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What percentage of someone’s inheritance is money they worked for, or money they deserve? Is inheritance compatible with meritocratic ideas?

• Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Meritocracy is a terrible framework. All you're doing is conflating greed, willingness to exploit, luck, and scarcity of attributes with goodness. Noone deserves anything other than access to a healthy community and a share of those things we have enough of for everyone. Capital (ie. the control over the physical commodities of the world including accumulated past labour whether assigned by markets, by political power, or by favour of those higher in a heirarchy) is agglomerative, and systems that don't redistribute it are pathologically broken. If your system assigns power and privilege to power, then you wind up with mentally ill power-seekers in control of everything. It should then be hardly surprising that they abuse the people under them and oppress and kill in order to get even more power.
  • epgui 4y ago
    I just want to point out that what you're describing isn't meritocracy... you're describing what happens when systems are not meritocratic, or when meritocracy breaks down. The "meritocracy trap" is well-known (see for example Michael Sandel's critique of same), but it says more about what changes are needed to get to a more truly meritocratic state, than it does about what meritocracy fundamentally is. Subsidiarily, the critique of meritocracy says less about how good or bad meritocracy is, and more about how the real world we live in is not meritocratic at all. The danger is not "meritocracy" itself, the danger is fooling yourself into thinking that you got where you are because of merit rather than a lot of luck.