. She works long hours with clients who live below the poverty line, and she is good at the...
The first night of a family gathering is almost always spent clearing the runway. People arrive tired, greet each other, compare journeys, eat, and quietly agree that the real conversation will start...
Sometime in the years after 1984, a Vietnamese refugee named Mr. Pham needed money he did not have. His mother was in a refugee camp in Thailand, and he wanted to fly her to the United States. He was...
There is a sentence parents in ambitious families say with pride, and children from ambitious families repeat, decades later, to their therapists. Philip Roth put it in the mouth of Alexander...
There is a decision every family makes in the first days of a child's life, before the child can object, that quietly announces what the child is for. It is the name.
Picture an old man in a courtyard in Shanxi province, northern China, sometime in the centuries when that region's merchant families ran the banks of an empire. His name is Hou Xingyu, he is wealthy...
Somewhere in Hong Kong there is a family document that says, in effect: take a second wife and you lose your board seat. Divorce, and you lose the board seat and the right to ever work in the company...
Somewhere in Seoul, in the years when Samsung was becoming Samsung, a young man sat for the company's recruitment examination. He had an advantage no other candidate in the room could match: his...
"We don't need meetings. We're a close family. We talk all the time."
There is a myth about wealth that almost nobody states out loud, because stating it exposes it. The myth says that visibility is the point. That the reason you build is so that everyone can see what...
Every wealth culture on earth seems to have written the same proverb. The English say clogs to clogs in three generations. The Americans say shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. In Uganda and Kenya you will...
In the late 1990s, a Malaysian property developer named Alan Tong and his son N.K. Tong sold one family business and set out to start another, the venture that would become Bukit Kiara Properties,...
A lawyer stops at a coffee shop between meetings, sends the client email he needed to send, and for one rare moment his mind is free. Out of nowhere, a question appears: "How old will Whit be when I...
Shari Sabelli's childhood was not predictable. Her parents divorced. Her mother was in and out of the hospital. The adults at the center of her world were, by her own account, not close to her. But...
Marjorie Brigham watched her four youngest children walk away from everything she had built her home around. She was a Mormon convert who had raised her family on weekly gatherings, scripture...
On paper, French law is careful about what one spouse owes the other when a long marriage ends. Article 271 of the French Civil Code instructs judges to weigh a considered set of criteria before...
In 1992, in a town near Bordeaux, a widowed baker named Marcelle Pilon retired and had to choose who would carry the family business. She gave the bakery, with its large attached house, to her son...
A retired woman in southwestern France loses her husband. She inherits their home and some rental apartments. Her legal adviser, reflecting on the case later, recalls that she told him straightaway...
There is a moment in the life of every family that handles money together when the handling starts to take a shape. The WhatsApp group gets a treasurer. The burial society or the chama, the rotating...
There is a moment that comes to every family that has built something, and it usually comes at a gathering. Someone asks the founder what the plan for the money is, and the founder says, in effect,...
Somewhere in the middle of The Stewardship of Wealth, his 2012 book on how families keep money across generations, Gregory Curtis draws a caricature so precise it stings. He is describing how a...
The week after the funeral is when a family discovers what was never written down. A widow sits at the table her husband managed everything from, holding a phone full of mobile money confirmations...