What Would a Functioning System of Equal Opportunity Look Like for the Losers?

I have a new piece up for New York Magazine about why leftists should give up on AOC. Please check it out and share. I would prefer if you held your comments on that piece until tomorrow’s open thread.

I don’t want to bore you all by once again pointing out that the concept of equality as a political goal, writ large, is nonsensical and contrary to elementary Marxist principles. Some types of equality are good in some contexts, and almost any progress towards greater morality or justice in our current system would increase equality. If you told me that I could have a magic wand and shake it to increase the equality in our society, I would do so, because that society would be materially better in many ways. But equality is at best epiphenomenal of what we really want - everybody to be healthy and happy and to enjoy a certain minimal threshold of material comfort, free from unfair impositions on their efforts to achieve in various ways, without any group having undue influence over politics and government by dint of their resources, with everyone able to meet on truly level playing fields in a courtroom or at the ballot box. Yes, a more just United States is a more equal United States, but it’s not “just because equal” but rather “equal in the service of justice.” Equality as such is a confounding variable in the formula for justice, so to speak.

I’m also particularly not a fan of the concept of equality of opportunity. This has always been the standard liberal saw against socialism and other kinds of radically egalitarian politics - we don’t want everyone to end up summatively equal in all respects, but we want everyone to have an equal chance to be all that they might be thanks to their abilities and work ethic. I think that the equality of opportunity/equality of outcomes distinction actually falls apart with a moment’s inspection, as I’ll get to. But even if we accept the concept on its own terms, it has a remarkably dark side that nobody ever wants to engage with.

Here’s the classic narrative about equal opportunity working as it should. You have a kid from a disadvantaged background - definitely poor, maybe Black, grew up in deprivation, subject to the local influence of crime and drugs, seems to have everything going against him - whose talent and perseverance pays off, gets him into an elite university, and propels him to a life of success and wealth. That’s equality of opportunity! It’s when the system enables everyone to work up to their own potential. Which sounds great when you talk about the people who rise up to meet their potential in a way that we would all define as success. The part that never gets discussed is the obverse: what happens if someone reaches their potential by becoming a D+ student who just barely graduates from high school and ends up a ditch digger making $24,000 a year? What if a life spent in material deprivation and constant financial insecurity is the outcome of a genuinely equal opportunity? What if someone’s potential is correctly fulfilled when they end up in a life that’s barren of wealth, stability, and success? If equality of opportunity means anything, then it must include such outcomes. I constantly have to make this point when discussing education, a field where failure is seen as inherently a matter of injustice and yet one where there will always be a distribution of performance - a distribution with a bottom as well as a top. What if someone faces a completely equal playing field and, through the full expression of their talent and hard work, ends up totally ill-equipped for the job market?

I find that you can get people on board with that kind of outcome if the loser in question came from great privilege; people like the cosmic karma of the most privileged being severely downwardly mobile. But what if someone is born into poverty and stays there, and that static outcome genuinely reflects them operating at the peak of their potential? That would have to constitute a successful implementation of a system of equal opportunity. And yet most people would likely still feel sympathy for that person and demand a better life for them. If that sympathy is systemic rather than individual, it would seem to suggest that equal opportunity is not in fact what people see as the correct system. Rather, equal opportunity functions as a moral backstop for the system that they’re already in - and provided the story of equal opportunity is always told in terms of the dedicated and smart person who rises above hardscrabble beginnings, it remains emotionally satisfying. But the person who gets all of the required opportunity and still struggles his way to a life of destitution is just as much a story of equal opportunity as that one.

As I said, even beyond that, there’s basic problems. Core to that whole conception of justice is the notion that talent and hard work are something inherent to the individual or under the control of the individual. But if we accept that there’s any sort of genetic component to talent at all, and we certainly should, it’s hard to see how rewarding talent falls under a rubric of distributing resources to people based on that which they can control. Talent, however defined, has always looked like just another fickle gift of nature, to me, and thus using it to hand out scarce goods is no more just than hereditary nobility. If someone suffers from complications during their birth such that they have a severe cognitive disability that prevents them from flourishing, few people would see their impoverishment as a just example of equal opportunity. But if someone is born with a genetic makeup that predisposes them to do very poorly in school and meritocracy, how is that any different? And of course hard work/perseverance/growth mindset/etc are also influenced by genetics, and are unsalvageably entangled with someone’s environment, their adult role models, those inflection points in life where chance intervened in such a way as to make hard work look irrelevant….

I think the concept of equality of opportunity is a mess and people should drop it.