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At both ends of the wealth spectrum, the laws governing credit and debt hardwire patterns of both privilege and poverty. They drive financial extraction by creating a flow of assets from the pockets of low-income families into the bank accounts of high-wealth ones. In short, some families are legally enabled as they accumulate and preserve great fortunes that get passed down through generations—while others are locked into a cycle of scraping by, just hoping to find affordable housing and put food on the table.
This book traces the joint forces of law, geography, and narrative that have built this superstructure of inequality and extraction: "the house of family money." Allison Anna Tait reveals how this monumental piece of economic architecture can be deciphered by the blueprints that guided its construction, navigated by maps that reveal its hidden shortcuts, and ultimately renovated by lasting reforms.
Allison Anna Tait is Dennis I. Belcher Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law.
"In this brilliant and learned book, Allison Tait offers a stunningly original perspective on the coproduction of extreme family wealth and poverty. With its unparalleled insights into the management of family money at opposite ends of the wealth scale, this book will transform debate on the role of law in perpetuating inequality.”—Melinda Cooper, author of Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance and Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
“Tait masterfully juxtaposes the lives and culture of impoverished households and dynastically wealthy families and their differences as well as unexpected similarities. Using the house as metaphor, she illuminates the complex narratives that households at each end of the economic spectrum deploy about wealth, credit, debt, financial need, and personal responsibility—while offering a plan to renovate the house to build a more equitable future for all. Insightful, readable, nuanced—an essential read for going beyond cartoonish caricatures about class, poverty, and wealth inequality.”—Chuck Collins, author of Burned by Billionaires and Born on Third Base
“Tait writes with an all-too-rare blend of doctrinal precision and narrative verve. Her tale of how families live in two Americas, one of poverty, the other of wealth, yet both shaped by a law of extraction, is at once rigorous and imaginative. This book promises to reshape how the legal academy thinks about family, inequality, and law in the United States.”—Andrew Hammond, Professor of Law and Ralph F. Fuchs Faculty Fellow, Indiana University Maurer School of Law
“A generous, capacious, and quietly radical book that rearranges the furniture in your head. Tait refuses the wall that keeps wealth management and consumer debt in separate rooms, showing that they are two faces of one legally engineered system of extraction. Read it for the argument; stay for the prose.”—Bridget Crawford, University Distinguished Professor, Pace University, and coeditor of Social Movements and the Law: Talking About Black Lives Matter and #MeToo