By all means hand them advantages, but don't then go and try to mingle them with the lower classes. Don't act like we're all in this together. Don't force my poor past self to listen to the girl sitting next to me in class talk to her friend about owning 7 houses.
If we're going to settle for feudalism can we at least just call it feudalism and set the bar at appropriate heights for each class? Why the hell do I need to be put up against your performance enhanced kid when it comes to success? Just have me toil in your lands where I compete against all the other serfs instead. If you're going to start people off in life ahead of me at least give me the courtesy of degrees of separation.
Pretending at equality while everyone is rigging the game is trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Whoever told you that did you a massive disservice. You're not entitled to what others have; you get what you create.
> Why the hell do I need to be put up against your performance enhanced kid when it comes to success? Just have me toil in your lands where I compete against all the other serfs instead. If you're going to start people off in life ahead of me at least give me the courtesy of degrees of separation. Pretending at equality while everyone is rigging the game is trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Drop the histrionics; at least in the US and Canada, the game isn't that rigged, especially in fields where merit and effort matters (and within tech, I've noticed PR, marketing, other non STEM to be where the 'connected' get promoted). I grew up relatively poor and my kids will grow up significantly better off because you can earn your way into better opportunities (and I say this not being particularly smart).
I think you hit on something important, this merit and skills based promotion is something unique to tech where there is a culture of meritocracy. That doesn't exist in many fields and in many fields people get where there are solely because of who their parents were rather than what their parents taught them, and that applies even in the United States and Canada
The goal is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Even that is loose, because of course no one has exactly the same advantage profile (and no one has exactly the same disadvantage profile either).
As upsetting as tactless people can be, the fact that children from a family that is struggling to make ends meet freely mingle with children from families that have abundance, even excess, is a very positive and rare thing. We should treasure it.
The belief that everyone has something important to contribute and that people from all backgrounds, creeds, and prosperity levels working and learning together will result in a better world is unique, and we absolutely should not be longing for its more conventional opposite: a world where everyone is divided up so that their feelings are protected from heterogeneity.
Opportunity is the probability distribution over outcomes. You can't equalize opportunity without reducing the variance of outcomes.
I will claim that every single student in that bucket (a fairly small number of people, when you stop and count them, adding up to well less than 5% of the population of the US) in fact had perfectly reasonable opportunity to end up in the top 20% of the income distribution. And just to be clear, from looking at page 17 of the original paper at <http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper..., "top 20% of the income distribution" in this case means an individual income of $58,000/year by age 34.
The 30% that did not end up there almost certainly prioritized other things over income. But that does not take away the fact that they had the opportunity.
So it might be more correct to say that opportunity is the probability distribution over outcomes, conditional on goals. That statement I might be willing to accept.
No, it's not. You aren't accounting for choice at all. Some people choose happiness over wealth, some people choose short-term outcomes over long-term outcomes, and some people just make choices that result in a much greater struggle for whatever reason.
Only in the sense that I consider individual choice to be "marginalized out" here. People's choices have only a limited causal influence on outcomes, after all, but it is instructive to look at how much causal power choices have, versus circumstances. Trying to maximize the causal power of choices and minimize that of circumstances is a worthy goal.
It still requires looking at the outcome distribution quantitatively, and admitting that both factors have causal power.
Why?
"Trying to maximize the causal power of choices and minimize that of circumstances is a worthy goal."
I see what you are saying, but I'm not sure we want to take that to an extreme. Diverse, interesting, and challenging circumstances produce a lot of creativity, culture, and happiness.
* Admitting students to university based on merely adequate grades and their citizenship in the community, rather than based on a "meritocratic" competition that actually just conditions outcomes on starting-points.
* Supporting trade unions and other institutions that regularize wages/salaries/incomes.
* Taxing inheritance heavily.
* Enforcing anti-trust law.
The point is to ensure that random events like which family you're born into can't strongly affect the course of your life. I'd love to hear other, less "bog standard" ways to compress the distribution over outcomes, thus equalizing opportunity.
However, note that we're talking about cutting a link. By default, opportunities are only available to people with past actual successes. By default, outcomes build upon outcomes and compound exponentially. We're looking to defy that natural process, cut a natural link, and thus regularize certain statistical structures.
This is impossible. We pretend like it's not true in America, but one's parents have massive, near-total influence. That doesn't mean you'll turn out to be an exact clone of your mom or dad, but it does mean that your childhood, and the choices your parents make on the family's behalf, are going to dictate a great deal about your life from the day you're born until the day you die.
There's no way around that. Should we take all of the community's children and randomly distribute them to different households so that parents with business aptitude don't grant their children an "unfair opportunity" by giving them good business advice? Is this not an unfair opportunity granted to children by the "random event" of their birth? If the benefit of a parent's intellectual resources is fair, why isn't the benefit of his/her financial resources?
>However, note that we're talking about cutting a link. By default, opportunities are only available to people with past actual successes. By default, outcomes build upon outcomes and compound exponentially. We're looking to defy that natural process, cut a natural link, and thus regularize certain statistical structures.
I disagree. By default, in the absence of a government, the market is open and opportunity is equal; two persons with no knowledge of one another can walk up to each other in the desert and make any trade considered agreeable between the two of them. That is equal opportunity. In a complex society, the government's role is to protect that natural transaction flow, not to confiscate the goods and redistribute in the way that it has decided is fair. That makes both parties unhappy and leaves only the governors pleased.
The government protects natural transaction flow by refusing to allow the enforcement of provisions that would unfairly exclude the participation of large portions of the population based on artificially imposed constraints (i.e., not inherent constraints that exist due to lack of financial, physical, or mental resources).
Natural marketplaces are also safeguarded by refusing to allow similarly artificial prohibitions to flow from the centralization of control within certain de-facto authorities, usually monopolies or cabals.
And for all that to work, the government also must provide more basic enforcement to safeguard human life and protect private property.
That's basically it! The goal is not to equalize the outcome, or ensure that the difficulty gradient of actually succeeding is identical or near-identical for everyone (which is impossible).
Opportunity refers to the ability to start out without someone's boot on your neck, not the ability to do better than your peers (that's merit, not opportunity).
The intrinsic problem with this approach is that it "drags others down", reducing the purpose of working harder or unfairly affects those more naturally capable.
> * Admitting students to university based on merely adequate grades and their citizenship in the community
Assuming you mean "citizenship in the community" to be "I live in state X, that means I have a better chance of access to X State University", over a generation, this would just mean that for higher achieving state X, students from state Y would be locked out of better opportunities based on geographic residency.
A real life example would be higher admittance for Californians to California State schools, which reduces the opportunities for a kid from Missouri or Alabama (because of realistic capacity constraints). The kid that went to University of Missouri is now at a significant disadvantage (based on education) and is not able to compete against her peers for jobs in regions with better long-term opportunities, even if she had a lot of potential. University of Missouri then has to accommodate the lackluster abilities of its enrolling body (as it ostensibly does with a 77% acceptance rate), which leads to dropping STEM requirements, which means an even less capable constituency.
> rather than based on a "meritocratic" competition that actually just conditions outcomes on starting-points.
Related to the last point, this would seek to normalize the achievement by "boosting up" those that haven't demonstrated aptitude, while limiting the opportunity of those that would benefit from a more rigorous program.
> * Supporting trade unions and other institutions that regularize wages/salaries/incomes.
For non-specialized labor, maybe. If the idea is that the base salary would need to increase, that would just increase the costs of goods "across the board", which doesn't do much except broaden the divide between the full-time employed and the unemployed.
Would you be willing to give up a percentage of your salary to someone else in your department that earns less, even if he/she doesn't work as hard or isn't as skilled? If yes, why aren't you doing that now?
> * Taxing inheritance heavily.
Why are others more entitled to the results of my labor after I'm dead versus when I'm alive? It's not my job to posthumously give advantage to the kids of strangers against my own in a competitive world. Also, if you try to implement this, you'll end up getting the government involved in interpersonal gifting (as the logical workaround would be to give the maximum tax deductible gift per year or sell assets to family at well below their value, if not just creating new avenues to tax avoidance).
> * Enforcing anti-trust law.
Agreed.
> We're looking to defy that natural process, cut a natural link, and thus regularize certain statistical structures.
This suggestion makes my brain feel fuzzy. If the thought is that it's a natural process for the above-average to create advantages for themselves and their own, isn't this asking for more laws to compel them to act against their own interests?
I don't think that there's anything natural about how much money your parents have. If we go back into history, the only "naturally capable" advantage some people had was a natural capacity to stick a sword through peasants and take their grain. "Natural" advantages came from violence, not from intrinsic individual greatness.
Actual individual greatness, like that of Einstein (for instance), is often just thrown into the general lot of human advancement.
>Assuming you mean "citizenship in the community" to be "I live in state X, that means I have a better chance of access to X State University", over a generation, this would just mean that for higher achieving state X, students from state Y would be locked out of better opportunities based on geographic residency.
Yes, that is a problem. However, the capacity limits you mention don't disappear when we just say, "Open University of California to the whole planet". The only real solution is to build up more top-quality universities in Missouri and Alabama.
Now, I know that trying to multiply one fish into thousands of fish and feed the masses can sound miraculous, but the amazing thing about education and technology is that they enhance productivity. Once you've committed to making Missouri and Alabama more productive, the process helps itself along, so it's actually nowhere near miraculous.
>Would you be willing to give up a percentage of your salary to someone else in your department that earns less, even if he/she doesn't work as hard or isn't as skilled? If yes, why aren't you doing that now?
Actually, the last place I worked, everyone earned the same salary. We functioned pretty well.
>Why are others more entitled to the results of my labor after I'm dead versus when I'm alive?
Because you can't enjoy things when you're dead, and we've seen in history that inheritance leads to aristocracy, social instability, and mass destruction.
>This suggestion makes my brain feel fuzzy. If the thought is that it's a natural process for the above-average to create advantages for themselves and their own, isn't this asking for more laws to compel them to act against their own interests?
Is it in your interest to defect in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma? Was it in the interest of Marie Antoinette to say, "Let them eat cake"? Your long-term rational interest can differ from short-term selfishness.
No, passing resources from generation to generation is not what leads to "mass destruction", etc. Familial/generational resources have been the sustenance of almost all free humans since time immemorial. They would live on tribal [read: familial] lands for their entire existence, cooperatively sharing the wealth to ensure that the needs of family members were supplied.
We're still dependent on generational wealth for the first couple decades of our lives at a minimum, and there's no reason to cut it off there except a) jealousy that some people are able to do so; and b) a desire to lessen the interdependent bonds between sympathetic family members and strengthen the dependency on the cold, hard creditors, standing at the ready to collect interest and increase the cost of all durable goods by 1.5x-3x.
The fact that some things, like thrones and other official positions, may not be good fits for straight inheritance models doesn't mean that all inheritance is evil or that parents shouldn't be allowed to provide a resource pool that will persist after their deaths.
I hope that I can leave an estate that provides for the housing and basic needs of my children and grandchildren and I fully intend on passing it down to them. This has nothing to do with "aristocracy, social instability, and mass destruction", and the claim that it does is plain class hostility.
That's unrealistic, otherwise there would be a top-quality university in Missouri and Alabama. Our existence is one of constraints.
> Once you've committed to making Missouri and Alabama more productive, the process helps itself along, so it's actually nowhere near miraculous.
Education is the immediate antithesis of productivity -- we're on hacker news and you know that pair programming is either a code-quality, knowledge-sharing, or bug-avoidance issue, and specifically never a means for immediate gains nor all three. You can't throw cash at university and get smarter students -- I went to a top 50 school where the top administration is compensated better than the top 10.
> Actually, the last place I worked, everyone earned the same salary. We functioned pretty well.
What about now? Do you ask junior QA if you can give them the earning difference? If you oppose this notion based on separation of duty, do you think union politics would be better at making this differentiation?
> Because you can't enjoy things when you're dead, and we've seen in history that inheritance leads to aristocracy, social instability, and mass destruction.
You avoided the issue of removing inheritance being untenable. If I die, my nephew gets all of my wealth and I hope it brings him happiness and fulfillment. If you try to legislate that, I will simply route around you.
What mass destruction? What social instability? My partner comes from a communist nation and his/her (not interested in disclosing sexual details) experiences add color to the reality that political dispensation of resources is a terrible machinery.
Socialism/communism does not result in a more "equal" society. If hard numbers don't do it for you, find the nearest Chinese/Russian emigrant area and buy an older person a drink and ask if it's alright to pick his/her brain.
> Is it in your interest to defect in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma? Was it in the interest of Marie Antoinette to say, "Let them eat cake"? Your long-term rational interest can differ from short-term selfishness.
I have no obligation to your kids, will always pick my own kids over yours, and it's not a prisoner's dilemma -- if you try to tax me to the extent that I'm providing luxury for others, that changes the moral algebra for resources that I very well could shield from taxation.
Are you really claiming it's impossible to have good educational institutions anywhere except where we already do? This sounds like an overly-general claim: "anything that can be accomplished, already has been".
If that truly were the goal, 100% inheritance tax would be the policy.
Outcome is bona fide; it's the resource access that allows people to do the things they wish to do, not the market access that allows one to generate those resources.
Since we don't have a substantial, legally-enforced caste system or other artificial limitations on success in America, it doesn't look like opportunity has anything to do with money (unless you're referring to the excessive fees and qualifications which the government imposes to engage in some types of business (licensing bodies, etc.)), so I'm not sure why you say that confiscating a family's resources will ensure opportunity for anybody.
Having money (derived from inheritance or anywhere else) gives you privileged access to the marketplace since it helps you get over natural as well as artificial barriers to entry.
This is exactly why the unifying feature of entrepreneurs is not a greater appetite for risk (quite the opposite), but access to cash - often from parents:
http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf
>Since we don't have a substantial, legally-enforced caste system or other artificial limitations on success in America,
Access to wealth is an artificial limitation on success and it's largely what the American caste system is geared around.
>I'm not sure why you say that confiscating a family's resources will ensure opportunity for anybody.
Opportunity flows from resources.
You can act like you don't care about equality of opportunity or you can support a 100% inheritance tax (and no private education) but you can't really have it both ways.
You're re-defining opportunity to mean the same thing as outcome.
If all outcomes must be equal for opportunities to be equal, which is the argument you're making when you say that both artificial and natural barriers must be equally surmountable and that any potential benefit, direct or indirect, from one's access to and deployment of resources is inherently unfair, then you're in an argument that fundamentally opposes private property and the hard physical realities that dictate human behavior.
If you have a specific complaint, like that the qualifications to be admitted to the bar in almost every state require graduation from a school accredited by the ABA and that this constitutes an unfair monopoly and presents an unduly burdensome artificial constraint which was installed only to limit competition in the law profession, then that's a totally valid example of opportunity gap that should be fixed.
But saying "Someone with more resources could potentially derive more benefits, either direct or indirect, than someone without an equivalent quantity of resources, as long as they deploy them efficiently" is only stating the obvious. Suggesting that this is an inequity to be resolved is simply suggesting that individuals should not be trusted to participate in a real marketplace at all.
I would stress about all these legacy rich folks--a lot of them don't amount to much. They party, do drugs, flame out young.
And then again, in some ways I totally agree with what you're saying--it isn't fair to tell a kid they can become a CEO when in fact the people who become CEOs are picked from a very select, elite group.
Basically, you're arguing that access to resources should be predicated upon a) the quantity of labor rather than its value; and b) that access should only last as long as the effort is continually expended (curious re b: how many days can one take off before access to resources is denied? what if I want to take a year off to focus on a business? what if you think my business is a sham and not a legitimate expenditure of effort? are some people entitled to resource access without effort, and if so, which people, and why?).
People who want to leave an inheritance for their kids argue instead that access to resources should be predicated upon a) the value of their contributions rather than the amount of labor; and b) access to any excess resources should persist until they are fully exhausted by the owner's willful use, without regard to the amount of effort involved in earning it.
Only one of these models scales, not just in a free society, but any society.
The perspective that idlers should not get to eat while laborers starve is solid, but the plans that have been proposed to resolve it are impractical. The fact is that to some extent, inequality and unfairness will always be around. That's due to the fundamental functions of the physical world that cause scarcity, not how nice or kind the people who surround you are, so just trying to make better people won't solve the basic problem of inequity (it may, however, prevent class oppression).
It's a very compelling argument, except that in practice it seems to evolve into access to resources being predicated on a) the ability to extract resources from the system via external factors rather than labor or contributions.
However, even if we agree that someone's gains were based on unfair rules, that's not justification for pilfering a family's nest egg. If we allowed them to accrue that money legally, it's theirs, and we just need to correct the loopholes and move on.
Dismantling the free markets and systems of exchange enabled by private property only results in shifting every advantage to a tiny centralized core (usually government ministers, bureaucrats, and their families and staffs) who quickly grow rich while 90%+ of the population becomes impoverished. It is simply not possible for any government to produce a sufficient central plan, no matter how well-meaning or knowledgeable the planners. The world's natural chaos doesn't allow for it.
We saw this tried many times in the 20th century and there's not one success story to come out of it. People must be free to make their own price and value judgments in an organic marketplace because it's the only thing that can adapt quickly enough to the real world, and the only thing that actually provides some advantage resilience to keep a dishonest, exploitative pirate class from pillaging the economy with stunning rapidity. Ask yourself why this clear fact is often misrepresented as its polar opposite, and consider the interests of the propagandists with reference to that misrepresentation.
There is too much inequality today. We should work to fix that, but no one seems interested in paying attention to the details that are necessary to do so because the propagandists are too busy whipping them into a frenzy about the need to confiscate the assets of the 1% and transfer control of that money to their friends in the government.
Mid-20th-century America seemed pretty damned successful, and it involved very high income taxes at the top, confiscatory inheritance taxes, and strong antitrust laws.
Nostalgia for the era of "Mad Men" seems bizarre to me.
Your philosophical approach seems to be inching toward an argument between the libertarians and the communists and their ideal policy on tax rats. I think that is kind of a false choice myself.
Biology will always place a limitation on the amount of labor that one can expend, and psychology, which is an only slightly more pliable abstraction on top of biology, limits it further. Humans are biologically programmed, as part of the survival instinct, to preserve as much energy as possible. They will only expend hard effort when they are convinced that it will provide them with tangible and necessary benefits (where necessary means that the brain sends rewards in response to the anticipated benefit).
Inasmuch as wealth refers to the ability to command labor, either directly (like hiring an employee) or indirectly (like paying for the work product of another organization's employees), there are real limits that can't be circumvented.
As automation and technology enable us to a) prevent or seriously impede natural corrosive processes that destroy our work product and b) generate more useful goods and services with increasingly-less dependence on human effort, I agree that "wealth", for the value of wealth that means access to conveniences and luxuries, will become more generally available as we continue to improve.
Flipping burgers for 14 hours a day doesn't improve society, which is why it doesn't pay anything. Get a real job if you want to make money. Improve people's lives.
No, I get paid a lot more because my work allows my boss to make more money per hour of my work than flipping burgers would.
If we're going to allocate resources based on who has "sacrificed the most" (...for what? and what algorithm should be used to quantify the sacrifice?), it seems that all the resources will ultimately flow down to the most self-sacrificial individuals in the area.
As these people are extremely self-sacrificial (and it will be hard to find such selfless people, because they are unlikely to talk about how selfless they are), they will then spend all of the money immediately, for the good of those around them who need access to more resources. Then we will give them more resources to re-spend, yes? How will the self-sacrificial people manage all of the services and goods they're procuring, or are they so self-sacrificial that they wouldn't ask for an exchange when transferring the resources? Perhaps these people are the new banks, but interest free? If they become interested in saving some resources for themselves, to compensate for their efforts in distributing the resources of the society, are they automatically disqualified from possessing the resources, since someone less selfish now probably exists?
Incidentally, in these types of systems, the parties most deserving of resources have a mysterious tendency to be the people who've set up the economic system and their close associates. Who can argue that the founders of a new fair system of resource allocation are not the most deserving and self-sacrificial? These revolutionaries broke the oppressive chains of the bourgeoisie. They fought, killed, and died, and they watched their family and friends die, for the good of the nation. They beheaded the dirty rich kids who thought they should eat cake while others starved.
Those brave souls, who at least metaphorically did all this for the good of the millions of innocents whom they would never meet, and the sage councils and carefully-chosen successors that protect their legacy, are surely the most self-sacrificial in any society. It is only right that these persons should collect all the resources and wisely distribute them. You would not suggest that your efforts are comparable, and thus deserving of their resources, would you?
Everyone from my highschool who is doing nothing at some dead end job 10 years later is there because they didn't try and work hard at all, and they sure as heck didn't try to read any books or learn any skills that society found valuable.
And somehow these people deserve my stuff? They get to treat my success and reward for working hard as some kind of loot chest that they can just take from me?
Capitalism is about rewarding those with capital. It's right there in the name. Nobody pays rent to the Duke of Westminster because he created value. He has created zero value. They pay him rent because he owns value.
It's very important to remember that we should not punish the 99.9999% of people based on the obnoxious immodesty of a select few. Even the well-off are likely to need to dip into their reserves occasionally, especially when you consider that the well-off do risky things like give some teenagers $100k so they can try to start a website that might make money some day.
The real problem is not private ownership, which necessitates that at some level, some people will always have more resources than others. The problem is that we've set up an artifice that grossly over-values certain contributions.
For example, the government has created an artificial monopoly on the usage or representation of most ideas, which curtails their free use in the marketplace for hundreds of years. That's bad! As good as ideas are, they are not that valuable, and if we truly believe someone is a genius who outputs unparalleled ideas, granting them a multi-generational monopoly to display facsimiles of those ideas hurts everyone because it actively discourages those geniuses from contributing more for the remainder of their lives. Copyrights are not real property and they must be modified to better represent their value.
Look at the Fortune 100 and think about how many of those companies are there just because the government has given them the exclusive and practically eternal right to resell the same ideas.
Compare Disney, who makes most of their money copying and pasting three semi-concentric circles and suing anyone who does the same, with peers in the top 100 like Walmart and Exxon. Those companies run extremely complex, high-overhead operations that require the daily labor of millions of people to generate new value that assists in fulfilling the population's basic needs. That's the kind of company we should expect to see at the top, not the people who loop re-runs.
Also consider the stock market. There's very little about that which isn't artificial and rigged up and down half way to Sunday. People with 0 involvement in the company can throw in money and watch it grow with 0 input or value contributed, other than already having money. The need to convince people who have been successful that you're a valid investment is a good thing, but we've definitely taken the rewards on this too far.
Such gross misvaluations are primarily enforced by legal actions that codify the mismatch between true value, which the market usually converges upon in a fairly reasonable time period, and the resources the contributor is able to reap for the contribution.
So if we want to be serious about fixing inequality, instead of suggesting forceful confiscation, redistribution, disinheritance, and the creation of taskmasters to make sure everyone is working enough hours, we should look at the places where the market's natural ability to converge upon a fair and reasonable value is being stymied and perverted by profiteering middlemen.
But I also recognize that this creates a tremendous hazard of unearned privilege. We have to acknowledge the fact that it allows us to tip the scale in favor of our own offspring -- and against those of the less successful. And when I consider the fact that the less successful often had less successful parents, I'm confronted with the reality that success is inseparable from unearned privilege in a society where there a large intergenerational transfers of capital.
To critique a couple of your specific points:
> Because money is not a self-renewing resource [...]
But it is. For a large enough fortune, you can easily live off part the interest, and let the rest compound. If your family tree grows geometrically, eventually the fortune runs out, but who cares at that point? Already, it's been wasted on a couple generations of people who lucked into it.
> the well-off do risky things like give some teenagers $100k [...]
I'm not criticizing investment. If there were no inherited wealth, there would still be excess capital in the hands of living people that needs to be invested. And the wealth of the deceased could be put towards investment in a whole bunch of possible ways.
> if we truly believe someone is a genius who outputs unparalleled ideas, granting them a multi-generational monopoly [...] actively discourages those geniuses from contributing more for the remainder of their lives.
Totally agree :). Applying capitalism to capitalists. Crazy idea!
Consider it in sports. Is it surprising that there are some families that have "figured it out" and are better overall than others? No. Not at all. Some will be genetics and some will be learning successful training regimes from a young age. However, even in there, the top performers are just that. The top performers.
This is showing that the top is not made up of people that are capable of getting to the top. That is concerning. Not life stoppingly so. But it is against what a lot of the world teaches each other for how working hard can help you get ahead in life.
I think % is a flawed metric. Your measuring your position compared to the rest of society as a gauge for "getting ahead in life" when you should measure yourself to yourself at different points in time.
Absolutely; to the extent that there a person has natural property interests, they don't extend beyond the end of their life; the ability to direct the disposition of property beyond that point makes sense as a legal privilege only to the extent that model on which that privilege is granted has social utility. It's clear that some rights here are probably desirable, but not unlimited, and beyond a point the inequality that results has considerable externalized disutility.
> I think % is a flawed metric. Your measuring your position compared to the rest of society as a gauge
Whatever you think people should value, it's empirically quite clear that relative deprivation -- compare to contemporaries as well as compared to one's own former state -- is a source of significant disutility consistently, across cultures.
It's also clear that, ceteris paribus, increasing concentration of wealth decreases the amount of progress people on the lower end of the scale can make against their own past state as well as against those on the upper end.
So, should you be able to increase the ability for your "dynasty" to do better? Yes. Of course, increasing society at large accomplishes this more effectively than just giving them more money. Good stewards of a society typically have it better in the long run than greedy stewards.
Hard work is important for many reasons. Hard work can be involved in getting access to a lot of money, but it isn't necessarily involved in it.
And there's nothing wrong with that, because monetary resources are just one aspect of an individual's overall circumstances and it doesn't mean anything in isolation. Like many other personal circumstances (including health, much, much more valuable than money), reversal in fortunes are not uncommon. Seeking to maintain a positive position for the people you care about to rely on as needed is good, and they should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their forebears' labors without undue judgment or excessive expectation.
Yeah, we all want to help our kids. But they weren't referring the middle (or even upper-middle) classes; but rather to the super-rich. Which have their own set of privileges and advantages -- which are rather different from what the rest of us experience.
But the opposite would be a much bigger problem.
Bolshevism, you mean? (Really now, it's not that helpful to always think in terms of polar opposites: "Either we leave things the way the are, or we begin an irreversible slide into the Pure Hell of its exact opposite"). But if that's not what you mean, you can at least be more specific about what you mean.
I think a less contentious interpretation is that this data simply supports the theory that intelligence is mostly hereditary. And that a predisposition for intelligence can account for both the parents' as well as their offspring's high earning potential.
As someone with kids in kindergarden and grade school, it's rather visible that 99% of the advantage 1% parents give kids is simply the will to do anything at all. In most kids, there is no such impulse present at all, and it is painfully obvious what the results will be, barring huge behavioral changes. Or at least this is rather obvious in kids whose parents are doctors or lawyers, something along those lines. Less so for kids with manager parents, but still, I do think I see a difference in attitude.
It's not intelligence that's hereditary, it's the 1% more effort (usually more like 100% more effort), that when sustained over 10 years will completely overwhelm any innate intelligence advantage that may be present.
Yes rich parents also give kids more means to accomplish things and that certainly also helps. No student debt, maybe even a house to live in ... certainly helps (frankly, a way to opt out of our financial "services" industry is what makes the difference). But this advantage is useless unless the extra effort is also present.
I would argue that. The university's time has come and gone. It's not valuable anymore.
>However, despite top universities accepting significant quantities of low-income and minority students, those students remain under-represented among the top earners; implying that it's your parents money and not your elite education that ultimately determined your earning potential.
That's far too simplistic an explanation. I think the fact is that at the point, a lifetime of non-quantifiable variables have piled up, and anyone who thinks they can suss out a general cause in an objective way is kidding themselves. That's a case of "Schrodinger's stats"; one can take any factor and contrive some semi-feasible background story by which it's among the principal causes, and anyone else who takes any other factor can do the same thing.
>I think a less contentious interpretation is that this data simply supports the theory that intelligence is mostly hereditary. And that a predisposition for intelligence can account for both the parents' as well as their offspring's high earning potential.
In many cases, I think that's a good theory. I would extend it to say it's not limited exclusively to intelligence, but also that more successful people are more likely to have characteristics that are useful for generating success, and thus are more likely to pass those some characteristics down to their kids.
I think overall, the issue is that many people are too insistent on a world that conforms tightly to their existing perceptions of fairness. They have not been taught to survive in the chaos and randomness that is the physical world, but rather they've been misled to believe in a pristine, curated world where anything they find distasteful or annoying is condemned and shut down. IMO, that is a sign of too much prosperity and not enough reality.
I don't think that's in evidence. The top universities are almost devoid of low-income students, however many "minorities" they pick up through international admissions.[1]
[1] -- https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/no-poi...
The opposite of this would be that joining the 1% has nothing to do with heredity. How is this bad?
There is the normal fact that the rightful owners of property don't need a reason to give it to someone; they are free to give, keep, sell, or destroy their property as they see fit, just as everyone else is.
That alone should settle this question, but it's even weirder that someone would complain when you apply this theory to parent-child relationships. Children have a natural claim to the prosperity of their parents at least until they come of age, and after that point, the parents will almost always have a continuing interest in the prosperity and well-being of the child, and they will use every rightful advantage they possess to secure it, including the ability to share money. Why shouldn't they? Isn't that what parents are supposed to do for their kids? If parents have sufficient resources to make it so their children can be secure and prosperous, wouldn't you expect them to deploy those resources to that end?
When you have kids, supplying for their needs becomes the main focus of your life for decades (and I would suggest it never ends, as your children have children that you will want to care for, and they'll have children, and so on...). If we want to encourage productivity, parents will be deeply de-motivated by rules that prevent their children from sharing in their property.
I know that personally, one of my overarching life goals is to have enough money not only to survive, but to put me in a position to ensure the survival and prosperity of my posterity as they age. That doesn't mean that they won't ever have a job. But if, for whatever reason, I felt my kid needed some money, I absolutely would expect to be able to give them money, and putting myself in a position to do that is a strong motivator for me.
Is the anti-inheritance theory that if some people have to waste 8 hours a day in wage slavery or spend 30 years in debt slavery to "own" a house, everyone else should have to too? Is it unfair for some people to have enough money to share with their kids that the kids don't have to go through that? Why do we all have to be born slaves of the financial-industrial complex?
I want to have enough money that wage and/or debt slavery are optional for my kids. I don't want them to have to worry about becoming homeless because they don't prostrate themselves to the boss's satisfaction. There's no reason my children should have to have those limitations if I'm able to supply an alternate path for them.
If my kids become evil because they have too much money, I'll stop giving them money. Pretty simple, right? Why should anyone be able to tell me that they don't trust my evaluation of my own child's needs and that the child must be a wage and debt slave to develop "good character" (read: to generate a lot of interest for us)?
I've known my children since they were born and I plan to know them until I become deceased. My wife and myself are now and will continue to be the persons most intimately familiar with the children and therefore best qualified to judge their needs and make determinations as to the beneficial extent of their wage and debt slavery. That's how it should be!
And I'll add tangentially, I think attempts to characterize children from wealthy families as lazy or entitled merely because they are not wage slaves are absurd. Wealthy children have many unique opportunities and frequently get involved in a variety of interesting engagements and causes which are surely much more socially beneficial than the cart-pushing, fry-cooking engagements of their peers. Equating idleness with freedom from wage and debt slavery is a very dangerous fallacy, but it clearly serves the interests of some nefarious anti-social actors.
The phrasing of the headline is a trap. Arguments against inheritance are really arguments against private property. Articles about "the 1%" are propaganda orchestrated specifically to anger 99 out of 100 people, who will say "what makes them so much more deserving of abundance than me?! We should take some of their stuff away so that things are 'more fair'."
That's not what inheritance or security is about. Notice that none of my motivations refer to having more than others, or buying fancier things, or doing anything else to oppress or harm anyone. My motivations are limited solely to ensuring that I can fulfill my direct responsibility to work to ensure the health, security, and prosperity of my family in the long-term.
The stigma on inheritance is pure propaganda, intended to keep as many people in wage and debt slavery as possible.
As a father and patriarch, I see developing the ability to protect my children from that slavery (not necessarily from those experiences) as an important element of my role, to the extent that I'm able to do so. Rules that jeopardize this are oppressive and I would seek to vacate any jurisdiction in which they were applicable.
A lottery is one way to have zero heredity influence.
And this is the problem for Marxists. Engels wrote a whole book[1] on how the family destroyed the ideal prehistoric communism[2] by accumulating property to pass to the next generations. This created classes and the state.
Originally this was just a trivia and the principal tool of reaching communism has been the revolutionary overthrowing of the bourgeois state. But in late 20th century, after many of these revolutions failing to spread worldwide, they naturally want to explore other ways to achieve communism, including targeting the root cause of the state.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family,_Priv...
If the reality is that they basically are there because they were born into it and that there's very little chance that anyone outside the 1% can move into that level of wealth, then you have to find a different justification for the tax benefits they have received over the past 20-30 years.
If my hard work wasn't reflected in the data, why would I work hard? Why would I care about bettering my kids if it had absolutely no impact on how well they would do?
Some people are acting like this is a problem. And to some small degree it is. But the opposite would be a much bigger problem.
Of course, a good parent teaches their kids how to fish, not just gives them fish. If anything this study just shows that successful parents are good at teaching their kids to be successful.