As generational change gains pace, many of the outgoing cohort’s dominant understandings of what wealth is, and what it’s for, aren’t being transferred; they’re being replaced. Which means that all the assets en route to the incoming cohorts could end up being old means to very new ends. How much do we know about them?

Martin Raymond is the cofounder of The Future Laboratory, the editor in chief of LS:N Global, and the author of a new report on the great wealth transfer. To Raymond, the “rising generations” inheriting this wealth don’t merely care about different things than their predecessors—whether in their approach to investment, their consumption of luxury goods, or their outlay on experiences; they understand investment, consumption, and experience through different frameworks of meaning. Neither do they care any less about growing their wealth over time; they just see that goal through different strategic optics—determined by these frameworks of meaning. For all their cultural and political diversity, Raymond says, it’s remarkable how much the rising generations share in common globally—and in historical terms, a short matter of time before their ideas about the good life and its dependence on the right relationship to the world start noticeably reshaping it.

Martin Raymond: The basic answer is death—and death. Which in this case are two slightly different things.

In the meantime, though, the high–net-worth Boomers still among us are trying to make preparations for their death—in the literal sense, of course, but also in an extended sense, being the death of their control over the wealth they’ve established and its preservation. So there’s increasing engagement among these Boomers, their financial advisers and asset managers, and their families’ younger generations.

As to the total amount, every projection will give us a somewhat different number, whether it’s $83 trillion or more, or less, but it’s generally agreed that, yes, we’re talking about a hefty sum beyond $70 trillion.

Gould: So this mass of wealth is coming from the Boomers, and it’s enormous. Where’s it going?

Raymond: It’s going disproportionately to the rising generations of Millennials, born between 1981 and ’96, and Generation Z, born from 1997. As to what’s at stake in that trajectory, one way to look at it is in terms of how Boomer wealth developed in the first place.

Boomer wealth was developed principally through investment and asset management conceived in a narrow way—as the Boomers themselves would tend to see it, in an unsentimental way. It was about focusing investment on industries, such as fossil fuels, that would maximally guarantee high rates of return, without too many questions about the long-term implications.

Today, if I chat to the head of a family office, who’s in their 60s or beyond—and I’m 61—the closer we get to the older end of their cohort, the less interested they are in questions about the long-term implications of investment; the less interested they are in ideas about sustainability, impact, or purpose; the less interested they are in the notion that we should be investing wealth for good, beyond merely for gain.

“… with these rising generations, when we’re talking about investment, we’re thinking about sustainability; we’re thinking about impact; we’re thinking about purpose. We’re thinking about an investment’s environmental, social, and ethical dimensions. In fact, these are often the first things the rising generations search out when they look to invest or manage assets—or even buy things. Where luxury goods or experiences used to be primarily about status or even personal passion, they’re now increasingly lifestyle-class assets that represent extensions of my environmental concerns, for example, my desire for positive change in the world, my sense of meaning.”

“It’s striking to me how much they seem to have in common—certainly, how common the themes are in what they want to do with their money. Despite cultural differences, despite political differences, there’s a very strong shared interest there—in environmental and sustainability issues, first and foremost, but also in a range of social issues, including poverty, public health, and gender inequality. Now of course, gender inequality is a high-level concern in, for example, the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, in a way it’s not in the U.A.E. or across the Middle East—where there are very different cultural mores and political power structures in place. But even within them, I’ve found a lot of interest in the idea of women’s education, of women’s empowerment, of investing more in women entrepreneurs—a sense that this was important for their society.”

“You can see some aspects of this wealth transfer that are apt to be transformative, in one way or another, already happening: You can see the effects of the rising generations’ technological adaptations, for example, particularly in fintech, which allows them to check and make decisions on their assets all the time—and which, as it disrupts asset management as an industry, will distribute investment decisions in a whole new way. You can see their influence in innovations at the intersection of health and technology. You can see it at every touchpoint between their wealth and the world around it. More women are meanwhile coming into wealth, by inheriting it or as entrepreneurs, bringing different perspectives and priorities to what they invest in—even changing the language of finance, which has traditionally been run through with a kind of hierarchical, aggressive masculinity, whether it’s asset stripping or bull markets, or what have you. More investors are coming from traditionally marginalized communities. More are coming from Africa, from Asia, from around the developing world. And they’re all bringing different perspectives and priorities too.”

‘A Whole New Era’

The public behavior of young women in Iran has been a matter of unrelenting national controversy since the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody in September 2022, after being arrested and beaten for not wearing her hijab in accordance with the country’s laws. Her death triggered weeks of demonstrations throughout Iran, along with effusive global condemnation. In the month following Amini’s death, in October 2022, Vali Nasr examined the threat the uprising posed to the regime. The scale of the protests, Nasr says, revealed the breadth of popular discontent with the country’s leaders—and with some of the cultural foundations of the Islamic Republic itself.

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