BETTER TO INHERIT THAN TO EARN?

BETTER TO INHERIT THAN TO EARN? Edmund Phelps, winner of Nobel Prize in economics, has an article in today’s Wall St. Journal arguing that European economies lag the American economy because of a lack of “dynamism—loosely, the rate of commercially successful innovation.” What struck me was the following: “A German would rather say he had inherited his fortune than say that he had made it himself,’ the economist Hans-Werner Sinn once remarked to me.” The theme that Americans consider it better to earn your wealth goes back a long way. Henry James on the first page of WASHINGTON SQUARE (published in 1880) introduces the main theme of a book about inheritance and an heiress by referring to the United States as “a country in which, to play a social part you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it.”

I am reading THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, set in the Midwest at the turn of the century and published in 1920. I am at a point in the story where the young lovers are at cross purposes. The heroine has asked the young man what he is going to do, what business or profession he intends to follow. The young man, the third generation of the wealthy Amberson family, says that he intends to show that a family can live on its income for three generations in the Midwest just as families in the East and South do. “That’s the way I feel about it and let me tell you I feel about it pretty deeply.” I have no idea whether the lovers will overcome this barrier to their marriage.