Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

I think that paper over-indexes on exactly that argument - that having a relative attend the school is just a proxy for wealth, so they would give just as much anyway if they went to a different school. It doesn't stand to reason at all that the donations will be transferred to whatever other school their kid attends, donations like this are not fungible and do not scale linearly - if everyone in your family for five generations has gone to Harvard, and your kid goes to Arizona State, you aren't suddenly going to build a family tradition of loving Arizona State. You're more likely to simply dilute the strength of the family-college connection and not donate at all, or donate a perfunctory amount and put the rest into the opera you attend these days. I didn't look up the authors of this study, but they certainly didn't bother to mention any familiarity with the field of fundraising, which isn't as straightforward as they make it sound. Even if the strength of connection was the same, do public schools have the same skills and desire to request donations as Harvard does?

To test that hypothesis: they should check the Arizona State alumni to see if the number of relatives who attended Harvard is just as good a predictor of donations to Arizona State, because it's equally as strong a proxy for wealth when you attend Arizona State as when you attend Harvard. My bet is that it's a very weak predictor!

the metric(s) I would use need to be ones that are meaningful (and meaningfully different) for more substantial parts of the population.

So, some suggestions could be:

* medical care induced bankruptcy

* personal bankruptcy in general

* percentage of income spent on housing costs

* disposable income after housing, health care, education and transportation costs

* some measure of "timely" access to medical care

* inter-generational economic mobility

There are certainly issues within the EU with any and all of these (worse in some places than in others), but overall my understanding is that the US generally does worse on all of them.

I am originally from the UK, and I would argue that while there are aspects of quality of life here in the USA that are vastly better than the UK or the EU, most of those things are primarily the domain of those who make median or above median income. I certainly don't think that the economic system in the USA is better than those found in the EU, even though there are some metrics where you might make that case. But mostly what the USA has a lot of that the EU has much less of is economic churn - businesses constantly starting and almost all of them failing, followed by more businesses starting etc. This gives the impression of very prosperous, active economy, but I would question whether we really do much better out of this model than the EU does with their much less entrepeneurial systems.

> if you go too far with redistribution you remove the incentive for people to do difficult or unpleasant work

The people who earn the most in our system are not the people who do difficult or unpleasant work, and it just seems preposterous to me to suggest that there is a link here.

> In a less extreme example we just witnessed France default on its pension obligations!

This is not an example of what I think you're claiming it is an example of. Defaulting on pension obligations is about a failure to honor past labor contracts, not income/wealth redistribution.

> How can we honestly consider expanding wealth distribution programs when we can’t even afford what we have now?

Same way we can afford a war whenever "we decide" to fight one. Same way we can "choose" to spend more than the next 10 top military spenders combined. We are a rich country, and we could choose to place substantially more emphasis on the quality of life of all our people. But we "choose" to do otherwise.

Billionaires get to send their kids to good schools and everyone else at the school gets their education subsidized by those billionaires voluntarily.

The only difference I can see with using taxes is that the billionaires' kids don't get to pick their school, and the government now has to waste time and effort collecting and auditing those tax dollars.

I don't see a gain that's worth the effort. They can still donate money to the school or its employees if they want to influence the school's policy, or maybe just make some phone calls to accomplish the same.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that billionaires have a lot of advantages that we should try to even out, but this feels like picking a fight for the sake of it. There are better things to try to fix in the world.

And I tuned out. I’m not paying for the sins of our fathers.