I don't believe in inheritance. It is purely based on random luck and it is close to impossible to escape bad luck which one has no control. It's no wonder society lauds and considers the escapists as heroes.
It's crazy why nothing has been done to fix it. By sheer random luck, a kid (and their future generations) born in a wealthy family reaps the benefits of an "easy" life".
This has nothing to do with socialism but common sense. The playing field has never equal and capitalism was supposed to make it equal at least for kids. If we don't find an innovative solution (not idiocy of perpetual redistribution of wealth) for this problem, we are playing with a time-bomb of violent revolution.
A good piece on - To Tackle Inequality, We Need to Start Talking About Where Wealth Comes From:
Someone that is born in the UK will earn more than someone born in Sub-Saharan Africa, even if they perform exactly the same labour. Why? Because one was lucky enough to be born in a powerful country with a legacy of imperialism that has rigged the rules of the global economy in its favour. The economist Branko Milanovic has estimated that 60% of someone’s income is determined by where they were born, and an additional 20% is determined by the income level of their parents. This means that place of birth and parental background accounts for around 80% of someone’s earning power on average.
In the age of the ‘self-made’ millionaire, the lottery of birth is more important than ever. As George Monbiot once said: “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”
Within countries, extreme fortunes almost always derive from control over a scare resource – fossil fuels, minerals, land, monopoly networks, money etc. To the early classical economists, this kind of wealth – attained by simply being a gatekeeper to scarce resources – was deemed to be unearned, and referred to it as ‘economic rent’. But today the Sunday Times Rich List is dominated by rentiers – financiers, real estate tycoons, oil barons, monopolists and aristocrats – many of whom acquired their original fortune in somewhat questionable circumstances.
As Grace Blakeley puts it: “You do not become a billionaire through labour. You become a billionaire through inheritance, corruption or economic rents – or, in most cases, some mixture of all three.”
A good paper detailing the share of inheritance in the US and Europe between 1900 to 2010; please don't focus on the authors (I am not a fan of them) but understand reality.
This paper provides historical series on the evolution of the share of inherited wealth in aggregate private wealth in Europe (France, the UK, Germany, Sweden) and the USA over the 1900–2010 period. Until 1910, the inheritance share was very high in Europe (70–80%). It then fell abruptly following the 1914–45 shocks, down to about 30–40% during the 1950–80 period, and is back to 50–60% (and rising) since around 2010. The US pattern also appears to be U-shaped, albeit less marked, and with significant uncertainty regarding recent trends, due to data limitations. We discuss possible interpretations for these long-run patterns.
The key is to understand the insanity of inheritance and how rigged is the game for an unborn child. I don't have a complete solution on how the world would work without inheritance; i.e. if someone dies what will happen to his or her wealth. The focus here is to understand inheritance is a problem and not find an alternative to it. If we collectively as a society understand the problem, the solution will evolve over time.
If I had an hour to save the world, I'd spend the first 55 minutes defining the problem.
- Albert Einstein
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