Most of us grew up absorbing a simple, almost religious logic of advancement: work hard, get educated, be responsible, and the system will reward you. Many families repeated this like a catechism, believing it because, in their specific experience, a version of it had been true. But I’ve spent the last decade watching that catechism collapse under the weight of data, and I’ve come to a conclusion that makes me deeply uncomfortable: the infrastructure of modern economies is not broken. It is performing exactly as designed. The feeling that upward mobility is impossible isn’t a feeling. It’s a measurement.
Let me be precise about what I mean by infrastructure. I’m not talking about roads and bridges. I’m talking about the layered systems of credentialing, capital access, zoning, hiring networks, and tax architecture that together form the actual operating system of class in the developed world. These systems are not neutral. They are load-bearing walls in a structure built to maintain the distribution of wealth and status across generations. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them. And once you can’t unsee them, the cheerful meritocratic story most of us were raised on starts to read like propaganda.
The credential trap and its hidden costs
The most visible piece of this infrastructure is higher education, and the way it functions as both a gateway and a tollbooth. A 2024 report from the Brookings Institution found that absolute income mobility in the United States has fallen from roughly 90% for children born in 1940 to around 50% for those born in the 1980s. Half. Half the people born in the 1980s will not out-earn their parents. And this isn’t because those people are lazier or less talented. It’s because the cost of entry into the professional class has exploded while the returns on that entry have compressed.
When I was deciding whether to pursue graduate school, the math was already grim. The median student loan debt for a master’s degree in the US had crossed $80,000. In Australia, where I grew up, the numbers were lower but the trajectory was the same. The credential was necessary to compete, but the debt it required would consume the very advantage it was supposed to provide. I went anyway — I ended up completing a master’s at the LSE — because what else do you do when the system makes the credential a prerequisite? You pay the toll. You hope the road on the other side leads somewhere. For a lot of people, the road just leads to another tollbooth.
What fascinates me, and what I think most analysis misses, is that this credential trap functions as a sorting mechanism that appears meritocratic while being profoundly plutocratic. The children of wealthy families can absorb the cost of education, unpaid internships, and the years of low-paying “prestige” work that precede real earning. The children of working-class families cannot. They either don’t enter the race at all, or they enter it carrying a weight that makes finishing nearly impossible. The infrastructure doesn’t say “poor people not welcome.” It says “everyone welcome” while quietly ensuring that only people with existing capital can survive the course.
Housing as the great wealth lock
If credentialing is the first wall, housing is the second, and it may be the more consequential one. I live in Singapore, where the government’s approach to housing is unusually interventionist by global standards, and where homeownership rates hover around 90%. Even here, the gap between those who bought property early and those who didn’t has become a chasm. In cities like London, Sydney, San Francisco, and Toronto, the situation is almost cartoonishly dystopian. A study from the OECD found that in most major Western cities, housing costs now consume between 30% and 50% of median household income, a figure that would have been considered a crisis indicator a generation ago but is now just Tuesday.
The mechanism here is straightforward but worth naming explicitly: property ownership is the primary vehicle for intergenerational wealth transfer in most developed economies. If your parents own a home, you have access to a down payment, or an inheritance, or at minimum a rent-free place to live while you accumulate capital. If your parents don’t own a home, you start from zero, in a market where zero is no longer a viable starting position. Zoning laws, restrictive building codes, and neighborhood opposition to density (the polite term for which is “community input” and the accurate term for which is “wealth hoarding”) ensure that housing supply stays constrained in the places where economic opportunity is concentrated.
I’ve written about how systems that appear to serve everyone often function as engines of concentration, and housing is the purest example. The homeowner votes for policies that increase their property value. The renter, who would benefit from policies that decrease property values, has less political power, less stability, and less time to organize. The infrastructure reinforces itself.
The network layer most people can’t see
The third piece of infrastructure, the one I find most insidious because it’s the most invisible, is the network layer. I’m talking about the informal systems of referral, introduction, and access that determine who gets opportunities and who doesn’t. A widely cited study published in Science in 2022 analyzed Facebook data from 21 billion friendships and found that the single strongest predictor of upward mobility was “economic connectedness,” defined as the degree to which low-income people have high-income friends. The researchers called this the most important factor they measured, more significant than school quality, family structure, or racial composition of neighborhoods.
Let that sink in for a moment. The most important factor in whether someone escapes poverty is whether they know rich people. And the systems we’ve built (segregated neighborhoods, stratified schools, exclusive social clubs, alumni networks at elite universities) are engineered, whether intentionally or through accumulated preference, to prevent exactly that kind of cross-class connection.
I’ve experienced this from both sides. Earlier in my career, before I had much of a professional network, the world felt like a series of locked doors. Once I started building companies — first Ideapod, then Brown Brothers Media with my brothers — once I was in rooms where capital and connections flowed, the doors didn’t just unlock: they opened before I reached them. People sent me opportunities I hadn’t asked for. Introductions materialized without effort. The market for my labor and ideas shifted not because my talent changed but because my position in the network changed. I’m not writing from a position of purity here. I benefit from these dynamics now, which is exactly why I can describe their mechanics with some precision.
The tax architecture of permanence
The final layer of infrastructure worth examining is the tax code, and specifically the way it treats earned income versus capital gains and inherited wealth. In most developed economies, the money you make by working is taxed at a higher effective rate than the money you make by owning things. This is not an accident. It is a policy choice, maintained across decades and across political parties, that systematically advantages those who already have capital over those who are trying to accumulate it.
In the United States, the long-term capital gains rate maxes out at 20%, while the top marginal income tax rate is 37%. In Australia, capital gains held for more than a year receive a 50% discount. The message embedded in these structures is clear: wealth that comes from wealth is more deserving of protection than wealth that comes from labor. And when you add estate planning tools — trusts, family limited partnerships, stepped-up basis provisions — the picture becomes even starker. Dynastic wealth doesn’t just persist. It compounds, tax-advantaged, across generations.
Having studied economic history at the LSE, I find this pattern hauntingly familiar. The structures change their names and their mechanisms, but the function remains the same: to convert temporary advantage into permanent position.
Why this matters beyond economics
The reason I keep returning to this subject isn’t purely analytical. It’s because the collapse of upward mobility corrodes something essential in democratic societies: the belief that the system is legitimate. When people feel — correctly — that the game is rigged, they don’t become more engaged citizens. They become cynical, or they become radicalized, or they simply check out. The infrastructure of immobility doesn’t just produce economic inequality. It produces political instability, social fragmentation, and a pervasive sense of betrayal that no amount of motivational rhetoric can fix.
I’ve spent years building platforms like Ideapod and The Vessel that try to grapple with how we make sense of the world. And one of the things I’ve noticed, consistently, is that people can tolerate difficulty. What they cannot tolerate is the suspicion that difficulty is manufactured, that the obstacles in their path were placed there deliberately by people who benefit from their failure. That suspicion is now widespread, and it’s widespread because it’s largely accurate.
The infrastructure of class is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a set of interlocking policy choices, each of which has identifiable authors, identifiable beneficiaries, and identifiable alternatives. The question isn’t whether these systems exist. The question is whether we have the collective will to dismantle them, or whether we’ll continue to tell our children the catechism — work hard, get educated, be responsible — while the architecture ensures that for half of them, it won’t be enough.
