I have some really bad news about your family tree...

[Igel]

61. We tend to have a biased data set.

Person X got money from slavery.

Person X had descendants. Lots of them.

After 7 generations, there are hundreds. And most of those alive didn't benefit from the slave-earned wealth.

Some squandered their inheritance, some invested foolishly. Depressions and bank failures. Or they were female and didn't inherit money. Or 4th sons and their lot wasn't a large inheritance.

If they managed to keep it, we assume it's because once rich, always rich. If they didn't, we forget about them.

If they inherited little or regained what they lost, we say it was education and connections that helped. If they didn't, education and connections were pointless.

The problem is we read the ends into the means and find that the present state was somehow inevitable. That most of the descendants didn't benefit says otherwise, but we ignore them--we don't try to find them and nobody's going to point them out to us--and so we can believe that somehow it's inevitable. If their ancestors benefitted at some point and they're wealthy now, there must be a direct, inevitable, causal connection between that money then and their money now. (In the case of trade with Nazis, that wasn't most of their wealth--and if it's not illegal it's not illegal. Funny trades and business dealings were made, but sometimes by contractual arrangement with subsidiaries that weren't covered by sanctions. Sometimes they were. But most people don't pay close attention to the details if somebody else says it was all illegal. We like to appeal to authority, however scant.)

This is what we do when we read about the great business acumen of some CEO or the genius of some politician. It sounds like their success was inevitable. It usually wasn't, but they're surrounded by a nimbus, and we don't see what we don't look for and aren't told about. Often they're far from dunces--but ability and drive has to meet up with good luck, random chance. Foolishness undoes any privileged beginning, as does bad luck. And the only time we humans like random chance is when we need it for emotional support. Otherwise we see patterns and spurious causality everywhere. But when it comes to denying that somebody actually was smarter, wiser, etc., than us, we're all over "dumb luck". It's protection for the ego.

We have the same blindness when it comes to all the wealth accrued in the ante-bellum South. Most Southerners kept nothing of that wealth. Between the war and carpetbaggers, recessions and depressions, most of the wealth was lost. Again, we see a few counterexamples and assume that the rare instance is the general case. We don't notice the ruined families and descendants of well-heeled "gentlemen" who died poor, and so we assume they didn't exist. We also forget about wealth accrued since then, diluting the effect of residual old wealth. We have a one-drop rule for ill-gotten gain.

Even in the case of businesses like banks that absorbed some other company that did benefit at some point, or benefited under their current operating name, most came close to hitting the wall at some point. A lot of the banks that were absorbed did so because they were on the ropes. All the "benefit", all the profit and wealth, pretty much gone. (Or we read that there was some small element of revenue that involved slavery, and blow that up into 99% of their revenue for the last 160 years.)