How Do I Introduce a “New” Idea to the World?

April 28, 2022 7:49 AM

So, I have developed what appears to be a “new” idea. At least, I cannot find its equivalent out there. I persuaded myself both that the idea is well-supported and that it is necessary for the world to know. Inheritance is an error in human economic systems, which will always poison any hope of a market-based meritocracy and instead create an inheritance-rigged oligarchy, like the present one. The briefest, quite incomplete, summary I can provide is:

If you proposed giving someone a 26-mile head start in a marathon because that person had an ancestor who once won an ancient marathon, you would be rightly ridiculed. But human societies and economies are run using the same principles. People who have earned nothing for themselves are handed all the money and the power that goes with it, simply because an ancestor won something long ago.

Market meritocracy requires equal opportunity. Equal opportunity requires an equal start on a level-playing field, with clearly understood rules that are enforced equally against everyone. This provides every individual the freedom and opportunity to succeed to maximum of their individual abilities and to truly say “I earned it”.
Material Inheritance denies this equal opportunity in favor of handing all the wealth, as well as the power that goes with it, to an Inheritor Class that did not earn a single penny of it, poisoning market meritocracy. In this way, unlimited material inheritance will always create an inheritance-rigged oligarchy.

Friedman’s “Free” Fallacy: The notion that the way to create a “free” market-based meritocracy is to hand all the wealth and the power that goes with it to an Inheritor Class that did not earn a single penny of it, while allowing no input from market forces as to the relative fitness or unfitness of the Inheritor Class.
There are no “free” markets. The only freedom unregulated markets ensure is the freedom of the unworthy Inheritor Class to abuse the rest of the world with impunity.

Friedman’s Fallacy mistakes the wants of the Inheritor Class and its capital for the requirements of a market-based meritocracy. Recognizing and correcting this error is the first step in creating a world that rewards ability, rather than the current system rewarding affinity to the Inheritor Class.

This is, of course, a radical departure from the way things have always been done. When inheritance is removed from the economic model, all the rigging of the system in favor of the Inheritor Class is revealed. An economic system without inheritance looks more like a DSA economy than a Club for Growth one and features a broad mix of capital, with employee-ownership and mutuality/cooperatives almost always preferable to private capital.
Unfortunately, I have neither the pedigree nor the platform to introduce this idea to the world. I have made the best efforts I can to both get it published by an outlet that might be favorable and to put it in front of people who know the field well and could conceivably carry it forward. No one has been interested, which is not surprising given my lack of pedigree and profile, as well as the radical nature of the idea.
I sit here feeling as though I have an idea that will greatly help the world but no way to circulate it and propagate it.
I am hoping the hive mind of MeFi will have some suggestions.
{Please excuse the length of this, it is as brief as I could manage to make it}

posted by Lazy Buffalo to Work & Money (27 answers total)

Isn't this why we have estate taxes? Varying levels of estate tax in different jurisdictions show that people do think about this and come to various conclusions.
posted by sagc at 7:59 AM on April 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

I feel like this kind of concept and lengthy discussion is very popular at /r/slatestarcodex.

I've always thought inheritance is unfair, but I don't know how it could be fixed in a way that didn't preclude estates, gifts while alive, and besides, the upbringing and connections that are passed down that gave nonmonetary value.
posted by bbqturtle at 8:01 AM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

What I wish for is some kind of formal discussion forum where ideas like this could be gently and skillfully critiqued. The fact that you are thinking about issues like this is important, and I wish people like you would think more and further with whatever new inputs are available.

I have come up with some ideas that I think could lead to positive change, but I know there are gaps in my knowledge that mean they will probably fail, at least in their current unrefined form. I need people -- more educated people than myself -- to help me shape them and filter them.
posted by amtho at 8:01 AM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

This idea is not new, it's just very difficult to accomplish. Mainly because most people care more for their progeny than for the general public. This includes the people who make the rules, who always have more resources than the general public. Almost every parent wants to make sure their particular kids get the best opportunities they can.

If you set aside just inheritance (ignoring all the other forms of inequality of resources and opportunities), how do you replace it? I.e., where does the money go and who controls it instead? The modern conservative movement is set up around the idea that no one can trust government with that kind of responsibility. Indeed, most people on the left would agree with your idea, and everyone on the right would howl that unfairness is actually a good thing.
posted by rikschell at 8:02 AM on April 28, 2022 [17 favorites]

Have you ever watched this?
posted by cakelite at 8:02 AM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

In some sense, I suspect the thing that makes people form cooperative societies in the first place is the desire to secure the best possible future for their own particular children. I think it’s rare to find people whose commitment to an idea exceeds that impulse. You’re not wrong that inheritance is unfair, but I can’t see this proposal getting out the starting gate anywhere other than a cult.
posted by eirias at 8:11 AM on April 28, 2022 [9 favorites]

Isn’t this a big part of what Piketty wrote about in Capital in the 21st Century?
posted by congen at 8:13 AM on April 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

Oops, hit that publish button early.

This idea has definitely been around the block - some of the founding fathers of the US wrote about limiting inheritance to prevent an aristocracy from forming. More recently Piketty wrote a lot about this and even had some policy prescriptions to try to help - you might be able to find an organization of some kind trying to get those policies implemented.
posted by congen at 8:17 AM on April 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

1) Being able to build something for the next generation is a powerful motivator for many people. We need them to be motivated -- a lot of good comes from this impulse.

2) Progress in civilization is made by people who learn from and benefit from past generations, and the drive to transmit knowledge and safety to one's relatives is strong enough to make this possible. Making it attractive to transmit this to non-relatives, non-progeny, even friends' children isn't a solved problem. Just look at education funding to see what I mean here.

3) The great innovations, scientific and societal, of the past have come mostly from people who had better parents than I did. I wish the world were fairer and that I'd had the same chance to be an awesome scientist or an awesome philosopher, but that doesn't mean I want the innovations of the privileged to be gone from my life.

4) Fairness is very important -- animals have a sense of fairness, and will become upset if, for example, they see another animal being rewarded disproportionately for the same thing they themselves do. But it is not the one virtue that must obliterate all other virtues, like personal joy, motivation, happiness, etc. If you want to solve society's problems, your solution must be fair, but it MUST also prioritize other qualities, like drive, safety, joy, bonds with other humans, beauty, knowledge transmission, etc.

If you want to propose an innovative idea, please don't only predicate it on the virtue of fairness. You have to show how it will benefit all of us in more primal ways and more high-level ways.
posted by amtho at 8:20 AM on April 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

It seems that your "idea" is really just your opinion about the way a specific thing should work. Write letters to the editor of financial publications to try and spread it, or do some more research and write full articles about it.
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:22 AM on April 28, 2022 [12 favorites]

If I'm reading your question right, you are just talking about 100% inheritance taxes?

There's a lot of existing political philosophy on the subject of inheritance and intergenerational justice.

It's also been picked up in media, such as this piece from the Guardian.
posted by knapah at 8:24 AM on April 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

I am an academic who knows some regular people who have entered the marketplace of ideas in my field through publishing in para-academic magazines. But all of them have developed through the years some kind of content-based expertise. Disregarding all the comments above that this idea of inheritance generating inequality does not indeed seem too groundbreaking, I would say that mostly what would perk economists' or other academic or specialized journalists' ears up is DATA.

When you say your idea is well-supported, are you doing research here? Or is it just like, your opinion? (Everyone has one and they all stink).

If you were my student I would say: support your claims with evidence! Then go from there.
posted by athirstforsalt at 8:37 AM on April 28, 2022 [17 favorites]

I feel like this comic neatly describes why this won't change:
Comic on twitter
posted by chrispy108 at 8:38 AM on April 28, 2022

Nthing this idea already exists and people care about their own children, but I want to add that the transmission of wealth also happens while people are alive and doesn't always include biological descendants.

Suppose Amy works at a huge tech company for $250k/year - well into the top 10% of earners, but not the 1%. Let's say Amy is a lesbian with no interest in having children or passing on her wealth to her own offspring, but she cares about mentoring and encouraging other LGBT people and supporting LGBT charitable organizations.

Obviously, a young person whose college tuition is paid by Amy (possibly via a fund or scholarship) is getting a "head start" in the "economic race." Should Amy be barred from doing that? How? Should the rules for Amy be different than the rules for people who want to support their cousins or members of their religious or ethnic communities?

Extreme, aggressive redistribution of wealth has been a part of some implementations of communism, but it has generally not gone very well as richer people aggressively resist these limitations on their ability to make personal decisions, and that resistance has often included lies, bribery, and fraud.

You may wish to look up "Universal Basic Income," which is a kind of redistribution of wealth that tries to benefit ordinary people with relatively minimal impact on the rich.
posted by All Might Be Well at 8:42 AM on April 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

The idea that inherited wealth inherently contributes to stratification and inequality is far from new, so I'm not sure you need to make any particular effort to introduce the world to the concept.
posted by slkinsey at 8:44 AM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I appreciate all the responses. I am aware that the idea of limiting/ending inheritance. I am unaware of others putting the theoretical scaffolding behind it to directly challenge the current model.
At this juncture I am going o mark this answered and continue to work to propagate it.
I'm happy to share the extended arguments with anyone, if there's interest
posted by Lazy Buffalo at 8:49 AM on April 28, 2022

Your explanation is really interesting and I appreciated reading it. But I rather suspect that "inter vivos gifts," real estate shenanigans, and personal resource investment like education and training and jobs would replace proper inheritance among wealthy people.

This piece from The Atlantic about the "9.9%" (i.e. people in the top 10% of US wealth but not in the top 0.1%) gets into a number of reasons why even without inheritance there is a societal architecture that is built for the top 10% to perpetuate itself. They will always go to the best schools, and live in the best neighborhoods, and (mostly) date and marry among themselves, and fill the C-Suites. And so even if they start at mile 0 of the marathon, they have personal trainers to teach them the course and personalize a stepped workout plan before the race starts, extra water stations with gatorade instead of tap water, a pair of the best shoes and layers of the best clothes, a personalized soundtrack, heart and respiratory monitors for adjustments in real time, etc etc etc. Absent some broader and more radical structural changes, they still win the race.
posted by AgentRocket at 8:51 AM on April 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

What I wish for is some kind of formal discussion forum where ideas like this could be gently and skillfully critiqued.

To literally answer the boiled down question: A lot of graduate schools require you to critically explore what you think might be a novel idea. grad school exposes you to subject matter experts who can offer guidance and point to references (credited and discredited). you might have to state your assertion, support it with research, and defend that text against a board of experts.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:52 AM on April 28, 2022 [18 favorites]

I came to say what is essentially j_curiouser's thought:

This is a premise for a thesis or other body of focused, critical work. You don't have to be in a university context to pursue the work of a thesis, but there are resources available to you on how to pursue it using the same critical, analytical tools that the relevant fields respect and react to.

THat is, in essence, what you need: development of the idea with information that the field finds compelling enough to respond to and interact with. Find the people who are active in this space and do Work they can access that is compelling enough for a conversation to start. I'm not in this fields so I can't make suggestions on who those people and ways of interacting are, but I imagine you have the knowledge you need to find a good starting point to elevate your existing work to its place in current discourse.

I will say that taking your ideas to the point of influencing policy is a long, long, frustrating, complicated, inane, rattling experience. I'm a basic scientist who now works in policy and lemme tell ya, I've found that peeking behind the curtain to see who the policy wizards are has made me (1) more confident in my own expertise and (2) horrified at the whos and whats and whys behind the actual levers, and a not too distant (3) at how many players in polcy are literally there to roadblock change and maintain the status quo and the existing fortunes that depend on it. (1) and (2) are kinda cool. (3) is, like, terrifying.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 9:46 AM on April 28, 2022 [7 favorites]

If you proposed giving someone a 26-mile head start in a marathon because that person had an ancestor who once won an ancient marathon

Would you? The number of children of professional athletes, musicians, and actors currently performing seems to disagree. These are going to become class identifiers, whether we like it or not.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:03 AM on April 28, 2022

I intentionally didn't read the "more inside" part, so I could comment on how to introduce the idea without a value judgment about it. The short answer is, publish it somewhere where people who are interested in similar topics will read it. That's more than likely either an academic journal, an intellectual "little magazine", or maaaaaybe a website with an established following. The problem is, those places don't often accept unsolicited manuscripts from unpublished, uncredentialed writers. So step zero is actually to become the kind of person who could get something published there. A lot of times that's going to mean formal schooling, probably grad school. Or it could mean working as a journalist, writing other, less intellectually stimulating stuff until you build a resume that gives you more freedom. Or heck, it could mean that your uncle lives next door to Pete Buttigieg, and he gives yours manuscript to Mayor Secretary Pete, who likes the argument and vouches for it to others. (This is actually not that uncommon, sadly.)

Step one is to get second, third, and fourth opinions. Send it to people, the smartest people you know, the biggest assholes you know, and ask them to tear it apart. First drafts always suck, no matter what you're writing. Once you've gotten a bunch of criticism, write another draft taking that criticism into account. Then repeat the process a couple more times.

Finally, I would urge you to have a little intellectual humility. Your idea might be brilliant, but it's unlikely to be particularly novel. Think of how many absolutely brilliant people have lived throughout history. You're doing something that never occurred to any of them? More likely, your idea is a new spin on or framing of an existing idea, and that's perfectly fine.
posted by kevinbelt at 11:34 AM on April 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

I went back and read your idea, and yeah, no offense, but it's not particularly novel, which is why you're able to describe it using references to other thinkers' concepts and cliches. That said, it's not a bad thing. There's a decent-sized market for thought like this; it'll be easier to publish this than it would be to publish something truly and radically novel. But you'll still want to sharpen your argument a bit before submitting anything.
posted by kevinbelt at 11:38 AM on April 28, 2022 [7 favorites]

Questions about capital, especially intergenerational capital, are quite prominent in a lot of left wing thought on this subject, especially now, but also going all the way back to Marx. Who accumulates capital and how is a pretty fundamental question in political economy. I don't think you're going to have any trouble finding many people who share your aim of at least reducing intergenerational transfers of wealth.

But the next step is to figure out how you propose to do so. I think those ideas, if well-thought out and novel, are much more likely to get traction than a general proposal to do away with intergenerational wealth transfers. Inheritance is not the only way those transfers happen, so you'd need a more broad proposal here. What you're up against is that people do tend to want to leave capitals to their offspring so you need practical solutions that achieve your aim of justice or equality while also somewhat matching people's general conception of what's just or how the world works.

Note that this same critique can also be applied on the state level. Wealth is not just transferred between individuals, but between generations. I think any proposal to tackle capital on the individual level would also need to address the state level or else you risk being dismissed by a lot of folks.
posted by ssg at 1:09 PM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

As it happens, I'm reading David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, which is relevant to your idea. It's a long read, but it's useful to know how we got where we are, and also that inheritance is not "the way things have always been done". They describe, for instance, societies where people destroy all their belongings before they die, and others where land reverts to the community upon death.

To answer your question more directly: you could spread your ideas by writing a blog or a book. But I think you need to do a lot more research first. Marxists, as mentioned, are inclined to agree with you-- Piketty's book is a good modern start. Anarchists too (Graeber was one). For that matter, as I never tire of pointing out, Rooseveltian liberalism was pretty anti-wealth, with among other things a 90% top marginal tax rate and a 75% estate tax. Those things were top targets of Reaganism, which is part of why we're in such a mess.
posted by zompist at 7:36 PM on April 28, 2022

This is not new. This is less of an idea, and more of a rambling opinion. You appear to have a naive and somewhat tenuous grasp on the multiple drivers of privilege, and a pretty fuzzy concept of what factors comprise "merit" and what it means to "earn" something.

You claim that individuals should be allowed to "to succeed to maximum of their individual abilities". If I'm white, male, English-speaking, able-bodied, attractive and mentally bright, I'm still a member of an "inheritor class", even without any material wealth.

Are those my individual abilities? I think you would argue yes. Have I earned them? Of course I haven't. I've just inherited good genes and a dominant position in a dominant culture. How, then, do you propose to nobble me? Would you even seek to do so, or am I getting ahead on my "merits"?

The same is true for your ancestor marathon runner, who has passed on their genes and the benefits they afford whether you like it or not, without their current carrier lifting so much as a finger. Presumably, if they won a foot race, you would consider this a meritorious victory.
posted by some little punk in a rocket at 5:07 AM on April 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

I’ve read your post twice now and I’m not quite clear what your “idea” is. Is it:

1. The realisation that inherited wealth creates an uneven playing field and a world can never be fair until that is reduced or stopped, or
2. A way of reducing or stopping inherited wealth that hasn’t previously been thought of.

Because if your idea is (1) then I’m puzzled as to what’s new about it, as it seems obvious to me and, even not having studied much economics and politics, I realise many people have given it a lot of thought over the years/centuries.

But if your idea is (2), and you just haven’t shared the actual idea here, then fair enough, maybe it is new, well done, and I wish you luck with spreading and implementing it.
posted by fabius at 6:20 AM on April 29, 2022

26 mile head start:

Have you ever seen the "Take 2 Steps Forward" video?
posted by McNulty at 12:32 PM on April 29, 2022