Agency

The Uprootedness Hypothesis

The measurement problem

We measure wealth by counting material possessions. Net worth. Property. Portfolios. Square footage. This seems to be fundamentally botched.

If wealth is the ability to live well across time, the real measure is time at discretion — the hours, days, and years you spend doing what you choose rather than what you must. Material possessions are one input to that. They are not the thing itself. And as the Kresy case demonstrates, they may not even be the most important input.

The Kresy case study shows that investment in material goods may be of limited value when measured across generations. The Kresy Poles lost everything — land, homes, savings, legal identity — overnight. Yet their descendants became the most educated, highest-earning subgroup in Poland within three generations. True generational wealth, it turns out, comes from mindset: the values, dispositions, and habits of investment that families transmit culturally, not the assets they accumulate physically.

Material possessions can be seized at a border, confiscated by a regime, divided among heirs until they disappear. Knowledge, skills, and the orientation that produces them cannot.

The hypothesis

The Uprootedness Hypothesis proposes that forced displacement causes a permanent reorientation of investment — away from physical assets and toward portable human capital, especially education.

The mechanism is not suffering producing toughness. It is irreversible epistemic learning about what is actually durable. When everything physical is taken, the survivors learn — not as an abstraction but as lived experience — that physical capital is contingent while human capital is portable and self-compounding. This learning encodes into family values and transmits across generations as a normalised worldview.

Step by step

  1. Rupture. Physical assets are seized overnight. The first generation learns through direct experience that material wealth is not durable under political upheaval.
  2. Rational reallocation. Investment redirects toward knowledge, skills, and credentials — assets that are immune to state confiscation and portable across any border.
  3. Cultural transmission. The preference shift encodes into family values. It transmits to the next generation not as a story about the past but as a taken-for-granted worldview about what matters.
  4. Behavioural persistence. Three or more generations later, descendants own fewer assets relative to income and prioritise children's education at higher rates — even when they cannot articulate why.

Origins

The idea has deep cultural roots before it became an academic hypothesis.

Amos Oz captured it in A Tale of Love and Darkness (2005):

"It was always like that with Jewish families: they believed that education was an investment for the future, the only thing that no one can ever take away from your children, even if, Heaven forbid, there's another war, another revolution, more discriminatory laws — your diploma you can always fold up quickly, hide it in the seams of your clothes, and run away to wherever Jews are allowed to live."

The academic lineage: attributed by Stigler and Becker (1977) to Chicago economist Reuben Kessel. Formally proposed by Brenner and Kiefer (1981) in Economics of the Diaspora. Referenced in subsequent forced migration studies but never empirically confirmed — until the Kresy study in 2020 provided the first rigorous test.

The evidence

Kresy Poles (the primary case)

Kresy Poles were less educated than Central Poland Poles before WWII. After displacement, their descendants show +11.2 pp higher secondary education completion, +8.8 pp higher university graduation, +1 full year more schooling, and ~10% higher incomes — persisting across 3+ generations. They also hold values that de-emphasise material accumulation. This is the first empirical confirmation of the hypothesis. See The Kresy Case Study.

Parallel cases

Case Study Finding
Germans expelled into West Germany post-WWII Bauer, Braun, Kvasnicka (2013), Economic Journal Migrant children acquired more education than native peers
Icelanders displaced by 1973 Heimaey volcano Nakamura, Sigurdsson, Steinsson (2017) Positive long-run intergenerational education effect
Finnish Karelian expellees Sarvimäki, Uusitalo, Jantti (2019); Łukianow & Wells (2024) Parallel intergenerational patterns

The pattern repeats across cultures, centuries, and political systems: forced loss of physical assets redirects families toward portable human capital, and the redirection persists.

What this reframes

On wealth

Land divides among heirs. A house depreciates. A portfolio can be confiscated, taxed, or inflated away. But a capability — the ability to learn, to teach, to create value in any context — generates flows, transfers to the next generation without division, and cannot be seized. A diploma in the seams of your clothes survives any border.

If you are building generational wealth, the question is not how much can I accumulate? but what am I transmitting that compounds without being divisible?

On agency

The Uprootedness Hypothesis connects directly to the Agency hypothesis. What the Kresy families transmitted was not a specific body of knowledge or a set of credentials. It was a disposition — a cluster of values and orientations that made knowledge-seeking the default family strategy across any circumstance.

This is the same cluster the Agency project identifies: long-term orientation, strategic awareness, self-efficacy, adaptive ambition. The Kresy case just happens to show what it looks like when those dispositions are forged by catastrophe rather than inherited from privilege.

Sources

  • Becker, S.O., Grosfeld, I., Grosjean, P., Voigtländer, N. & Zhuravskaya, E. (2020). Forced Migration and Human Capital. American Economic Review, 110(5), 1430–1463. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20181518
  • Brenner, R. & Kiefer, N.M. (1981). Economics of the Diaspora. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 29(3), 517–534.
  • Oz, A. (2005). A Tale of Love and Darkness. Vintage.
  • Bauer, T.K., Braun, S. & Kvasnicka, M. (2013). The Economic Integration of Forced Migrants. Economic Journal, 123, 998–1024.

Further reading