By: Kirsten Hilgeford
How do some wealthy families remain in the upper class for many generations, while other rich families do not? That is the question author Shay O’Brien (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) tackles in the sociological study “Kinship Interlocks: How the Intimate Exchange of Wealth, Status, and Power Generates Upper-Class Persistence,” appearing in the April 2026 issue of the American Sociological Review.
In asking when, which, and how elites connect and remain within the upper class, O’Brien pulls from several sociological tracks—economic sociology, political sociology, and stratification—and proposes a new concept for the study of elites: “kinship interlocks.” Similar to the concept of board interlocks that connect corporate elites through overlapping board memberships, kinship interlocks connect economic, social, and political elites through family ties.
To understand how kinship interlocks generated upper-class persistence, O’Brien did more than 100 case studies of families who fit the pattern of kinship interlocks generating persistence, defied the pattern, and everything in between. She concluded that the “intimate exchange of resources in kinship interlocks generates upper-class persistence in two main ways: protecting kin from economic, social, and legal risk; and propelling kin into more resources.” O’Brien also found that persistence was deeply entangled with systems of gender, sexuality, and race. As a result, the most enduring segments of the upper class tend to be especially heteronormative and racially dominant.
“Many of us tend to think of families as separate from politics and markets, especially in a capitalist democracy like the United States,” O’Brien said. “But presidents, monarchs, billionaires, and CEOs all tend to entrench themselves by funneling resources toward their family members. To fully understand how inequality gets produced and maintained, we need to pay close attention to the family ties that knit elites together.”
O’Brien developed her concept by creating a database of all elites and upper-class people in Dallas, TX, during its first 122 years (1841–1963). Using a larger-scale, more structured version of family genealogical research, she compiled information such as demographics, organizational memberships, mutual kin ties, and multiple measures of wealth, status, and power for everyone in the database. To find out which families remained in the upper class, or “persisted,” O’Brien looked at which lineages in 1910 remained in the upper class after the “stress test” of the Great Depression.
Overall, about 40 percent (39.7 percent) of the upper class persisted by this measure. Those who were in kinship interlocks persisted twice as often; at least 82.2 percent had upper-class descendants in Dallas after 1940. O’Brien generally argues that “the more wealth, status, and power upper-class families amassed, the more often they remained upper-class decades later.” However, she also observes that, while ties to economic elites certainly contribute significantly to upper-class persistence, the patterns she observed cannot be reduced to wealth alone. Upper-class adults with kin ties only to social and political elites ultimately persisted more often than did those tied only to economic elites.
