Great Houses

Gregory Treat interviews Will Tanner about rebuilding “great houses” and why asset ownership matters more than wage income, using late-17th-century Virginia yeomen and planter society as a model of adaptation and competence. Tanner outlines a Virginia-style cursus honorum, from plantation management to unpaid church and county roles to the House of Burgesses, as a system for cultivating leadership, public virtue, and second- and third-order thinking. They contrast aristocracy with plutocracy and discuss how AI and emerging technologies may reward cross-domain “builders,” long-term legacy planning, and localized power.