By Shay O’BrienShay O’Brien is currently the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, and will join the UC Berkeley Sociology Department as an Assistant Professor in January 2027. She studies the kinship networks that weave elites together. Her mixed-methods research tracks the capture and circulation of resources through upper-class populations over time, with a particular focus on wealth, race, gender/sexuality, and the United States. She was formerly a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University.ⓘI used ChatGPT to quickly generate a small chunk of R code for the bar graph, which I then modified in Adobe Illustrator for visual clarity. I checked all the code for the graph line by line, and take full responsibility for any mistakes. I did not use LLMs for any other visualizations or for any part of the literature review or writing process.

Since Trump took office, his fortune has ballooned. So have the fortunes of his close family members. He has used his power not only to multiply his billions, but also to wrap himself, his family, and his family’s family in a protective legal cocoon. He has slapped the Trump name on prestigious cultural institutions. He has showered his children and in-laws with corporate jobs, political appointments, and media platforms. He’s even demanded a Nobel Peace Prize. These are straightforward examples of conflicts of interest, self-aggrandizement, and political corruption. They are also classic acts of family upper-class entrenchment.

Trump is an extreme case, but he is not alone. CEOs, monarchs, presidents, socialites, tycoons, and tyrants all entrench themselves not only by amassing their own resources, but also by funneling resources toward their kin. And their family members are often elites themselves, or the family of other elites. That’s because elites everywhere tend to marry each other, and they tend to produce elite children. So, Trump, for example, is not only a multimillionaire’s son with many billionaire children and in-laws; he is also a second cousin of the Heinz ketchup barons.

These consistent empirical patterns – elites have elite kin, and they share their resources with one another – have important implications for social scientists, who tend to study elites as ultra-rich or powerful individuals. The truth is that great resources are never really held alone. When it comes to the family-based “class project” of upper-class entrenchment (Hamilton and Armstrong 2021), all fortunes are family fortunes, all status is family status, and all power is family power.

My new article, “Kinship Interlocks,” focuses on this process of upper-class entrenchment, asking how some families manage to persist in the upper class for many generations while others don’t. I argue that families that closely combine, political, economic, and social elites – what I call “kinship interlocks” – are especially able to entrench themselves in the upper class, because they exchange resources among themselves in ways that both protect them from risk and propel them into more resources. Cementing a dynasty long-term is not a matter of wealth, power, or status alone; it’s all three.

Structurally, the core argument I’m making follows a long tradition in economic and political sociology of tying some abstract network structure to an important political or economic outcome. Classic examples include structural holes leading to forms of market advantage (Burt 1992), weak ties matching men to jobs (Granovetter 1973), and board interlocks generating functional states (Mizruchi 2013). Here, I’m tying an abstract network structure- kinship interlocks- to the multigenerational reproduction of economic, political, and social dominance.

I am also building on a long tradition in the study of elites that asks whether elites persist or circulate over time. In other words, at the top of a stratified society, do we have a lot of stickiness, where the same families are rich and powerful for a long time? Or is there a lot of fluidity, where entirely new people are amassing fortunes and running governments with each generation? A key underlying assumption, which is shared with a lot of stratification and mobility research, is that stickiness at the top means we’ve got an unfair, aristocratic society, and fluidity means that maybe we have more of a meritocracy.

But a tricky question in this study of elite persistence, and even in mobility research more broadly, is: how persistent is persistent? Does persistent mean that all elites are nepo babies? Only half? A third? A fourth? The reality is that in any stratified society, some elite families persist, and some don’t. A much more answerable question is: how do some persist when others don’t? That’s the central question of this paper. The how of elite persistence is important to understand because these are processes that shape not only who is richest, but who is rich the longest (Korom, Lutter, and Beckert 2017), and not only who ruled in 1900, but who rules today.

The article is based on a lot of data: a hand-constructed relational database consisting of all economic, political, and social elites and the full upper class for Dallas, TX in its first century and a quarter (1841-1963; >20k people), all their mutual family ties, and 106 in depth qualitative case studies randomly sampled from the quantitative analysis. The dataset is essentially a much larger-scale, more structured version of family genealogical research.

The defining feature of the dataset is family entanglement: most (at least 78%) elites and upper-class people were closely related in a massive hairball of family, depicted below. This level of elite family entanglement is not unique to Dallas from 1841-1963. Scholars have uncovered elite family hairballs in many other settings using narrower definitions of elites, including Chile (Bro 2023), Germany (Tisch and Ischinsky 2023), Poland (Wroński and Minakowska 2025), and Switzerland (Armandola 2024; Benz et al. 2024). If anything, elite populations are likely much more entangled in other cases, because this is the first century and a quarter of colonial settlement in Dallas, meaning the network began as a population of strangers. Dallas elites wove themselves together like this in a matter of decades through moderate levels of endogamy and relatively high rates of geographic and social mobility (O’Brien 2024).

Using these data, I first show quantitatively that kinship interlocks – portions of a kinship network within one kin tie of at least one economic, political, and social elite – produced upper class descendants at remarkably high rates. More specifically, Dallas upper-class people who were in kinship interlocks in 1910 almost always managed to entrench their descendants in the upper class through the Great Depression. And the closer they were to kinship interlocks, the more often they persisted, as demonstrated in the bar graph below. This is exactly what we would expect if kinship interlocks did generate upper-class persistence.

But that quantitative analysis can’t explain how elites did or did not persist. So, I randomly sampled at least three, and as many as nine, families at each possible combination of elite kin ties and persistence: people who fit the pattern of kinship interlocks being more durable, people who defied the pattern, and everything in between. For each case study, I pulled together all the information I had from archival records to tell the story of their family’s (non-)persistence. Replication data are available here and summaries of all case studies are available in an appendix to the article. A two-by-two below summarizes themes from the case studies.

Through the case studies, I found that people in kinship interlocks shared their wealth, status, and power with family members in ways that generated persistence through two mechanisms: they protected kin from economic, social, and legal risk, and they propelled them into more resources. You can think of this “protect” mechanism as the formation of a multidimensional, multi-person safety net, and the “propel” mechanism as a multidimensional, multi-person process of cumulative advantage, or “the rich get richer.”

The multidimensionality is really important. When elites lost fortunes or elections, other resources and family members could step in to keep them in the upper class. This is something we’ve seen with the Trump, too: the presidency has reportedly saved him from financial ruin.

I was especially struck in the case studies by two seemingly contradictory themes: on the one hand, the immense freedom elites had to break laws and steal and exploit, and on the other hand, the immense pressure they experienced to conform to strict rules of family and property. It’s analogous to the dual freedoms and constrictions of royalty. King Edward VIII of England could get away with practically anything – but to marry divorcée Wallis Simpson, he had to abdicate.

The concentration of wealth, status, and power in families continually creates collections of people who are practically immune to all kinds of risks: not only to downward mobility, but also to any kind of legal or social accountability for their nefarious deeds. People in the Dallas kinship interlocks had remarkable freedom to lie, steal, cheat, exploit, assault, and murder with impunity. Of course, we see this kind of thing in the news every day. In the paper, I highlight a case of a diamond thief, John T. Higginbotham Jr., who got away with stealing millions of dollars of jewels from some of the richest women in the city. Below is an abbreviated version of his family network, showing how well-connected he was. Not only was John born to a Dallas kinship interlock, with an economic elite mother and a father who was simultaneously an economic, political, and social elite; his first cousin, who was exactly his age and who grew up a few doors down from him, married the debutante granddaughter of President Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt. As Pederson (2024:323) observed, “the Higginbothams didn’t just know ‘the right people,’ they were the right people.”

But second, I found that people in kinship interlocks are also highly constrained by norms of family-making, gendered labor, and property. To fully benefit from a kinship interlock, they have to follow the “rules of the game” for making family and sharing resources, and those rules are co-constitutive with local systems of race, gender, and sexuality. People who break the rules get nudged or flung out of the protection and propulsion of a kinship interlock. The pressure is on an intimate, relatively unspoken, everyday kind of level, and it can also be reinforced and expressed quite explicitly by the legal system. So, the Dallas diamond thief may have gotten away with pretty extravagantly breaking the law, but he was also secretly gay, and when he began inching away from public heteronormativity, he began to face some material consequences.

This pressure to conform is a “huge carrot, small stick” situation. The diamond thief still ended up better-off socioeconomically than most of the city- he just wasn’t nearly as rich or powerful as he could have been if he conformed. His peers who did conform to these rules of the game could receive huge rewards. They could become friends with presidents, they could launch themselves into a European aristocracy, and they could cement a family fortune so thoroughly that even their great-grandchildren would be basically guaranteed to be rich. These are enormous incentives to form cookie-cutter white heteropatriarchal families where men manage the money and women plan parties and manage the household.

And that pressure is not specific to midcentury Dallas. Consider, for example, the never-married eldest Koch brother, Freddie. Freddie inherited his father’s name, and was situated from birth to inherit control of the family business, but instead he devoted his life to historic preservation and the arts. He claimed to be straight until his death, despite the “open secret” among family and friends that he was gay. His brothers tried to steal his shares in the family business by threatening to tell their father, a ploy Freddie called “homosexual blackmail” (Mayer 2016). Although they failed, their father was consistently disappointed that Freddie did not conform to his brand of masculinity, and eventually cut him out of the will. Thanks to Freddie’s share of an irrevocable family trust, he remained enormously rich until his death – but he was not as rich or powerful as his brothers in heterosexual marriages.

Of course, I’m referencing some setting-specific “rules of the game” for making family and sharing property. If John or Freddie were born in different times or places, their queerness might not have cost them as much. But a key advantage of the “kinship interlocks” concept is its flexibility. Given knowledge of the local rules of the game, an elite kinship network, and some measures of great wealth, status, and power, someone could easily extend and test this theory elsewhere. They could even extend it to full populations with the right data. If kinship interlocks can capture upper-class entrenchment practices in the present-day Trump and Koch families, then they may also help us understand upper-class persistence, and even inequality more generally, in cases much further in time and space from Dallas from 1841-1963.

Altogether, we can think of upper-class persistence as a kind of continual choreography of conformity and exclusion. Some potential heirs may fail or rebel, but the upper class lives on. These processes can help explain why upper classes are typically racially dominant and heteronormative – why, even in the contemporary U.S., rich and powerful families are so much whiter and straighter than the rest of us. And it also means we can’t think about elite domination just in terms of presidents or billionaires in isolation. When it comes to the long-term dynamics of economic, social, and political domination, family is still where the action is.