Must-Read: John Quiggin: Australia and the Return of the Patrimonial Society

…The fact that currently wealthy Americans have not, in general, inherited their wealth follows logically from the fact that, in their parents’ generation, there weren’t comparable accumulations…. Given the pattern of highly unequal incomes, and social immobility observed in the United States today, we can expect inheritance to play a much bigger role in explaining inequal…. Inherited advantages in the patrimonial society predicted by Piketty will include direct transfers of wealth as well as the effects of increasingly unequal access to education, early job opportunities and home ownership.