I personally think it's okay for families to give their inheritance/assistance to their children even if the children don't "deserve" it. etc. Working towards bettering your children lives is a reason many of us get up in the morning.
See the British upper class for a fine example of wealthy inheritors void of merit.
A family generally supports each other and works together. Parents help the children, etc.
Knowing this, wouldn't it make more sense to see if our society follows a meritocracy on the family level than on the individual level? Individually our society might not follow a strong meritocracy, but familially we might.
Now the question exists, is that still a meritocracy? On the family level, yes.
Are we okay with giving up a meritocracy on the individual level to allow a family to help each other? Probably yes to that as well. We should be more concerned with family meritocracy than individual meritocracy IMO.
Absolutely! it's just that when someone has a lot of success because their family helped them, they are successful because of that help. It's not a "meritocracy". The same reasoning can be used to invalidate the claim that there is a "meritocracy" of families. If you claim "family X has more merit than family Y", well you can apply the same reasoning to show that just like person A got their privilege from family X, family X got their privilege from situation Q (not from an impoverished country, not from a persecuted ethnic or racial community, not ravaged by war or genocide, not enslaved, etc. etc.).
Some of the comments here seem upset that the author is trying to link a correlation to a causation. That's not the case; the premise of the article is about the lack of a cause of something; e.g. that someone who is extremely successful cannot claim that such success is obviously due to merit. If anyone is to be accused of premature "correlation == causation" it would be those who claim that merit is the leading factor in one's success.
Not at all. Situation Q could be the same among many families, but only a few will succeed.
That comes from an understanding that making the best of living under a system that creates opportunities to be rich and opportunities to be poor is not the same as altering that system.
Really, the idea of privilege as people use it now is too individualistic to make sense at the macro level.
Equality is probably unachieveable unless we physically seperate parents from their children or abolish money altogether.
Not at all. Parents give much of their money while still alive.
There's absolutely 0 need for inheritance if you want to set your children up in life, barring of course sudden death (which, even then, is still easily circumvented via life insurance policies)
A meritocracy of families vs meritocracy of individuals. Also, how do you contend with married people? Does it really make sense to look at how they perform on the individual level? Isn't it more of a group effort?