Sadly inheritance is looked down upon, and people would like every citizen to be born with the same information, and this information being delivered by public education.
Sadly, parents teach much better than teachers when it is about the little things that make a life successful. There will never be a way around this. Transmission will never be good between people who don’t care for each others, such as civil servants. Therefore we should acknowledge that, yes, some parts of success will be taught by parents, and tearing children from parents will only lose information instead of elevating everyone. We should elevate parents and teach them so that they, too, can get successful children, and make sure all kids get two parents, and as many grandparents as possible (who are very, very important for psychological stability and growth), and make sure parents can be confident in teaching their children, i.e. not criticizing them for teaching them methods to succeed which have succeeded for a millenium, like, I don’t know, marrying which is the single best predictor of success.
Sure, we can re-engineer humans without parent inheritance, tear them off and give them to childcare centers, but we already know the sad results.
I’ve once asked my Arab employee why only (foreign) Arabs applied to our job (in France) and had the skills, he very acutely noted that their parents don’t allow them to fail, whereas French-born developers were more lazy. The result is very visible here: The only decent application we have are from North Africa.
« The right parents » is not about wealth or social exclusion. It is that some parents decide to be crap parents and destroy a millenium of wisdom at their generation by not transmitting all the accumulated knowledge, generally due to some ideological dream (« my ancestors were all wrong! THIS is how you do it! I shall be free to roam! ») But the failed child is free to start again, marry, work a lot, study success, and he can give his child an excellent life, and his grandson can be CEO of a large company.
Society can’t offset crap parents. Society already does a good job at making social move possible; 86% billionaires of our generation didn’t have billionaire parents. Also, don’t believe I’m not sorry for the victims, but let’s pass the word and teach again the good tips that have worked for millenia, instead of telling everyone they can survive with a mother-and-two-step-uncles, a flat, a brother in jail and a pink dress. It is not ok to say that. We should rather tell them it will be hard and we can help them progress if they choose to live a clean life starting from now.
Also I'd love to see a deeper analysis of your "86% of billionaires" comment. Usually what happens is we discover that "self-made" millionaires grew up in quite affluent circumstances, perhaps not with millionaire parents, but with parents who earned a sufficient income to themselves retire as millionaires. That is to say, they aren't "self-made". It isn't meaningful to compare their accumulation of wealth to the struggles of those born in less favorable circumstances.
There are no "self-made" billionaires. Or very, very few (WhatsApp founder Jan Koum is literally the only one I can think of who comes close). Every single high-profile billionaire today--Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, etc.--came from a family with substantial financial means and social connections.
How many of them had hundred-millionaire parents? The way wealth has grown for the super rich over the past few decades is staggering. Children of wealthy parents attaining far greater wealth than their parents has been the norm in America for generations now, it's not some exceptional accomplishment.
I make about ten times as much as my mother did, although we are both university educated. The difference is that I can sell my products on the Internet to a much wider audience. That was a serious multiplier which affected a lot of people and businesses, even on the lower end of the scale.
But I am very definitely not a USD-millionaire and likely won't ever be.
That's a bold statement.
French-born engineers are some of the best I've worked with, definitely not lazy by any means. But the local market in France is truly disconnected, salary-wise, when compared to the rest of the world.
If you advertise French wages on the French market, you simply won't get any of that french-born talent. They are either working remotely or already in the Bay Area!
It is not. You don't choose your parents, just the same way as you don't get to choose your sex/gender, race/ethnicity or caste. If you take "equal chances for everyone" seriously, it is a primary concern for a society to allow children to prosper freely without being impeded by the misfortune or failings of their parents.
> Sadly inheritance is looked down upon
We're totally not on the same page. Not even close.
> destroy a millenium of wisdom at their generation by not transmitting all the accumulated knowledge, generally due to some ideological dream (« my ancestors were all wrong! THIS is how you do it! I shall be free to roam! »)
I think it doesn't take a millennium of wisdom to understand what's needed to raise sane, mentally healthy children. Besides, this chain of knowledge-transfer gets interrupted constantly anyway, often due to war, accidents or addictions.
> But the failed child is free to start again, marry, work a lot, study success, and he can give his child an excellent life, and his grandson can be CEO of a large company.
Why the grandson? Why not the son? (Or daughter, for what it's worth.)
According to this study[0], at least 50% of wealth persistence is accounted for by direct transfers from parents, i.e. financial inheritance, while earnings and education are only able to explain 25%.
0 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecoj.12535
If success means just the ability to buy stuff, the richest person gets the same iPhone, so why bother striving for more?
Perfect equality means total inhumanity and the destruction of family.