All Episodes
Previous Next
July 26, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
22:58
Equality of Opportunity vs Equality of Outcome
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So there's an article on Vox.com called The Case Against Equality of Opportunity, and I thought it might be worth addressing.
The tagline to the article is, it's an incoherent, impossible ideal, and if we're really going to fight inequality, it needs to be abandoned.
You can already tell by the way that this is phrased that the author really doesn't understand the concept of equality of opportunity.
I suspect that the definition that most people are working with when they say equality of opportunity is the removal of structural barriers that would otherwise prevent meritocratic success.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines equality of opportunity as a political ideal that is opposed to a caste hierarchy, but not to hierarchy per se.
The background assumption is that a society contains a hierarchy of more and less desirable superior and inferior positions.
In a caste society, the assignment of individuals to places in the social hierarchy is fixed by birth.
The child acquires the social status of his or her parents if their union is socially sanctioned.
Social mobility may be possible in a cased society, but the process whereby one is admitted to a different level of the hierarchy is only open to some individuals depending on their initial ascriptive social status.
In contrast, when equality of opportunity prevails, the assignment of individuals to places in the social hierarchy is determined by some form of competitive process, and all members of society are eligible to compete on equal terms.
I think you can't have personal freedom without equality of opportunity.
If there are institutional or social barriers in your way preventing you from trying to attain a goal, then you don't have equality of opportunity.
This is why I am against discrimination based on race or gender or sexuality, but I am in favour of assistance to the poor for healthcare and education.
I don't think wealth should be a barrier to these things, especially not education, which is the cornerstone of social mobility.
And I don't think it's actually very difficult to create a system that does give a reasonable degree of equality of opportunity.
Now, of course, it's not going to be perfect, but it doesn't have to be to provide people with enough opportunity to get themselves out of the condition they're currently in and into a much more preferable one.
The reason I want equality of opportunity is because opportunities are required in life for people to succeed.
If you have no opportunity to do something, it doesn't matter how brilliant you are, you simply won't be able to do it.
And this provides, as far as I'm concerned, an even enough field for everyone to start on.
But not only that, I want equality of opportunity because I believe in human agency.
I think that when people have an opportunity, they will go for it.
Because what equality of opportunity really is, is empowerment.
By removing barriers to an individual's success, you are not only giving them the opportunity to get ahead in life and improve their own material conditions, but you're giving them the opportunity to do what they want.
This is what freedom is, the freedom to choose one's own destiny, and to earn it if it's possible.
And I'm sure it goes without saying that equality of opportunity does not translate into equality of outcomes, and nor should it.
I don't want the result of someone else's life choices, as I'm sure someone else won't want the result of mine.
I made those life choices for me, and I want other people who have made different life choices to receive what they have earned.
I don't want our outcomes to be the same, and I think the idea of thinking that it should be is crazy.
Not only is it the antithesis of free choice, but it puts us on a road where you now have justification for almost anything.
And I really think this is the difference between the authoritarian and libertarian points of view.
The authoritarian point of view is everyone must have the same.
Everything must come out the same, and therefore we must restrict your personal freedoms because you may make choices that give you a different outcome to someone else.
Well, that's what I want.
I want different outcomes to other people.
I want a plurality of outcomes.
I don't want everyone to just have the same.
This is the liberal individualist position, and we're going to contrast it with the progressive collectivist position that's found in this article.
So it starts with, everyone wants equality of opportunity.
Huge amounts of time, money, and intellectual effort are devoted to this idea, that a just world is one in which opportunity is equal, even if outcomes aren't.
And that's correct.
Outcomes should not be the same, because equality of outcome is unjust.
To have equality of outcome, you would have to restrict the high achievements of some because of the low achievements of others.
Through no fault of the high achievers either.
Not only is this deeply unjust, but it then opens the door to any kind of totalitarianism you can think of.
When the goal of making everyone quote-unquote equal is superior to the goal of ensuring that everyone is free, that opens the door to any manner of abuses of power in order to drag down the high achievers to the level of the low achievers.
But not according to our author.
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 prove impossible.
Clearly, this person does not understand the concepts with which they are dealing.
You cannot have a dystopian totalitarian nightmare state that protects the freedom of opportunity of its citizens and doesn't restrict them from pursuing their life goals.
If anything, it sounds like you would end up with the ideal liberal democratic state.
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.
Well, it really depends on what your criteria of victory is.
My criteria isn't to get massively wealthy.
My criteria was simply to have a job I was passionate about.
Our author seems to think that the world is Wall Street, and everyone in it is trying to be Gordon Gecko.
Our author then says, it assumes there will always be an underclass.
It just wants to reserve membership for those who truly deserve it.
Well, yes, but consider this.
There will always be an underclass because human beings are not equal.
It is ridiculous to think that equality of outcome is even possible when individual human beings vary so wildly.
Even if human beings were made equal in every conceivable physical way, you would still be able to find some discrepancy between them that would then create class hierarchies.
There is simply no getting around it.
This is how human beings are built.
You may have heard of the blue eye-brown eye experiment that they do in classrooms with kids sometimes to demonstrate the consequences of discrimination.
I'll leave a link in the description if anyone wants to read about it, but basically, people with blue eyes are given privileges over people with brown eyes, and unsurprisingly, this creates a hierarchy.
Obviously this demonstrates why it's a bad thing to have caste hierarchies like this, but what it also demonstrates is just how easy it is for human beings to fall into them.
But not only that, wealth is simply one distinguishing factor.
You can choose any distinguishing factor, and it will end up creating a form of caste hierarchy.
So instead of creating an all-consuming dystopian authority that controls every aspect of a person's life, It's much better to simply have as little interaction as possible and give people as even a platform as possible from which to go out.
And this allows you to set the minimum standard that you want people in your society to live at.
But conversely, it doesn't prevent other people who are way above this minimum standard from achieving the life they deserve.
Yes, you will have people on this minimum standard, but most people won't be on the minimum standard.
And the people on the minimum standard will at least have the minimum standard.
This is the only way I can think of to have genuine freedom and a social safety net.
To make sure that people aren't starving on your streets and yet not preventing people from achieving their dreams.
Then our author starts getting rather idealistic.
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.
This is of course ridiculous.
We are not talking about building a better aristocracy.
What we are talking about is giving poor people, specifically, but all people really, the tools to move forward on the life path that they want and that they can reasonably achieve.
As I've already pointed out, even if you so severely restrict the differences between people that it seems that you can't possibly find anything more to control, there will still be some kind of discrepancy and that will create a class difference.
And you are going to have to eradicate the concept of personal freedom to get to this point.
Not only is what this person asking for totally unfeasible and unachievable, but the pursuit of this utopian ideal will lead to a dystopian reality.
And of course, after coming to this point, our author begins to start projecting.
Implementing equality of opportunity would be a totalitarian nightmare.
Really?
That's an incredible statement, given that what you have just laid out necessitates a totalitarian nightmare.
And this example really cements exactly what I mean when I say this person does not understand these concepts.
On her 25th birthday, Meghan Ellison, daughter of Larry Ellison, the fifth richest man in the world, with an estimated net worth of $50 billion, inherited a massive sum, rumoured it as much as $2 billion, and used it to finance firms and boost her career as a producer.
In Ellison's case, we know how equalizing opportunity would work.
What?
There is a proven mechanism, inheritance taxes, that the government could use to cut her wealth down to the level of her peers, even though what our author is describing here is equality of outcome, and they are framing it as equality of opportunity.
The opportunity has already passed.
We know how much she now has at the end of this.
No further action needs to be taken against Meghan Ellison.
She's not impoverished.
She doesn't need help getting anywhere in life.
She's fine.
We do not need to do anything to her.
But someone pursuing an equality of outcome now has to start being oppressive to Megan Ellison, even though they know doing so would be politically impossible and probably undesirable.
And this is how they've come to the conclusion that equality of opportunity is undesirable.
By substituting equality of opportunity for equality of outcome, claiming what they're after is equality of opportunity, and then saying, well, look how oppressive that would be.
That would be awful.
But of course, our author doesn't stop there, and then they start going down the rabbit hole of totalitarian control freaks.
Equality of opportunity promises not just sufficient opportunities to all families, but equivalent ones, and this is really the mindset laid bare.
They think that equality of opportunity is providing something, as if it's top-down and authoritarian.
As if it isn't bottom-up and libertarian.
It's about ensuring there are no structural barriers to one's life path.
It is about removing hindrances.
It's not about providing something.
Because again, that is equality of outcome.
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 or pairs on nannies, no after-school tutors, no summer camps, no violin lessons or chess lessons or tennis lessons or theatre classes, certainly no inheritances.
Again, this is the mindset of someone who wants an equality of outcome.
This person thinks that equality of opportunity means the state provides the same outcome for everyone.
And then they're outlining exactly the problems with equality of outcome.
Yes, I'm sure that in a system where you were to reduce everyone to the minimum level, you wouldn't have any of these nice luxuries that they've listed, but that's not the world we want.
And this is where our author has built on a faulty premise and starts really going off the rails.
Equality of opportunity would make every parenting choice a matter of public policy, to be regulated accordingly.
And again, if you think from a top-down perspective, if you are a controlling authoritarian person, then yeah, you might think that.
You might think, well, we've got to make sure that everyone's the same, whereas this isn't about making everyone the same.
It is entirely about removing structural barriers that prevent people from achieving in life unfairly, that are anti-meritocratic.
Is this really so hard to understand?
But we're not done yet.
In fact, it gets worse.
Equality of opportunity is not an ethical way to decide who deserves what.
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.
Where to even begin with this?
If someone makes the decision to squander every opportunity that they have, then they will still be at the agreed minimum level that we as a society have decreed, and we maintain through taxpayer contributions and various other social programs, and that's fine.
I am totally fine with that.
If someone has the opportunities and they squander them, that's their choice.
We are not abandoning them.
We are making sure they have a minimum standard of living.
We don't need to do any more than that.
From then, it's up to them, and they've decided they made the conscious choice to not follow up on the opportunities that they had.
And I say this as a complete underachiever.
I should be free to fail, and indeed I have many times in my life.
And that's okay.
Because we have minimum standards.
But again, it comes from this authoritarian mindset.
It's a way for us to justify the abandonment of people.
What are you talking about?
It's a way for us to justify not having to control their every action and force them to do things against their own interests or their own nature.
This is what freedom is, and it includes the freedom to fail if people make the choice to squander those opportunities.
And again, the alternative is a terrifying level of control over one's life that completely eradicates the idea of personal freedom.
Equality of opportunity is usually defined in opposition to equality of outcomes.
The idea is that there are some people who struggle despite being smart, hard-working, industrious members of society.
They deserve the same opportunities that smart, hard-working, industrious people in the upper classes receive.
Or the middle classes, but I notice you're ignoring them completely.
But not only that, they receive the same opportunities that absolute wastrels receive.
This is the point, equality of opportunity, now it is up to the person to seize it and make use of it.
Goodwill hunting is an effective romanticization of this ideology.
It's a principle, it's not an entire ideology.
A portrait of a world where a good intellect is all you need to escape poverty, a depiction of equality of opportunity in practice.
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 gain for every poor person, equality of opportunity explicitly leaves some people out of it.
Equality of outcome explicitly promises to oppress people who aren't poor.
It tells the poor who are not Mensa members, who do not have the work ethic of John Henry, that they deserve nothing.
It gives Will Hunting everything and offers his southy friends squat.
Well, for a start, Will's friends all had jobs and worked hard.
But frankly, if you don't earn something, then you don't deserve it.
If you don't earn your top place in society, why would you think you should deserve it?
Why do you think that because some people don't earn the upper echelons of society, that that means the people who do need to be dragged down to the level of these people who either can't do it or won't do it?
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.
Well, I think doing next to nothing is one of the problems.
If you separate out socioeconomic factors, a huge chunk of people's economic success is determined by genetic variations beyond anyone's control.
Yes, which means that other people shouldn't be punished for these genetic variations, and we should provide a minimum standard of living that we can all agree on because it's not their fault that they aren't going to become millionaires.
Again, I stress this is the liberal position.
You don't drag others down because some people aren't as capable as they are.
The author then brings up a 2005 paper by Harvard sociologists Christopher Jenks and Laura Tack that suggests that there's about a two-fifths correlation between parents and children's earnings that can be attributed to genetic factors.
All we need to acknowledge is that genes play a non-trivial role.
This implies that in a world of pure equality of opportunity, where environmental inequalities were eliminated and the Will Huntings of the world had an equal shot of success, there would be inequality.
Yes.
Yes, there will be inequality.
There will be some people who have more than other people.
There would be an overclass and an underclass.
People who do better or worse due to no fault of their own.
You cannot change the intrinsic properties of a person.
If someone is not very tall, and there is a job in which tall people succeed, then a short person will never get that job due to no fault of their own.
And that's okay.
People who are tall should not be prevented from achieving in this field because there are people who are short that cannot.
And it is absurd, idealistic, utopian thinking to think that this is ever going to change or should change.
Sometimes there is just something you can't do because of the way you were born and the thing that you are.
Deal with it.
As 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.
That's not an injustice.
People are not rewarded by the effort they put in.
How the hell would you measure such a thing?
People are rewarded by the results they can produce.
It might be very easy for me to produce a certain set of results.
It might be very difficult for an idiot to produce the exact same results.
How could you possibly measure how much effort this required?
How could you do it?
How would you know how much time I spent thinking compared to how much time someone of much lower IQ spent thinking about the same problem?
Because what Thomas Nagel is saying here, whether he knows it or not, is that the differences in human beings are unjust.
Well, Thomas, I'm afraid that's not something we can do something about, and even if we could do something about it, it's not something we should do something about.
Our author then demonstrates the difference between empowerment and dependency.
We could choose to help them, the poor, despite that, to offer a basic income so their injury doesn't condemn them to a life of poverty, their injury being them being poor.
But we don't choose that.
Instead, we choose work requirements.
We choose responsibility.
And yes, that's something that you have to have in a free society.
If you are a free person, you are responsible for what you do.
I find this bit rather hilarious as well.
Elites like to talk about effort because it justifies their own positions.
It provides a non-arbitrary explanation for their wealth and privilege.
As in this is a reason they have it and they may well deserve it.
You might well say they've earned it.
Hashtag not all.
Not all elites deserve their wealth and privilege, but some do.
And that's the point.
We want more people who deserve it to get it, and people who don't deserve it to not get it.
And they end with, equality of opportunity is not the goal.
The goal is a good life for all.
We should settle for nothing less.
The great irony, of course, being that this person is arguing for a bad life for most when they say this.
This person doesn't know what a good life looks like to every single person.
You can't create a blanket rule that simply reduces the quality of life for people who have worked hard to earn this quality of life.
And on the justification that, well, some people didn't earn that.
They might not want to earn that.
They might want to earn something completely different.
You can't just say, well, this is what we need to do to make everyone happy.
All you're going to do is make most people unhappy.
It is oppressive.
It is illiberal.
▲
Export Selection