Back when most wealth was inherited (before 1800 say), upper class families used to practice primogeniture, or giving all the money to the oldest son. If they

Back when most wealth was inherited (before 1800 say), upper class families used to practice primogeniture, or giving all the money to the oldest son. If they didn't do that, then the kids in the nth generation would get something like a 1/2^n share. In that case, nobody in the family would have enough money to support a presence at court to lobby for the family's interests, and eventually their claim to noble status would die out. Upper class parents concluded that having some wealthy sons was better than having no wealthy sons eventually. The dynamic of the younger, educated, connected but poor son of a noble family is pretty important in history, even if it isn't interesting to us in the egalitarian West. But such people did sometimes succeed in making themselves rich, and probably more often succeeded in impoverishing themselves further. A lot of them ended up as bandits.