Whose Your Daddy Matters: Wirecard, the Financial Times, and The Rise of #GENINT

As states become weak they turn to family ties.

I was chatting with a friend of mine who works at the Pentagon and basically the conversation boiled down to this: “Do you even genealogy bro?”

I explained that many of these companies that are causing trouble in America will continue to cause trouble simply because of the pedigree of their leadership teams. This is extremely controversial and it may even be un-American but that doesn’t mean it’s not super important.

“Does the Pentagon even pay attention to such things?” I asked rather innocently. “No,” she said, “and the bios are rather rudimentary.”

It is extremely important that mainstream newspapers are starting to understand the role of #GENINT, that is the role genealogy plays in intelligence.

Dan McCrum @FD

Good morning, so @samgadjones discovered that Wirecard fugitive Jan Marsalek was grandson to a suspected Russian spy.

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There are so many things we could delve into concerning Jan Marsalek and his family ties to the Russian intelligence world. We might even have a conversation about Austria generally and how its an entrance point for the Russians into the West.

But for now let’s focus on the traits that the Marsalek family displays. Your behavior, intelligence, personality are all highly heritable. There are families of tailors, smiths, wrights, carpenters, etc. There are also families of spies, like the Maxwells. An unwillingness to notice spy families and their roles in geopolitics has left us unprepared for the modern world which is mostly spy versus spy among the great powers.

You need to know who is related to who and what that means. I’ve long believed that Galton’s book, Hereditary Genius (1869), should be seen as one of the first forays into this sort of research. He essentially made the social graph of his day legible, in much the same that LinkedIn or Facebook does today. Galton knew that many traits skip generations.

Knowing that fact of heredity, it’s going to be become increasingly important as we examine public figures like the PayPal Mafia. Such research affects markets too, especially as markets become more oligarchic. I write about it often.

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And of course there’s this curious factoid. David Sacks cofounded a genealogical database company — Geni. Ancestry is owned by the Chinese through Blackstone. Deborah Liu — Ancestry’s current CEO — was an acolyte of Sheryl Sandberg, herself from a spy family who helped move Jews out of the Soviet Union. If you don’t think genealogy is used by other countries you are sorely mistaken. Knowing the bloodlines can help you see the fault lines—and avoid the bloodlands that historian Timothy Snyder points out and warns about in his works.

However counterintuitive it might seem there’s quite a lot of evidence for the historical record confirming that most elites stay in charge. See generally the work of Gregory Clark, whose book The Son Also Rises is perhaps the seminal text here. His analysis of surnames is quite good though that he’s simply updating Galton’s work.

My sense is that a lot of us are already getting quite smart about ancestry in light of the recent frauds we’ve seen. Elizabeth Holmes had a family member also involved in Enron and medical fraud.

We don't like to think that this is true in America but it is. Intergenerational mobility is something of a myth.

Alas just because we don’t like talking about this stuff doesn’t mean it’s any less true.