The nepo baby economy
It's a rich kid's world
Welcome back to Ordinary Delusions, a newsletter searching for answers in the fever swamp of late capitalism. I’m currently deep in a sprint on my second book, which I’m very excited about. It’s about climate, and how our rapidly heating atmosphere connects to all our other present malaises. Despite the, y’know, somewhat apocalyptic subject matter, I’m having a lot of fun writing it. However, my brain only has space for so many words, so this is the last essay I’ll be publishing for a while. I’ll still be landing in your inbox in the coming weeks, but it’ll be with a punchier format. Thanks for being here.
The nepo baby discourse was cultural dynamite when it blew up a couple of years ago. It tapped into something everyone knows to be true — that the entertainment industries are full of rich kids — but took on a life of its own because we have grown up in an economy that’s turned nepotism from an annoying fact of life into an unavoidable force that’s felt in every corner of our cultural spaces.
Of course, the children of the rich and famous don’t like people talking about nepotism, and of course everyone else loves it. You can contrast Sydney Sweeney telling reporters that she literally can’t afford to take time off or have a kid, with Dakota Johnson, who once told an interviewer she could “easily” sleep 14 hours a night and described the nepo baby discourse as “like, lame”.
It’s always been kinda like this. Brighton, my hometown, became famous in the 1800s because the son of King George III built a palace there modeled on the Taj Mahal. The Prince Regent was obese, possibly addicted to opium, and spent most of his life spending taxpayers’ money. "A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist” wrote one of his aides in his diary.
British society is so aristocratic that you can spot old money a mile away if you know what you’re looking for. Here’s the ancestry section of Cara Delevigne’s Wikipedia:
Delevingne's maternal grandfather was publishing executive and English Heritage chairman Sir Jocelyn Stevens. Her paternal grandmother was Hon. Angela Delevingne and her maternal grandmother was Jane Armyne Sheffield, herself a granddaughter of Berkeley Sheffield, 6th Baronet, Sir Lionel Faudel-Phillips, 3rd Baronet and Armyne Gordon of Huntly, of Clan Gordon, as well as a descendant of the House of de Vere (through Sheffields), the House of Orange-Nassau, French kings, Anglo-Norman kings, and the House of Limburg-Stirum through Mathilde van Limburg Stirum. Furthermore, Jane Sheffield was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret.
It’s murkier in the US. Take The Strokes: if you’d heard that some guys with Italian names were in a rock n roll band from New York, you might guess that their parents were taxi drivers or cops or worked in construction but no, the singer’s dad founded Elite Model Management and the guitarist’s dad wrote songs for Celine Dion and Whitney Houston. The band all met at private school, but the lore leaves out that part: the downtown kids with their leather jackets revived the spirit of garage rock. I guess they wouldn’t sell so many records if they had a little sticker on the cover saying “btw our dads are very rich”. It would be honest, though!
The nepo baby discourse touches a nerve because nepotism has become such an inescapable feature of life in the 21st century. People aren’t pissed that nepo babies exist, they’re pissed that there’s no chances for the ordinary babies anymore.
The big cultural capitals where all the movers and shakers hang out are unaffordable for regular people. Just going to university is a luxury. Career ladders are disappearing as tech rewires entire industries. Getting onto the property market is a fantasy if you don’t have a few hundred grand lying around. And if you’re in the US, the beating heart of the nepo baby economy, you can also add the giant scam that is health insurance to the list of financial “headwinds” you have to grind through just to keep the lights on (the American Psychiatric association reports that money is the number one cause of anxiety for Americans).
These problems are much easier — if they exist at all — for the kids of the 1%. They have the connections, the way of moving through the world that opens the doors to all those spaces. And the money to sit around doing cool stuff without having to worry about paying the bills. And beneath them is the comfort class — people who got a head start in life because their parents got on the property ladder at the right time, even if they worked very ordinary jobs and were paid very ordinary salaries (you can put me in this camp).
But if you weren’t born on the right side of the intergenerational wealth chasm, just working in a quote-unquote cool industry is becoming a luxury in itself. Many of these spaces never paid well to begin with, but they’re now having to adapt to new (and in many ways worse) economic models thanks to brutal technology shifts from Silicon Valley. Think Hollywood and the shift to streaming, writers pivoting to newsletters and musicians trying to eke out a living when their work has been made essentially free by Spotify. And on top of that, inflation is making everything more expensive while wages stay flat.
The nepo baby phenomenon is what happens when social mobility tightens, or just disappears altogether — it’s not about this or that actor being an entitled shithead who doesn’t know how lucky they have it (although they might be!). It’s about the framework of our economies and how they open so many doors for the rich and well-connected, and slam them shut for almost everyone else. It all comes down to the boring, unsexy ways politics shapes our lives — it’s the laws and tax codes that concentrate wealth at the top of society, and the unregulated property markets that push home ownership further and further out of reach.
Clearly, it’s deeply unfair, but it doesn’t bode so well for the future of our culture more generally. Culture is supposed to be a way for us to come to terms with the slippery, indescribable parts of the human condition without losing our minds. What does it mean when it’s only a tiny sliver of the population that’s able to do that?
Our cultural spaces start to lose their shine when you know that 90%+ of all the new restauranteurs / actors / musicians / designers are only there because their parents are rich and/or famous. That goes for the magazines too. Take The White Lotus — are we supposed to find all the Patrick Schwarzenegger interviews even slightly interesting when his dad is one of the most famous men of all time?
It’s telling that the one part of our culture that is thriving is podcasting, the only medium where being a regular Joe is a massive plus. Sure, the manosphere is clearly making a very big (and bad) impact on our political climate, but you could never accuse any of those guys of being nepo babies. Joe Rogan did construction work and delivered newspapers while he was starting his standup career, and Theo Von was legally separated from his parents at 14.
The Kamala vs Trump election will go down in history as the podcast election. It was the moment in time where we finally saw the power of long-form audio and the bros who mastered it. Just throwing this out there, but maybe the reason these guys are drawing such huge audiences is the direct result of the nepo baby economy? When everyone knows that “proper” culture is for rich kids only, then they’re going to go somewhere else to make sense of the world.