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.
Distinction with barely a difference. The former is a mere extension of the latter. In a meritocracy the racial composition of classes will match the class ability of the races; that is, in a knowledge economy, we expect Hispanics to be "under-represented" in the upper echelons and "over-represented" in those involving skilled and unskilled labor.
We can sneer at people for being short-sighted and only worrying about their own class but what they are seeing is correct.
No. The problem is when elites think that casting a black mermaid will somehow magically resolve the racial wealth gap or address the disproportionate number of blacks living in poverty. It's an obsession with fairy dust and unicorns as solutions to real world problems and it's pretty pathetic.
If they're sufficiently elite to be involved in the casting of movies then they're hardly to be blamed for worrying about what they can control. Should they be picketing Walmart instead, to make sure enough shift managers are Hmong?
All of the bitching about minority representation at the Oscars or in movies is idiocy. Does it actually have any impact outside of elite spheres? Maybe, maybe not. Regardless though it is idiocy.
Yeah, it is stupid. Most of this conversation is stupid, though. The l difference between black mermaid and black scientists is just one of degrees - it's all borne from the same premises, though, which I've bloviated enough about already. So rather than relitigating that I'll just say your definition of "impact" is incoherent.
Asian Americans have the highest income of any racial group in the United States, including whites, while simultaneously have the lowest "representation" in terms of the number of Asian entertainers (actors, comedians, musicians, etc.) or athletes in professional sports.
What they do have is the lowest rate of single parent households.
The first is completely irrelevant. The second is critical. Of course the debate focuses on blacks mermaids. That is not merely stupid--it is monstrously so.
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.
Moving from the theoretical to the concrete though what I worry about now is a growing gulf (economic, cultural, etc.) in this country between the haves and the have nots.
Agreed but it is helpful to be clear on whether problems are practical or theoretical, Freddie seemed to be suggesting a problem at the theoretical level
I would argue that the focus right now should be on the economic fortunes of everybody that didn't go to college. I mean, deBoer's right that _behind_ the "equality of opportunity" argument is an implicit narrative that has everybody going to college and taking a white collar job.
As a solution to, for example, the racial wealth gap that is insane.
They have a quality of life that's the envy of the entire world, which is why every non-college person in every random -stan and -land is crawling over broken glass to get here.
It is certainly better than anywhere south of the border by most metrics, and it is fair to note that. But it is not great compared to many of our peers in the world of wealthy nations.
You are right - it's also completely inevitable given what the guy you're replying to thinks he wants. What does "equality of opportunity with a quality of life floor for the poorly equipped" do to "solve that issue conceptually" - that issue being "what do we do with the losers?"
Well, let's think about it. What would a floor look like for the least able? Would it look like: universal education? Subsidized preschool? Free childhood nutrition? Free accommodation, up to and including for the generationally unemployed, to say nothing of the generationally criminal? Would it look like free healthcare at need-point for these people? Would it entail universal suffrage and a caloric surplus that would embarrass Dionysus? Would it be free libraries in every town and endless adult education opportunities in every city?
Could we have literally all of these things and still pretend that what's holding back 'equality of opportunity' is some kind of 'floor'? What does a floor even fucking look like at this point?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: your average ghetto urban dweller in the US has at their literal doorstep the kind of resources that are the envy of the world.
It's not the lack of a floor - it's that they have no feet to stand on it. They are the losers!
They don't have the capability to take advantage of these things. But every shitlib on this blog thinks we're UBI away from turning Gary into Geneva.
I know this isn't the argument you're making, but rather the guy you're responding to, but man, I'm tired of even engaging with these guys. They think they're engaged with the literature but they're not, they're just putting a new coat of lipstick on the desiccated swine corpse of "more money for them programs."
You are, of course, completely correct. The gulf, as spelled out by Charles Murray in Coming Apart, is the INEVITABLE OUTCOME of the 'floorism'. You encumber dumbs with all kinds of programs and money and tell them, "you were created dumb - go and be smart! Go forth and compete!" And of course they can't, because they have dumb parents, so they live among other dumbs while the smart kids who took advantage of their own particular equality of opportunity get rich and marry each other, and have smart kids, and the smart kids throw some more money at the floor, and on and on it goes.
No. It's stupid. The options aren't how to carpet the floor. The options are, accept that an inevitable outcome of meritocracy is a WIDENING social gulf and a DEEPENING stratification, or don't.
Freddie is right in saying that we don't all have equal talent or ability, and therefore shouldn't base having 'a good and decent life' only on the willful application of those things. But then that begs the question: should excellence and drive not really matter then? Since we can't just make everyone rich due to every practical economic reason under the sun, it's a bit like subtracting seconds off your 1st place 100yd dash time and adding them to the last place runner. I don't think anyone would agree to that kind of stark redistribution...well almost anyone.
I agree that the key here is the 'quality of life floor' as you put it. On one hand, some on the Left seem to think we should just try and give everyone a lovely upper middle-class lifestyle - something akin to the coastal PMC's. And some on the Right seem to think all we should really do is give everyone a water bottle and sharpened stick, and let the cards fall where they may - Spartan style.
I think raising the 'floor' is the right way to do it. I don't think it's high enough where it is now...it's pretty damn low if you think about it. But I also don't think everyone deserves a life free of struggle or discomfort of any kind just because you exist in the world. If I had to pick a level for that floor, I would choose lower middle-class.
Where that lower middle-class line is these days is beyond me, and I have no idea if that's even economically feasible. But I would say that a system that provides everyone with decent degree of health care, education, housing, and enough time and money left over for getting a modicum of actual enjoyment out of life, would be a good place to start. This way, everyone shares at least a baseline of life comfort, while also not artificially holding back those superstars who have both the drive and ability to go on to bigger and better things.
The floor is already ridiculously high. Take it from this immigrant: the quality of life of your average indigent American is the envy of the entire world. It's laughably easy to live comfortably here. These people want for absolutely nothing. The struggles they face are not because of some supposed material deprivation.
It's incredible that you can look at this country's housing situation and think "hmm, yep, the problem here is definitely that the less able don't have sufficiently beautiful housing." It's literally in defiance of reality. It's jaw-dropping that you can look at the amount of human capital, to say nothing of financial capital, that we devote to schooling the least able and say that we're not doing everything that can be possibly done to provide a "decent degree" of education. It's just wilfully ignoring what's in front of you, if you've spent literally a week looking at what we do and what the system provides, and think "aha, if we just boost it x% then finally we've solved inequality."
The baseline of life comfort has been so far exceeded that it's hard to put it into words. What comfort do you think is missing? What's the material aspect that's missing here? For the terminally unemployed, where's the lack of time? Waiting for the bus?
I'm genuinely in awe of people who've managed to convince themselves of two things simultaneously: that there are superstars who could be artificially held back by some kind of excess of comfort (???), as though the next Fields Medal winner is going to quit math if he gets a free Happy Meal, but also that the lower orders are so benighted that they don't have education. You people just argue against yourselves and while I *try* not to assign ill motives to people I disagree with, I make an exception here: I think you're just married to your own positive outcome but still want to feel like a "good person" by tossing a crumb to the poors.
You can either have a meritocracy or you can't. You don't get to have one, then bribe people not to notice (with other peoples' money) and meet any objection with more bribes.
You really have to think about in the context of providing different floors for different capacities. If you provide a lower middle class floor for not working, meaningful numbers of people that are perfectly capable of driving a UPS truck will just take the check and drink themselves to death, immerse themselves in some non-productive hobby that is the source of all meaning in their life etc. I'd like to provide a lower middle class life to those that are really incapable of functioning in any realistic employment environment, but these are not clear lines. And doctors and other experts have already demonstrated that they aren't capable of drawing them. The scale of disability fraud can be debated endlessly because the hard/debatable cases vastly outnumber the blatant fraud cases.
I'd bet there's also an argument to be made that allowing the most talented and driven people to "reach their potential" creates more wealth and technological advances that raise the floor of the life experience of a person whose "full potential" is considered a failure by the more successful. Sort of a cosmic version of "mercantilism makes it so the queen can get stockings, markets make it so every woman in the country can get stockings" idea.
The quality of life floor in this country is the single greatest achievement in human history. Dumb poors want for absolutely nothing. They have technology, medicine, and material possessions that a French monarch would gasp at. They have UBI in all but name and they don't live in "precarity" - their housing is free and will be free until the sun burns out.
What they don't have, and what a "floor" cannot provide, is dignity and worth.
Very few people have free housing, and health care is only free to the poor in a very limited way. Comparing contemprorary standards of living to the 18th century isn't very useful.
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.
As I've said before, there's a difference between arguing that only some people are cut out to do job X versus job X deserves to be compensated at twenty times the rate of job Y. Freddie's not asking for unqualified people to be engineers, he's asking for the living standards of ditch diggers to be closer to those of engineers.
And FWIW, there is ample evidence from nations which have lower Gini coefficients that making the working class more well paid - and even having the professional class a little less well paid - doesn't actually stop type A people from putting in their best effort. The same "sorts" of people become doctors, lawyers, etc. even in Scandinavia, and productivity is still high. If we can make life less miserable for "failures" while not in any way slowing down the performance of "winners" - well, why shouldn't we?
Of course, the way that the Soviets (and Chinese) did it absolutely did not work. But there were lots of confounding factors there, such as the state often picking career choices for the students via fiat. I don't think anyone seriously advocates for that, even on the left.
Great point. I'd add that we wouldn't need to lower the standards of education or professional competence if the life outside of elite circles wasn't so harrowing, with low wages, rising costs of essentials and the looming terror of going broke by getting sick. I say this often- the people bitching about participation trophies never admit that we built a world where only people who win awards matter.
Started working in a factory for 4 years after high school, before earning my degree.
If the difference in quality of life between factory work and engineer were much smaller, I would not have bothered earning a degree in engineering.
Agree on a minimum standard. Working 3 jobs to survive is not humane. But too high of a minimum standard would drastically reduce incentives to excel.
The example of Scandinavia is one of a homogeneous society. Might not work here - especially since that would require a drastic change in expectations. An attempt to transform the US into Scandinavia runs the very real risk of destroying the nation.
We are at each other's throats now. What happens to politics if the stakes are raised to have the government redistribute and control the population more than is already the case? Each election becomes a super high stakes event, with likelihood of even more corruption.
If you even want to become like Scandinavia, the first step would be to prove that we can be a cohesive nation, and cooperate to reduce corruption in our government, and reestablish the standards for free speech and constitutional rights, and some semblance of a national news media dedicated to truth over partisan narrative.
Any attempt to radically transform our nation without those prerequisites would not - and should not - be even considered.
Their economic output in Scandinavia is significantly lower than their equivalent here in the US, which is why the US runs train on the much-vaunted "Northern European" states in all measures of economic output, and also a large reason of why the Eurozone has stagnated in the last decade while the US' economy has soared.
(It would be remiss not to add that another reason is that the Eurozone sacrificed its energy policy to please the US, to which it is subservient, but that's just in the nature of Europeans to tilt at windmills.)
I am European by birth and spent a few years in white collar employment in Europe, working across offices in several cities in several countrie. I realize this is anecdotal but it is striking just how little work Europeans actually do. They're in the office - or at least somewhere office-adjacent, like a coffee shop - for just as long as Americans, but don't actually *do* very much. This is borne out in productivity figures: yeah, they're high compared to, say, Thailand, but they pale in comparison to those of the US. I think part of the reason is that we like to talk, whereas Americans like to act.
When I raise this with people back home this is the point where the conversation turns to "ah yes, but we get so much with our taxes, and plus we're happier and just enjoy life more."
Overwork can bring misery. In your case, it's not it.
The supposed happiness surfeit of Northern Europe derives not from an idyllic life of leisure. Certainly they work fewer hours (albeit not as few as you might think). Instead it self-reportedly derives from a greater feeling of social coherence and belonging.
I say this with compassion, as I've struggled with depression in my life (which, while maybe distinct from an existential misery, is at least a near neighbor.)
The sociological grass is not greener. You wouldn't be happier working six hours a week less. The productivity and career in question is *probably* irrelevant to the source of your unhappiness. I could only speculate, not knowing you at all, as to what it is, but I can say with 100% confidence it's not your job and it's irrelevant to your job, and that having a different or less demanding job will make absolutely no difference to your happiness.
I would like it, to increase your happiness and that of those around you, if you could figure out what the source is. I wish you luck with this and say with honesty that you deserve not to live in misery.
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.
Let's say they attribute it entirely, 100%, to those things, with literally zero consideration to breeding, upbringing, fortune, helping hands along the way etc. Explain to me the negative outcome of that thinking.
For what it's worth, I've never met anyone in my life who attributes literally everything to their "hard work, perseverance, and fine character". I've met people who have cited these as the defining factors of their success, and in all cases I believe it to be true. But that's very different from saying there's zero attribution towards anything else.
A cordial suggestion for people who don't like the Protestant work ethic is that, as it is a peculiar value to legacy Americans and a few pockets of Northern Europe, they needn't travel too far to avoid it. The vast majority of people live in countries where this is at most a foreign imposition and at best completely unheard of. Numerous neighborhoods in the US couldn't spell it, much less practice it. For the exotically-inclined: I hear Bhutan has 'gross national happiness' instead - why not give that a try?
Those of us who subscribe to it, meanwhile, will continue to eke out a living in the most prosperous, just, and fair society the world has ever known.
I'll take that as a compliment. Others less politic might describe them as either the posterity of the founding stock, or the rightful inheritors of the American state.
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?
This seems somewhat of an aside from his general point, since the question of finite resources and unbounded demand will need to be addressed for ecological reasons eventually regardless (in particular areas, like global demand for wild-caught seafood, it's already there).
Regardless, I don't think that many philosophers ever considered "maximizing human flourishing" to mean pony rides all day long and eating cotton candy till we're sick.
A lot of people’s idea of flourishing does seem to include travel though. And a wide variety of foods. These things are relatively easy to access in rich countries and most people seem to want a lot of them. So it is a valid question to ask how much of it qualifies as prosperity, and how should it be distributed. Currently you can get it if you can pay for it. What is the alternative to this? Also who cares what philosophers ideas of flourishing are? Some people more or less share those ideas, but a lot of people don’t. A lot of people’s idea of flourishing is basically pony rides and cotton candy, and nobody can really tell those people what they should want…
I don't think your point about frequent international travel among the working class is true, at least in the U.S. Less than half of Americans have passports. Undoubtedly most of the lower-income Americans who have them are from immigrant families, and travel abroad almost entirely to visit family in their home countries. Sure, there's been a rise in recent years to things like direct flights/long weekends at resorts in the Dominican Republic at fairly affordable prices, but I don't think that home health aides are going on these trips.
But as to your broader point, I don't quite get what you're saying. I have not advocated for the abolition of money here, only the reduction of income inequality (not even the total elimination...even the Soviets didn't do that). So it's not like there would be some government office deciding who would get international trips by fiat. If ditch diggers got paid more, they likely would take a few more vacations, but the money would come from elsewhere in the economy, where consumption would be lowered.
You rhetorically asked: "who cares what philosophers ideas of flourishing are."
I interpret that as "Who cares what the best minds in all history have to say." We should listen very closely to Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Benedict Spinoza, Immanuel Kant. G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say about flourishing, living the good life, creating a just society. They were geniuses who thought long, hard, and well about the human condition. We neglect their bodies of work at our peril, unless you're content with living by guidelines from Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, Steve Bannon, and Howard Stern.
But this is a political question, not a philosophical one. As is already seen in numerous debates, what constitutes a “living wage” or “fair share” mean a lot of different things to different people. But even if we somehow agreed on what some baseline is, I predict it would be about 5 minutes after it was passed until someone would start complaining that it’s insufficient.
Well yeah, utopia is clearly something that is impossible. We can't live at the endpoint of history, after all.
The way it would likely work is the same way all public policy debates work right now; there would be countervailing forces arguing to expand the baseline versus curtail it until, at some point, the two evened out and policy reached a metastable equilibrium (for the short term since there's no "forever" when it comes to politics and culture).
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.
I want to unpack a bit the idea that "equality of opportunity" slots people into where they perform the best. I think it's more accurate to say that within a capitalist system, people have incentives to try and slot themselves into a job that makes them more money that they also don't mind doing. If they're on the right end of the bell curve, this means leveraging their intelligence to ensure they aren't doing some crappy, low-paid job.
However, that doesn't mean that's what they'd be best at. IIRC, lots of studies have found that smart people actually perform better than dumb people even in manual labor. The gap isn't as wide as with professional class jobs, but it's still there, probably because if you're smart you can find different labor-saving ways to undertake your work (or even do research to find an easier way to complete it).
Add to this that for a lot of people, having an office job where you do one hour of work and surf the internet the rest of the day is living the dream. Hence in many individual cases, you end up with a smart person who's not being particularly productive at all.
Hence, economic incentives within capitalism and our educational system do not really enhance productivity per se. They enhance the bargaining power of people who are already exceptional to increase their earnings power. If they're Type A and driven, they'll do hard work, but that is hardly a requirement.
You and Alexander are both right. Capitalism/market incentives increase productivity overall, but individually, there are many smart people who choose professions that are more lucrative to them but more harmful to society (like advertising).
Your argument doesn't follow at all; it presumes a labor theory of value that is irrelevant to productivity as measured by capitalism (i.e. the generation of capital value.)
The guy who spends 24 hours frantically digging random holes in his back yard is putting in a ton of work and generating no productivity. The lawyer who bills one hour to a multinational, allowing them to close an important deal, then goes on TikTok for the rest of the day has probably generated a few hundred dollars of his own and multiples for his client.
If the argument is instead that our current system doesn't *fully optimize* productivity per se, that's a fair claim. But to say it doesn't enhance it is flatly false.
I was explicitly responding to Alexander's first point, that "equality of opportunity" slots people into the jobs they perform the best. Certainly it will result in better outcomes than something like aristocracy, but best is a pretty broad-based claim. I'm not willing to go along with the assertion that it optimizes productivity for that reason.
To give one well-known example, it does seem that there's a relationship between income and IQ, but only up to a point. The top 1% of the income distribution, for example, don't seem to be as smart as the 97th/98th percentiles. While there's likely some non-meritocratic elements for this, part of it is undoubtedly just that the extreme right end of the bell curve generally has interests other than being a hedge fund manager or something of the sort. They're smart enough to have their pick of jobs which engage them and work well for them, which may be different from the jobs which actually maximize "productivity" the most.
Well, Alexander is correct in that it's the best of any system yet devised. It's not the theoretical best, but a quick look at GDP calculations across history and between states shows that nothing else comes close to "optimizing" performance (if we assume that optimization is synonymous with productivity.)
It's maybe slightly depressing that capitalism is insufficiently optimized, meaning a future with even more edges sanded off than now :)
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 think we do go in on the person that can't learn calculus--we go on on the schools, or society, or racism, or some other external factor, rather than just admitting that some brains work differently than others, and some brains are capable of understanding higher math and some just are not. People who can't learn higher math can still live full lives, earn a decent living, raise good kids, and contribute to society.
One of the great things about American culture is that it is good at allowing people chances to flourish, but the negative side of that is our tendency to reflexively assign blame based on mythology when things go wrong. Conservatives tend to point to a lack of character or hard work--in effect blaming something that should be in an individual's control--a lack of effort is the reason for a lack of accomplishment. Liberals will look at structural factors like family, race, lousy schools, etc. so a lack of external support is responsible for a lack of accomplishment.
Nobody is willing to talk about internal factors that are outside of our control--intelligence is one, but not the only factor that can hold a person back. Sometimes it's a physical condition. Sometimes it's mental health that gets in the way. Sometimes it may be a personality disorder---not exactly a mental illness, but there are people who are so disagreeable/irrational that they can't get along with others well enough to hold down a job or maintain a stable friend or romantic relationship.
It seems dishonest to me not to talk about the fact that there is a baseline level of cognitive processing power that is required to hold down a job that pays a living wage. When I started my career in finance, most repetitive office tasks were still done by hand. Voicemail was in its infancy so there were a lot of workers (almost all women) who did nothing more than answer a phone and record a name, a phone number and possibly a short phrase indicating why a person had called and when they could/needed to be reached. That was it. That was the job. All you had to do was be pleasant and have legible handwriting. Receptionist jobs (that was the title) didn't pay much, but you got benefits, a week or two of vacation a year, and got to sit in an air conditioned office when it was hot and a warm office when it was cold outside. If a woman was very attractive, she could even meet, date and possibly marry a man of higher income/social status. If she was smart she could apply for and get a higher level job and move up.
Are there jobs now that afford that kind of middle class life for a person who has good social skills but limited intelligence? I'm sure there are somewhere but I can't think of any. It feels to me like the "cutoff" if you will to work in corporate America is quite a bit higher than it was--it's not enough to be pleasant and conscientious anymore. I wonder if a lot of the anger in politics today is because there aren't enough secure and undemanding jobs for people who grew up in families where their not-bright parents were able to provide a secure life for their kids, who in turn weren't great students and could not or would not get educated beyond high school.
Those jobs, strictly speaking, DO exist, but they're being gatekept by college degrees, and the situation is spiraling out of control as more people get BAs and even masters. I 100% believe that if we broke the stranglehold that college has on the job market and open more jobs to people with just a high school diploma it would do a ton for equality. Having done a soft liberal arts major (history) in college ( a good college too, not a degree mill) I can 100% say I use NOTHING I learned in college at my current job. I think if people were honest, they'd put up similar numbers to me. But there's so much social prestige wrapped in college and credentials that people will deny this clear truth to gas themselves up.
You're right that college degrees are being used as a barrier to entry for good quality jobs, but I also think that an entry level office job today is far more complex than it was when I entered the workforce. I showed up almost exactly when the transition from manual to automated happened--I got my break into tech because I understood the step by step processes involved in trading stocks and bonds and I could explain to developers what needed to happen to create a fully automated transaction. Trading systems displaced vast numbers of clerical employees, just like word processing, voicemail and later email replaced receptionists, typists, and secretaries. None of those jobs required a college degree--many of them didn't require a high level of industry knowledge or even much intelligence. Some did--but those tended to be specialty jobs. I highly doubt any company would actually pay somebody to just sit at a desk and do nothing but answer a phone and during slow times stuff envelopes or put meeting packets together. That would be an insane waste of resources and also be very strange to see in today's business environment.
What jobs that don't involve manual labor do you think a) can be done by someone with only a high school diploma and b) can't be easily automated by AI within the next 3 years?
Theoretically, somebody with a high school diploma could do almost any office job if they are smart and somebody teaches them what they need to know to do the job. I'm having trouble thinking of any office job that will still be around in 3 years--call center jobs are being replaced with AI--that actually started about 5 years ago with chatbots and speech recognition software. Paralegal work will go AI very soon if it isn't already being done. There may be some customer facing jobs that will require an actual human--maybe some tax and accounting work where the client has such messy records that they can't be scanned and read and organized by software? There will always be some segments of some service businesses where clients will refuse to deal with automated advisors--but roles like financial advisor and insurance agent are going to be the exception--most of us will be better served and for less money by dealing with an automated service powered by AI.
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 just put a way too long response to somebody else--in essence that people who aren't mentally handicapped are still not smart enough to meet a minimum bar for a job that can actually support one person, let alone a family. Do we create "Pride Industries" type jobs for people with IQ's between 80-100?
Are they competent to manage their finances without being fleeced either accidentally, or intentionally? Are they competent enough to manage a household?
Without a baseline competency, they'll fail at everything and end up homeless ... yet again.
Yes--I'm talking about people who are not mentally disabled in any way--they just aren't bright. There are a lot of kids who struggle to learn but don't qualify for special ed because they test too high.
I have a neighbor who cares for her older (75 YO) sister who was brain damaged at birth. She can read, tell you the names of the grad students who studied under their father in the 60s. Can't unload the dishwasher, gave her inheritance to a TV psychic. Can dress herself, but needs assistance to bathe, won't put on clean clothing without drama.
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.
But once you've hedged, in this way, what is the descriptive value of "equality of opportunity" at all? Why not simply say that we're going to advance a world where no one can be too poor and too deprived, period, and leave the question of equality out of it?
I don't think I'd call it hedging. What I'm trying to do is describe an assumption behind "equality of opportunity" ideology that I don't think your description of the D+ student sufficiently considered: the moralistic premise that personal failure and impoverishment can be the result of personal viciousness, and thus can be a proper and just outcome for some people.
Equality of Opportunity ideology isn't really about optimizing economic utility by letting everyone match their talents to their most appropriate occupation. It's not even about giving people the individual right to choose their preferred occupation. At least, it's not *only* about those things. It's also about rewarding the good with wealth, and punishing the bad with poverty.
When you see free-market conservative types talking about "equality of opportunity," they almost always talk about how their ideal order would reward "hard work" and "merit" and other forms of classical virtue. And they often talk about how unjust systems (regulation, Big Government, etc.) keeps virtuous people from receiving their proper reward.
Less often, and maybe only after a few drinks on the National Review cruise, you can hear them talk about how most poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy and corrupt. They do not wish that this weren't the case! They will tell you that in a just and fair world, if you waste all your money on crack and lotto tickets and can't pay your rent, then you deserve to get thrown out on the street.
You're right that they rarely talk about your natural D+ student, the guy who's plenty virtuous but just not that good at doing stuff through no fault of his own. That blind spot exists because it steps outside of the moralistic core of the ideology.
They'll occasionally mention that *not every* poor person deserves it, of course; they'll talk about good folks who can't catch a break, and they'll feel sorry for them and maybe even agree that the government ought to help them out a little bit (but only if they deserve it! Not a dime for welfare queens!). They often have a soft spot for the obviously physically disabled (though of course, no sympathy for all those slackers faking it!). They'll help out after natural disasters (but only until you can get back on your own feet!).
But in their ideology, misfortune is the exception, not the rule. The normal order of things is that the righteous prosper, and the wicked suffer. And it's as unjust to save the wicked from their fate as it is to keep the righteous from their reward.
I think you can't understand the popular appeal of "equality of opportunity" ideology -- and you need to fully understand its appeal if you want to counteract it -- until you recognize that it taps into this deep natural human need to moralize.
Because incentives matter for increased prosperity of the nation as a whole. Why settle for a nation where we are all equal, but poor? The real world shows us this is the tradeoff. If ideology says different, and you want a real world solution, it is the ideology which must be rejected.
Also needed for comity, is a sense that society is just, honest, and fair. There will never be truly equal sharing of wealth. Not everyone can live on the top floor, or in the best climate, or have the most pleasant job. Someone needs to clean the sewer. Without equality of opportunity, and proper rewards, it all becomes about power, and thus corruption. Corruption leads to dysfunction and poverty for the masses, or worse.
We are at each other's throats now. Each side seems to care only about power - not principle, not law, not fairness - although one side seems clearly more at fault - and in power of the institutions - than the other. What happens to politics if the stakes are raised to have the government redistribute and control the population more than is already the case? Each election becomes a super high stakes event, with likelihood of even more corruption.
If you even want the US to become more equal, the first step would be to prove that we can be a cohesive nation, and cooperate to reduce corruption in our government, re-establish the standards for free speech and constitutional rights, and establish some semblance of a national news media dedicated to truth over partisan narrative.
Any attempt to radically transform our nation without those prerequisites should not even be considered.
I think most people use the phrase "equality of opportunity" simply to mean that a person is not unfairly restrained pursuing opportunities, legally or by convention. To distinguish America from, say, a caste system, or even a highly classist society like pre-war Britain. Very few people imagine that any two people actually have the same opportunities nevertheless an entire society. And I've never met a true blank-slater.
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.
Distinction with barely a difference. The former is a mere extension of the latter. In a meritocracy the racial composition of classes will match the class ability of the races; that is, in a knowledge economy, we expect Hispanics to be "under-represented" in the upper echelons and "over-represented" in those involving skilled and unskilled labor.
We can sneer at people for being short-sighted and only worrying about their own class but what they are seeing is correct.
No. The problem is when elites think that casting a black mermaid will somehow magically resolve the racial wealth gap or address the disproportionate number of blacks living in poverty. It's an obsession with fairy dust and unicorns as solutions to real world problems and it's pretty pathetic.
If they're sufficiently elite to be involved in the casting of movies then they're hardly to be blamed for worrying about what they can control. Should they be picketing Walmart instead, to make sure enough shift managers are Hmong?
They could try not being blinded by stupidity.
All of the bitching about minority representation at the Oscars or in movies is idiocy. Does it actually have any impact outside of elite spheres? Maybe, maybe not. Regardless though it is idiocy.
Yeah, it is stupid. Most of this conversation is stupid, though. The l difference between black mermaid and black scientists is just one of degrees - it's all borne from the same premises, though, which I've bloviated enough about already. So rather than relitigating that I'll just say your definition of "impact" is incoherent.
Asian Americans have the highest income of any racial group in the United States, including whites, while simultaneously have the lowest "representation" in terms of the number of Asian entertainers (actors, comedians, musicians, etc.) or athletes in professional sports.
What they do have is the lowest rate of single parent households.
The first is completely irrelevant. The second is critical. Of course the debate focuses on blacks mermaids. That is not merely stupid--it is monstrously so.
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.
Well said. Just because "equality of opportunity" is the beginning of the story rather than the whole story doesn't mean the whole idea is a mess.
Moving from the theoretical to the concrete though what I worry about now is a growing gulf (economic, cultural, etc.) in this country between the haves and the have nots.
Theoretically, I have a shot with Margot Robbie.
Dude, she's only a 7. She should be glad to have you.
I just signed up for Twitter and now I'm kind of wondering where it's been all my life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX5jNnDMfxA
Agreed but it is helpful to be clear on whether problems are practical or theoretical, Freddie seemed to be suggesting a problem at the theoretical level
I would argue that the focus right now should be on the economic fortunes of everybody that didn't go to college. I mean, deBoer's right that _behind_ the "equality of opportunity" argument is an implicit narrative that has everybody going to college and taking a white collar job.
As a solution to, for example, the racial wealth gap that is insane.
Making non college outcomes have decent quality of life can fall under the "floor" rubric theoretically though
They have a quality of life that's the envy of the entire world, which is why every non-college person in every random -stan and -land is crawling over broken glass to get here.
It is certainly better than anywhere south of the border by most metrics, and it is fair to note that. But it is not great compared to many of our peers in the world of wealthy nations.
You are right - it's also completely inevitable given what the guy you're replying to thinks he wants. What does "equality of opportunity with a quality of life floor for the poorly equipped" do to "solve that issue conceptually" - that issue being "what do we do with the losers?"
Well, let's think about it. What would a floor look like for the least able? Would it look like: universal education? Subsidized preschool? Free childhood nutrition? Free accommodation, up to and including for the generationally unemployed, to say nothing of the generationally criminal? Would it look like free healthcare at need-point for these people? Would it entail universal suffrage and a caloric surplus that would embarrass Dionysus? Would it be free libraries in every town and endless adult education opportunities in every city?
Could we have literally all of these things and still pretend that what's holding back 'equality of opportunity' is some kind of 'floor'? What does a floor even fucking look like at this point?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: your average ghetto urban dweller in the US has at their literal doorstep the kind of resources that are the envy of the world.
It's not the lack of a floor - it's that they have no feet to stand on it. They are the losers!
They don't have the capability to take advantage of these things. But every shitlib on this blog thinks we're UBI away from turning Gary into Geneva.
I know this isn't the argument you're making, but rather the guy you're responding to, but man, I'm tired of even engaging with these guys. They think they're engaged with the literature but they're not, they're just putting a new coat of lipstick on the desiccated swine corpse of "more money for them programs."
You are, of course, completely correct. The gulf, as spelled out by Charles Murray in Coming Apart, is the INEVITABLE OUTCOME of the 'floorism'. You encumber dumbs with all kinds of programs and money and tell them, "you were created dumb - go and be smart! Go forth and compete!" And of course they can't, because they have dumb parents, so they live among other dumbs while the smart kids who took advantage of their own particular equality of opportunity get rich and marry each other, and have smart kids, and the smart kids throw some more money at the floor, and on and on it goes.
No. It's stupid. The options aren't how to carpet the floor. The options are, accept that an inevitable outcome of meritocracy is a WIDENING social gulf and a DEEPENING stratification, or don't.
I was going to say this same thing.
Freddie is right in saying that we don't all have equal talent or ability, and therefore shouldn't base having 'a good and decent life' only on the willful application of those things. But then that begs the question: should excellence and drive not really matter then? Since we can't just make everyone rich due to every practical economic reason under the sun, it's a bit like subtracting seconds off your 1st place 100yd dash time and adding them to the last place runner. I don't think anyone would agree to that kind of stark redistribution...well almost anyone.
I agree that the key here is the 'quality of life floor' as you put it. On one hand, some on the Left seem to think we should just try and give everyone a lovely upper middle-class lifestyle - something akin to the coastal PMC's. And some on the Right seem to think all we should really do is give everyone a water bottle and sharpened stick, and let the cards fall where they may - Spartan style.
I think raising the 'floor' is the right way to do it. I don't think it's high enough where it is now...it's pretty damn low if you think about it. But I also don't think everyone deserves a life free of struggle or discomfort of any kind just because you exist in the world. If I had to pick a level for that floor, I would choose lower middle-class.
Where that lower middle-class line is these days is beyond me, and I have no idea if that's even economically feasible. But I would say that a system that provides everyone with decent degree of health care, education, housing, and enough time and money left over for getting a modicum of actual enjoyment out of life, would be a good place to start. This way, everyone shares at least a baseline of life comfort, while also not artificially holding back those superstars who have both the drive and ability to go on to bigger and better things.
The floor is already ridiculously high. Take it from this immigrant: the quality of life of your average indigent American is the envy of the entire world. It's laughably easy to live comfortably here. These people want for absolutely nothing. The struggles they face are not because of some supposed material deprivation.
It's incredible that you can look at this country's housing situation and think "hmm, yep, the problem here is definitely that the less able don't have sufficiently beautiful housing." It's literally in defiance of reality. It's jaw-dropping that you can look at the amount of human capital, to say nothing of financial capital, that we devote to schooling the least able and say that we're not doing everything that can be possibly done to provide a "decent degree" of education. It's just wilfully ignoring what's in front of you, if you've spent literally a week looking at what we do and what the system provides, and think "aha, if we just boost it x% then finally we've solved inequality."
The baseline of life comfort has been so far exceeded that it's hard to put it into words. What comfort do you think is missing? What's the material aspect that's missing here? For the terminally unemployed, where's the lack of time? Waiting for the bus?
I'm genuinely in awe of people who've managed to convince themselves of two things simultaneously: that there are superstars who could be artificially held back by some kind of excess of comfort (???), as though the next Fields Medal winner is going to quit math if he gets a free Happy Meal, but also that the lower orders are so benighted that they don't have education. You people just argue against yourselves and while I *try* not to assign ill motives to people I disagree with, I make an exception here: I think you're just married to your own positive outcome but still want to feel like a "good person" by tossing a crumb to the poors.
You can either have a meritocracy or you can't. You don't get to have one, then bribe people not to notice (with other peoples' money) and meet any objection with more bribes.
You really have to think about in the context of providing different floors for different capacities. If you provide a lower middle class floor for not working, meaningful numbers of people that are perfectly capable of driving a UPS truck will just take the check and drink themselves to death, immerse themselves in some non-productive hobby that is the source of all meaning in their life etc. I'd like to provide a lower middle class life to those that are really incapable of functioning in any realistic employment environment, but these are not clear lines. And doctors and other experts have already demonstrated that they aren't capable of drawing them. The scale of disability fraud can be debated endlessly because the hard/debatable cases vastly outnumber the blatant fraud cases.
I'd bet there's also an argument to be made that allowing the most talented and driven people to "reach their potential" creates more wealth and technological advances that raise the floor of the life experience of a person whose "full potential" is considered a failure by the more successful. Sort of a cosmic version of "mercantilism makes it so the queen can get stockings, markets make it so every woman in the country can get stockings" idea.
Yes. Capitalism is the engine that has harnessed this mental energy and has, among other things, ended world hunger with it.
The quality of life floor in this country is the single greatest achievement in human history. Dumb poors want for absolutely nothing. They have technology, medicine, and material possessions that a French monarch would gasp at. They have UBI in all but name and they don't live in "precarity" - their housing is free and will be free until the sun burns out.
What they don't have, and what a "floor" cannot provide, is dignity and worth.
Very few people have free housing, and health care is only free to the poor in a very limited way. Comparing contemprorary standards of living to the 18th century isn't very useful.
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.
As I've said before, there's a difference between arguing that only some people are cut out to do job X versus job X deserves to be compensated at twenty times the rate of job Y. Freddie's not asking for unqualified people to be engineers, he's asking for the living standards of ditch diggers to be closer to those of engineers.
And FWIW, there is ample evidence from nations which have lower Gini coefficients that making the working class more well paid - and even having the professional class a little less well paid - doesn't actually stop type A people from putting in their best effort. The same "sorts" of people become doctors, lawyers, etc. even in Scandinavia, and productivity is still high. If we can make life less miserable for "failures" while not in any way slowing down the performance of "winners" - well, why shouldn't we?
Of course, the way that the Soviets (and Chinese) did it absolutely did not work. But there were lots of confounding factors there, such as the state often picking career choices for the students via fiat. I don't think anyone seriously advocates for that, even on the left.
Great point. I'd add that we wouldn't need to lower the standards of education or professional competence if the life outside of elite circles wasn't so harrowing, with low wages, rising costs of essentials and the looming terror of going broke by getting sick. I say this often- the people bitching about participation trophies never admit that we built a world where only people who win awards matter.
Engineer here.
Started working in a factory for 4 years after high school, before earning my degree.
If the difference in quality of life between factory work and engineer were much smaller, I would not have bothered earning a degree in engineering.
Agree on a minimum standard. Working 3 jobs to survive is not humane. But too high of a minimum standard would drastically reduce incentives to excel.
The example of Scandinavia is one of a homogeneous society. Might not work here - especially since that would require a drastic change in expectations. An attempt to transform the US into Scandinavia runs the very real risk of destroying the nation.
We are at each other's throats now. What happens to politics if the stakes are raised to have the government redistribute and control the population more than is already the case? Each election becomes a super high stakes event, with likelihood of even more corruption.
If you even want to become like Scandinavia, the first step would be to prove that we can be a cohesive nation, and cooperate to reduce corruption in our government, and reestablish the standards for free speech and constitutional rights, and some semblance of a national news media dedicated to truth over partisan narrative.
Any attempt to radically transform our nation without those prerequisites would not - and should not - be even considered.
Their economic output in Scandinavia is significantly lower than their equivalent here in the US, which is why the US runs train on the much-vaunted "Northern European" states in all measures of economic output, and also a large reason of why the Eurozone has stagnated in the last decade while the US' economy has soared.
(It would be remiss not to add that another reason is that the Eurozone sacrificed its energy policy to please the US, to which it is subservient, but that's just in the nature of Europeans to tilt at windmills.)
I am European by birth and spent a few years in white collar employment in Europe, working across offices in several cities in several countrie. I realize this is anecdotal but it is striking just how little work Europeans actually do. They're in the office - or at least somewhere office-adjacent, like a coffee shop - for just as long as Americans, but don't actually *do* very much. This is borne out in productivity figures: yeah, they're high compared to, say, Thailand, but they pale in comparison to those of the US. I think part of the reason is that we like to talk, whereas Americans like to act.
When I raise this with people back home this is the point where the conversation turns to "ah yes, but we get so much with our taxes, and plus we're happier and just enjoy life more."
Overwork can bring misery. In your case, it's not it.
The supposed happiness surfeit of Northern Europe derives not from an idyllic life of leisure. Certainly they work fewer hours (albeit not as few as you might think). Instead it self-reportedly derives from a greater feeling of social coherence and belonging.
I say this with compassion, as I've struggled with depression in my life (which, while maybe distinct from an existential misery, is at least a near neighbor.)
The sociological grass is not greener. You wouldn't be happier working six hours a week less. The productivity and career in question is *probably* irrelevant to the source of your unhappiness. I could only speculate, not knowing you at all, as to what it is, but I can say with 100% confidence it's not your job and it's irrelevant to your job, and that having a different or less demanding job will make absolutely no difference to your happiness.
I would like it, to increase your happiness and that of those around you, if you could figure out what the source is. I wish you luck with this and say with honesty that you deserve not to live in misery.
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.
Let's say they attribute it entirely, 100%, to those things, with literally zero consideration to breeding, upbringing, fortune, helping hands along the way etc. Explain to me the negative outcome of that thinking.
For what it's worth, I've never met anyone in my life who attributes literally everything to their "hard work, perseverance, and fine character". I've met people who have cited these as the defining factors of their success, and in all cases I believe it to be true. But that's very different from saying there's zero attribution towards anything else.
A cordial suggestion for people who don't like the Protestant work ethic is that, as it is a peculiar value to legacy Americans and a few pockets of Northern Europe, they needn't travel too far to avoid it. The vast majority of people live in countries where this is at most a foreign imposition and at best completely unheard of. Numerous neighborhoods in the US couldn't spell it, much less practice it. For the exotically-inclined: I hear Bhutan has 'gross national happiness' instead - why not give that a try?
Those of us who subscribe to it, meanwhile, will continue to eke out a living in the most prosperous, just, and fair society the world has ever known.
"Legacy Americans?" That's a racist and disgraceful phrase.
I'll take that as a compliment. Others less politic might describe them as either the posterity of the founding stock, or the rightful inheritors of the American state.
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?
This seems somewhat of an aside from his general point, since the question of finite resources and unbounded demand will need to be addressed for ecological reasons eventually regardless (in particular areas, like global demand for wild-caught seafood, it's already there).
Regardless, I don't think that many philosophers ever considered "maximizing human flourishing" to mean pony rides all day long and eating cotton candy till we're sick.
A lot of people’s idea of flourishing does seem to include travel though. And a wide variety of foods. These things are relatively easy to access in rich countries and most people seem to want a lot of them. So it is a valid question to ask how much of it qualifies as prosperity, and how should it be distributed. Currently you can get it if you can pay for it. What is the alternative to this? Also who cares what philosophers ideas of flourishing are? Some people more or less share those ideas, but a lot of people don’t. A lot of people’s idea of flourishing is basically pony rides and cotton candy, and nobody can really tell those people what they should want…
I don't think your point about frequent international travel among the working class is true, at least in the U.S. Less than half of Americans have passports. Undoubtedly most of the lower-income Americans who have them are from immigrant families, and travel abroad almost entirely to visit family in their home countries. Sure, there's been a rise in recent years to things like direct flights/long weekends at resorts in the Dominican Republic at fairly affordable prices, but I don't think that home health aides are going on these trips.
But as to your broader point, I don't quite get what you're saying. I have not advocated for the abolition of money here, only the reduction of income inequality (not even the total elimination...even the Soviets didn't do that). So it's not like there would be some government office deciding who would get international trips by fiat. If ditch diggers got paid more, they likely would take a few more vacations, but the money would come from elsewhere in the economy, where consumption would be lowered.
You rhetorically asked: "who cares what philosophers ideas of flourishing are."
I interpret that as "Who cares what the best minds in all history have to say." We should listen very closely to Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Benedict Spinoza, Immanuel Kant. G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say about flourishing, living the good life, creating a just society. They were geniuses who thought long, hard, and well about the human condition. We neglect their bodies of work at our peril, unless you're content with living by guidelines from Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, Steve Bannon, and Howard Stern.
I mean I might care on a personal level. But you can’t really force anyone else to care who doesn’t already..
But this is a political question, not a philosophical one. As is already seen in numerous debates, what constitutes a “living wage” or “fair share” mean a lot of different things to different people. But even if we somehow agreed on what some baseline is, I predict it would be about 5 minutes after it was passed until someone would start complaining that it’s insufficient.
Well yeah, utopia is clearly something that is impossible. We can't live at the endpoint of history, after all.
The way it would likely work is the same way all public policy debates work right now; there would be countervailing forces arguing to expand the baseline versus curtail it until, at some point, the two evened out and policy reached a metastable equilibrium (for the short term since there's no "forever" when it comes to politics and culture).
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.
I want to unpack a bit the idea that "equality of opportunity" slots people into where they perform the best. I think it's more accurate to say that within a capitalist system, people have incentives to try and slot themselves into a job that makes them more money that they also don't mind doing. If they're on the right end of the bell curve, this means leveraging their intelligence to ensure they aren't doing some crappy, low-paid job.
However, that doesn't mean that's what they'd be best at. IIRC, lots of studies have found that smart people actually perform better than dumb people even in manual labor. The gap isn't as wide as with professional class jobs, but it's still there, probably because if you're smart you can find different labor-saving ways to undertake your work (or even do research to find an easier way to complete it).
Add to this that for a lot of people, having an office job where you do one hour of work and surf the internet the rest of the day is living the dream. Hence in many individual cases, you end up with a smart person who's not being particularly productive at all.
Hence, economic incentives within capitalism and our educational system do not really enhance productivity per se. They enhance the bargaining power of people who are already exceptional to increase their earnings power. If they're Type A and driven, they'll do hard work, but that is hardly a requirement.
You and Alexander are both right. Capitalism/market incentives increase productivity overall, but individually, there are many smart people who choose professions that are more lucrative to them but more harmful to society (like advertising).
Your argument doesn't follow at all; it presumes a labor theory of value that is irrelevant to productivity as measured by capitalism (i.e. the generation of capital value.)
The guy who spends 24 hours frantically digging random holes in his back yard is putting in a ton of work and generating no productivity. The lawyer who bills one hour to a multinational, allowing them to close an important deal, then goes on TikTok for the rest of the day has probably generated a few hundred dollars of his own and multiples for his client.
If the argument is instead that our current system doesn't *fully optimize* productivity per se, that's a fair claim. But to say it doesn't enhance it is flatly false.
I was explicitly responding to Alexander's first point, that "equality of opportunity" slots people into the jobs they perform the best. Certainly it will result in better outcomes than something like aristocracy, but best is a pretty broad-based claim. I'm not willing to go along with the assertion that it optimizes productivity for that reason.
To give one well-known example, it does seem that there's a relationship between income and IQ, but only up to a point. The top 1% of the income distribution, for example, don't seem to be as smart as the 97th/98th percentiles. While there's likely some non-meritocratic elements for this, part of it is undoubtedly just that the extreme right end of the bell curve generally has interests other than being a hedge fund manager or something of the sort. They're smart enough to have their pick of jobs which engage them and work well for them, which may be different from the jobs which actually maximize "productivity" the most.
Well, Alexander is correct in that it's the best of any system yet devised. It's not the theoretical best, but a quick look at GDP calculations across history and between states shows that nothing else comes close to "optimizing" performance (if we assume that optimization is synonymous with productivity.)
It's maybe slightly depressing that capitalism is insufficiently optimized, meaning a future with even more edges sanded off than now :)
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.
I've heard that literally half the population is below average. However, that's such a horrible thought I try not to dwell on it.
"Think how stupid the average person is. Then remember that half the people are dumber." -George Carlin
If you see intelligence as a bell curve, of course half of the people are below average.
*that’s the joke.
If you think of this in terms of standard deviations, only 18 percent of the population is meaningfully below average.
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 think we do go in on the person that can't learn calculus--we go on on the schools, or society, or racism, or some other external factor, rather than just admitting that some brains work differently than others, and some brains are capable of understanding higher math and some just are not. People who can't learn higher math can still live full lives, earn a decent living, raise good kids, and contribute to society.
One of the great things about American culture is that it is good at allowing people chances to flourish, but the negative side of that is our tendency to reflexively assign blame based on mythology when things go wrong. Conservatives tend to point to a lack of character or hard work--in effect blaming something that should be in an individual's control--a lack of effort is the reason for a lack of accomplishment. Liberals will look at structural factors like family, race, lousy schools, etc. so a lack of external support is responsible for a lack of accomplishment.
Nobody is willing to talk about internal factors that are outside of our control--intelligence is one, but not the only factor that can hold a person back. Sometimes it's a physical condition. Sometimes it's mental health that gets in the way. Sometimes it may be a personality disorder---not exactly a mental illness, but there are people who are so disagreeable/irrational that they can't get along with others well enough to hold down a job or maintain a stable friend or romantic relationship.
It seems dishonest to me not to talk about the fact that there is a baseline level of cognitive processing power that is required to hold down a job that pays a living wage. When I started my career in finance, most repetitive office tasks were still done by hand. Voicemail was in its infancy so there were a lot of workers (almost all women) who did nothing more than answer a phone and record a name, a phone number and possibly a short phrase indicating why a person had called and when they could/needed to be reached. That was it. That was the job. All you had to do was be pleasant and have legible handwriting. Receptionist jobs (that was the title) didn't pay much, but you got benefits, a week or two of vacation a year, and got to sit in an air conditioned office when it was hot and a warm office when it was cold outside. If a woman was very attractive, she could even meet, date and possibly marry a man of higher income/social status. If she was smart she could apply for and get a higher level job and move up.
Are there jobs now that afford that kind of middle class life for a person who has good social skills but limited intelligence? I'm sure there are somewhere but I can't think of any. It feels to me like the "cutoff" if you will to work in corporate America is quite a bit higher than it was--it's not enough to be pleasant and conscientious anymore. I wonder if a lot of the anger in politics today is because there aren't enough secure and undemanding jobs for people who grew up in families where their not-bright parents were able to provide a secure life for their kids, who in turn weren't great students and could not or would not get educated beyond high school.
Those jobs, strictly speaking, DO exist, but they're being gatekept by college degrees, and the situation is spiraling out of control as more people get BAs and even masters. I 100% believe that if we broke the stranglehold that college has on the job market and open more jobs to people with just a high school diploma it would do a ton for equality. Having done a soft liberal arts major (history) in college ( a good college too, not a degree mill) I can 100% say I use NOTHING I learned in college at my current job. I think if people were honest, they'd put up similar numbers to me. But there's so much social prestige wrapped in college and credentials that people will deny this clear truth to gas themselves up.
You're right that college degrees are being used as a barrier to entry for good quality jobs, but I also think that an entry level office job today is far more complex than it was when I entered the workforce. I showed up almost exactly when the transition from manual to automated happened--I got my break into tech because I understood the step by step processes involved in trading stocks and bonds and I could explain to developers what needed to happen to create a fully automated transaction. Trading systems displaced vast numbers of clerical employees, just like word processing, voicemail and later email replaced receptionists, typists, and secretaries. None of those jobs required a college degree--many of them didn't require a high level of industry knowledge or even much intelligence. Some did--but those tended to be specialty jobs. I highly doubt any company would actually pay somebody to just sit at a desk and do nothing but answer a phone and during slow times stuff envelopes or put meeting packets together. That would be an insane waste of resources and also be very strange to see in today's business environment.
What jobs that don't involve manual labor do you think a) can be done by someone with only a high school diploma and b) can't be easily automated by AI within the next 3 years?
Most secretarial work in professional environments.
LOL
AI is going to make and answer phone calls and talk to people about stuff?
Theoretically, somebody with a high school diploma could do almost any office job if they are smart and somebody teaches them what they need to know to do the job. I'm having trouble thinking of any office job that will still be around in 3 years--call center jobs are being replaced with AI--that actually started about 5 years ago with chatbots and speech recognition software. Paralegal work will go AI very soon if it isn't already being done. There may be some customer facing jobs that will require an actual human--maybe some tax and accounting work where the client has such messy records that they can't be scanned and read and organized by software? There will always be some segments of some service businesses where clients will refuse to deal with automated advisors--but roles like financial advisor and insurance agent are going to be the exception--most of us will be better served and for less money by dealing with an automated service powered by AI.
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 just put a way too long response to somebody else--in essence that people who aren't mentally handicapped are still not smart enough to meet a minimum bar for a job that can actually support one person, let alone a family. Do we create "Pride Industries" type jobs for people with IQ's between 80-100?
Are they competent to manage their finances without being fleeced either accidentally, or intentionally? Are they competent enough to manage a household?
Without a baseline competency, they'll fail at everything and end up homeless ... yet again.
Yes--I'm talking about people who are not mentally disabled in any way--they just aren't bright. There are a lot of kids who struggle to learn but don't qualify for special ed because they test too high.
Get a full evaluation.
I have a neighbor who cares for her older (75 YO) sister who was brain damaged at birth. She can read, tell you the names of the grad students who studied under their father in the 60s. Can't unload the dishwasher, gave her inheritance to a TV psychic. Can dress herself, but needs assistance to bathe, won't put on clean clothing without drama.
Can she survive alone, maintain an apartment? No.
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.
Opportunity is passive.
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.
This post should be required reading to pair with this article.
But once you've hedged, in this way, what is the descriptive value of "equality of opportunity" at all? Why not simply say that we're going to advance a world where no one can be too poor and too deprived, period, and leave the question of equality out of it?
I don't think I'd call it hedging. What I'm trying to do is describe an assumption behind "equality of opportunity" ideology that I don't think your description of the D+ student sufficiently considered: the moralistic premise that personal failure and impoverishment can be the result of personal viciousness, and thus can be a proper and just outcome for some people.
Equality of Opportunity ideology isn't really about optimizing economic utility by letting everyone match their talents to their most appropriate occupation. It's not even about giving people the individual right to choose their preferred occupation. At least, it's not *only* about those things. It's also about rewarding the good with wealth, and punishing the bad with poverty.
When you see free-market conservative types talking about "equality of opportunity," they almost always talk about how their ideal order would reward "hard work" and "merit" and other forms of classical virtue. And they often talk about how unjust systems (regulation, Big Government, etc.) keeps virtuous people from receiving their proper reward.
Less often, and maybe only after a few drinks on the National Review cruise, you can hear them talk about how most poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy and corrupt. They do not wish that this weren't the case! They will tell you that in a just and fair world, if you waste all your money on crack and lotto tickets and can't pay your rent, then you deserve to get thrown out on the street.
You're right that they rarely talk about your natural D+ student, the guy who's plenty virtuous but just not that good at doing stuff through no fault of his own. That blind spot exists because it steps outside of the moralistic core of the ideology.
They'll occasionally mention that *not every* poor person deserves it, of course; they'll talk about good folks who can't catch a break, and they'll feel sorry for them and maybe even agree that the government ought to help them out a little bit (but only if they deserve it! Not a dime for welfare queens!). They often have a soft spot for the obviously physically disabled (though of course, no sympathy for all those slackers faking it!). They'll help out after natural disasters (but only until you can get back on your own feet!).
But in their ideology, misfortune is the exception, not the rule. The normal order of things is that the righteous prosper, and the wicked suffer. And it's as unjust to save the wicked from their fate as it is to keep the righteous from their reward.
I think you can't understand the popular appeal of "equality of opportunity" ideology -- and you need to fully understand its appeal if you want to counteract it -- until you recognize that it taps into this deep natural human need to moralize.
Because incentives matter for increased prosperity of the nation as a whole. Why settle for a nation where we are all equal, but poor? The real world shows us this is the tradeoff. If ideology says different, and you want a real world solution, it is the ideology which must be rejected.
Also needed for comity, is a sense that society is just, honest, and fair. There will never be truly equal sharing of wealth. Not everyone can live on the top floor, or in the best climate, or have the most pleasant job. Someone needs to clean the sewer. Without equality of opportunity, and proper rewards, it all becomes about power, and thus corruption. Corruption leads to dysfunction and poverty for the masses, or worse.
We are at each other's throats now. Each side seems to care only about power - not principle, not law, not fairness - although one side seems clearly more at fault - and in power of the institutions - than the other. What happens to politics if the stakes are raised to have the government redistribute and control the population more than is already the case? Each election becomes a super high stakes event, with likelihood of even more corruption.
If you even want the US to become more equal, the first step would be to prove that we can be a cohesive nation, and cooperate to reduce corruption in our government, re-establish the standards for free speech and constitutional rights, and establish some semblance of a national news media dedicated to truth over partisan narrative.
Any attempt to radically transform our nation without those prerequisites should not even be considered.
I think most people use the phrase "equality of opportunity" simply to mean that a person is not unfairly restrained pursuing opportunities, legally or by convention. To distinguish America from, say, a caste system, or even a highly classist society like pre-war Britain. Very few people imagine that any two people actually have the same opportunities nevertheless an entire society. And I've never met a true blank-slater.
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.