Dan,
Click over to the “Chatterbox” piece Timothy Noah posted on Slate yesterday, called “The Inheritance Tax and the Idle Rich.” Like Noah, I was also struck by the patrician tone of the Melik Kaylan article in the Wall Street Journal, perhaps even more so because I live in the Philadelphia area.
As you well know, Dan, we’ve got patricians by the score around here. Phillip Barry didn’t–and couldn’t–write The Philadelphia Story about suburban Chicago, Nashville, or Seattle. If any other American metro area has class consciousness so woven into its cultural fabric, I haven’t heard about it. A friend at the Inky who moved here from the San Francisco area once told me one of the biggest differences she noticed was that here, you can still tell a cabbie from a stockbroker by the way they talk. If you wanted to adapt My Fair Lady for an American setting, you couldn’t find a better place. Imagine a Main Line Henry Higgins coaching a Eliza Doolittle from Kensington–wid addytood!!
That brings me back to Noah’s piece. He wonders whether an objective survey of heirs and heiresses across America would find more dedicated noblesse oblige types putting their wealth and talent to good use, or idle wastrels squandering their forebears’ legacy. It’s a good question, which somebody should really take a stab at before the estate tax repeal issue rolls back to Congress for another vote.
I can’t think of a more fertile place for this kind of research than Philadelphia–can you? We’ve got first-, second-, and eighth-generation heirs stashed from Chestnut Hill to Bryn Mawr, from Paoli to New Hope. And as a guy who’s lived among and chronicled the upper crust for decades–as well as an editor of a magazine with a specific interest in inheritance–you’re clearly the right man for the job. Whaddya think?
Andy
