"Why it is impossible to abolish the inheritance"

Each week, Olivier Babeau decrypts the spirit of the times for FigaroVox. He is president of the think-tank Institut Sapiens and, moreover, professor of management sciences at the University of Bordeaux. The author recently published Praise of Hypocrisy (Éditions du Cerf, 2018).

Our democracies are inhabited, said Tocqueville, with a passion for equality. Regularly, the idea of ​​a more radical taxation of inheritance resurfaces, even though France is already one of the countries most taxed in the matter. Let us pass on the philosophical problem posed by the idea of ​​a total spoliation of goods accumulated by a working life and which have already been the subject of numerous levies. One can especially doubt that canceling any transmission of economic capital will really allow this perfect equality of which we dream.

A study has shown that 84% of Chinese elites in 2017 were already part of the elite before the revolution. Despite the complete resetting of heritage, the dominant families of the country were the same as before. The transmission of economic capital is only one part, and perhaps not the most important, of the inheritance. Cultural and social capital is undoubtedly of decisive weight in life trajectories. However in this matter the education system presents a particularly dramatic assessment: it totally fails to correct the inequalities of initial cultural endowments. Parents, even despoiled, will never be prevented from transmitting to their children a greater wealth of view of the world, giving them more chances of success.

Let us add that if it is necessary to admit the existence of a genetic factor in the determination of cognitive performances, an important part of the differences of destiny seems particularly difficult to combat. In a short short story written in 1970, Vonnegut staged a world where the keenest minds must wear an implant which deprives them of their cognitive advantage over mediocre intelligences. A perspective obviously less acceptable than the opposite option, technically more difficult, which would consist in increasing the cognitive performances of the less privileged.

Beauty is another stone in the garden of those who dream of perfect equality based on the prohibition of all inheritance. The research area of pulchronomics is concerned with how physical appearance affects our destinies. The results are astounding. As an English study shows, ugliness results in an average lower salary of 15% for men and 11% for women. The pretty but hard-working student will also have the benefit of the doubt on average, unlike the one who is “aesthetically challenged”, whose marks will be lower. A student's physique predicts between 20 and 40% of the variance in his or her academic results, which is as much as the actual academic skills. The aesthetic advantage unfolds throughout life: beautiful people are on average happier and richer. In Facial Justice , a novel of anticipation published in 1960, Hartley imagines a society where, for the sake of equalization of conditions, each young girl is subjected to an operation of cosmetic surgery in order to present an average beauty.

In reality, our era hates heritage because it dreams of undifferentiated individuals, artificially abstract from all roots. This is the condition of our two great contradictory contemporary fantasies: on the one hand the integral self-determination of the individual, beyond all biological contingency in particular, on the other hand the possibility for the State to shape a new man according to the moral criteria he decides.

Read also: Olivier Babeau: Advocacy for inequalities

The libertarian Rothbard wrote that egalitarianism was "a revolt against nature" . The egalitarian ideology makes all inequality an injustice and would like a society of identical beings. Fortunately, this nightmare remains out of reach regardless of our fiscal excesses.