CeleryKills

I live in a place that prefers straight talk and measurable results. When local leaders celebrate a “merit-based” economy, I hear an aspiration that does not line up with what I have watched in hiring rooms, funding meetings, and admissions panels. The real operating system rewards pedigree, proximity, and loyalty. You can see it in health, in wealth, and in who gets to make culture. You can also see how diversity programs became theater when regulatory pressure eased, and how easily they are being unwound. If we are honest, do we want rituals or results?

The evidence from health is blunt. Maternal traits and early behaviors shape birth outcomes through biological and behavioral pathways, and those outcomes anchor life chances before school or work begins. Large-scale analyses decompose the contribution of maternal cognition, personality, education, smoking, and physical fitness to risks like being small for gestational age, and they find that these early endowments transmit advantage at birth in ways that later money cannot fully erase (Eshaghnia and Heckman, Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality: Maternal Endowments, Investments, and Birth Outcomes, 2023). New linked-administrative studies reach the same conclusion, showing persistent gradients across maternal and infant health that later interventions struggle to undo (Kennedy‑Moulton et al., Maternal and Infant Health Inequality, 2025).

Wealth interacts with those origins, and timing matters as much as totals. A long follow-up of the MIDUS cohort shows that the sibling or twin who holds more wealth by midlife tends to live longer than their co‑sibling, evidence that wealth itself has health value even when you account for shared family background. At the same time, the finding highlights how much the shared early environment still anchors trajectories, because later money shifts risk rather than resetting the baseline (Finegood et al., Association of Wealth With Longevity, 2021; Diez Roux, The Pervasive Influence of Wealth Inequality on Health, 2021).

At the national level, the distribution tells a familiar story. Federal Reserve analyses of the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances and the Distributional Financial Accounts document large and persistent gaps, with the typical white family holding multiples of the typical Black or Hispanic family’s wealth, and with concentration at the top scarcely budging through the pandemic period despite median gains (Federal Reserve Board, “FEDS Notes on SCF 2022,” 2023; Federal Reserve, “Distributional Financial Accounts Overview,” 2026). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2022, the top tenth held about 60 percent of all wealth, and the top one percent about 27 percent, up from 23 percent in 1989 (CBO, Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989–2022, 2024).

Add the role of inheritance and transfers and the picture sharpens further. Researchers at Duke’s Cook Center report the Black–white wealth gap grew from 2019 to 2022 by mean net worth, driven in part by intergenerational transfers that secure opportunity for some and deny it for others, even at equivalent levels of education or income (Duke/Cook Center, Racial Wealth Gap… Persistent and Growing, 2024). Brookings estimates we are entering the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in U.S. history, a dynamic that will widen dynastic advantage without counterweights (Gale et al., Taxing the Great Wealth Transfer, 2024).

If you want a clearer picture of how family‑rooted advantage actually works, compare Bezos and Musk in terms of access rather than mythology. Bezos launched Amazon with a friends‑and‑family raise that included $245,573 from his parents; an early, high‑risk infusion that materially expanded his runway and later became famous for its outsized return (Bezos parents’ Amazon investment, 1995–1997). Bezos attended Princeton University (1982–1986), and had no student loans as his family paid out‑of‑pocket. That’s substantial, in 1984-85, a four‑year Princeton degree cost on average $61,340.00, which in today’s dollar would be 3.12 x $61,340.00 or $191,380.80.

Musk’s story is different but no less shaped by circumstance. He grew up in a financially comfortable household with a father who worked as an engineer and property developer, and he benefited from mobility, private schooling, and international educational pathways that positioned him to cross borders, enter elite universities, and access early tech networks long before founding Zip2 or X.com (Musk family background, 2026). The contrast isn’t about a hidden emerald windfall; it’s about the quieter mechanics of early environment, social capital, and proximity to opportunity. Both trajectories show how much easier it is to enter the right rooms when your starting point places you at the door.

I am not speaking from a distance. I did get a family lump sum that helped me secure a home loan, and that cushion mattered. Every car I’ve owned I paid for myself, and the career shift that changed my trajectory came from a mix of luck, timing, and working my way through a second degree while holding down a full‑time job. None of that made me less capable, but it did give me buffers that others never had. When we talk about being “self-made,” how often are we really naming the quiet supports that softened our risks?

The same divergence shows up in culture. The National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found a sharp drop in in‑person attendance in 2022 compared with 2017, even as digital consumption and arts creation persisted. Participation remains stratified by education and income, a quiet reminder that time, money, and geography still determine who gets in the room, not just who cares about the art (NEA, Arts Participation in 2022: Technical Summary, 2025; NEA, SPPA 2022 dataset).

On the professional side, the pipeline is even tighter. UK evidence from the Sutton Trust and Creative Access documents how unpaid internships, elite training routes, and closed networks reproduce class advantage in music, film, television, and visual arts. Their data are British, but the mechanisms will be familiar to early‑career artists here: working for free, leaning on prestige credentials, and relying on introductions that working‑class talent simply does not have (Sutton Trust, A Class Act, 2024; Creative Access and FleishmanHillard, Class Ceiling in the Creative Industries, 2024).

So where did DEI fit, and why is so much of it fading now? In the best telling, DEI was supposed to be a practical patch: measure gaps, change gatekeeping, and move resources in ways that alter actual opportunity. In practice, many organizations built a stage for themselves. When legal and political winds shifted, the stagehands left. In 2025, major firms pared or rebranded goals, dropped language from reports, and narrowed supplier‑diversity and sponsorship commitments, often citing compliance risk. Public reporting confirms the trend, and legal guidance from the EEOC and DOJ has made counsel even more cautious about any policy that could be construed as using protected traits in employment decisions (AP News, “Which US companies are pulling back on DEI,” 2025; Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, “Navigating DEI Disclosure,” 2025; EEOC/DOJ, “Warn Against Unlawful DEI‑Related Discrimination,” 2025).

There is also the problem of what many organizations funded. The research record shows that one‑off bias trainings, grievance hotlines, and compliance‑driven policing of managers often fail to change representation and can backfire, while process changes that alter who is mentored, sponsored, considered, and greenlit tend to move outcomes (Dobbin and Kalev, Why Diversity Programs Fail, 2016; Zhao et al., Systematic Meta‑Review of D&I Interventions, 2025). I have sat through those slide decks and watched nothing change. The difference between a pledge and a promotion list is the difference between performance and power.

What would a results‑first approach look like in a region that prides itself on building things that work? Upstream, fund the life stages that change the slope of the curve: prenatal and early‑childhood conditions that have strong causal links to improved birth outcomes and capabilities later on (Eshaghnia and Heckman, 2023; Kennedy‑Moulton et al., 2025). Downstream, audit and rebuild the systems that actually allocate opportunity: sponsorship, selection, stretch assignments, grant greenlights, vendor and capital access. If your budgets point to town halls instead of to these two places, you already know which you have chosen.

Now the hard part. Where in your own life can you see the system difference? Who around you used family gifts or early housing equity to leapfrog risk, and who never had that lever (Duke/Cook Center, 2024; CBO, 2024)? Who could afford the unpaid season that led to the first agent or exhibition, and who turned away because rent came due (Sutton Trust, 2024; Creative Access, 2024)? Who received the ambiguous, high‑potential assignment after a mistake, and who did not? If the answers are uneven, then merit is the story and pedigree is the mechanism.

I am not asking anyone to surrender standards. I am asking us to locate the inputs we already know move outcomes, and to stop calling performance progress. In the Northwest we work in the rain. If we want different results, we should start where the evidence points and keep going after the press release.

References

• Associated Press. “Which US companies are pulling back on diversity initiatives?” Jan. 23 and Mar. 7, 2025.
• Congressional Budget Office. Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989–2022. October 2024.
• Creative Access and FleishmanHillard UK. The Class Ceiling in the Creative Industries. 2024.
• Diez Roux, Ana V. “The Pervasive Influence of Wealth Inequality on Health.” JAMA Health Forum, 2021.
• Dobbin, Frank, and Alexandra Kalev. “Why Diversity Programs Fail.” Harvard Business Review, 2016.
• Duke University Cook Center. “U.S. Racial Wealth Gap Is Persistent and Growing.” June 10, 2024.
• EEOC and Department of Justice. “Warn Against Unlawful DEI‑Related Discrimination.” March 19, 2025.
• Eshaghnia, Sadegh, and James J. Heckman. Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality: Maternal Endowments, Investments, and Birth Outcomes. NBER Working Paper 31761, 2023.
• Finegood, Eric D., et al. “Association of Wealth With Longevity in US Adults at Midlife.” MIDUS study, 2021.
• Gale, William G., Oliver Hall, and John Sabelhaus. A Preliminary Report on Taxing the Great Wealth Transfer. Brookings, 2024.
• Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. “Navigating DEI Disclosure amid Regulatory Shifts.” March 24, 2025.
• Kennedy‑Moulton, Kate, et al. Maternal and Infant Health Inequality: New Evidence from Linked Administrative Data. NBER Working Paper 30693, rev. 2025.
• National Endowment for the Arts. Arts Participation in 2022: A Technical Summary Report. 2025.
• National Endowment for the Arts and U.S. Census Bureau. Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), 2022.
• Sutton Trust. A Class Act: Access to the Creative Industries. 2024.
• Federal Reserve Board. “Greater Wealth, Greater Uncertainty: Changes in Racial Inequality in the SCF.” FEDS Notes, October 18, 2023.
• Federal Reserve Board. “Distributional Financial Accounts Overview.” Updated January 16, 2026.
• Zhao, Kun, et al. “A Systematic Meta‑Review of Organizational Diversity and Inclusion Interventions.” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 2025.