So? Whats the issue? That's the point. I work hard to help my kids. They're supposed to be better off because of my work. That's the reason many of us get up in the morning. Dont take that away from me.
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.
So there's a lie being told to the rest of us that life is supposed to be reasonably fair and that we're supposed to work toward keeping it that way. Keeping that lie while many people are intentionally trying to subvert the concept by having kids start life at different points is an unnecessary cruelty.
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.
> So there's a lie being told to the rest of us that life is supposed to be reasonably fair and that we're supposed to work toward keeping it that way.
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).
>So there's a lie being told to the rest of us that life is supposed to be reasonably fair and that we're supposed to work toward keeping it that way. Keeping that lie while many people are intentionally trying to subvert the concept by having kids start life at different points is an unnecessary cruelty.
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.
I'm not sure if I should upvote this or not... I mean, I went to a "less competitive" college to start out with, then ended up at a major university for a masters and then another major university for a PhD. I have definitely been upwardly mobile due to my education and it didn't cause me much debt. No, I'm not a 1%er, but my station in life improved greatly from the humble place I started from. That's the American Dream, right? No guarantees, just maybe a chance at something better.
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.
Other people also work hard to help their kids. Many even work multiple jobs and gruelling hours. The point is, we have a system that doesn't reward hard work, but instead rewards rentiers, people who do no productive work (relatively speaking) and yet keep getting rich.
Yeah, this is the point that the parent is making.
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).
Sorry the school system lied to you, you're supposed to work smart, not hard.
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.
New flash Mr. or Ms. 1%, the other way around is an actual problem that people deal with everyday. There are people who probably work harder and sacrifice more than you everyday, yet they're working class and in poverty.
Isn't that the case for anyone? Isn't there always someone out there with a sob story that can top yours?
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?
News flash Mr. or Ms. communist, life isn't fair. Maybe those people should have worked smarter and sacrificed the right things. How many people do you know in poverty who read books? Nonfiction books?
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?
Hypothetically, capitalism and meritocracy work because people who provide societal value are rewarded. When those rewards are diverted to others who have created no value, the system does not work. We call that nepotism and cronyism.
>Hypothetically, capitalism and meritocracy work because people who provide societal value are rewarded.
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.
Because money is not a self-renewing resource, in all but the most extreme circumstances, the resources controlled by those who have created no value get exhausted relatively quickly. If someone is not interested in losing access to those resources permanently, they are motivated to make independent value contributions, at least insofar as we assume that things that renew monetary supplies are valuable.
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.
This makes no sense. Being in the top 1%, by most people's measures, should always come down to working to be there. It is accepted that some things are easier to learn at the top, so that they do have an advantage of education. However, they should still be working hard to be there.
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.
On the other side, if you were to achieve dynastical levels of wealth, should you be prevented from passing it down? Should your descendants centuries in the future be forced to prove they deserve their position as a 1%er?
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.
Define "top". Having a lot of money does not make you a top businessperson any more than it makes you a top athlete. Also, define "ahead". Having a lot of resources doesn't necessarily mean you're "ahead" of anything. And isn't the thought process that someone should try to "get ahead" sort of the root problem here, anyway? Who do you want to get ahead of, and why do they deserve to be behind you?
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.
So? Whats the issue? That's the point. I work hard to help my kids.
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 don't think anyone would argue that parents shouldn't be able to send their kids to top universities. 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.
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.
> 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 don't think anyone would argue that parents shouldn't be able to send their kids to top universities.
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.
>However, despite top universities accepting significant quantities of low-income and minority students
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]
Some people believe in equality of opportunity (as opposed to equality of outcome). When privileged children are protected from their bad behavior and decisions, the class gap widens.
The opposite means that parents have very little reason to care about how well they raise their kids. Maybe thats a good thing, but I think its a bad thing. Mainly because then many of us would have very little happiness in life. The drive to make your kids succeed is very motivating. It gives purpose to life for many of us.
Why should children be allowed to receive gifts from their parents (aka inheritance)? It's a really weird question.
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.
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.
It's an issue because so much of the justification for less taxes on the 1% and on inheritance is centered on the idea that they somehow "earned it." Also that you are punishing people who are not part of these extremely wealthy households, but could be if they "worked hard".
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.
This article seems to be missing an obvious point: The top 1% earn most of their money from investments rather than salary. And since rich parents will often give their assets to their children (in the form of trust funds or inheritance) it's natural that the children will also be rich.
In fact, I'm surprised at how little advantage there is to having rich parents. Someone whose parents' income is in the top 1% and graduates from an elite university has less than a one-in-five chance of staying in the top 1%.
Top 1% income includes a lot of people who are just barely in that 1% and get most of their money from income. Many people go in and out of that top 1% in good and bad years so it's not as fixed as your thinking. Wealthy people may even have a net negative income for multiple years while keeping a 7 figure lifestyle.
Even wealth is tricky as someone's wealth at death is probably a better indicator. Though again complicated by trusts that are not in their name.
Citations? I think the top 1% is a much more stable group than this indicates. Top 10%, I would completely agree with here.
And I fully accept I could be wrong. I'm currently googling a few things, to see if I am off here. I'm asking not to be a jerk, but this is put forward as fact here. So I'm assuming you have actual numbers to back this up.
Studies of lottery winners show regression to the mean over generations. Self-earners do not. What do you think the discrepancy's cause is, given your hypothesis?
A lump sum of money and an estate built around extracting wealth from economic processes are two different things. The typical lottery winner doesn't have the social connections or technical skills necessary to create such an estate themself. Having money quite obviously is different from having investments.
If the lottery winning family does not focus on wealth accumulation, then their wealth will regress towards the mean for their lifestyle. If the lottery winner puts all their winnings in an index fund, that would be a good start to creating such an intergenerational estate.
However, surprising perhaps to many people, not everyone is interested in turning money into more money. People who try to make money, surprise, have the skills, connections, and desire to do so. Of course, wanting to be such a "self-earner" doesn't mean one has the means or the luck to become one.
The key point is this: if your estate is currently extracting wealth from investments, odds are that you inherited that estate. Your family having money in the past is a precondition of such a state, but it is not sufficient to sustain it. Wanting to be the first generation of your family with wealth extraction privileges does not mean you'll succeed and most such aspirants fail.
Maintaining weath is something weather family's teach their kids. Avoiding losing the fortune is not that hard, but requires a focus on doing so. Further, family's tend to spread weath between members. If you have wealthy friends and hit bad times then plenty of people may help you get a leg up. But, if you are the only person is a circle with weath you end up helping a large group which can't help you back.
As an example, a weathly family friend may help with tuition. Or funding a business venture, which is how people may go broke and then become rich again.
In the case of the Chinese that might also have been caused in the past by communists taking over the country and nationalizing everything or by people from up-North invading and making themselves rulers.
Things are much more stable in Europe, not to mention the US. The Nazis were, generally speaking, quite friendly towards accumulated wealth (unless you were a Jew, of course), and in case of Britain the last major "all of your accumulated stuff is ours"-thingie happened after the Norman invasion, almost 1,000 years ago.
I would guess that the author read the study from which the report is based, and noted the section defining 'Child Income' :
"Our primary measure of child income is total pre-tax
individual
earnings. For
single filers, individual earnings is defined as the sum of wage earnings and net self-employment
income"
They go on to say how they also measured child income in the same manner as for parents (including investment income, etc) to see if that made a difference.
I don't see why it's surprising. Unless you're exceptionally lucky as well as exceptionally successful, it takes more than one working lifetime to amass enough wealth to be in the top 1%, and so you will only get there if you inherit some significant amount of wealth.
What I find most interesting is the article's assumption that the biggest predictor should be which college you go to, a perception which the 'best' collages have spent millions of dollars to create.
"Unless you're exceptionally lucky as well as exceptionally successful, it takes more than one working lifetime to amass enough wealth to be in the top 1%, and so you will only get there if you inherit some significant amount of wealth."
Not really. In terms of income, it's $500K/year.
If you go into certain kinds of banking from a decent school, and do well, you can 'easily' earn that.
Again, this is 1% income, not assets of which I'm speaking.
But even then - if you spend 30 years in banking, and do well, you'll probably be in the 1%.
If you were to say the top 0.05% - I think I might be more inclined to agree with you.
Most of the 1% are not 'rich', they're really the upper bounds of 'upper middle class' - I'd say the 0.1% is where you can start calling yourself 'wealthy' in terms of economic class.
I'm sorry, but you must be out of touch with reality.
Certain kinds of banking from a decent school? You mean an Ivy League or top school with acceptance rates lower than 20%?
The reality is, you must be exceptionally lucky to have the circumstances that get you into your so-called "decent" school that gets you into "certain kids of banking" that allow you to "easily" earn 1% income.
It's serfs and masters, and it always has been. Since a few hundred years ago, a creative/merchant/white collar class clawed their way a bit above the serfs, but the gap between all of us and the 1% is still enormous. Sure there are individual outliers between those two close lumps on the scale, and between the very distant lump and the rest of us, but lest we forget, those that have the gold make the rules.
This is an excellent point, whose magnitude I have come to appreciate more recently.
One of my favorite ruminations on the fundamental role that inequality plays in civilized society comes from "Midnight Tides" by Steven Erikson:
"As they walked, Tehol spoke '... the assumption is the foundation stone of Letherii society, perhaps all societies the world over. The notion of inequity, my friends. For from inequity derives the concept of value, whether measured by money or the countless other means of gauging human worth. Simply put, there resides in all of us the un-challenged belief that the poor and the starving are in some way deserving of their fate. In other words, there will always be poor people. A truism to grant structure to the continual task of comparison, the establishment through observation of not our mutual similarities, but our essential differences.
'I know what you're thinking, to which I have no choice but to challenge you both. Like this. Imagine walking down this street, doling out coins by the thousands. Until everyone here is in possession of vast wealth. A solution? No, you say, because among these suddenly rich folk there will be perhaps a majority who will prove wasteful, profligate, and foolish, and before long they will be poor once again. Besides, if wealth were distributed in such a fashion, the coins themselves would lose all value - they would cease being useful. And without such utility, the entire social structure we love so dearly would collapse.
'Ah, but to that I say, so what? There are other ways of measuring self-worth. To which you both heatedly reply: with no value applicable to labour, all sense of worth vanishes! And in answer to that I simply smile and shake my head. Labour and its product become the negotiable commodities. But wait, you object, then value sneaks in after all! Because a man who makes bricks cannot be equated with, say, a man who paints portraits. Material is inherently value-laden, on the basis of our need to assert comparison - but ah, was I not challenging the very assumption that one must proceed with such intricate structures of value?
'And so you ask, what's your point, Tehol? To which I reply with a shrug. Did I say my discourse was a valuable means of using this time? I did not. No, you assumed it was. Thus proving my point!'"
it has always been like that.Few powerful people only.Unfortunatelly socialism emerged like a fake and dangerous pseudosaviour and from then on many people think we are supposed to be 'equal'.
If I buy a house, and give the house to my children when they retire (and they either use it or sell it to get one they want to use), they'll never have to pay rent, only taxes and maintenance.
They can use that money to invest, to take longer to pick better job, to train and get better at what they do...and eventually they can take all of that, and give it to their children who'll be even richer, and so on.
The only way to prevent this from happening is to ban inheritance, which would be all sorts of bullshit.
There's not a whole lot of benefit to society of inheritances. Inheritances mostly just distorts society and encourages a "fuck you, got mine" attitude
We should certainly be more aggressive about taxing inheritances since we are very far from the point where people will stop working because they have no desire for money.
The inheritance tax is a tax on people who were too stupid to put their money in a family trust or similar arrangement before they died. It's trivial to avoid if you are the kind of person who has enough money to be subject to such a tax. Increase the tax, and avoidance will increase as well.
What gives you the right to treat other people's hard work as some kind of treasure chest you can loot? How about I come to your house and start drinking your beer? There's not a lot of benefit to society for you to have beer in your fridge, after all. You could be feeding some orphans or helping some refugees instead of lazing around drinking beer.
If you want something, work for it. Don't steal it from others.
>The only way to prevent this from happening is to ban inheritance, which would be all sorts of bullshit.
Shifting the tax and legal system to favor earned rather than unearned income would easily prevent it.
One example of this would be a land value tax. Another would be watering down patent enforcement. Another would be strengthening bankruptcy protections. Another would be strong enforcement of anti-trust law.
> ban inheritance, which
> would be all sorts of
> bullshit
My only concern about a 100% inheritance tax is enforcement — what other bullshit is there? If there is one thing I can absolutely guarantee you, it's that once you're dead, you won't care what happens to your money.
I fail to see any benefit to society of people receiving unearned money for having the right parents.
Edit: as always, this is an unfailingly unpopular view. I'd encourage you to comment on what you don't like about it, though.
Takes money to make money. Plus, if you grow up in the top 1% the way you see the world, and the opportunities you're exposed to are dramatically different to those in the bottom half... Or, really, even in the 80th-90th percentile.
I was very expensively educated despite having lower-middle class parents (the government paid). I worked at Pizza Hut during the holidays while classmates went to private islands.
Simply put, if I had told my teachers I wanted to be Prime Minister one day, they'd have told me I needed to enroll in debate club and study politics, rather than laughing or doubting my ability. As a child at school, nobody ever doubted or questioned that me and my classmates would run the world one day, and lo and behold, many of my classmates at 33 are in positions of considerable influence, power, and/or wealth. It is generally very very easy to spot other people who went to expensive private boarding schools in social and work situations.
Was this expensive education as helpful for you and other folks from the relatively lower economic class as for private island hopping students (in terms of career opportunities)?
This is very true. In my experience many people from money carry a certain confidence and expectation. They're higher on Maslows pyramid and they're not worrying about the wolf howling at their door. There's a certain ritual of knowledge that wealthy people have -- a kind of of dance signals if you're in or your out.
The real advantage to being rich is that failure carries little to no consequence. You get many do-overs, and aren't stuck eating ramen in the bootstrap stage.
The really proper term is "the owning class": those for which money is invested, to produce goods, which are then sold for a profit to make money. This contrasts with everyone else, who uses labor to produce goods, which makes wages, which are then spent to consume goods.
The US median family income is ~$50k/yr. Most people think that you can spend 4% of capital indefinitely. So to make $50k/yr you need $1.25M. If you have $1.25M in assets you are in the 92nd percentile(1).
So apparently you don't even have to be in the 1% to be in "the owning class" and get by as well as the median American household.
That's a much better term, and I agree, with one caveat - more and more the owning class don't invest in production (the 'real economy') but in financial instruments that really at the heart make money by extracting value from the productive sectors.
Readit News
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism
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.
In fact, I'm surprised at how little advantage there is to having rich parents. Someone whose parents' income is in the top 1% and graduates from an elite university has less than a one-in-five chance of staying in the top 1%.
Even wealth is tricky as someone's wealth at death is probably a better indicator. Though again complicated by trusts that are not in their name.
And I fully accept I could be wrong. I'm currently googling a few things, to see if I am off here. I'm asking not to be a jerk, but this is put forward as fact here. So I'm assuming you have actual numbers to back this up.
http://http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2007/11/2...
If the lottery winning family does not focus on wealth accumulation, then their wealth will regress towards the mean for their lifestyle. If the lottery winner puts all their winnings in an index fund, that would be a good start to creating such an intergenerational estate.
However, surprising perhaps to many people, not everyone is interested in turning money into more money. People who try to make money, surprise, have the skills, connections, and desire to do so. Of course, wanting to be such a "self-earner" doesn't mean one has the means or the luck to become one.
The key point is this: if your estate is currently extracting wealth from investments, odds are that you inherited that estate. Your family having money in the past is a precondition of such a state, but it is not sufficient to sustain it. Wanting to be the first generation of your family with wealth extraction privileges does not mean you'll succeed and most such aspirants fail.
As an example, a weathly family friend may help with tuition. Or funding a business venture, which is how people may go broke and then become rich again.
Things are much more stable in Europe, not to mention the US. The Nazis were, generally speaking, quite friendly towards accumulated wealth (unless you were a Jew, of course), and in case of Britain the last major "all of your accumulated stuff is ours"-thingie happened after the Norman invasion, almost 1,000 years ago.
"Our primary measure of child income is total pre-tax individual earnings. For single filers, individual earnings is defined as the sum of wage earnings and net self-employment income"
They go on to say how they also measured child income in the same manner as for parents (including investment income, etc) to see if that made a difference.
Dead Comment
What I find most interesting is the article's assumption that the biggest predictor should be which college you go to, a perception which the 'best' collages have spent millions of dollars to create.
Not really. In terms of income, it's $500K/year.
If you go into certain kinds of banking from a decent school, and do well, you can 'easily' earn that.
Again, this is 1% income, not assets of which I'm speaking.
But even then - if you spend 30 years in banking, and do well, you'll probably be in the 1%.
If you were to say the top 0.05% - I think I might be more inclined to agree with you.
Most of the 1% are not 'rich', they're really the upper bounds of 'upper middle class' - I'd say the 0.1% is where you can start calling yourself 'wealthy' in terms of economic class.
Certain kinds of banking from a decent school? You mean an Ivy League or top school with acceptance rates lower than 20%?
The reality is, you must be exceptionally lucky to have the circumstances that get you into your so-called "decent" school that gets you into "certain kids of banking" that allow you to "easily" earn 1% income.
I'd like to see your sources.
This is an excellent point, whose magnitude I have come to appreciate more recently.
One of my favorite ruminations on the fundamental role that inequality plays in civilized society comes from "Midnight Tides" by Steven Erikson:
"As they walked, Tehol spoke '... the assumption is the foundation stone of Letherii society, perhaps all societies the world over. The notion of inequity, my friends. For from inequity derives the concept of value, whether measured by money or the countless other means of gauging human worth. Simply put, there resides in all of us the un-challenged belief that the poor and the starving are in some way deserving of their fate. In other words, there will always be poor people. A truism to grant structure to the continual task of comparison, the establishment through observation of not our mutual similarities, but our essential differences.
'I know what you're thinking, to which I have no choice but to challenge you both. Like this. Imagine walking down this street, doling out coins by the thousands. Until everyone here is in possession of vast wealth. A solution? No, you say, because among these suddenly rich folk there will be perhaps a majority who will prove wasteful, profligate, and foolish, and before long they will be poor once again. Besides, if wealth were distributed in such a fashion, the coins themselves would lose all value - they would cease being useful. And without such utility, the entire social structure we love so dearly would collapse.
'Ah, but to that I say, so what? There are other ways of measuring self-worth. To which you both heatedly reply: with no value applicable to labour, all sense of worth vanishes! And in answer to that I simply smile and shake my head. Labour and its product become the negotiable commodities. But wait, you object, then value sneaks in after all! Because a man who makes bricks cannot be equated with, say, a man who paints portraits. Material is inherently value-laden, on the basis of our need to assert comparison - but ah, was I not challenging the very assumption that one must proceed with such intricate structures of value?
'And so you ask, what's your point, Tehol? To which I reply with a shrug. Did I say my discourse was a valuable means of using this time? I did not. No, you assumed it was. Thus proving my point!'"
They can use that money to invest, to take longer to pick better job, to train and get better at what they do...and eventually they can take all of that, and give it to their children who'll be even richer, and so on.
The only way to prevent this from happening is to ban inheritance, which would be all sorts of bullshit.
We should certainly be more aggressive about taxing inheritances since we are very far from the point where people will stop working because they have no desire for money.
If you want something, work for it. Don't steal it from others.
Shifting the tax and legal system to favor earned rather than unearned income would easily prevent it.
One example of this would be a land value tax. Another would be watering down patent enforcement. Another would be strengthening bankruptcy protections. Another would be strong enforcement of anti-trust law.
I fail to see any benefit to society of people receiving unearned money for having the right parents.
Edit: as always, this is an unfailingly unpopular view. I'd encourage you to comment on what you don't like about it, though.
I'm not saying anything about your conclusion, but your reasoning is flawed.
Well we already have a partial ban, in the form of the estate tax. We could make it a full ban.
Simply put, if I had told my teachers I wanted to be Prime Minister one day, they'd have told me I needed to enroll in debate club and study politics, rather than laughing or doubting my ability. As a child at school, nobody ever doubted or questioned that me and my classmates would run the world one day, and lo and behold, many of my classmates at 33 are in positions of considerable influence, power, and/or wealth. It is generally very very easy to spot other people who went to expensive private boarding schools in social and work situations.
The proper term is "the 0.01%".
So apparently you don't even have to be in the 1% to be in "the owning class" and get by as well as the median American household.
[1] According to http://www.shnugi.com/networth-percentile-calculator/ which I found via a quick Google search. I won't vouch for it's accuracy but I'm guessing it's in the ballpark.
Michael Hudson has some interesting writing on the subject, such as this journal article, 'Finance is not the Economy' - http://michael-hudson.com/2016/08/finance-is-not-the-economy...
Hence, why the term "rentier class" is actually meaningful, even though it's from a disreputable economic tradition.
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