[JoeNr76]

Of course. Becoming a milionaire because your dad gave you a million is not what people understand as being meritocratic.

They already get a lot of advantages during their life because of the position and wealth of their parents.

Is it bad to leave things for your kids? Nope, it's completelhy natural. But you can't claim that the society where that happens is a meritocracy.

[sokoloff]

I think there's clearly a spectrum. Giving your kid $100K while my kid gets only $25K doesn't make the society not a meritocracy, even though your kid got 4x as much. If your kids gets $100K and mine gets $100M and then we see what happens, I agree that that's not a meritocracy with respect to those two families.

Personally, I came from a family of public schoolteachers. Even though many families had many millions more than we did, I think our society, as experienced by the median and mode citizens, is far more a meritocracy than a plutocracy.

Does everyone get a full reset and the exact same starting point as everyone else, as if life were a board game? No, of course not. Would the world be better if it worked that way? It would undeniably be more "fair", but I think less desirable.