Civilization has been a long struggle to prevent powerful people from passing on their wealth and power to their children. I mean, most of the history of civilization has indeed functioned the way you describe, but many of the achievements of the past few hundred years has been thanks to the monumental effort to strengthen meritocracy, rule of law and democracy in order to limit the transfer of power hereditarily.
Interesting point. One thing that speaks for the relative harmlessness of hereditary wealth is, what happens when it gets passed on to an insane/idiotic/psychopathic heir. In these cases, it normally gets rapidly redistributed, as the heir wastes their fortune. In the case of normal 'power', it doesn't get really redistributed, so everybody has to deal with Emperor Caligula.
>Interesting point. One thing that speaks for the relative harmlessness of hereditary wealth is, what happens when it gets passed on to an insane/idiotic/psychopathic heir. In these cases, it normally gets rapidly redistributed, as the heir wastes their fortune.
We are past that now. Now we have advisors, funds, elite accountants, and all kinds of dead easy ways to invest and keep huge wealth long term, for even the most inane person. Plus those people are not accountable to anyone. It's not like a hated heir of a royal who has to tread lightly anymore, lest the senate or the people take them down...
In fact, inane people can even make a great fortune from scratch in this era, what with the various famous-for-being-famous celebrities...
1. Advisors and accountants do not own the wealth - you set the goals. If you want to spend it or mismanage it, they are not going to stop you.
2. The wealthier you are, the more difficult it is to maintain the real value of your wealth, in general.
3. If you have 3 children, they have 3 children and so on, and you split your wealth equally among your children, even a billion turns into only 5 million within 5 generations - and that is if they manage to maintain its real value over time.
And if they do manage it cleverly and get to keep the real value of the wealth? Great! Society is better off, because that means they allocated capital productively within our society, making the economy more efficient.
While this was quite common (money being squandered after several generations), it's not necessarily as common today among the ultra-rich. Among the upper middle class, yes, it's common to happen.
E.g. maintaining the "real value" is not as much of problem for people having tens of billions (as we increasingly see today). Even if the value drops, they're still multi-billionaires. And diversification strategies today span the globe.
And the "3 children inheritance diffusion" problem is easy to solve: rich people have less kids today than historically.
1. If a family that gets wealthy, stays wealthy, that's great - the number of wealthy families can only go up, so over time there will be more and more wealthy families.
2. If, on the other hand, there is some survivorship bias going on there and wealth rotates a lot, and some members of wealthy families keep their wealth, that is not as good an outcome but it is still not so bad, as it suggests that as a family's culture degrades their wealth will likely degrade as well.
"Civilization has been a long struggle to prevent powerful people from passing on their wealth and power to their children. "
The opposite. Civilization invented laws so people could pass their wealth and power to their children, to the point that the absolute head of the state was determined by birth and not by skills.
In precivilized tribal cultures there was inheritance of weapons, tools, tents etc. to childrens and of course it played a role beeing born the chieftains son, but no ruler was born that way. They had to directly earn the respect of the tribe, by proving they are good leaders, before they were accepted. Direct democracy, long before the greek "invented" the concept.
The exact opposite of this is true. Great leaps forward in Civilization have come from things like Empire, explicitly run by hereditary ruling classes, and technological advances. In today’s world the latter now eclipses the former. There’s no reason, in my mind, to think that that ratio will (or should) remain.
And you attribute this fact entirely - as in 100% - to the fall of Empires, and not the technological advancements that happened in parallel?
I find it strikingly hard to believe that democracy, which is what I assume you’re referring to, is the actual imperative that caused this. If we had managed to avoid WWI it’s really difficult to imagine that we’d still be using a horse drawn buggy and a typewriter.
