🧵 NEW: How fair is Britain?

Wealthy families are surprisingly good at hanging onto their riches from generation to generation.

Our bank of mum and dad - one of the most generous in Europe - is making things worse... @thetimes

https://t.co/8PVzDjDw7y

A few years ago, researchers @NJCummins @GregoryClarkUCD tracked how the descendants of rich people who died between 1858-1887 got on.

Britain has since gotten more equal. But 5 generations later, those families who were rich in Victorian Britain were still rich in the 2000s!

It's therefore not surprising that the link between your parents' income and yours is strong in Britain, at least compared with other countries

In the Nordic countries, where wealth is distributed more evenly, it's harder to predict what you'll earn by looking at your parents

British families have always been good at passing down wealth.

But today, it matters more, even if millennials won't inherit until they're 61.

Young people are much less wealthy than their parents were at the same age..

How did this happen? Three things stand out..

💰 Final salary pension schemes - many of which are now closed - allowed baby boomers to accumulate huge sums of wealth

📈 Stock market performance since the 1980s