I think most people are not aware how commonplace this is.

Take Senator Ron Wyden’s son, Adam—directly upon graduation from his Columbia MBA program he started his own hedge fund, no doubt capitalizing on contacts he made interning at the $19-billion fund of one of his father’s supporters, David Shaw. “Not many college kids get to intern on a D.E. Shaw portfolio for the summer,” Brian Marshall, who once ran the fund, was quoted as saying in a 2011 Bloomberg article on the younger Wyden.

It might be a stretch here, but I think this is quite related to Piketty's groundbreaking book on capital -- this is the nature of the beast, wealth remains in the family through connections, and this is just one of the ways how it happens.

We all know how many people get jobs because of connections... the privileged among us just take it for granted -- indeed because it so unremarkable we often just forget how we got there or don't think much of it (I'll confess that I initially got a well-paying job (that I was entirely unqualified for) purely because of family connections). Just think how many of these backroom "hey instead of paying me $2000 for my campaign, hire my daughter who's having trouble finding employment" dealings there are that go unreported and are never found out. I'd say it absolutely is commonplace.

No, I don't think we all know this. Most of the people I know did not get jobs through family connections. I suspect a trend analysis would show that the number of high-income workers who achieved their position through nepotism or some other form of non-achievement-based social connection is declining, not rising.

We're social animals, and "connections" will always be valuable. I don't see any evidence that D.E. Shaw treated Wyden's son differently because they wanted something out of his father.

Seriously though, after working at a prestigious institution and seeing how often lunch and dinner conversations between peers involved talk of how "my daughter can work in your group!" and "your son can work in my group!", my intuition tells me this is just the way it is - nepotism is pretty much everywhere. Sure, more anecdotes, but that's all I got until someone does some solid research on it.

For now here're two more articles, that may have some more information: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/3...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/07/in-prais...

There's no requirement that data must be exhaustive. And in most social science research, it never is (actually that is frequently the case in hard sciences, too).

While it is large in scope, this is mostly about how campaign funds are funneled to relatives, and doesn't appear to include favoritism in banking, lobbying, foundations, etc.

Congress is bought and our laws are bought.

Unfortunately sometimes citizens have to resort to the old-fashioned and not 100% accurate "judge for yourself, based on the partial information that is available, to figure out what the bigger picture is".

The people with the funds and power to connect all those dots are in the set of people who are somewhat likely to have benefitted from those connections. I don't see a big move to get that research funded any time soon.