This is oddly seen as something to be proud of rather than an embarrassment among some of the media:
>It is encouraging that a man whose family first got rich because his ancestor was the fat huntsman (gros veneur) of William the Conqueror has £9 billion today, 950 years later. It shows that our culture respects private property over government interference. It gives hope to us all.
If you're open to a bit of interesting fiction, _The Wake_ by Paul Kingsnorth is a post apocalyptic novel set after the Norman invasion of 1066. Kingsnorth wrote the book in an invented version of old english:
Here's Kingsnorth writing about the consequences of the Norman invasion upon England today:
> [...] legacies of 1066 remain with us. Take that law enacted by Guillaume in 1067. In Anglo-Saxon England, the idea that one man — the king — literally owned the entire landbase of the nation would have been unthinkable. Today, it remains a legal reality: England is still owned, as a whole, by the Crown. The hereditary monarchy introduced by the Normans remains too, and the French concept known as ‘primogeniture’ — in which estates are inherited wholesale by the first-born son, rather than parceled out between children as was more common in Anglo-Saxon England
> [...] Today, Britain is the country with the second most unequal distribution of land on Earth, after Brazil. More than 70 per cent of the land is owned by fewer than two per cent of the population. Much of this is directly traceable to Guillaume, whose 22nd-great-granddaughter sits on the English throne today.
> [...] ask yourself whether the development of early modern capitalism in England would have been possible without that concentration of land, and therefore power and wealth. What about the consequent empire? Did the industrial revolution begin in England because that funnel of power and money made it possible? Or what about class, which is directly connected to all of those things? We are still one of the most socially and economically stratified countries in Europe. In today’s England, the rulers still drink wine and the ‘plebs’ still drink beer, just as they did in 1066.
> [...] The Duke dealt with this problem in characteristic style: with violence. He marched his army up through the south-east, burning, looting and raping. He circled London, burnt Southwark to the ground and then marched west, brutalising the populations of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire.
Quite, some good old fashioned respect for the rule of law there...
The Wake is an exceptional book. It introduced me to the fact that Welsh meant slave in old English. It also led me to wonder whether the British trait of forelock tugging or deference to a supposed upper class was really just “colonization of the mind”.
Come come old chap, you don't get to be editor of an esteemed organ like the Daily Torygraph by cultivating self-awareness, irony, or other kinds of flim-flammery.
> Upon his father's death, in August 2016, as well as the peerages, he inherited a wealth currently estimated at £9 billion, with considerable trust funds for his sisters. This wealth is held in a trust, of which the Duke is a beneficial owner but not the legal owner — an arrangement which received considerable press attention due to the inheritance tax exemption this confers.
I don't think its to do with fairness, but as this exemplifies, wealth accumulates over generations. If left unchecked then over 400 years a few people own a huge chunk of the world. Why? Is that good for society? Doesn't seem so. Yet society spends a lot of time and money enforcing these laws. Certainly you want your children to inherit if you've done well, but hundreds of years later?
Ownership is a fiction of society, as are most rules, and its probably up to us to decide what "fairness" means. I find it hard to make an argument that someones great grandchildren to the nth level has any claim on this property. So inheritance taxes do seem reasonable.
I have wondered if the modern trend of the rich establishing "foundations" is a way to sidestep inheritance taxes. The foundation will accumulate assets that will be controlled by the heirs some goes to charity which is good for society, but still more and more assets will of necessity be controlled by the foundation and all tax free.
I don’t know. If I’ve been paying taxes over my income all my life, and I’ve chosen to do nothing with what remains, what business is that of the government? It’s just another way of double taxation.
Does it make more sense to think that a grandson should get paid because the grandfather inherited a billion that the son (who dies) wasn't able to spend fast enough to squander? Both inheritance scenarios are conventions and both are a bit silly when presented nakedly without nuance.
You have it backwards. When a person dies, their property becomes unowned (dead people cannot own things). It is active government intervention that takes that unowned property and gives to rich kids on the basis of some scribbles on some pieces of paper.
You say that like it goes to the government and stays there. But really this would just be another part of the public budget. So try it the other way around:
I don't think it's fair that public services for all have to be cut so that some people who's parents (not themselves!) got very rich can stay rich. Let them start out from "wealthy" or from "well off" instead, and let everyone else go from "scraping by" to "okay" in return.
If you extend this logic then it would imply that government should simply prevent anyone from getting rich - dead or alive. If you were socialist then you still wouldn’t have issue with this but for all others this would be infringement on their right to own property and more broadly to achieve prosperity even while doing nothing illegal. In other words, becoming rich should not be an act of crime that leads to stiff penalties.
A more logical view is to think of inheritance as just usual income to other person and hence eligible for usual income tax as contribution towards shared goal of the society.
1. You can extend that argument like that, but I wouldn't. At least not to "there should be no rich people at all". But at some level of wealth, a difference in quantity (of money owned by an individual) becomes a difference in quality, and IMHO we should think really hard if we want that difference to exist in our societies.
2. I agree that an inheritance can/should be treated just like an income. And that's why I applied the usual tax fairness argument of "the more wealth you have, the more responsibility you bear for financing public services, because you have greatly (if perhaps indirectly) benefited from them."
> I'm not sure why everyone thinks it's fair the government should get paid when a citizen dies.
I'd argue that it's even less fair that the government feels it's entitled to a percentage of your income. Taking money from a dead person doesn't seem as bad as taking money from a living person.
Nobody likes taxes, but they have been a part of society for several thousand years.
You might not need your money when you're dead, but people you very much wanted to provide for and support, like your spouse or your children, certainly do need it if they survive you. Providing for one's family is one of the main motivations for people to do productive work and create wealth.
> Do you have a dataset showing people without children work less hard and create less wealth?
That wouldn't be the right calculation. If a person has children, their children will contribute to future GDP. So a proper analysis of having children on the economy would compare the output of:
- someone without children; and
- someone with children plus the net output of their children discounted to present day value.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the average person without children individually contributes more to GDP than the average person with children. However, that's largely because raising children takes time, labor, and resources. The person with children is sacrificing their own individual wealth and production and investing it their children. However, when the children's future production is taken into account, discounted by the future value of that production, I suspect that it turns out the other way.
I don't have data on this and although my suspicions feel correct, maybe they aren't. I'd be genuinely to see such data.
> That wouldn't be the right calculation. If a person has children, their children will contribute to future GDP
I think you're taking that in the wrong direction. The op was suggesting that the primary reason people work hard and create wealth is because they want to leave money for their children after they're dead, and that a redistributive estate tax would prevent that. Essentially: people are primarily motivated to create because of their children.
> The op was suggesting that the primary reason people work hard and create wealth is because they want to leave money for their children after they're dead
No, I was not. I was saying that that is one of the main reasons, not the main reason.
> Do you have a dataset showing people without children work less hard and create less wealth?
That's not what I was claiming. I was only claiming that providing for one's family is one of the main motivations for people to do productive work and create wealth, not that it is the only motivation.
Do you have a dataset showing that people with spouses and children do not do productive work and create wealth?
Of course the thing about systems of rules with people is that they react to incentives in inconvenient ways. At best they would save less to pass on if nobody they cared about would receive any of it.
Really if we valued equality of opportunity at all cost we would either collectivize or randomize children but needless to say that would be incredibly unpopular and not lead to good outcomes given aspects of mammalian child-raising and bonds - we already know from our experience with orphanages that calling the results sub-optimal is an understatement.
That isn't too surprising as an extension of the Upton Sinclair quote
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Essentially those who benefit from the status quo will nearly always rationalize it as why it is a good thing even if it is transparently benefiting from and perpetuating travesties.
It sadly takes a good deal of integrity and self-awareness to not do so.
There seems to be a major cultural force in the UK of enforcing their own bubbles of hereditary elite self-justification at all costs - and that is sadly by no means unique. It has been seen many times throughout history and around globe and usually ends in utter disaster when reality comes along and slaps them in the face - often after many smaller disasters which should have been major warning signs were ignored.
Pandering to their readership. Daily Telegraph is mostly read by rich old white people who need constant reminders that they are upholding ancient and noble traditions to justify their choices.
I don’t need the daily telegraph to remind me of this. Worse than people that exploit others and don’t care are the people that do so and do care to some extend.
Because this is the only positive aspect. In most continental countries family wealth doesn't go that far back not because of enlightened equality but because it was burned in a war or confiscated in a revolution.
It’s certainly impressive to the families that have benefited and more importantly continue to benefit from this stability. If I was a scion of one of these families it would make absolute sense that I would do anything within my power to maintain this status quo.
Looking at that history it’s easy to think that might be how the “born to rule” mentality among the aristocracy in the UK became so entrenched.
To attach this to stability is to implicitly assume that what's important is that the wealth itself was passed down between generations. This would require stability, because if the wealth was all lost in one event, the chain would be irrevocably broken.
The alternative view is that the people in these families have the personal characteristics that allow one to build wealth, and that those characteristics are passed down (either by some kind of conditioning, or genetically, or some combination). This doesn't require much stability at all, since the wealth can all be lost but the capacity to build it is not as long as the person survives.
Examples of the second view can be found in diverse examples like: Wealthy Irans who lost everything in the '79 revolution, moved to America, and rebuilt from nothing to become wealthy again, often not even speaking English to start. Jews after the Holocaust, who lost everything and rebuilt from nothing to now become >17% of global billionaires on 0.1% of global population. And so on.
Though both views are obviously in effect, given the massive instability present throughout history, I'm inclined to say the second causality is dominant over the long term, while the first is only effective over the short term (e.g. trust-fund babies who lose everything in one generation, pro sports players or lottery winners who get millions and lose it all within a few years, etc).
I think it's important to keep both causalities in mind.
Education and development are essentially the most 'durable' of goods - it cannot be stolen once taken - only damaged or destroyed by killing the bearer. In the past nutrition also played a similar role where better nourished aristocrats would have a concrete advantage over peasants.
With no cataclysms to prove their ability to rebuild if needed, wealth's ability to self perpetuate means ascribing it to stability makes sense. Since they would remain wealthy as both with and without the 'virtues' (in the sense of self-promotion as opposed to morality) its presence is irrelevant. All they need to do is avoid doing anything extraordinarily stupid and wasteful.
Good point, theres plenty of storys about aristocrats frittering their wealth away on cards. Genetics? I'll stay away from that one.
I'm not sure it really changes the dynamic very much though. Even if the cream always rises to the top, theres no harm in shaking the milk bottle every so often.
all I'm thinking: it takes a lot of luck and discipline to keep a fortune for 950 years. You could say laws (might forbid sale unless...), but I imagine that they weren't enforced uniformly. Where do you store the title? Imagine what the country went through 950 years.
IIRC, they only lease the land for as much as 999 years, don't sell.
Well not everyone cares, the media gets clicks from the hoards people who can never qualify to even aspire to be in the same situation, but not everyone sees it as an embarrassment
Most weath created in capitalism is a result of very recent development (see all IT companies that top S&P500). The generalizations that this article promotes, do seem akin to communist pamphlets. Those also use populist rethorics and half truth to steer hatred towards the rich.
There's a huge class element to startups. The rich well connected people get more funding faster. The equity distribution and contract negotiations is based on social connections and power dynamics. The access to the right higher education is based on parent's wealth.
I totally have a preference during hiring and promotions whether I like to admit it or not if someone is like me in some substantiative way. I also put up with more bullshit from them. Power perpetuates itself even when you fight again it
The entire silicon valley is dripping with classic robber baron style clubhouse capitalism enormously predetermined by class.
Whenever everything is run by a bunch of similar looking white dudes who grew up in rich neighborhoods claiming it's some bountiful meritocracy of equal opportunity skill based free market Utopia requires some mighty fine rose colored glasses.
There's an important reality here that organizes and filters the structure.
And to ward off the classic responses:
1 It's not necessarily a bad thing.
2 I'm not saying there's something wrong with it
3 I'm blaming nobody
4 I'm not saying it needs fixing
5 I mostly vote libertarian
This is just a reality and your personal politics shouldn't get in the way of acknowledging the sky is blue and water is wet.
YC admits a wide range of founders, and gives them excellent access to SVs networks.
This whole class fatalism/cynicism thing is really disheartening to see repeated over and over on the internet as if it’s some fundamental truth, it doesn’t reflect my experience at all. It’s certainly not “sky is blue and water is wet” level certainty.
Your description is dead on. And it's absolutely dystopian, especially for anyone who falls outside of the specific caste described.
But I find it odd that you wouldn't think there's something wrong with it. Essentially large swaths of the population are locked out. That is a huge problem.
i don't think so, considering that a cornerstone of the marxist historical worldview is that in europe the industrial revolution and bourgeois political revolutions overthew the feudal ruling class and replaced it
>It is encouraging that a man whose family first got rich because his ancestor was the fat huntsman (gros veneur) of William the Conqueror has £9 billion today, 950 years later. It shows that our culture respects private property over government interference. It gives hope to us all.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/13/a-dukes-wealth-i...