Stephan: There is a very important trend taking place that until just the past few days. except for SR (see SR archives), has been getting very little public attention, and even now I don't think the long term implications are fully comprehended. As a culture we are experiencing the largest transfer of wealth from one generation to the next that has every occurred. The emergence of the Nepo babies as they are being called, a manifestation of the last fifty years since the tax laws were changed to grotesquely favor the uber-rich represent as described the creation of a permanent financial artistocracy. What it doesn't say, and what I predict, is that this is part of the emergence of a new hominid species, Homo Superior, as a result of the emerging CRISPR technology. As the Broad Institute explains it, “'CRISPR' (pronounced 'crisper') stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which are the hallmark of a bacterial defense system that forms the basis for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology." It is going to be very expensive, and kept that way, I think, because the uber-rich are going to use it to literally make themselves a separate species, and won't want it to spread. It will include gene-lining, that is the benefits will be passed on from generation to generation. And I think it is very important to note, that at the very beginning of the new Congress the Republicans are saying they want to restrain the IRS from monitoring the the taxes of the rich. They are serving their funding masters, and step-by-step we are going into a new era way beyond what climate change is going to do.
Nepos Credit: Shutterstock
There is a common feeling that many of us have experienced in professional or academic environments, especially when we struggle against gender or racial bias. It’s called “imposter syndrome”—the feeling that one doesn’t deserve one’s position and that others will discover this lack of competence at any moment. I felt this way as a female graduate student in a science field in the 1990s. I felt it as a young journalist of color in a white-dominated industry.
The rich and the elite among us appear to feel the opposite—that they are deserving of unearned privilege. A recent series of stories in New York Magazine headlined “The Year of the Nepo Baby” has struck a chord among those who are being outed for having benefited from insider status. Nepo babies are the children of the rich and famous, the ones who are borne of naked nepotism and whose ubiquity exposes the myth of American meritocracy. Nepo babies can be found everywhere there is power.
The New York Magazine stories have predictably generated […]
