Stone Inequality & Social Policy Seminar: Doron Shiffer-Sebba

Family Tied: How Dynasties are Made in America

Doron Shiffer-Sebba, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University

Abstract: The wealthiest Americans are amassing historically large fortunes in an era some are calling “a new Gilded Age”. But in a context of high individualism and ideals of meritocracy, how does individual wealth become an entrenched dynastic project? Using six months of ethnographic observation at a wealth manager ("family office") that caters to top 0.1% wealthy families in the United States, and 30 interviews with additional managers, I argue that dynasty creation in the United States is a professional-driven legal and affective endeavor. Even when elites do not seek out to create dynasties, professionals use legal tools and cultural meanings around families and deservingness to diffuse elite wealth across extended families and recruit disparate family members into the dynastic project. The ensuing familial wealth preservation paradoxically limits individual elites' control over wealth. Dynamics within elite families and between families and professionals have far-reaching consequences for the distribution of elite wealth and subsequent patterns of inequality in the United States. 

Doron Shiffer-Sebba studies the intersection of extended families and economic inequality. He focuses on 1) elite wealthy families and how they organize their wealth; 2) the role of extended families in economic inequality in the broader U.S. population; and 3) developing novel computational methods to analyze how people use their bodies in social interaction. In doing so, Doron employs a wide array of methodological perspectives -- ethnographic, quantitative, and computational. Doron is currently working on an ethnographic book manuscript that explores the structural forces that keep economic elites wealthy and, subsequently, sustain economic inequality.