Byrne Hobart looks at emergency portfolios for worst-case scenarios:
Physical gold, for example, retains some of its value even if the financial system collapses. On the other hand, the old coins we have are often recovered from hoards that someone buried and never dug up, often because of war, famine, plague, or revolution.
[…]
Members of the early 20th century English upper class tended to have portfolios weighted towards land and government bonds, exactly what you’d buy if you were certain of disaster but uncertain about whether it would be inflationary or deflationary. But after the First and Second World Wars, they got the worst of both worlds: inflation high enough to devalue the purchasing power of their bonds, taxes high enough to render the real return from their land negative.
[…]
China’s communist revolution was one of the most thorough economic levelings in human history, one so effective that the children of the elite were actually poorer than average for a while, but then recovered and by the early days of China’s opening-up, and were better-off than ever. Similarly, in the post-Civil War South, the descendants of slave-owning families ended up about as well-off as other rich people, even though their land was seized, their currency depreciated to nothing, and the source of their wealth was banned by the Constitution.
RE: “… and were better-off than ever.” & “…ended up about as well-off as other rich people,….”
IQ breeds true, no?
Gregory Clark found this same phenomenon in modern Sweden, fourteenth-century England, and Qing Dynasty China.
“as well-off as other rich people”…other rich people in the South, or other rich people in the country in general?
Such analyses invariably fail to account for contemporaneous permanent policy changes, indicating a likewise durable changing of the guard. China may be a special case because of its special relationship with pinnacle international finance.