[muscomposter]

nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children

but it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts (or something like that)

[mrguyorama]

>nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children

Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on family lines, and "it takes a village" was a literal statement.

Humans have an instinct to take care of babies, not just our own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people.

This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a scientific one.

[amanaplanacanal]

Yes! Thank you so much for pointing this out! Our ideas about the nuclear family probably derive from the invention of agriculture, not from the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been in this earth.

[Cthulhu_]

It's individualism vs collectivism (if I got my terms right), with one side being "got mine, fuck you", whereas the other says that we're better together.

Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.

[arethuza]

There were different kinds of kings though - before a certain point in the history of most countries kings had to actively fight and wage war to achieve and maintain their positions. Over time this became more of a position where the king would deserve their positions simply by having ancestors who were "stupendous badasses" but otherwise actually had to do very little.

[MichaelZuo]

Why does the opinion of any ‘side’ outweigh the opinions of any other ‘side’, beyond the ballot box?

Seems more sensible to just assume they all negate each other out in the long run, unless proven otherwise by voting records.

[Joker_vD]

> the super and hyper-rich who live like kings,

Including having lots of offsprings. Apparently, "not procreating to save the planet" is for the poor.

[michaelt]

To me, nepotism is a classic principal-agent problem.

Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it.

If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid internships? Not nepotism.

If you, the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money.

But if I want my dumb kid paid six figures of your money? So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you're not going to like me ripping you off.

[Viliam1234]

Yes, plus sometimes the "owner" is a group of people. Then it gets more difficult for them to coordinate against the agent.

If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.

[bell-cot]

Nepotism is mostly a scaling problem. If you have a decent family and aren't an idiot about it - then for smaller stakes, and over shorter time-spans, nepotism usually works extremely well. And there is precious little damage to society, if Chuck hires his son Sam to drive one of his Chilly Chuck's Ice Cream Trucks for the summer.

But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil. The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent - not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level physicist is pretty damn low.

[Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course, is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.

[mmooss]

> a natural mammalian instinct

So what? I don't make decisions, and I don't think society should make decisions, based on "mammalian instinct". My standards are a little higher than that.

It's a common, but bizarre way to try to argue something is inevitable. You don't have to act like a cow, or even a chimpanzee - if someone says you do, it's not a compliment.

> it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts

It reduces outcomes and fairness because productive work is shifted to unproductive people who lack merit.