It is hard to be a nepo baby when migration defines your family history. My grandfather was a policeman in undivided India but my father couldn’t be one (I’m not sure if he even wanted to be one) because he migrated with his mother and siblings to Pakistan and had to start fresh. He did his best to make sure his own children received the education that would make them want to do something other than real estate (a profession he stumbled into). And now I’ve moved away from the place I call home. Now, I will have to start fresh.
Imagine a family where this isn’t the case at all. You grow up with the security of knowing you can follow your parents’ career path and, even if not, at least their network and presence will open doors for you that, otherwise, may always remained sealed shut. So if you are someone who followed your parents’ footsteps, I hate to break it to you, but the internet now calls you a 'nepo baby'.
What are nepo babies and is it inherently wrong to be one? Where can we find nepo babies and what do they tell us about the world to come? To dig into the answers to these questions, keep reading this issue of The Global Tiller.
The term nepo baby is short for nepotism baby — a shorthand to describe someone who gained success due to nepotism (often thanks to their parents). You don’t have to be an actual baby to qualify as one but, as a descendant of someone famous, the spotlight shines on you from an early age.
The idea of following in your parents’ footsteps is not a novel one. In fact, it dates back as far as human civilisation. At the dawn of agriculture 10,000 or so years ago, children had little option but to become farmers like their parents. According to Facebook research, this trend continues to this day but it varies depending on the occupations. Using a sample of 5.6 million parent-child pairs from English-speaking locales, they found that the highest probability of a child following the parents’ career happens in the military. A son who has a father in the military is five times more likely to enter the military. Similarly for women, daughters of mothers in nursing are nearly four times more likely to choose a career in nursing.
Then why do nepo babies have gained such a bad reputation? Didn't the early farmers work the same land as their fathers and mothers? Didn’t their parents introduce them to the best buyers for their produce? If part of the parenting job involves making sure your child gets the best education, why does it become bad if the same parents make sure you get the best job too?
The problem with nepo babies isn’t their choice of career, but the unfair advantage they have over others, especially in industries where networking is key, such as Hollywood. In fact, the 2022 uproar about nepo babies started off when a young viewer of the TV series, Euphoria, discovered that one of the actresses is the daughter of actress Leslie Mann and director Judd Apatow. This eventually unveiled the entire genealogy of Hollywood hook-ups.
But this kind of nepotism in the entertainment is not just an American phenomenon. As the Vice succinctly puts: "Nepotism in the UK is different in the same way that Ricky Gervais’ The Office differs to Steve Carrell’s: It’s subtler, nastier, and arguably more effective in achieving its aims." Here class difference comes into play, alongside wealth and we find ourselves in a cesspool of private-school educated cliques who not only create opportunities for their kins but also provide the wealth and cushion needed to make art without depending on it for a living. Closer to home, the Indian film industry, Bollywood, is also rife with nepo babies — a trend that is seemingly being embraced wholeheartedly by the children of the stars I grew up watching in the 90s.
Another industry where the term nepo babies needs no introduction is politics. It may be called something else, like dynastic politics, but the idea is the same and equally global. From former US president George W. Bush following in the footsteps of his father, to Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto inheriting the mantle from her father, former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and passing it on to her son, foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, or Bangladesh’s current prime minister Sheikh Hasina who is the daughter of the country’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, or even Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, son of the country’s two-time prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Even contemporary Japanese politics is filled with nepo babies and I’m sure this list can go on.
What the outrage against nepo babies tells us isn’t that people have an issue when parents help their children with their careers. If that were so, why would my father continue to get his suits stitched by the son of his tailor? Or sweet shops proudly add 'and sons or daughters' to their shop displays when their child is finally old enough to man the cash register?
The problem is that nepo babies bother us in industries where wealth accumulation is of an obscene proportion — the likes of Hollywood celebrities who bend college admissions rules to get their kids into Ivy league colleges, or Malia Obama having the door wide open to the writer’s room of an upcoming Amazon series.
And that brings us to who the real villains are? Shouldn't we really be mad at the millionaire and billionaire parents of the nepo babies who hoarded wealth, often at the expense of another? What about the children of tech lords, such as Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg, who will not only inherit immense wealth but power too?
The outrage against nepo babies is justified but it has to lead to a redistribution of resources otherwise, they’ll just get on their fancy yachts and let us rot in the hell the created.
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Note: You may have noticed that you didn’t receive The Global Tiller in your inbox last week. I am travelling and my schedule got the better of me. Sorry about that!
Dig Deeper
Nearly four-in-10 American children born to parents in the top fifth of the income distribution remain in the top fifth as adults.
…and now what?
Could we go as far as saying that nepotism is deeply engrained in our nature? After all, watching those animal documentaries, you see the lions killing the babies from other lions for his own offspring to get better chances at survival. If that’s not nepotism, I don’t know what is! We all agree, that’s part of nature. Survival of the fittest right? The offspring of the strongest gets to continue the lineage and the others… well they find their way or not!
Isn’t it the same system for humans? Aren’t the billionaires or millionaires’ kids just the offspring of the fittest? I’m sure that’s what they would like us to believe. But as far as humans go, our “being the fittest” is not about being the strongest. Our natural competitive advantage is about being the most collaborative, according to the latest research on the subject.
So, no. Nepo babies are probably not the fittest for survival. Mostly because they often lack the skills and grit necessary to continue to push forward. Not all of course! But it’s clearly something that could be observed beyond the coincidental.
That’s why we have a problem with some and not all. The farmer’s son has worked his way to take over from his father. He had to learn the technique and work as hard as his father to keep on going. It’s a matter of survival as farming doesn’t work otherwise.
Some high-level CEOs, or actors do eventually push for their kids to walk in their steps but they get them to go through the whole journey: from the bottom-up. This was the case for my first boss, for example, who was then after not completely disconnected from reality.
So in a world were many of us are struggling and working hard to deserve what we get, it seems quite logical that we have a problem with those who never had to work their way up, especially when they don’t even have any realisation of their privilege.
But this doesn’t apply to nepo babies only. What humans do not like is not that we try to favour our kin, it’s quite a natural if not instinctive thing to do. What humans do not like is when everyone is not putting up the same effort for the collective to grow. We appreciate success when it’s well-deserved. We don’t appreciate injustice and the lack of collaboration when the rest of us all are putting our all for the common good. Whether it be through family privilege or by evading taxes, injustice is what gets under our skin. Take it from someone who was born in France, where we learned the importance of doing away with the head of one famous nepo baby: Louis XVI!
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury