The Triumph of Equality of Opportunity
I read a piece on the data-driven journalism website, Vox, called: The Case Against Equality of Opportunity. It was from a friend who took quite a fancy to the piece. It purports to question the near ubiquitous notion of equality of opportunity as an ideal in political discourse. I was intrigued at first, but ultimately very disappointed in what the article offered. I included the link to the article above even though I quote the article below, just in case someone wanted to see any of the few tidbits I left out. You may want to read the first paragraph of the piece for background as well.
“The only problem? No one really wants equality of opportunity, nor anything close to it. Nor should they. Pursuing true equality of opportunity would require turning America into a dystopian, totalitarian nightmare — and even then, it would still prove impossible.”
At this point, I’ll just be charitable and assume this is solely a statement of position. This demonstrates nothing that it purports to and amounts to no more than the claim that equality of outcomes is some disastrous, monstrous goal that we should abandon in our pursuit of superior forms of social organization. Obviously, strict equality in either outcomes or opportunity is impossible, but it is obvious that such strict equality would not be what any serious advocate of either position would be advancing.
“Moreover, equality of opportunity is simply a bad goal. It assumes that life is a zero-sum competition for wealth and status, that the most important thing is ensuring that only the smartest and hardest-working among us end up the victors. It assumes there will always be an underclass; it just wants to reserve membership for those who truly deserve it.”
I find this paragraph outright bizarre. Equality of opportunity in the broadest sense does not assume anything this paragraph claims; they are speaking only about one narrow version of equality of opportunity which entirely misses the points made by any sophisticated advocate of the position. They don’t even make any arguments showing why equality of opportunity assumes what they say it does. Equality of opportunity assumes that people should be given equal opportunities to succeed, though what “equal” means in that context is obviously not “identical” since that would not be remotely possible or desirable. More accurately, it means something like equality in value or fairness for each respective individual. It doesn’t presume, without selecting a specific version of equality of opportunity and substituting that version for the more fluid concept, by what standard this sort of equality is to be judged by (such as that it must be judged according to wealth or status in a zero-sum game fashion). Perhaps the concept of equity or fairness is more apt than equality here. That is unfortunate because it is unlikely that terms like equality of outcome and equality of opportunity will be abandoned due to their history in political discourse. With that said, this paragraph is engaging in a logical fallacy called a Frozen Abstraction, coined by Ayn Rand. It essentially substitutes one (obviously ridiculous) version of equality of opportunity and then uses that single version to argue against the more fluid, multifaceted concept, much in the way that someone could substitute a critique of biblical Christian morality as a critique of morality as a concept. It’s an illegitimate, rather transparent maneuver to anyone who would want to argue for a plausible version of something like equality of opportunity. To get back into it, it doesn’t assume anything about victors, since that just presupposes some simplistic binary judgment scheme that need not apply to any version of this concept in practice. The underclass bit might be slightly less inaccurate, but is still misleading, which will become clearer when we get into the next paragraph. It is true that if people have roughly equitable opportunities, and their success is judged by some metric (even a non-binary, multifaceted one), some will turn out more successful than others. That’s just a fact of life; some people will do better than others. Anyone who argues against this is not worth having a discussion with. Calling the consequences of this the creation of an underclass is blatantly loaded. Just because some people are less successful does not mean they are suffering, or that their opportunities will run out, or that they will only be given one chance, as so often happens in modern societies. Also, equality of opportunity, particularly if those opportunities are maintained and understood in a certain way, makes it so that class identifications become irrelevant. One’s class is not an intransigent part of one’s identity; it is simply one’s current state based on some measure of success or achievement, so even calling it a “class” is misleading. I don’t even see how the concept of class is compatible with a society that truly embraces and lives according to equality of opportunity. The whole point is that people should have maximal social mobility, and that social classes would be prevented from ossifying in unfair, unjust ways. That is very vague, but that is another matter, as we are discussing ideals, not implementations.
“We shouldn't want a better underclass. We should want no underclass, a world in which there might be some inequality but deep poverty is a thing of the past. A decent society shouldn't try to build a better aristocracy. It should try to achieve a reasonable and rising standard of living for all.”
I couldn’t agree more with the basic sentiment proffered here. There will always be some inequality; a world in which everything is truly equal is a world of literally nothing. That’s the most insipid world imaginable; it’s like a homogenous soup. Inequality (i.e. difference) is what makes the world so interesting and what makes life so worth living. If handled irresponsibly, inequality has a tendency to become unfairness, and that is what we seek to prevent in our societies. An aristocracy is incompatible with equality of opportunity. An aristocracy, that is, some kind of landed consolidation of power for the sake of power due to the success someone in an aristocratic lineage had at one stage, is precisely what equality of opportunity seeks to prevent. Any society that allowed the formation of that sort of “aristocracy” is not implementing equality of opportunity in any stable way, and thus it really failed to implement it effectively at all. The entire point is that people should be allowed to have their successes, but as much as possible, should be prevented from wielding the power that those successes afford them in a way that undermines the equality of opportunity that gifted them their original opportunities. Solving the problems posed by such a framework is a dizzyingly complex endeavor in intellectual, moral, and economic terms, but I can’t see why it is such a horrific thing to strive for. It should try to achieve a reasonable and rising standard of living for all, but it should also be fair about recognizing merit and rewarding it appropriately, because it is only through merit that the advancement of a society and its people are optimized.
“At least in Ellison's case we know how equalizing opportunity would work. There is a proven mechanism — inheritance taxes — that the government could use to cut her wealth down to the level of her peers, even if doing so would be politically impossible, and probably undesirable.”
Despite protestations, inheritance taxes may have to be implemented at one point in the formation of the ultimate society, or the ultimate meta-human organism. The current monetary system, as it exists, allows power to accumulate in the most corrupt ways, and its influence is seen in our corrupt political system, the dominance of corporations, etc. Hyper-Individualists would have a tough time embracing this, but it the fact of the matter is, one’s highest self is the entire universe. There is a stratification that progressively reaches into lower and lower levels, with more alienation at each, until we reach what we usually think of as ourselves, separate individual human beings. Alone, we cannot advance, and we will remain forever separate. We must work together to advance both the human species and even ourselves, though from our individual perspective in space and time, it may not always seem this way. In devoting ourselves to higher forms of organization, the concept of inheritance tax could soften in the radicalism of its current appearance, and more likely would change form entirely since an entirely different monetary system might be in place. The monetary system we have now exists primarily by the force of the historical currents which carried it here, and Natural Law undoes all that is untruthful in time. Of course, I am far from sure that inheritance taxes are a good idea, but I do not dismiss its impossibility or undesirability in principle.
“But some of the most important inequalities of opportunity cannot be addressed by governments in any reasonable way. Taking them seriously underscores what should be obvious: Pure equality of opportunity is deeply illiberal, and no one who understands its true implications would ever endorse it.”
Before we can have this discussion, we must detach from ideologies like liberalism. Our ideologies will always be there when we return from our investigations, but our ideologies are inherently incomplete, so we must set aside judgment in order to expand our frameworks and make sure they stack up to reality. Thus, marking something as “illiberal” is not a valid or useful critique in this context, because it assumes that being liberal is superior, and it assumes that one’s understanding of liberalism is as good as or better than what anyone else understands as liberal, etc. The point is that instead of arguing through labels, it is better to set the labels aside and explore the underlying views. The rest of this paragraph is just dogmatic claims.
“Equality of opportunity promises not just sufficient opportunities to all families, but equivalent ones.”
As I pointed out earlier, equivalent is a vague concept. Equivalent can essentially mean identical. In that sense, of course the promise would be both false and undesirable. There is nothing in the universe that is equal that is not precisely the same thing. This is the famous Aristotelian Law of Identity. Even two things which have precisely the same properties can differ in their relative positions. True equality of opportunity, that is, fair opportunities accounting for the nature of the individual as a member of society, would take account of things like unique abilities. Sufficient opportunities are also vital, but that would be taken care of by assuring that we got fair opportunities on the basis of who we are to begin with. Fairness and soundness are more important helping everyone, which is probably impossible.
“Think for a second about what that means. For one thing, any actions taken by affluent families meant to help their kids get ahead are prima facie illegitimate. That means no private schools. No fancy preschool or daycare. No au pairs or nannies. No after-school tutors. No summer camps. No violin lessons or chess lessons or tennis lessons or theater classes. Certainly no inheritances.”
I think there could be larger problem with parents raising their children at all. The nuclear family is not always how humans have operated in their history and it is not necessarily how humans were designed to work best. Currently, there's a sad truth that parents do a generally awful job of raising their children, and trauma from one’s childhood is the norm rather than the exception. In a society that embraced equality of opportunity, parents would could still have a close relationship to their children due to the natural and important bond between families, but the children no longer need be essentially owned by them. Instead, the state, the tribe, etc., could put them in the care of people actually trained to raise and care for children. This would need to be a diverse crew in order to account for diversity appropriately, and children would be exposed both to programming or music, or whichever other careers are in vogue at the time. This would avoid the fate of children being too closely tied to both the successes and unhealed trauma of the parents. Like the inheritance tax, this may sound dazzling radical now, but in a more loving, connected, abundant world, I don’t think it will seem as outlandish. Raising children is a sacred honor that one might need to go through intense training to undertake, just as one must go through intense training to be a physicist or a doctor. Certainly parents using their wealth to give some children inequitable opportunities goes against the spirit of equality of opportunity, but people may object that it is not a good idea to take away the exceptional opportunities of some members of society. Fear not; the arrangement of equality of opportunity would only work in an abundant, powerful society where most were given sufficient opportunities as well, so that avoiding inequitable opportunities would not be a cause for undue stress.
“That's the deepest difficulty with achieving full equality of opportunity. Parents, in practice, endow their children with a diverse array of opportunities. Some teach their children violin. Some teach their children C++. Some teach their children to speak Mandarin. Some teach their children French cooking. Some of those skills are going to be more valuable on average. But all of them are going to be valuable to someone. We need programmers and violinists, and chefs, and fluent Mandarin speakers. We could attempt to control children's opportunity sets so that everyone grows up with opportunities that, together, provide an equal shot at economic or education success. But that would be monstrous, and would deny us the benefits of our current pluralist approach to parenting.”
The problem with this is that we don’t know what skills will be economically or educationally successful 20 years down the line, or 50 years, or 2 centuries, etc. It’s impossible to conceive what the planet or the state of humanity will look like by then. The rate of invention, sociopolitical drama, etc. make prediction on this scale all but impossible. The best thing that we can do for our children is to give them productively harmonious opportunities to explore and make sure that their exposure to a vast array of opportunities is widespread and safe. In addition to practicum, children must be taught virtue in conduct, respect for merit, knowledge, and the unknown, and awe at the universe and existence itself. They must be taught these things explicitly as well as by example; we must remove the hypocrisies that children can discern so readily in the way that most adults raise them. Who knows whether humans will be playing violin at all after a certain period of history elapses, or whether they will be programming in 3rd generation programming languages like C++, etc. Those skills might be entirely obsolete, and I think that is another thing this piece misses in the model of parenting that it advocates. The rate obsolescence of new technologies burgeons by the day like a rising tide. Computers and inventions may take over tasks like language translation, programming, and even instrumental music soon. We don’t know. That is yet another reason to ensure that a child is not overly taken in by the ties of the parents; we want to give each child an unbiased chance for their abilities to shine and to be appropriately loved. Additionally, the point isn’t necessarily economic or educational success. Our current education system is a disaster and does not promote equal opportunity in the slightest; it clearly favors certain people that do better at disciplined, bottom-up learning and only being given essentially one shot to succeed in the attendant cutthroat grading system. I have already spoken about some of the difficulties with the money system and aristocracy… I do not know the best solution to the ills that our money system brings up, but perhaps at some point, measures of global utility like money will belong primarily to higher entities which truly serve the interests of the people, like a state, or some entirely new conception of tribe or guild that overcomes the issues that plague modern statehood. Lastly, our current approach to parenting is a disaster, not something to have a protectionist towards. There are almost no children who do not grow up traumatized; nuclear families in this society are not optimally equipped to raise children. Our approach to parenting and raising our children must radically change if society is to return to sanity. Emphasizing the benefits of western nuclear family system operant now over the radical change that must take place is a sign that the status quo is being taken way too seriously in this piece.
“Defenders of equal opportunity might object that they're only concerned with opportunities granted by money. But it's unclear what principled justification there is for such a distinction; plenty of other factors influence children's odds of success, and could be affected by government intervention.
Equality of opportunity would make every parenting choice a matter of public policy, to be regulated accordingly. It's a deeply, deeply illiberal ideal.”
Good, liberals are clueless and wholly incapable of solving the problems that plague our world right now. Let’s put them aside. Again, they are representing seekers of equality of opportunity as if all we cared about was money. At least they say “some” here, but that particular position is being emphasized way too much. I couldn’t agree more that there are many other pivotal factors for us to pay attention to. And again, child raising choices would be influenced and constrained by sounder public policy (and public policy constraining child raising is already happening now so I don’t see why it should be so radical an idea), but they would not each be individually determined strictly by public policy. That’s just a dumb system and one clumsy way of rendering a confused idea of equality of opportunity, being represented here as the only possible way. I think that it is this author that needs to seriously reexamine this issue, starting with a less pedantic and naive way of viewing the concept of equality.
“Equality of opportunity is also a morally heinous ideal. It is a way for us to justify the abandonment of people who — we insist — were given opportunities and squandered them. Even if it were possible to achieve equality of opportunity, it's not an achievement worth fighting for.
Call it the Good Will Hunting problem. The title character and his friend Chuckie (played by Ben Affleck) both expect to work menial jobs their whole lives, by virtue of having been born working-class in South Boston rather than rich in Back Bay. Will gets out, not because he is Chuckie's moral better or even because he works harder than Chuckie, but because, due to some genetic fluke, he has a near-perfect memory and is a mathematical prodigy. Chuckie, meanwhile, is stuck working jobs he hates, telling Will, "I'd do anything to fuckin' have what you got."
Equality of opportunity promises to help people like Will. It promises to abandon people like Chuckie.”
No, that’s not equality of opportunity, that’s social Darwinism seen through the cloudy lens of our cutthroat, “one-shot and you’re done” education and economic systems. It's a straw figure argument. We could not even hope to have anything resembling equality of opportunity without scrapping those systems first and either starting with something new entirely or at least incrementally evolving those systems into something new. True equality of opportunity would engender a world of loving equity. All people would be given as relatively equal opportunities to succeed at first, and for people who failed or took longer, we would not simply resort to casting them off into some underclass in an abundant society. They would be given guidance and continually given the same kinds of opportunities until those opportunities truly prove equal, as long as we had sufficient abundance. Though, as I said, realistically, we cannot always provide for everyone, and we have to keep that in mind. Failure will be treated as lovingly and mercifully as possible, but eliminating such a thing is a pipe dream. Equality of outcomes, on the other hand, could never work, because the pipe of dream of insipid equality is its only goal. We can always try to have the abundance to make sure that people have sufficient opportunities, but this is not equality of outcome; what we cannot do is make people equally successful or equally meritorious. The best and brightest amongst us must be given the opportunity to flourish primarily, for the advancement of humanity, not simply for the advancement of themselves. Equality of outcomes would hold them back, and hold back the human condition.
"That all sounds rather pleasant. But equality of outcomes would also help these poor, smart strivers. The difference is that while equality of outcomes promises gains for every poor person, equality of opportunity explicitly leaves some people out. It tells the poor who are not Mensa members, who don't have the work ethic of John Henry, that they deserve nothing. It gives Will Hunting everything, and offers his Southie friends squat.
But the people equality of opportunity abandons do not deserve to be abandoned, for the simple reason that they did next to nothing to deserve their lot. If you separate out socioeconomic factors, a huge chunk of people's economic success is determined by genetic variations beyond anyone's control."
There is a hard truth of life that refutes this kind of thinking: we have to prioritize the effective and powerful and meritorious in order to survive and grow. That may only seem sad to most humans in their smallness. One issue with liberalism is that it leans towards saying that no one is better than anyone else in its unsophisticated forms, and that is decidedly false. There are people who should have first take at opportunities, regardless of social status, parenthood, money, race, sex, etc. It is for the advancement of all humans. Equality of outcomes is a morally bankrupt ideal that unfairly cheats the gifted out of being able to use their gifts, cheats humanity out of experiencing the fruits of those gifts, and cheats society out of perpetual growth towards being more aligned to natural law rather than stagnating into a world of vapid homogeneity of outcome. However, when we live in an abundant society that is even more occasioned by the genuine fairness of real, effective equality of opportunity, we have more time and resources to allow all, even the vulnerable, or not as readily gifted, to be fed and loved and dignified. We even have the wherewithal to discover the latent gifts in these more vulnerable, less immediately successful souls, and find them a place where they can deeply flourish and possibly contribute as much as people who succeeded in opportunities before they did. All beings, ultimately, can be a gift, in the right circumstances. The actualization of this vision would not be possible in a world that strives for equality of outcomes. The people whose gifts the world is ready to receive will overwhelmingly not be able to give them, and society will grow at an ever more lethargic pace, possibly even leading to stagnation.
“Incidentally, it should be noticed that 'keeping everyone alive and well-fed' is the highest social aim which the sane mind can accept without reservation or discomfort. This is because everyone is capable of eating -- and so are animals and plants -- so this qualifies magnificently as a 'real' piece of 'real life'. There are other reasons in its favour as well, of course, such as the fact that well-fed people do not usually become more single-minded, purposeful, or interested in metaphysics.” – Celia Green
Considering the stone-cold concept of objective merit is uncomfortable for most. Self-sacrifice alone is not the highest moral attainment; that would be too easy. The highest aim is not helping the poor or the downtrodden, although that can be noble; the highest aim is helping all intelligent life in the universe rise to the experience of pure truth and unconditional love.
“A 2005 paper by Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks and Laura Tach (then at Harvard, now at Cornell) estimated that about two-fifths of the correlation between parents' and children's earnings can be attributed to genetic factors. Research by behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin comparing British standardized test results of twins and non-twin siblings suggested that genes explained a substantial share of the variation in scores. The point is not to identify the exact size of the effect. All we need to acknowledge is that genes play a nontrivial role.”
Well, these papers present an approximation at best. If anything, it emphasizes that genes are not the overwhelming contributor to where someone ends up and can be overcome. I’ve also noticed that genetic arguments have been waning in frequency throughout history, with things like the Flynn effect discovered by intelligence researcher James Flynn, etc. People are realizing that genes are not deterministic and can be overcome, to increase things like intelligence and more besides.
“That implies that even in a world of pure equality of opportunity, where environmental inequalities were eliminated and the Will Huntings of the world had an equal shot at success, there would be inequality. There would be an overclass and an underclass, people who do better or worse due to no fault of their own. Chuckie would still be throwing his back out working construction. This is the end goal that the opportunity agenda is hurtling toward. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel once noted, "When racial and sexual injustice have been reduced, we shall still be left with the great injustice of the smart and the dumb, who are so differently rewarded for comparable effort."
There will always be inequality. Literal mathematical equality, as this article insists on using as its sole conceptualization of the concept, will never exist between humans, and that is a great thing. I cannot imagine a more pointless, boring, valueless world. It doesn’t imply in the slightest that we will live in a non-abundant society where they poor and less able will be trampled; in fact, it will give them better and better opportunities to be nourished and have their gifts explored, as I already explained, because the meritorious will always triumph ultimately over the less so, and this is how it should be. The construction example is beyond naïve; machines will do all of that soon. They will do that due to the opportunities afforded to meritorious roboticists to make that happen and raise the quality of life for all humans. There is no injustice of someone being smarter or more meritorious than other. These more meritorious beings will simply have more responsibility. The point of existence is not to reward everyone equally for “comparable effort” based on some mindless moral principle, but to reward real effectiveness according to Natural Law. Some people will do better than others in some respects and this is a necessary, inescapable truth. The only reason this would seem insufferable is that some people want to believe that they are no worse than anyone else, and this is because development, self-improvement, and striving are extremely difficult paths that few have the bravery to venture out onto.
“This matters in practice. When specific parts of the government try to pursue equality of opportunity, they not only disadvantage people due to genetics, they also disadvantage them based on inequalities between families and neighborhoods that the opportunity egalitarians haven't stamped out yet.”
It is not the government’s fault that people have different genetic endowments. The government’s job is to do the best that it can with the resources that it has to produce optimal growth so that it can provide for the less able in addition to allowing the gifted to flourish and facilitate growth. Also, implying that a system is wrong because it hasn’t gotten to something yet is usually putting the cart before the horse, particularly when dealing with this level of idealization.
“Welfare reform, for example, was meant to foster equality of opportunity. It sought to distinguish between the poor who were willing to work hard, abstain from drugs, and otherwise prove their virtue from the poor who were not: the deserving poor from the undeserving poor. But think about who falls through the cracks here. We know, for example, that lead paint is more prevalent in poor neighborhoods. We also know that lead poisoning hurts children's IQs, their ability to pay attention, and their school achievement, and that its effects on cognition last through adulthood. Many victims of lead poisoning are just not going to be able to hold a job, or to work enough hours to get by. They won't be able to work as hard as our welfare system demands they work.”
Welfare reform is a consequence of our corrupt monetary system, which is antithetical to equality of opportunity to begin with. The failure to help poor people who cannot work jobs or be reliable due to lead poisoning is not a consequence of pursuing equality of opportunity; it is the result of not having equality of opportunity. People raised in an environment where they can get lead poisoning generally do not have equal opportunities with those who are not exposed to such ambient toxicity. Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes agree on this point. All this shows is that equality of opportunity might be a great idea after all; it is not a valid criticism of its pursuit.
“We could choose to help them despite that, to offer a basic income so that their injury doesn't condemn them to a life of poverty. But we don't choose that. Instead, we choose work requirements. We choose "responsibility." If they are really severely impaired and can persuade the Social Security Administration as much, we might give them a pittance. But if they're among the large number of disabled people who can't get on insurance, who can't stand in front of a bureaucrat and prove that they're "deserving," or who can work but just can't work enough to survive, we sort them into the basket of people who don't deserve society's help. If we just cared about equality of outcomes, this sorting wouldn't be necessary. But focusing on equality of opportunity demands it. An opportunity is only an opportunity if it can be squandered — even if that squandering is a consequence of poverty, deprivation, and lead poisoning.”
In order to have the wherewithal to offer a basic income to the struggling, the demonstrably and manifestly gifted and meritorious individuals need to be given the opportunity to flourish so that their gifts can feed the growth of society, which in turn can feed the needy. The point isn’t feeding the needy. The point is overall advancement, which is a prerequisite for all things you might wish to do with that advancement. The problem is that this article has it backwards, as I see it. If we approach things from the equality of outcomes perspective, society will have its efforts directed at promoting the welfare of the least among us, whereas from the equality of opportunity perspective, or meritocracy perspective, we promote the welfare of the most meritorious among us. I ask: which one of these will lead to the most sustainable growth of a society? It’s the latter. Once the best are taken care of, we’ll have the foundation with which we can take care of those who cannot take care of themselves and allow their gifts to flourish as well. Also, their concept of opportunity is the usual frozen abstraction that entirely ignores the multifaceted and complex nature of the underlying concept. Here are some dictionary definitions of opportunity:
“a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something.”
“an appropriate or favorable time or occasion:”
“a situation or condition favorable for attainment of a goal.”
“a good position, chance, or prospect, as for advancement or success.”
“an appropriate or favorable time or occasion:”
“a situation or condition favorable for attainment of a goal.”
“a good position, chance, or prospect, as for advancement or success.”
None of those definitions strictly require that we must take away opportunities from citizens if they fail at one of them. That’s an artifact of our current cutthroat, one-shot, prison planet educational and economic systems, which MUST be abandoned if we are to approach equality of opportunity. The opportunities that we want to citizens to have equally, respective to each individual, are chances to flourish according to their innate nature and their otherwise individual gifts. Our concept of opportunity is based on humans following their peak pathway and having productive harmony with existence. We need not be prisoners of our history that was unconscious of what made humans tick, and we should not conceptualize our future possibilities as though we were such prisoners, or we shall remain so.
"This obsession with effort, the conviction that it not only is the main difference between success and failure but ought to be as well, pervades the discourse on equality of opportunity. But effort is not the main difference between success and failure, nor should it be."
Actually, this is projection. It’s the obsession with effort that pervades the discourse about equality of outcomes, not equality of opportunity. They think it is unjust if someone who is smarter but doesn’t try as hard does better than someone who puts in more effort but lacks ability, as they've already made plain as day. In fact, this obsession with effort is necessary in equality of outcomes, because it is tied to the way they conceptualize states of affairs as fair. Equality of opportunity simply recognizes that we must prioritize the meritorious if we are to have any hope at all, but it has always intended on treating everyone lovingly and rewarding results above all else. Like intentions are not magical, effort is not magical. If one’s efforts are failing, then one should redirect one’s efforts to the highest goal they can. Equality of opportunity actually doesn’t need to rely on effort at all; it relies on Natural Law effectiveness and results. Equality of outcomes relies on impossible dreams that will never come true that exist in part due to fear of mediocrity and jealousy of superiority.
One conceptual polarity that this discourse brings to mind is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Master and Slave morality. Nietzsche argued that there are two fundamental types of morality. Master morality is a morality of consequences, weighing things on a scale of good and bad, the classical Greek and Roman virtues and vices, and values pride, strength, and nobility. Slave morality is a morality of intention, weighing things on a scale of good and evil, the Christian virtues and vices, and values kindness, humility, and sympathy. Nietzsche of course preferred master morality, in keeping with his Will to Power. Therein, the strong and the strong-willed define their actions according to their consequences, and thus it creates moral values by displacement. Master morality is the origin of sentiment. The good is the noble, strong, powerful, open-minded, courageous, truthful, trustworthy, and that which accurately measures self-worth. The bad is the weak, cowardly, timid, and petty. Slave morality is a reaction to master morality, and it is not value creating. It is re-sentiment, or a reaction to the sentiment of the more dominant masters. Slave morality vilifies the "good" concept of the masters as evil, and the "bad" concept of the masters as good, roughly speaking. It seeks to drag everyone else down to its state of slavery by careful subversion rather than by powerful assertion.
Looking at master and slave morality, I think we can agree that there are valuable aspects to both. However, I submit that both are fundamentally flawed, even in their very names. Master morality has the issues of being competitive and alienating others, thus putting bottlenecks on the size and power of the collectives it can create around its values. It also has a tendency towards egotism and overestimation of its abilities and power since that is its main focus. Slave morality fails because it is prone to jealousy, resentment, passive aggression against people who are rightly superior, and being meek and self-sacrificing where one should simply be more assertive and not be crushed under the weight of the pain that one carries. With that said, master morality does have the genuine virtues of courage, assertiveness, and nobility, and slave morality does have the virtues of selflessness, love, and healing. The terms master and slave morality to refer to the wholes of both is an abomination, and is itself a slave morality reaction to the pain that our clumsy cultural history has conditioned us with. There need not be masters and slaves. There can be people who are more meritorious than others, but we should all help each other and see the value in all of our stories and work in an optimized so that all can flourish as closely as we can. People only feel the need to be masters because they need to inappropriately control everything out of a fear of not being validated, and without masters, there need be no slaves. Masterhood and slavery are a reaction to the demons that spawned from the confused and resentful historical forces of humans not getting the energetic feeds they need to thrive. I will change the name of Master Morality to Assertive Morality, and Slave Morality to Cooperative Morality, and only the negative aspects of each respectively will be termed Master Morality and Slave Morality respectively, to reflect the dysfunction inherent in that fundamentally competitive and divided conception. The morality we require for effective equality of opportunity is a synthesis of Assertive Morality and Cooperative Morality. As it relates to our former discussion, Equality of outcomes uses a mixture of Cooperative Morality but also slave morality, since it is a reaction against merit and suggests that the less meritorious deserve to subvert the success of the meritorious, which is both unjust and impractical.
“The motivation to work hard and make a serious effort isn't simply a personal choice. It's the result of millions of environmental and genetic factors: Did your parents push you growing up? Are you predisposed to depression? Did you go to a good school? Were you held as an infant? Did you inhale lead fumes as a child? The ability to work hard is a privilege, spread unevenly across genomes and households, with more going to the rich than to the poor. People who struggle with motivation due to factors beyond their control — be it genetics or mental illness or socioeconomic deprivation — do not deserve our scorn. They deserve our help.”
Yes, they do deserve our help, not our scorn. But we only have so much help to offer. The way to acquire the maximum help to offer is to use our resources that we already have optimally on those with the most merit to contribute.
“Elites like to talk about effort because it justifies their own positions. It provides a non-arbitrary explanation for their wealth and privilege. It offers an excuse for elites to look out for disadvantaged people with whom they empathize, and not those with whom they feel no kinship. We look at an oft-suspended kid with a 1.4 GPA and see a delinquent. We look at a violinist with a 4.0 and see ourselves. And so we wind up helping the one who needs less help to begin with.”
Equality of opportunity is fundamentally opposed to ossified elites. Any elitism that one acquires must be earned through a combination of effort and fortune, and the effect on future generations based on the whims of the elite should be minimized. Not everyone looks at the kids in question the way the article states; that is only those with tunnel vision. It is not a question of helping one more than the other, but the optimal use of current resources to acquire more resources ultimately.
“Proponents of equality of opportunity love to reference statistics on social mobility, on how much someone's economic destiny is controlled by his background, how easy it is to surge from the bottom to the top. The numbers are depressing. Half of people's incomes are determined by how much their parents made. A child born at the bottom of the income distribution only has a 9 percent chance of making it to the top. But the numbers are also, for policymaking purposes, all but useless. They tell us literally nothing about how close we are to equality of opportunity.”
This is a correlation versus causation fallacy. No one’s income is “determined” by the income of the parents. They are correlated to the income of the parents, which is a large difference; that’s all those statistics demonstrate. I nonetheless agree with the article here that we are nowhere near close to achieving anything like true equality of opportunity, and that all methods currently employed towards that end are decidedly ineffective.
“In an excellent paper titled "Would Perfect Mobility be Perfect?"the British philosopher Adam Swift explains why. He notes that sociologists and other people studying mobility tend to assume that a world in which our incomes aren't related at all to those of our parents is best. "The conception of a society in which people's destinations are quite independent of their origins often acts as an implicit benchmark" in sociological research, he writes. But this is foolish. A society with perfect mobility would not necessarily be perfect.
Typically, mobility is estimated by calculating a statistic economists and sociologists call "intergenerational elasticity of income." That tracks the strength of the relationship between parents' earnings and that of their children. The intuition behind using this stat is clear enough: We don't want parents' life outcomes to be wholly determinative of their children's life outcomes. If the intergenerational elasticity of income is zero, then every child has an equal chance of ending up on the top of the income distribution as on the bottom, regardless of where they came from.
But we shouldn't actually want that. Intergenerational elasticity of income can go down because poor kids are growing up rich, but it can also go down because middle-class or rich kids are getting poorer. If poor kids are no better off but middle-class kids suddenly start struggling, intergenerational elasticity of income goes down — but we're not any closer to equality of opportunity. If a billionaire disinherits his son for being gay, that's a boon as far as intergenerational elasticity is concerned. This is madness. The goal isn't — or shouldn't be — to make life harder for people on top. It should be making it easier for people on the bottom to rise.
Sociologists also have a metric that measures that: the odds that a kid born into the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution will reach the top 20 percent as an adult. But this measure, too, is flawed. If every kid in the bottom 20 percent reached the top 20 percent, then by definition they're knocking out kids who grew up in the top 20 percent. If they're doing that because everyone's getting richer and the poorest are gaining the most, great. If they're doing it because wages are generally stagnating but the rich are hurting more, is that a gain, from an equality of opportunity perspective? What good is really being done there?
More to the point, Swift points out that these metrics are indifferent as to why people gain or lose income relative to their parents. Suppose we've actually achieved equality of opportunity, and people from poor backgrounds really do have plenty of chances to make it ahead — but none of them take those chances. Fewer poor people would be jumping to the top 20 percent, but that wouldn't be evidence that equality of opportunity hadn't been achieved. Quite the contrary. Or take the opposite scenario: We have no equality of opportunity, but poor people are doing better. Maybe they all just win the lottery or something. From an equality of opportunity perspective, these gains are ill-gotten; they're not coming because poor people worked hard and seized opportunities. But they make the mobility statistics look good.
It's absolutely maddening to see smart people like Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez study these statistics under the banner of equality of opportunity when they tell us nothing at all about how close we are to that ideal. At any given moment, it's genuinely unclear how we want these numbers to look, or which direction we want them to move in. That renders them basically useless as metrics. I know I want poverty to fall. I know I want incomes to rise. I have genuinely no idea if I want the intergenerational elasticity of income to go up or down. These kinds of numbers don't tell us what we need to know.”
All of this perfect mobility stuff isn’t perfect because it’s not really based on what fulfills humans; it’s based on myopic economic systems and models. They’re absolutely right that this kind of perfect mobility, besides being impossible, wouldn’t be perfect even if it was actualized. The real way that we can measure if humans are becoming more fulfilled is not economics at all; it is peak pathways! Any economic system we created should have its rules be subservient to making sure that humans are actually flourishing on account of it. What is the point otherwise? The goal isn’t making life easier for people at the bottom, or at the top. The goal is making overall quality of life for everything better. We are the universe talking about itself. Perfect mobility or mobility of any kind is not a measure of equality of opportunity; this article is right but for the wrong reasons. Peak Pathways and the Elevator of Enlightenment are the measure. I have already explained this, so I don’t need to address every point in the proceeding paragraphs. This relatively short point addresses all of it.
“The best attempt at identifying a way to measure progress toward equality of opportunity that I've seen comes from the University of Texas's Fishkin. Rather than seeking an unobtainable world with perfect equality of opportunity, or relying on impossible-to-interpret statistical metrics, he argues we should seek out "bottlenecks" that close off opportunities to the poor. Knowing English is a textbook bottleneck; if you're fluent in English, a whole bevy of opportunities are available to you, and if you're not, most of the economy is closed off. A college degree can be a bottleneck; a high school degree is an even bigger one. Professional licensing requirements are bottlenecks, as are old boys' clubs that exclude outsiders from choice careers. Bust up these bottlenecks, or make them easier to pass through, Fishkin argues, and you get closer to equal opportunity.
That all sounds nice. But it doesn't solve the problem of diverse opportunities. Knowing violin is a bottleneck if one wants to play in a symphony. Having access to a luge track is a bottleneck is one wants to be an Olympic luger. Inevitably, because of the diversity of opportunities granted to different children, everyone will face some bottlenecks.”
It is true that everyone will likely experience some bottlenecks, but unpredictable things like the internet and technologies like the iPhone and artificial intelligence show the ways in which bottlenecks can be broken down in novel ways. The point is increasing the connectivity of the universe and making bottlenecks less and less of a problem. As long as we are striving towards that, we are in some respect getting closer to a world of equality of opportunity. Things are becoming easier to learn. Bottleneck skills are becoming obsolete. People are able to be more and more independent, and have access to more information and tools all over the place. Of course we won’t take exactly the same opportunities. But that’s just a dumb concept of equality of opportunity. The point is that we should all have equal opportunities for our peak pathways to flourish, and we can come closer and closer to achieving this, if not ever exactly arrive at it since the universe is always in state of flux. There is no way this person thinks that these bottlenecks shouldn’t be busted up anyways, so they are just being petty and fault-finding to discredit a perspective they can’t refute.
“More to the point, I'm not really sure we need to, or should, conceive of this in terms of equal opportunity. I don't want more job opportunities available to people without high school diplomas because it's fairer. It isn't, necessarily; one could argue it's not fair to people who went to the trouble to get the credential of a high school diploma (or a college degree, or a professional license) for that effort to suddenly be devalued. I want more opportunities for high school dropouts because I want their lives to be better. Equality really has nothing to do with it. The desire isn't egalitarian, but humanitarian.”
This I agree with in part. I prefer humanitarianism to egalitarianism. I prefer equity to object-level mathematical equality. Equality of opportunity may not be the best way of putting it for those who insist on a mathematically pedantic use of the term equality, but it can and should be interpreted in a way that essentially makes equality and equity the same thing for our purposes. That is, people having equal opportunities RELATIVE to their peak pathway and individual gifts to thrive. I am also decidedly results oriented and want people’s lives to be better. The only way we can do that, however, is fairness. We have to have the meritorious getting opportunities before those who are less meritorious, so that our society will always be moving in the best direction possible. Merit is to be defined as actual ability in relation to the state of Natural Law, which has multifarious measures which will be sorted out for each individual application.
“Equality of opportunity is nearly impossible to measure, but you know what we do know how to measure? If people's incomes are growing. How equal the income — and wealth — distribution is. If poverty is falling. If life expectancy is increasing. If children are learning. How long kids are staying in school. How many people lack permanent homes. How many illnesses — physical and mental alike — are going untreated. These things are not necessarily easy to measure. But we can, and do, measure them, and we know how we want the numbers to look at the end of the day.
That's because they're outcomes, the thing opportunity egalitarians define themselves in opposition to. By embracing them, we give ourselves goals to strive for, a basis to determine if our politics are working, a clear path forward. By rejecting them, we are left with a morass of conceptual confusion. Equality of opportunity is a distraction. It takes our eyes off the prize. And in the process, it perpetuates the logic that lets actual inequality fester. The sooner we stop talking about mobility and opportunity and start talking about poverty and suffering, the sooner we can solve these problems.
Equality of opportunity is not the goal. The goal is a good life for all. We should settle for nothing less.”
Equality of opportunity is the ONLY WAY that we can increase quality of life for everyone, as I have already explained. The entire point of equality of opportunity is that it also grants the best outcomes. Equality of outcomes is based on slave morality and creates a stagnant world where the best have to sacrifice their energy for the least among us. I feel for the least among us. They aren’t necessarily the least due to their fault. But that’s life; life isn’t fair. We have to make it fair. And if we want to help them, me need to make sure that the meritorious of all stripes are thriving and in charge of things at all costs. Everything depends on that. The reason our world is so messed up right now is because it is not based on merit. Equality of outcomes gives goals that are simple, but also weak. Only those willing to courageously sail through the conceptual confusion of equality of opportunity with a strong, discerning mind and a brave, magnanimous heart will be able to find true fulfillment. Equality of opportunity is for the few, the elite, and the proud, who are the only ones that could help the many from their fate of disharmony and torpidity. The point is not removing inequality, which is the only thing that makes life beautiful and fascinating. Some inequality will always flourish. The solution is to make the inequality fair, and make it so that everyone can thrive in spite of it. Equality of outcomes is an impossible fantasy that distracts from the real prize, which is the good life for all. The good life for all is not achieved by focusing on the poor, and the sick, and the dysfunctional. It is achieved by focusing on the strong, on the noble, on the wise, and on the meritorious. Equality of opportunity is the only way we will reach it, or come ever closer to it.
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
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