That sounds like a lottery for housing, with extra steps? Hypothetical scenario: we have 100 houses, and 200 young families looking for one. Your solution in effect is: let's give 100 houses to the 100 young people with an inheritance. That sounds arbitrary.

Lack of housing is a disconnected problem from inheritance taxes.

Did you skip biology class? There's nothing 'arbitrary' about it. There's no lottery system for assigning children to parents.

Eddington is a fictional community, with 2 people: Ed and Sue. Unfortunately, due to lack of housing, they only have 1 house. The decision is made to hand it to Sue, because Ed's _parents_ were alcoholics that drank their life away.

The decision is not necessarily wrong. But the reasoning to base someone's fortune on the merits of their parents is very arbitrary. Why not base it on their own merits or needs?

It's not your decision. Why would Sue's parents ever want to leave the family home to a stranger of alcoholics rather than their own responsible daughter?

Wanting the best for your own children is very sound reasoning. Putting strangers' needs ahead of your own family's prosperity is abhorrent and wildly irresponsible.

Sure, almost all parents want the best for their children. But not every child has a parent that can or wants to provide the best for them.

You are framing the issue as a right you have for society to provide for your children when you are dead. I am framing the issue as a right everyone has for society to provide for them, irregardless of who their parents were when those parents were still alive.

I am framing the issue as a right of a man to provide for his family. You are framing it as a right to pillage a stranger's estate for your own family's gain.

I understand that you want to do that. We all want what's best for our own. I am steadfast in that it is morally reprehensible.

Why even wait until they're dead? Just steal all their assets now, if that's how you feel about it. The thing I find most distasteful about people with your view is how you pretend you're doing good. It's evil. It's wrong. You're lying. I would respect you far more if you candidly admitted that you are violently envious of wealthier and happier families, and wish to manipulate the levers of the state to crush them and steal their property on your behalf.

Expect resistance.

Are you and kfterrg67 the same person? Ban evasion?

> I would respect you far more if you candidly admitted that you are violently envious of wealthier and happier families, and wish to manipulate the levers of the state to crush them and steal their property on your behalf.

I don't think that is accurate, but let me try to get as close as possible with something that is accurate:

* I am not envious of people with wealthy and happy families. After all, I have exactly such a family.

* I am empathetic with people that don't have such a family.

* I recognise that there are a lot of the former, who are wealthy beyond their needs due to no merit of their own, while there are a lot of the latter who live below their needs despite their merits.

* I want the state to provide for the poor up to what they need, and to fund it they can take some from the rich who got it without merit.

* Inheritance is the perfect place. After all, the estate is given for neither merit nor need. And the owner of the estate doesn't exist anymore, so has no more moral rights.

You really need to think about all of this a lot more. I know you think you are advocating for nice things but this is evil. It's wrong.

>the owner of the estate doesn't exist anymore, so has no more moral rights

This is psychopathic. By this logic, it's open season as soon as a person's heart stops. Feed the body to your dogs, rape their corpse, burn it, cut it up for fun, set their car on fire, smash your way into their house and shit on the floor... They have no rights, right? So none of this is wrong. There is no victim. No right has been violated.

Here's a little tip for you: You can donate your children's would-be inheritance voluntarily. Nobody is stopping you. If you really believe you haven't earned your wealth, you have no right to it as soon as you're gone, and random strangers deserve it more than your own children, then do that. I fully support that. But leave my family out of it. Stop cowardly nagging the state to carry out your crimes.

Your analogy is plain wrong. To start with people with inheritances can and do own multiple homes.

I'm sorry, I genuinly don't understand your point. Could you expand a bit?

> Hypothetical scenario: we have 100 houses, and 200 young families looking for one. Your solution in effect is: let's give 100 houses to the 100 young people with an inheritance

This assumes that each family only gets a single house. With enough wealth you can buy out all the houses (not considering other factors)

Of course? I think we are debating the same side of this point though: "Inheritance is a horrible way to divide prosperity within society, as it doesn't take into account the wants or needs of the people still alive."

If that is not the case, I unfortunately still didn't get your point.

That is a problem with housing and supply-side in European countries.

The reason there is an issue with housing is the same reason why these articles appear declaiming the political risks (notice, Stigliz only says the risk is political...his friends losing office) of inequality.

This will continue forever, it is ingrained in human nature, it is why it took tens of thousands of years for economic growth to happen from the birth of modern human society.

> Inheritance is in most cases the only way young people in a lot of European countries can even own their own home

Only if you don't build enough new homes in places where people desire to live, because you can own a home - just not where you want to actually live.

That observation is correct, but I'd challenge the implication that "therefore inheritance must be allowed to continue in its current form".

Why are houses so expensive? Alongside challenges and inefficiences related to permits and building (as plenty discussed elsewhere) housing is also used as an investment asset by people with money to invest. This ranges from individuals buying an apartment to rent out, to large investment and private equity firms buying up whole swathes of real estate. When the global money supply is increased (e.g. post-2008 crash, post-Covid, etc.) a lot of it ends up with the rich, who then invest directly or indirectly in asset classes including housing. (Also see how e.g. classic car prices have increased since ~'08).

Until this mechanism is recognised as the cause of asset appreciation and measures are put in place to reverse this trend, the current cost-of-living issues will continue to worsen. Sadly, most politicians are already rich enough to benefit from this situation, and so --in the unlikely event that they even recognise this as a cause-- are unlikely to strongly advocate for measures to address it. Additionally, politics in many countries is too intertwined with big business to mean that such a revolutionary concept would be entertained.

tl;dr: addressing the huge progressive accumulation of wealth by the rich --of which inheritance is one aspect-- is what is needed to address the continual appreciation in so many asset classes, including housing.

> Until this mechanism is recognised as the cause of asset appreciation

What do you mean "until"? It's the core of many of European "dreams".

Take UK for example, where there's a concept called "property ladder". This property ladder is the promise of ever increasing property values, to build wealth(it's a pyramid scheme). This "always appreciating" promise is not just subtextual, it's literally the core of the method for becoming wealthy.

Whole economies in Europe are built around this constant real estate appreciation and first-home-buyers' support.

This is becoming the case in US as well, to lesser extent. US has a much more dynamic property market, than the wealthy Europe.

Politicians will bend over backwards to protect this "dream"... and at this point it is screwing over the new generation.

> What do you mean "until"? It's the core of many of European "dreams".

Sorry if I was unclear; I'm not referring to the "housing ladder" here, but rather that the accumulation of wealth (accelerated in recent years) by the already-rich has driven investment patterns that have in turn driven the appreciation of many asset classes that sit behind the current "cost of living crisis".

If one accepts this premise, then an obvious solution would be wealth taxation, of which inheritance tax is one form. But very few people in the politican/economics sphere are seriously talking about wealth taxation. (There are some, e.g. Gary Stevenson, and Zack Polanski is gently flirting with it as a policy.)

Let's just make the first million (€/$) "tax free", everything else increase progressively up to 100% over 100 millions or any other value.

Maybe thats why we need to focus on the underlying issue instead of using inheritance to postpone it/burden next generation with it.

And what do you suggest for those that don't have any inheritance?