Inheritance will be the death of our economy

How nature and society deal with wealth in opposing ways

Our society is becoming increasingly diverse. New types of jobs are popping up that are more and more specialized — dog barber, personal stylist, etc. The same thing tends to happen in nature, where more species evolve as time goes by. But while nature flourishes because of this, in our society there is a huge downside to it: the slow accumulation of means that results from this specialization. In this article, I will argue that it’s the concept of inheritance that makes specialization toxic for society.

Over the course of history, a lot of people have become specialists. It all started some ten thousand years ago with jobs like ‘farmer’, ‘soldier’ and ‘worker’. Nowadays, these three have branched out into (respectively, and among others) bulb-growers, urban farming enthusiasts and dairy farmers; policemen, marines and fighter jet pilots; machinists, seamstresses and clerks. In itself a completely useful and understandable process: if everybody learns one thing very well, they can sell that added value and use the revenues from it to compensate for their weaknesses in other activities. Expertise caused — and still causes — progress.

Highly developed expertise, however, also brings opacity with it: how do you judge something if you can’t understand it? The tension this creates develops often very subtly, until it escalates explosively. Sometimes someone lights the fuse with a simple question…