Meritocracy and Birthrights - Survey Experiment

The overarching goal of the project ”Meritocracy and Birthrights” is to better understand how people
who adhere to meritocratic fairness views perceive inequalities that arise from the “birth lottery.” This
refers to the idea that the circumstances, place, and community into which a person is born is a lucky
outcome over which that person had no control, but that has an important influence on their life
outcomes. The core of the project is a controlled online experiment where I show that people perceive
birthright to be a genuine source of entitlement. Put differently, there is a sense that being born into
the ”right” group, like a family, entitles one to its wealth and opportunities. To better understand these
results and put them into perspective, I extend the analysis and conduct a survey experiment. The
purpose of this experiment is twofold. First, I want to test whether the discovered pattern with respect
to birthright and meritocracy is driven by people’s inattentiveness to the luck dimension when evaluating
inequalities that arise due to the birth lottery. Second, I want to measure the relative importance of
two motives concerning inheritance taxation: the role of a birthright motive compared to the role of an
altruistic bequest motive.