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
I think Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote that the preoccupation of elites is with racial disparities within their own class rather than the gulf between classes. Hence the focus on the hypothetical poor kid who nonetheless manages to graduate from Harvard and take a job as an investment banker, or the focus on meaningless trivia like Oscar nominations or the race of actors in Hollywood movies.
And of course the people at the top believe they deserve to be there. "Hard work and perseverance" are how they justify their fat paychecks.
One of the silent unanswered questions about "equality of opportunity" is "to what?" I think most people who use the phrase mean it at the most basic level, i.e. people should not be stuck in hereditary or caste based employment roles - a blacksmith's son can be something other than a blacksmith, working as a butcher or mortician shouldn't single your family out for generational social sanction, etc.
At that level, I agree that "equality of opportunity" is a sensible societal goal. But anything more than that assumes that people of unequal abilities and temperaments will have equal opportunities to be employed in all sectors of the economy, from show biz to particle physics, which makes no sense.
Seems to me equality of opportunity with a quality of life floor for the poorly equipped solves that issue conceptually without much problem. Leaving aside whatever political issues there may be and staying at the theoretical level.
I think Freddie makes a good point that any advocates of equality of opportunities needs to consider the failures as well as the successes. Having said that, I'm not sure how the cure wouldn't be worse than the disease. People value competence and rightly so. I certainly don't prefer a world where competency is sacrificed at the alter of cosmic fairness.
Well and concisely said. The idea of equality of opportunity is deeply ingrained in American society. So many of the people I know who have "made it" are incapable of attributing it to anything beyond their hard work, perseverance, and fine character. The Protestant Ethic of Max Weber still haunts the American culture.
By the way, congrats on being the first writer I've read to use the word epiphenomenal. I had to look it up.
If the goal is general prosperity not equality, how does this square with the fact that people’s wants don’t seem to have any logical upper limit? Working to lower middle class people from rich countries do go to other countries for beach vacations for example, which was something only the very wealthy did not that long ago. And within this context, never taking an overseas vacation can be a sign of relative low social status. In any society, there has to be a method of deciding who gets to do what, which is basically inequality. If the abstract goal is general flourishing, what if everyone think they’re flourishing involves 6 months a year overseas beach vacation?
1. Equality of opportunity sorts people into jobs where they will perform the best. If that happens systematically, then you have a boost in productivity across the board, and that $24K/year digging ditches will buy a better standard of living. Think of the way the real cost of feeding a family is about half what it was a century ago.
2. Whatever government benefits are out there, the best social insurance will always be family. This is why family structure has been one of the main driving forces behind poverty for about six decades. Falling fertility is also a looming, structural problem.
3. "What if someone’s potential is correctly fulfilled when they end up in a life that’s barren of wealth, stability, and success?" In terms of absolute wealth, the poor today are better off than the middle class of the early 20th century, but if you mean relative wealth, it's human nature to strive for status, so there will necessarily be winners and losers. Same with success. Can people find meaning, purpose, and contentment in life if their status is below average? I sure hope so! Finally, to the point of stability in life, that seems more an issue of personal choices influenced by culture. One can be poor, but married and holding down a steady job and have a fairly stable life. On the other hand, addiction and criminal activity can mean an unstable life, regardless of the circumstances one came from. This hardly seems the sort of problem that minimum wage, universal health care, or welfare programs can really address.
The sad part is that it seems like for most liberals, the mental leap is even acknowledging that there’s a group of people in the bottom half of the distribution of talent in the first place.
I think it’s telling that Dem policy makers and pundits focus so much on the cost of college and student loans. Not that those aren’t big issues, but my reaction is always ‘what about people who DONT go to college? Aren’t they in an even worse position?’ It’s incredible how little they’re brought up.
Equality of opportunity presumes that people are equal. All of the evidence showing the inheritability of intelligence proves otherwise. It was a common refrain among the mental health zealots that we should treat mental health like physical health, but we need to take this a step further and treat mental ability like physical ability. When a 5 foot tall person can't dunk a basketball, we don't berate his lack of effort, and if someone just doesn't have the facilities to do calculus, we shouldn't go in on that person either.
I don’t really believe equality of opportunity is possible but I think they will typically say the government should provide equal opportunity and civil society should provide for the Ditch digger mostly through religious institutions and people
Who can tell when they’re being lazy versus just inept.
Eventually you come to find that the people on the bottom are mildly handicapped, and you need to have the 40c organizations like Pride Industries to provide meaningful employment/lifestyle for the mildly handicapped, cause their conditions don't support healthy lifestyles.
I think some people who say equality of opportunity actually mean equality of outcomes, in the sense that if x% of the population are (insert disadvantaged category here) then we also expect x% of doctors, astronauts, successful tech billionaires, you name it - to be from said category; if not, then clearly the problem is we're not providing them with enough OPPORTUNITY.
Like most political arguments, a sufficiently weak version of this one is actually true - if you have the potential to be a great scientist but your school doesn't have any decent science teaching, maybe you can't realize that potential as much as the equally smart kid at the rich school across town.
Like Freddie, I'm just not sure what this buys the 80% or so of the population whose IQ is not +1 SD above the mean.
I think you can also argue that, given how many different factors can plausibly be said to contribute to 'opportunity', an actual regime of equality of opportunity would be hideously invasive. So even from a civil libertarian standpoint, there's reason to be skeptical of it.
Replace the term "equality of opportunity" with "abundance of opportunity". The thing missing today that better sustained the population of all classes was the existence of copious paths toward economic self-sufficiency.
The education system needs reform, but launching students into a world without enough good paying jobs... it is useless to talk about equality of opportunity.
I think there's a great deal of value in looking at the dark side of "Equality of Opportunity" like this, but I think there's a crucial part of the picture that this particular description lacks: the problem of moral and non-moral judgments.
An "equality-of-opportunist" would, I think, have very different assessments of your D+ student destined for a life of poverty, depending on their perception of *why exactly* that person failed to achieve a happy and prosperous life. They would ask the question: Why did this person end up poor? Was it because of general factors beyond their control -- anything from having shitty parents, to having shitty genes, to having shitty bosses or a shitty government holding them back? Or was it because of factors that they *could* control -- their own choices, about how to spend their time, what to care about, who to associate with, how to behave?
This question is based on a fundamental human sense -- you can see it in Stoicism, Hinduism, Confucianism, the Torah, basically all of human moral theorizing -- that there are two kinds of bad things that can happen to you. Sometimes, it's just bad stuff that is outside of your control. But sometimes, bad things happen to you because you did bad things and caused them to happen.
Think about the Book of Job. Sometimes Job is right, and the universe is screwing you for no reason. But sometimes, Job's friends are right, and the universe is screwing you for very good reasons, and you damn well deserve to get screwed.
Basically, the ideology of Equal Opportunity asks the question: If you're poor, is it *your fault* or not? And it believes that the answer is going to be different for each person.
EO is very happy to "help out" poor folks if it seems like it's "not their fault." That's actually the core of EO theory: that there are lots of barriers to "opportunity" that keep things unfair -- that is, that keep people from getting the outcomes that they morally deserve based on their own chosen actions. They say we should try to achieve EO by removing these barriers, to tear down the unjust structures that let the wicked prosper while the righteous go hungry. Because if things really were fair, and opportunities really were equal, then it would be the righteous who prosper and the wicked who go hungry.
So you're right that "Equality of Opportunity" isn't about "equality." -- it's about "fairness." But this "fairness" is all about moral judgment and personal responsibility, distinguished from external, non-moral conditions.
Now, there's lots of really good reasons to be critical of this whole ideology (read the end of Job -- God doesn't really endorse either side!). But I don't think it's possible to understand EO ideology, or to accurately criticize it, without focusing on its moralistic core.
FdB raises the issue a few times in this post (and it's a major theme in The Cult of Smart), but I really do wonder how much a "blank slate" assumption about talent, intelligence, personality, etc underlies progressive politics. Do progressives sincerely believe that structural inequalities wholly determine whether an individual succeeds or fails, or is it mostly a noble lie meant to make us feel better? Even progressive evolutionary biologists who are comfortable with the concept of heritability (including behavioral traits) in non-human species often start acting as if we can't know anything about heritable differences between individuals once you start talking about human abilities. These conversations are often fairly dishonest...we need some kind of Godwin's Law for when the specter of eugenics is raised any time someone wades in genetic differences between individuals.
I think Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote that the preoccupation of elites is with racial disparities within their own class rather than the gulf between classes. Hence the focus on the hypothetical poor kid who nonetheless manages to graduate from Harvard and take a job as an investment banker, or the focus on meaningless trivia like Oscar nominations or the race of actors in Hollywood movies.
And of course the people at the top believe they deserve to be there. "Hard work and perseverance" are how they justify their fat paychecks.
One of the silent unanswered questions about "equality of opportunity" is "to what?" I think most people who use the phrase mean it at the most basic level, i.e. people should not be stuck in hereditary or caste based employment roles - a blacksmith's son can be something other than a blacksmith, working as a butcher or mortician shouldn't single your family out for generational social sanction, etc.
At that level, I agree that "equality of opportunity" is a sensible societal goal. But anything more than that assumes that people of unequal abilities and temperaments will have equal opportunities to be employed in all sectors of the economy, from show biz to particle physics, which makes no sense.
Seems to me equality of opportunity with a quality of life floor for the poorly equipped solves that issue conceptually without much problem. Leaving aside whatever political issues there may be and staying at the theoretical level.
I think Freddie makes a good point that any advocates of equality of opportunities needs to consider the failures as well as the successes. Having said that, I'm not sure how the cure wouldn't be worse than the disease. People value competence and rightly so. I certainly don't prefer a world where competency is sacrificed at the alter of cosmic fairness.
Well and concisely said. The idea of equality of opportunity is deeply ingrained in American society. So many of the people I know who have "made it" are incapable of attributing it to anything beyond their hard work, perseverance, and fine character. The Protestant Ethic of Max Weber still haunts the American culture.
By the way, congrats on being the first writer I've read to use the word epiphenomenal. I had to look it up.
If the goal is general prosperity not equality, how does this square with the fact that people’s wants don’t seem to have any logical upper limit? Working to lower middle class people from rich countries do go to other countries for beach vacations for example, which was something only the very wealthy did not that long ago. And within this context, never taking an overseas vacation can be a sign of relative low social status. In any society, there has to be a method of deciding who gets to do what, which is basically inequality. If the abstract goal is general flourishing, what if everyone think they’re flourishing involves 6 months a year overseas beach vacation?
A few thoughts:
1. Equality of opportunity sorts people into jobs where they will perform the best. If that happens systematically, then you have a boost in productivity across the board, and that $24K/year digging ditches will buy a better standard of living. Think of the way the real cost of feeding a family is about half what it was a century ago.
2. Whatever government benefits are out there, the best social insurance will always be family. This is why family structure has been one of the main driving forces behind poverty for about six decades. Falling fertility is also a looming, structural problem.
3. "What if someone’s potential is correctly fulfilled when they end up in a life that’s barren of wealth, stability, and success?" In terms of absolute wealth, the poor today are better off than the middle class of the early 20th century, but if you mean relative wealth, it's human nature to strive for status, so there will necessarily be winners and losers. Same with success. Can people find meaning, purpose, and contentment in life if their status is below average? I sure hope so! Finally, to the point of stability in life, that seems more an issue of personal choices influenced by culture. One can be poor, but married and holding down a steady job and have a fairly stable life. On the other hand, addiction and criminal activity can mean an unstable life, regardless of the circumstances one came from. This hardly seems the sort of problem that minimum wage, universal health care, or welfare programs can really address.
The sad part is that it seems like for most liberals, the mental leap is even acknowledging that there’s a group of people in the bottom half of the distribution of talent in the first place.
I think it’s telling that Dem policy makers and pundits focus so much on the cost of college and student loans. Not that those aren’t big issues, but my reaction is always ‘what about people who DONT go to college? Aren’t they in an even worse position?’ It’s incredible how little they’re brought up.
Equality of opportunity presumes that people are equal. All of the evidence showing the inheritability of intelligence proves otherwise. It was a common refrain among the mental health zealots that we should treat mental health like physical health, but we need to take this a step further and treat mental ability like physical ability. When a 5 foot tall person can't dunk a basketball, we don't berate his lack of effort, and if someone just doesn't have the facilities to do calculus, we shouldn't go in on that person either.
I don’t really believe equality of opportunity is possible but I think they will typically say the government should provide equal opportunity and civil society should provide for the Ditch digger mostly through religious institutions and people
Who can tell when they’re being lazy versus just inept.
Eventually you come to find that the people on the bottom are mildly handicapped, and you need to have the 40c organizations like Pride Industries to provide meaningful employment/lifestyle for the mildly handicapped, cause their conditions don't support healthy lifestyles.
I think some people who say equality of opportunity actually mean equality of outcomes, in the sense that if x% of the population are (insert disadvantaged category here) then we also expect x% of doctors, astronauts, successful tech billionaires, you name it - to be from said category; if not, then clearly the problem is we're not providing them with enough OPPORTUNITY.
Like most political arguments, a sufficiently weak version of this one is actually true - if you have the potential to be a great scientist but your school doesn't have any decent science teaching, maybe you can't realize that potential as much as the equally smart kid at the rich school across town.
Like Freddie, I'm just not sure what this buys the 80% or so of the population whose IQ is not +1 SD above the mean.
I think you can also argue that, given how many different factors can plausibly be said to contribute to 'opportunity', an actual regime of equality of opportunity would be hideously invasive. So even from a civil libertarian standpoint, there's reason to be skeptical of it.
Replace the term "equality of opportunity" with "abundance of opportunity". The thing missing today that better sustained the population of all classes was the existence of copious paths toward economic self-sufficiency.
The education system needs reform, but launching students into a world without enough good paying jobs... it is useless to talk about equality of opportunity.
I think there's a great deal of value in looking at the dark side of "Equality of Opportunity" like this, but I think there's a crucial part of the picture that this particular description lacks: the problem of moral and non-moral judgments.
An "equality-of-opportunist" would, I think, have very different assessments of your D+ student destined for a life of poverty, depending on their perception of *why exactly* that person failed to achieve a happy and prosperous life. They would ask the question: Why did this person end up poor? Was it because of general factors beyond their control -- anything from having shitty parents, to having shitty genes, to having shitty bosses or a shitty government holding them back? Or was it because of factors that they *could* control -- their own choices, about how to spend their time, what to care about, who to associate with, how to behave?
This question is based on a fundamental human sense -- you can see it in Stoicism, Hinduism, Confucianism, the Torah, basically all of human moral theorizing -- that there are two kinds of bad things that can happen to you. Sometimes, it's just bad stuff that is outside of your control. But sometimes, bad things happen to you because you did bad things and caused them to happen.
Think about the Book of Job. Sometimes Job is right, and the universe is screwing you for no reason. But sometimes, Job's friends are right, and the universe is screwing you for very good reasons, and you damn well deserve to get screwed.
Basically, the ideology of Equal Opportunity asks the question: If you're poor, is it *your fault* or not? And it believes that the answer is going to be different for each person.
EO is very happy to "help out" poor folks if it seems like it's "not their fault." That's actually the core of EO theory: that there are lots of barriers to "opportunity" that keep things unfair -- that is, that keep people from getting the outcomes that they morally deserve based on their own chosen actions. They say we should try to achieve EO by removing these barriers, to tear down the unjust structures that let the wicked prosper while the righteous go hungry. Because if things really were fair, and opportunities really were equal, then it would be the righteous who prosper and the wicked who go hungry.
So you're right that "Equality of Opportunity" isn't about "equality." -- it's about "fairness." But this "fairness" is all about moral judgment and personal responsibility, distinguished from external, non-moral conditions.
Now, there's lots of really good reasons to be critical of this whole ideology (read the end of Job -- God doesn't really endorse either side!). But I don't think it's possible to understand EO ideology, or to accurately criticize it, without focusing on its moralistic core.
FdB raises the issue a few times in this post (and it's a major theme in The Cult of Smart), but I really do wonder how much a "blank slate" assumption about talent, intelligence, personality, etc underlies progressive politics. Do progressives sincerely believe that structural inequalities wholly determine whether an individual succeeds or fails, or is it mostly a noble lie meant to make us feel better? Even progressive evolutionary biologists who are comfortable with the concept of heritability (including behavioral traits) in non-human species often start acting as if we can't know anything about heritable differences between individuals once you start talking about human abilities. These conversations are often fairly dishonest...we need some kind of Godwin's Law for when the specter of eugenics is raised any time someone wades in genetic differences between individuals.