>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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.