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I limited my hypotheticals to a single generation because I was interested in learning specifically what it is about inheritence that people find unfair. Your

by c22 4y ago

I limited my hypotheticals to a single generation because I was interested in learning specifically what it is about inheritence that people find unfair. Your response would seem to posit a different set of questions, namely should capital be used to make decisions for society and does a concentration of capital force those without to work a lifetime of menial jobs? I'm less interested in addressing these questions since I've heard a lot about them before and I think it will take us on a further tangent from the original discussion. But I will just say that I see no difference between a first generation person who doesn't work and a tenth generation person who doesn't work beyond perhaps an abstract greater disconnection from the rest of society and the concept of hard working. And that for capital to have influence over society it must be deployed which carries with it the risk of losing said capital.

saghm 4y ago
I'm not sure how you can separate the question about inheritance fairness from multiple generations other than in a very abstract sense because I think the unfairness is most often perceived with wealth that is so great that it will last beyond just the immediate heirs lifetimes. An inheritance of $10,000 is likely not going to last long enough to be passed on to one's own children, but an inheritance of hundreds of millions is presumably not going to be entirely used up in one generation.
- c22 4y ago
  Why does the number of generations that can free ride matter? If Warren Buffett can make 100 billion dollars in a single generation then he can skew society today. How would it be any different if he'd inherited it from his parents? Or his great great great to the nth grandparents? If there is a problem with concentrated wealth why is it more of a problem if it took a long time to accrue or to deplete or if it was accrued 200 years ago or this morning?
  - saghm 4y ago
    Let's say that there are three tables being used for playing Monopoly. Each of these games is played between a player designated A and a player designated B. At table 1, the game is played under standard rules. At table 2, the game is played with the standard rules, except at the end of the game, all of the money that the winning player has is given to player A in addition to their regular starting amount. At table 3, the same rules are played as at table 2, except that money is only passed on to player A in games where they did not start with additional extra money from the previous game. Each table plays 10,000 games, and then the number of wins for each player are counted. Which table do you expect to have the greatest difference in the number of wins between players A and B, and which would you expect to have the least difference in wins between players A and B? I'd consider the table with the least expected difference of wins to be the most "fair", and the table with the greatest expected difference to be the least fair. My hypothesis is that table 1 would be the most fair, followed by table 3, and then table 2 would be the least fair. Translating this to inheritance in the real world, I think being able to give an advantage to one's descendants for 10 generations is less fair than being able to give it to only one generation. In the context of something like an estate tax, I could imagine something like an implementation where accepting an inheritance incurs a higher tax rate on any money bequeathed up to the amount you inherited. For example, if I inherit $1,000,000 over my lifetime and then leave $5,000,000 to my heir, maybe the first $1,000,000 might incur an extra 10% tax, but then the remaining $4,000,000 is taxed at the regular rate. For something like this to be seriously implemented, I expect that it might need do account for more things (e.g. adjustment for inflation), but at least as far as I can see it seems like a pretty reasonable idea. It's possible that something like this already exists though!
    - c22 4y ago
      Monopoly is an extremely crude model of the real world. To strain the analogy further, why are you always transferring wins to player A? A better model is to just let both players keep whatever they have at the end of each game and use it to start the next game. Oh, and also at the end of each game you die and are replaced with a completely different person. But none of this matters because Monopoly is not real life. The wealthy used to amass real physical resources; ores, livestock, land, people... Now we mostly have them chasing digital zeroes in a bank account. It really is much better. So some people buy a yacht every now and again? That's great! Yachtmakers have a reason to go to work every day and the world keeps spinning. If you think there should be a cap on the total amount of zeroes anyone can hold at one time I totally get where you're coming from, but I don't get the obsession with taking a cut when someone dies beyond the normal cut we take when people just transfer wealth to eachother because a clever person will just make a plan to do this before they die and that is unfair to folks that aren't so clever.

by c22 4y ago

saghm 4y ago

I'm not sure how you can separate the question about inheritance fairness from multiple generations other than in a very abstract sense because I think the unfairness is most often perceived with wealth that is so great that it will last beyond just the immediate heirs lifetimes. An inheritance of $10,000 is likely not going to last long enough to be passed on to one's own children, but an inheritance of hundreds of millions is presumably not going to be entirely used up in one generation.

c22 4y ago
Why does the number of generations that can free ride matter? If Warren Buffett can make 100 billion dollars in a single generation then he can skew society today. How would it be any different if he'd inherited it from his parents? Or his great great great to the nth grandparents? If there is a problem with concentrated wealth why is it more of a problem if it took a long time to accrue or to deplete or if it was accrued 200 years ago or this morning?
- saghm 4y ago
  Let's say that there are three tables being used for playing Monopoly. Each of these games is played between a player designated A and a player designated B. At table 1, the game is played under standard rules. At table 2, the game is played with the standard rules, except at the end of the game, all of the money that the winning player has is given to player A in addition to their regular starting amount. At table 3, the same rules are played as at table 2, except that money is only passed on to player A in games where they did not start with additional extra money from the previous game. Each table plays 10,000 games, and then the number of wins for each player are counted. Which table do you expect to have the greatest difference in the number of wins between players A and B, and which would you expect to have the least difference in wins between players A and B? I'd consider the table with the least expected difference of wins to be the most "fair", and the table with the greatest expected difference to be the least fair. My hypothesis is that table 1 would be the most fair, followed by table 3, and then table 2 would be the least fair. Translating this to inheritance in the real world, I think being able to give an advantage to one's descendants for 10 generations is less fair than being able to give it to only one generation. In the context of something like an estate tax, I could imagine something like an implementation where accepting an inheritance incurs a higher tax rate on any money bequeathed up to the amount you inherited. For example, if I inherit $1,000,000 over my lifetime and then leave $5,000,000 to my heir, maybe the first $1,000,000 might incur an extra 10% tax, but then the remaining $4,000,000 is taxed at the regular rate. For something like this to be seriously implemented, I expect that it might need do account for more things (e.g. adjustment for inflation), but at least as far as I can see it seems like a pretty reasonable idea. It's possible that something like this already exists though!
  - c22 4y ago
    Monopoly is an extremely crude model of the real world. To strain the analogy further, why are you always transferring wins to player A? A better model is to just let both players keep whatever they have at the end of each game and use it to start the next game. Oh, and also at the end of each game you die and are replaced with a completely different person. But none of this matters because Monopoly is not real life. The wealthy used to amass real physical resources; ores, livestock, land, people... Now we mostly have them chasing digital zeroes in a bank account. It really is much better. So some people buy a yacht every now and again? That's great! Yachtmakers have a reason to go to work every day and the world keeps spinning. If you think there should be a cap on the total amount of zeroes anyone can hold at one time I totally get where you're coming from, but I don't get the obsession with taking a cut when someone dies beyond the normal cut we take when people just transfer wealth to eachother because a clever person will just make a plan to do this before they die and that is unfair to folks that aren't so clever.