Inherited Inequality and the Dilemma of Meritocracy

In a meritocratic society, inequality is considered to be just if it reflects factors within but not outside individuals’ control. However, individuals are often not responsible for their out-comes themselves but, to a differential extent, benefit from the efforts of others. By meri-tocratic standards, the resulting inherited inequality is just and unjust at the same time and confronts meritocrats with a dilemma—the dilemma of meritocracy. We run a preregistered survey experiment with a representative sample of US citizens to investigate how people deal with this dilemma. In the experiment, impartial spectators redistribute payments be-tween pairs of individuals. We vary a) whether the initial payment distribution is based on a random draw or on relative effort and b) whether spectators redistribute between individ-uals who have worked themselves or who merely benefit from the work of real-life friends. Redistribution levels are substantially higher if inequality is based on luck instead of effort. However, whether individuals worked themselves or merely inherited their initial payoffs does not matter much for spectators’ redistribution decisions. Our results suggest that many US citizens accept inherited inequality as long as it is merited at some stage, which may explain why many people oppose redistributive policies.