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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

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.

tabeth 10y ago
Why is the opposite a "much bigger problem", exactly? The title is that "new data shows that joining the 1% remains unsettlingly hereditary." The opposite of this would be that joining the 1% has nothing to do with heredity. How is this bad?
- paulddraper 10y ago
  It's bad because it's random. Parenting makes no difference, it's just a lottery.
  - tabeth 10y ago
    Something having nothing to do with heredity does not mean it is random.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      True, it doesn't necessarily mean that. A lottery is one way to have zero heredity influence.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  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.
- randyrand 10y ago
  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.
yedava 10y ago
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.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  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).
  - __s 10y ago
    The scarcity of wealth might as well be compared to the scarcity of diamonds
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      Quite the contrary. While the scarcity of diamonds is enforced by a small cabal of diamond hoarders, the scarcity of labor is enforced by unchangeable biological demands that are universal across the human family. 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.
tcbawo 10y ago
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.
banhfun 10y ago
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.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  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?
- 10y ago
Trundle 10y ago
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.
- battlebot 10y ago
  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.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  >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.
acjohnson55 10y ago
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.
- randyrand 10y ago
  My reward is helping my kids. Take that away, and there goes my reward. Capitalism fails at both extremes.
  - acjohnson55 10y ago
    Not all incentives are socially productive. My guess is that if that particular incentive were cancelled out, people would still have plenty other ones to drive private enterprise. And there would be significantly fewer people lucking into enormous amounts of unearned resources.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  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.
kafkaesq 10y ago
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.
gfody 10y ago
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.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  >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.
taeric 10y ago
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.
- conductr 10y ago
  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.
  - tormeh 10y ago
    This crap is infuriating. Wealth. Is. Relative. It's your ability to buy other people's time. Nobody wants to get rich so that they can have a bigger fridge. The middle-upper class has essentially all materialistic wealth they could ever use. They want the prestige and spare time you get when you're rich.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > On the other side, if you were to achieve dynastical levels of wealth, should you be prevented from passing it down? 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.
pandaman 10y ago
> I work hard to help my kids. 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,_Private_Property_and_the_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family,_Priv... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism
nikdaheratik 10y ago
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.

tabeth 10y ago

Why is the opposite a "much bigger problem", exactly? The title is that "new data shows that joining the 1% remains unsettlingly hereditary." The opposite of this would be that joining the 1% has nothing to do with heredity. How is this bad?

paulddraper 10y ago
It's bad because it's random. Parenting makes no difference, it's just a lottery.
- tabeth 10y ago
  Something having nothing to do with heredity does not mean it is random.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    True, it doesn't necessarily mean that. A lottery is one way to have zero heredity influence.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
cookiecaper 10y ago
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.
randyrand 10y ago
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.

yedava 10y ago

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.

cookiecaper 10y ago
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).
- __s 10y ago
  The scarcity of wealth might as well be compared to the scarcity of diamonds
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Quite the contrary. While the scarcity of diamonds is enforced by a small cabal of diamond hoarders, the scarcity of labor is enforced by unchangeable biological demands that are universal across the human family. 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.

tcbawo 10y ago

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.

banhfun 10y ago

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.

cookiecaper 10y ago
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?
10y ago

Trundle 10y ago

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.

battlebot 10y ago
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.
cookiecaper 10y ago
>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.

acjohnson55 10y ago

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.

randyrand 10y ago
My reward is helping my kids. Take that away, and there goes my reward. Capitalism fails at both extremes.
- acjohnson55 10y ago
  Not all incentives are socially productive. My guess is that if that particular incentive were cancelled out, people would still have plenty other ones to drive private enterprise. And there would be significantly fewer people lucking into enormous amounts of unearned resources.
cookiecaper 10y ago
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.

kafkaesq 10y ago

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.

gfody 10y ago

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.

cookiecaper 10y ago
>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.

taeric 10y ago

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.

conductr 10y ago
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.
- tormeh 10y ago
  This crap is infuriating. Wealth. Is. Relative. It's your ability to buy other people's time. Nobody wants to get rich so that they can have a bigger fridge. The middle-upper class has essentially all materialistic wealth they could ever use. They want the prestige and spare time you get when you're rich.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > On the other side, if you were to achieve dynastical levels of wealth, should you be prevented from passing it down? 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.

pandaman 10y ago

> I work hard to help my kids. 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,_Private_Property_and_the_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family,_Priv... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism

nikdaheratik 10y ago

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.