New research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) released on Wednesday shows that intergenerational financial support — flowing from older, wealthy family members to younger ones — is increasingly driving inequality.
New research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) released on Wednesday shows that intergenerational financial support — flowing from older, wealthy family members to younger ones — is increasingly driving inequality.
Inherited wealthy is antithetical to an egalitarian society. And people whose lives have been influenced or stand to be influenced by inherited wealth are terrified of egalitarianism.
Take a moment to imagine a world where everybody started from the same point and nobody was able to ride the achievements of their parents or grandparents. We could have a true meritocracy, instead of being ruled by rich people’s spoiled kids.
And when you die, your property goes back to the state to be bought by someone else. If you started and built a company, it goes under democratic control of its employees.
Sounds pretty nice.
I’ve been thinking this for a while, it’s difficult to think about transitioning to a system like this from inside a system that we’re in now. We’re all hardwired to take advantage of anything we can get, because basic necessities are held hostage.
To start with on social change like this, I think we’d need to induce a feeling of safety in the general person. Everyone should have a baseline of their food, shelter, basic needs being met. Only after we have a generation freed from that fear of scarcity can we start making societal changes as large as this, or if we’re lucky it’ll occur by itself as a social movement.
Agreed, there’s a great deal of distance between this and that, and realistically it seems unlikely that it would ever be possible. But it sure is nice to imagine, no need or desire to accumulate more than you need in one lifetime, and nobody starting 10 steps ahead or behind.