Suppose you had seven children.
All of them, having reached the age of maturity, were jobless and were encouraged to find a job.
Child one keeps applying for different jobs in the technology industry but nobody will accept them. However, they keep trying and trying. They are like Sisyphus. They also aren’t doing anything as they wait.
Child two makes themselves exclusive to doing odds and ends for a decent amount of money. While child one thinks jobs should be sought via the application process, child two is averse enough to this that the inconsistency of what they do day to day is intentional.
Child three applied an actual application for an “actual” job and found one. The catch? It’s an organized crime job. However, it’s not immoral even though it’s illegal. They’re the personal household assistant of the mob boss. They too get paid immensely.
Child four also applied an actual application for an “actual” job and found one. The catch? It’s not illegal but has ethical issues involved. They mastermind ways to monitor and deal with those considered national threats. They too get paid immensely.
Child five, too, applied an actual application for an “actual” job, but it’s something they’re utterly terrible at doing, skill-wise. They’re tasked with therapy but have so little skill it’s considered useless. Child five, despite this flaw, gets paid decently by the office building.
Child six applied for a job and was appointed into one that had the completely foreseeable result of causing many dozens of people to lose their own job. They maintain a scenery-modifying machine which caused and still threatens to cause many scenery workers to become like spare cogs wandering the streets in search of a purpose. Child six too gets paid well, despite also having a version of their job that undermines the importance of the profession itself.
Finally, child seven is a volunteer, one with no ethical or legal issues involved, no issues finding a job, and no limits whatsoever in what they can do for others, and they do it all for free. However, after a few months of doing it, they think “that’s enough for me” and they never do a deed again.
One day, you realize you are passing away and summon all seven children to your home. You have specific things, all of which only one child can inherit, and due to the nature of these things, it has to be the child whose deeds make them out to seem the worthiest, as it’s the only tiebreaker. Which child do you prioritize as being the best candidate for the one with the highest worth?
The question is a bit misleading but I understand the desired output is an ordering of the children based on the information provided and our own personal values.
I will start with some thoughts on each child:
- If they are not doing anything while waiting to be accepted, then they got to work on themselves. They could be starting personal projects, learning new things, exploring new hobbies, volunteering… whatever being frozen like that feels sad.
- They are true to themselves, and I applaud them for that.
- No problem with working for the mob, there are far worse things they could be doing.
- I would need to know their intent behind what they are doing, ethics are not black and white, maybe they see some merit to their endeavours and maybe they are right in the end. The specific example would send them to the very bottom of my list (ACAB).
- I am willing to bet there is a phobia for that, I would try to give them the support they need to find their calling.
- I am not against progress, it’s not their fault that people will lose their jobs. In the first place it wouldn’t have been an issue if people weren’t so dependent on our capitalistic overlords.
- They are taking a break, it makes sense to me, keep it up pall, in no time you would be finding new ways to create a better world for all of us.
Overall, I feel the descriptions are too judgy, people are doing the best they can, and you got to give them that.
If I had to choose a single child I would go with #7.
Overall my ordering is 6,7 > 2,3 > 1,5 > 4
Even accepting the premise that this inheritance is indivisible, their jobs are far from the most important factor.
But if you had to measure that aspect, which one would have the greatest measure?
I wouldn’t have seven children.
Given the (very contrived) constraints, I suppose I’d try to maximize utility. The “things”, from what I can tell, are needed most by child 1 and 7 as all the others are capable of making a living themselves. Between the two, I’d opt for #7 as they are at least providing utility to others, even if it is just for a short time.
Sell all assets setup trust to fund health care and education up to state school tuition levels for all genetic descendents.
The children will either find their way, or not. They are all adults, grandchildren need the safety net.
This hypothetical makes no sense to me. Why couldn’t they all be given something of value? If the dying person only has one valuable item then sell it and share the money equally. If the dying person doesn’t want the item to be sold then set up a sharing agreement where they each get to have it for equal amounts of time. Etc. But even in your version of it you say the dying person has several things of value to give away. I don’t understand the premise or point of this hypothetical.
Because the point of the hypothetical scenario wasn’t to be realistic, it was to ask about the worth of goodwill via a circumstantial comparison. It even says “hypothetical” in the title, which would presume it’s supposed to suspend one’s expectations of real processes.
I’ll be more blunt then. It’s a badly composed hypothetical.
You wouldn’t be wrong. I’m not necessarily good at those. Though I didn’t think a few quirks would cause such a post to become incapable of being discussed.
Yeah, the whole kids and inheritance thing is a really big sticking point. I saw your other comment about this being based on a discussion your family has had. The thing is, that even if your family was discussing jobs on the surface, if the people they are picking from are other family members (or at least people they actually know), their decisions are weighed by all their other knowledge and feelings about those people.
I can see you’re trying to figure out how much value people put on each of these particular career cicurmastances in isolation but kids and inheritance is just a terrible framing for that for the above reasons. As a framing exercise, I think the question would have needed to be framed in a way that puts the reader in a much more distant position. This could be something like:
An eccentric billionaire gives you the following list of people and tells you to choose one person from the list for him to give a million dollars to. The billionaire says you must make your decision based solely on the list. Who do you choose and why did you make that choice?
Still maybe not a great framing, but it helps alleviate some of the rejection of the premise.
A hypothetical should be absolutely as barebones minimal as it can possibly be. The point of a hypothetical is to isolate the actual point you’re trying to ask about. In the one you wrote, i think what you’re trying to ask is “How should we value people’s ambition, success, and ethics?” So the setup should be something like this:
“You’re tasked with giving a million dollars to one of the following random people. All you know about them is these descriptions you were handed.”
And then after the descriptions of the people just say "Who would you choose to give the money to?
Most of the problem was the phrasing. But in my head it required expansion. I see now this was a mistake.
That’s how all us humans learn how to do things. You try something and see how it could be done better next time. Then you try again over and over until you’re good at it.
If my only measure of worth was someone’s job and the circumstances they acquired it, I would say that it is entirely irresponsible to make any fair judgement.
What an incredibly bizarre prompt.
Your assets can be divided up evenly when you die, making the whole thing moot.
Edit: Wait…OP are you describing your siblings or something? Lol.
OP got passed over for inheritance, and has come to the Internet to hopefully get others to agree that they should have gotten more. They’ve only presented jobs and money as evidence, because OP doesn’t really understand being a parent.
First, I get that you note “Child” 1 thru 7 to indicate offspring. Really, they’re adults though and I start my framing as such.
Adults are responsible for their decisions. Working gig jobs instead of a more traditional job, ethical issues, accepting jobs they aren’t suitable for or which have low/no compensation are all factors adults would have to consider.
The only person who seems to be obviously struggling despite decent planning and actioning (based on minimal descriptions provided) is child 1. Even that logic is tenuous depending on how long they’ve been attempting and failing in one industry while another is potentially a better fit for them that for some reason, ego or other, that they won’t consider. The rest are employed, with situation and compensation consciously accepted by each.
And I would also consider a human relationship element. If I have strong reason to believe giving all to one person would turn the other six against them in the form of lawsuits or violence, I might consider skipping inheritance altogether and give it to some charity. I suppose the amount of money and reason it can’t be split into multiple portions would also play a part in that decision.
Second from final thought, I do have a lot of siblings. Not quite seven but close. If our parents were to say, “hey, we only have enough money to give one person a meaningful inheritance, what should we do?”, I am confident nearly all of us would ask that they give it to the youngest who is still working through college and drowning in student debt. The rest of us have made our decisions on education and careers pursued, jobs accepted, lifestyle balanced with ability to support it. Not the spirit of your rigid scenario, but just pointing out another way of approaching the issue that was bricked out in the setup.
And final thought. Toss the rigid scenario aside and jobs/salary are not how I would hope to decide to divide assets among inheritors. I hope I have relationships with all my future offspring that go beyond simple sum of dollars.
But which one of them do I like the most?
I don’t know, which of them do you like the most?
