Why it’s a great idea to only hire your relatives

About four years ago, I was invited to join an unusual social network. It wasn’t LinkedIn – I was already a member of that. No, this social network operated a little differently.

It began with a bizarre email that popped up in my inbox on a Tuesday afternoon. “You don’t know me,” the emailer wrote, “But you’re my eighth cousin.”

Naturally, I thought I was about to get a request to wire $10,000 to a Nigerian bank account. But I didn’t.

My correspondent turned out to be legitimate, and is working on a fascinating project. He’s part of a group of researchers and scientists trying to build the biggest family tree in history. Well, tree isn’t quite the right word. It’s more like a forest. We’re talking literally millions of people from dozens of countries and hundreds of ethnicities — all linked together on one big family chart. All connected through blood and marriage.

The scope of this endeavor astounded me. Family – the original social network – had gone global.

The world family tree is made possible by startling advances in technology. Millions of us have spit into tubes and had their DNA analyzed. Millions more have collaborated online to create an interlocking tree. Think of Wikipedia meets genealogy. Think of thousands of people working on the same jigsaw puzzle. Several services – including Geni, WikiTree and FamilySearch – all have platforms with this model. They’re competing to see who can connect all seven billion humans on earth. Right now, Geni is at 110 million people and FamilySearch has more than 200 million.  

We’ve all heard the cliché that humans are one big family. But now, for the first time in history, we can see it concretely. Scientists estimate the farthest cousin you have on earth is likely about a seventieth cousin. And that’s not to mention the connections through marriage.

The massive databases in these services will reveal your links. For instance, I typed Barack Obama’s name into the search bar at Geni. After a minute, out popped my link. Barack Obama is – this is true -- my fifth great aunt’s husband’s brother’s wife’s seventh great nephew. We’re practically brothers! It’s like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but now everyone is Kevin Bacon.

My new social network has proved incredibly useful. Soon after I got that initial email, I decided I wanted to write a book about family and the remarkable changes it’s going through. As part of the book, I wanted to interview some of my more notable relatives, such as George H.W. Bush. He’s the patriarch of a dynasty, and I figured he’d have some insights on the topic of family. I put in a call to his chief of staff and asked if I could perhaps interview the former president. She told me the president rarely grants interviews anymore. At which point I played the cousin card.

“Just so you know, the president is my first cousin once removed’s husband’s third-great-grandfather’s wife’s third great nephew. So…maybe he’d do it as a favor for a relative?”

She chuckled and said she’d get back to me.

A week later, I was on a plane to Houston to have a beer-enhanced lunch with President Bush.

Technically, there’s a word for the practice of using family relations to help your business: Nepotism. But my argument is this: This is a radically new type of nepotism. It’s not narrow nepotism. I refer to it as “universal nepotism.”

Universal nepotism is the idea that if everyone is related, and everyone can join the world family tree, you can’t help but do business with a relative. You can’t avoid working with your cousin.

Now in one sense, re-labelling everyone as family is simply a bit of wordplay. But it’s a powerful bit of wordplay. There’s empirical evidence it might improve human behavior. A Harvard study from 2016 applied it to one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. The researchers took Palestinians and Israelis, and told some subjects they were related, and others that they weren’t. The ones who believed they were related treated each other more kindly in a memory game that followed. Another part of the study showed the “cousins” were more open to hearing peaceful solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.[SJ1] [SJ2]

Universal nepotism urges us to treat everyone with the favor usually reserved for close family.

I’m hoping universal nepotism replaces narrow nepotism. Because narrow nepotism – hiring your kids or nieces or first cousins – can be corrosive and unfair.

Narrow nepotism has existed for millennia, of course, partly because it has an evolutionary advantage. When you give preferential treatment to those who share your close DNA, you raise the chances that you’ll pass along your genes. Narrow nepotism is everywhere. About 70 percent of businesses in the United States are family-owned. And we’re not just talking mom and pop stores. About one-third of Fortune 500 companies are run by families. The current White House is a nepotism festival – with Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner holding prominent positions.

But narrow nepotism comes at a high social cost. It’s good for the immediate family, not so good for society. A 2004 Wharton study showed that after the founding member of a family business steps down, family-run businesses are, on average, less profitable than non-family-run business. Actually, more accurately: Family-run businesses are still more profitable than average for the immediate family, but they are less profitable for stockholders than businesses not run by family members.

Which is why I think we need to practice universal nepotism. When you are hiring an employee, yes, go ahead and hire family members. You have to. We’re all related. But you should be just as willing to hire a seventeenth cousin as a first cousin. You should be open to hiring any member of the human family.

Cass Sunstein, the great behavioral economist and co-author of Nudge, says our tendency to give preferential treatment to our relatives is a cognitive bias. He calls it the “family heuristic.”

But he says the Global Family project could hijack the family heuristic for the good of society. The notion of a Global Family exploits “the family heuristic by triggering the positive emotions and the strong feelings of commonality associated with small kinship units and applying them to the big world of distant strangers. Whenever you’re irritated by strangers on the subway, or enraged by people of the opposing political party, or whenever you wonder whether it’s really worthwhile to help vulnerable people who are far away, it might not be a bad idea to consider that they, too, might be your cousins.”  

So when hiring someone, remember all the applicants are cousins. And remember to send nice rejection letters to the cousins you don’t hire. They’re family.

How to join a tree:

There are several services competing to build a global family tree. Geni, WikiTree and FamilySearch are among the biggest. Some are free, others paid. To join a global Tree, you join one of the services and input as much of your immediate family as you can. The services will search their databases and try to link you to those already on the big tree. You can also try the DNA route. Services such as 23andMe, MyHeritage will give you a list of close genetic matches, and estimate how far they are from you (third cousin, fourth cousin, etc.) You can then try to connect with them on the tree.

One caveat: For universal nepotism to be fair, everyone has to be able to join the World Family Tree, no matter what his or her background. Everyone has to be able to link to everyone else. Technically, this is the case. The world family tree has every ethnicity: African-American, Asian, Native American, Latino and so on. Because of increasing rates of intermarriage, everyone can find a link in. But in reality, at least for now, it’s easier for members of some ethnic groups (like WASPs) to find an entry point than others (say, Burmese). This is because the tree still has more westerners. The ratio is improving, but it’s still lopsided. So to make the World Family Tree fair, I urge those with non-Western backgrounds to join!

A.J. Jacobs is the author of It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree, on which this article is based.