Hamilton

I hope you'll pardon me for not knowing Alexander Hamilton: I didn't study American history and haven't heard of George Washington's aide-de-camp in the Continental Army until my recent London trip.

When a good friend of our family bought us tickets for the multi-award winning musical based on the life of Hamilton, I borrowed the biography written about this man. The eight-hundred-page biography by Ron Chernow attests to the rise of an illegitimate orphan from the Caribbean. He was probably born in 1755 in the West Indies, where he was "surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people." His mother was unhappily married, and was soon deserted by Hamilton's father. With determined pursuit, six months after starting his self-education, Hamilton passed the bar exam at the age of twenty-seven and was licensed as an attorney before the New York State Supreme Court.

The rest of his story has led us to think about the Gatsby curve; that is about the height of economic ladder rungs. The farther apart each rung becomes, the much more difficult to climb. If not because Hamilton was born more than two hundred years ago, he could not have become the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.

Not any more. With time, the degree of income or status inequalities has climbed higher and higher. That means our economic prospects are determined by our parents' wealth rather than our own success.