Dr. Eliza Philby

And a heritocracy is to do with the lottery of birth.

You can't choose who your parents are, but increasingly it's determining the opportunities you have.

Wow.

And so I wanted to write about that because I was like, we're not talking about this enough.

There's a level of shame, embarrassment, concealment, and it is defining the 21st century.

And the book is essentially, it's a memoir, it's my own story, but I define an inheritocracy as one where...

your opportunities in life are not defined by what you earn, because wages have stalled, certainly in Europe, and are slightly more here, but very out of whack with house prices.

Your opportunity is not defined by your wages, it's not defined by your education, because as you said, the return on that investment, all that hard work is declining, particularly now in the age of AI.

It's ever more defined by who your parents are and the leg up they give you and the safety net they create.

And that's the story I wanted to tell.

Yeah.

And I think I wanted to start the book in that moment because I remember it so well.

My eight month old son was playing in a playpen and being really rowdy and screaming.

And I was trying to record my dad who was stuttering and muttering and really towards the end of his life couldn't really coherently sort of articulate himself.

But I was so struck by what was about to be lost.

The stories, the memories, the knowledge, the expertise, the lived experience.

And my family is quite unique in that I'm from London, but we've never moved.

And when I say we've never moved, I grew up in the house that my mom still lives in and my dad inherited.

But my family grew up, born, worked, lived, died in the same area for about 200 years.

So, like, we have never moved.