Grandstand. Amazing phenomenon. While our society claims to be deeply sensitive to issues of equal opportunity and considers that income is poorly distributed, it is resolutely opposed to the taxation of assets and, more broadly, to any questioning of the right to heritage. Including for the wealthy. All of France was thus scandalized to see David and Laura Hallyday dismissed from the succession of Johnny Hallyday. However, a recent study by the Economic Analysis Council [CAE]“ Rethinking inheritance (December 2021), clearly shows that social injustice is not produced mainly by income, but by heritage, more than 60% of which today comes from a donation or transmission. The privileged, in our society, are therefore not overpaid employees, but quite simply heirs.
How to explain this paradox ? Are we simply dealing with a pedagogical problem, as asserted by the authors of the CAE report? Nothing is less certain. The passionate character of the subject of inheritance could reveal something deeper, which would send us back to the very mechanisms of the functioning of the brain. Behavioral psychology and neuroeconomics offer us three elements of interpretation on this subject.
While income is perceived by the mind in the form of flows, which are the counterpart of present services, heritage is mentally represented as a stock. It results from an investment, both mental and economic, whose expected psychological return must be commensurate with the efforts and sacrifices made to build it up (savings), to keep it (inheritance) or finally to wait for it (inheritance). future). Hence the clarification of the fact that those with low assets very often turn out to be the quickest to defend it, because it represents for them a higher opportunity cost than the favored social categories. Without forgetting that the very smallness of their capital does not allow them to exploit the possibilities of tax exemptions backed by savings products from which the richest benefit.
Sacralization of heritage
To use the terms of Daniel Kahneman, a cognitive psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002, heritage represents, for its owners (present and future), a ” benchmark ” from which they assess gains and losses. Any project to overhaul the taxation of transmissions is therefore perceived as a threat to this status quo. Its consequences on the situations of each other are perceived as vague, confused and imprecise by minds traditionally opposed to ambiguity (this is the famous paradox of Ellsberg, well known to behavioral economists). Since inheritance reforms are likely to generate losses for some (the intensity of which, explains Mr. Kahneman, is more strongly felt than gains of the same level), the brain prefers to reject them altogether for s saving the neurological cost of thinking.
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