I think it's fine in a true "family business" e.g. you wholly own a hardware store or a restaurant and you have your family working there and eventually you hand it off to your children (assuming they want it).

In large public companies or institutions that have shareholders or state owners then it's unfair for an executive or senior administrator to carve out a job for a family member. He's giving them something he doesn't own, unlike in the family business example.

No, we can't, because it rarely ever works out that way.

I've yet to work at a family owned company where the children were anywhere near as competent as their parents, and I've worked at multigenerational companies, so imagine that.

The one I spent the most time with was a publisher whose founders were Tulane educated intellectuals who walked the walk and talked the talk. The next generation sounded like they fell off an alligator tour air boat with the intellect to match. Their children are the dumbest group of human beings I've ever seen graduate from high school. Utterly and completely useless for anything other than getting hammered on the weekends and keeping random desk chairs from rolling away. Yet they were guaranteed jobs, even as the company's numbers continued to dwindle and they continued to use far more resources than they contributed. No Christmas bonus? That's because they needed to pay these morons enough to live in the same neighborhood as their father, meaning that they needed to make about 80% more than anyone else in their roles.

Ownership is not leadership. Leadership takes a set of skills that many people don't possess, and it's less common with the children of the well-off.

We currently live in a society that valorizes meritocracy and equal opportunity and also providing for one's descendants. It supposes that you're you should have equal opportunity to enjoy a middle class or greater lifestyle if you're not a total mess, and that your success is something you can provide to your children as a leg up.

Not every society struggles/struggled so poignantly with the contradiction between those things as we now do, but we do, and that's where the modern criticism of nepotism originates.

Teaching your children your trade by inviting them into your workshop or boardroom is sensible, but it inevitably means that there's less room in that workshop or boardroom for the scrappy, bright outsider whose supposed to have a fair chance.

There's not really one right answer under that kind of tension, so there's no surprise when criticism is levied in either direction.

Honestly, I think "nepotism" and "occupational persistence" are more about how we feel or judge the phenomenon, and what are prior expectations are.

If sons and nephews are bad managers and a business suffers... that's nepotism. If they're good managers and the business succeeds, that's a family business. if the local authorities hire family... that's nepotism, because we have an expectation that it should be done differently.

A lot of words are like this. Positive and negative words with positive or negative associations that we use to describe the same thing... depending on the association we want to emphasize.

But once homo retcom has words... we think in those words. So, we think of nepotism (for example) as this distinct thing, and expect this nuanced definition to account for the negative or positive aspects.

This paper is basically a formalization of that process.

It seems to me that academia grew out of the church doctors who grew out of the knighthood: thé eldest son of an aristocrat would inherit the land without lifting a finger, but to earn their spurs they needed to convince existing knights they were capable of doing equivalent work in the field. So, out of major feudal institutions, it was among the least nepotist.

Nah, we can't. We can't redefine words to make us feel better.

According to Cambridge Dictionary, nepotism is "the act of using your power or influence to get good jobs or unfair advantages for members of your own family." As soon as you favored your kid, it's nepotism, and it's bad. It undermines meritocracy and contributes to an unjust society. It's pretty straightforward to understand.

The article is not about toddlers. It is about adult children.

> Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?

That difference is only on paper, purely academical. In reality, almost all the time, this quickly morphs into pushing your kin into positions of power where they make a mess but you still tolerate them because supposedly they are at least somewhat predictable and you don't want to invest the time and effort to build trust with a stranger.

(Or whatever their actual motivation is -- to me it remains mostly a mystery.)