I will claim that every single student in that bucket (a fairly small number of people, when you stop and count them, adding up to well less than 5% of the population of the US) in fact had perfectly reasonable opportunity to end up in the top 20% of the income distribution. And just to be clear, from looking at page 17 of the original paper at <http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper..., "top 20% of the income distribution" in this case means an individual income of $58,000/year by age 34.
The 30% that did not end up there almost certainly prioritized other things over income. But that does not take away the fact that they had the opportunity.
So it might be more correct to say that opportunity is the probability distribution over outcomes, conditional on goals. That statement I might be willing to accept.
No, it's not. You aren't accounting for choice at all. Some people choose happiness over wealth, some people choose short-term outcomes over long-term outcomes, and some people just make choices that result in a much greater struggle for whatever reason.
Only in the sense that I consider individual choice to be "marginalized out" here. People's choices have only a limited causal influence on outcomes, after all, but it is instructive to look at how much causal power choices have, versus circumstances. Trying to maximize the causal power of choices and minimize that of circumstances is a worthy goal.
It still requires looking at the outcome distribution quantitatively, and admitting that both factors have causal power.
Why?
"Trying to maximize the causal power of choices and minimize that of circumstances is a worthy goal."
I see what you are saying, but I'm not sure we want to take that to an extreme. Diverse, interesting, and challenging circumstances produce a lot of creativity, culture, and happiness.
* Admitting students to university based on merely adequate grades and their citizenship in the community, rather than based on a "meritocratic" competition that actually just conditions outcomes on starting-points.
* Supporting trade unions and other institutions that regularize wages/salaries/incomes.
* Taxing inheritance heavily.
* Enforcing anti-trust law.
The point is to ensure that random events like which family you're born into can't strongly affect the course of your life. I'd love to hear other, less "bog standard" ways to compress the distribution over outcomes, thus equalizing opportunity.
However, note that we're talking about cutting a link. By default, opportunities are only available to people with past actual successes. By default, outcomes build upon outcomes and compound exponentially. We're looking to defy that natural process, cut a natural link, and thus regularize certain statistical structures.
This is impossible. We pretend like it's not true in America, but one's parents have massive, near-total influence. That doesn't mean you'll turn out to be an exact clone of your mom or dad, but it does mean that your childhood, and the choices your parents make on the family's behalf, are going to dictate a great deal about your life from the day you're born until the day you die.
There's no way around that. Should we take all of the community's children and randomly distribute them to different households so that parents with business aptitude don't grant their children an "unfair opportunity" by giving them good business advice? Is this not an unfair opportunity granted to children by the "random event" of their birth? If the benefit of a parent's intellectual resources is fair, why isn't the benefit of his/her financial resources?
>However, note that we're talking about cutting a link. By default, opportunities are only available to people with past actual successes. By default, outcomes build upon outcomes and compound exponentially. We're looking to defy that natural process, cut a natural link, and thus regularize certain statistical structures.
I disagree. By default, in the absence of a government, the market is open and opportunity is equal; two persons with no knowledge of one another can walk up to each other in the desert and make any trade considered agreeable between the two of them. That is equal opportunity. In a complex society, the government's role is to protect that natural transaction flow, not to confiscate the goods and redistribute in the way that it has decided is fair. That makes both parties unhappy and leaves only the governors pleased.
The government protects natural transaction flow by refusing to allow the enforcement of provisions that would unfairly exclude the participation of large portions of the population based on artificially imposed constraints (i.e., not inherent constraints that exist due to lack of financial, physical, or mental resources).
Natural marketplaces are also safeguarded by refusing to allow similarly artificial prohibitions to flow from the centralization of control within certain de-facto authorities, usually monopolies or cabals.
And for all that to work, the government also must provide more basic enforcement to safeguard human life and protect private property.
That's basically it! The goal is not to equalize the outcome, or ensure that the difficulty gradient of actually succeeding is identical or near-identical for everyone (which is impossible).
Opportunity refers to the ability to start out without someone's boot on your neck, not the ability to do better than your peers (that's merit, not opportunity).
The intrinsic problem with this approach is that it "drags others down", reducing the purpose of working harder or unfairly affects those more naturally capable.
> * Admitting students to university based on merely adequate grades and their citizenship in the community
Assuming you mean "citizenship in the community" to be "I live in state X, that means I have a better chance of access to X State University", over a generation, this would just mean that for higher achieving state X, students from state Y would be locked out of better opportunities based on geographic residency.
A real life example would be higher admittance for Californians to California State schools, which reduces the opportunities for a kid from Missouri or Alabama (because of realistic capacity constraints). The kid that went to University of Missouri is now at a significant disadvantage (based on education) and is not able to compete against her peers for jobs in regions with better long-term opportunities, even if she had a lot of potential. University of Missouri then has to accommodate the lackluster abilities of its enrolling body (as it ostensibly does with a 77% acceptance rate), which leads to dropping STEM requirements, which means an even less capable constituency.
> rather than based on a "meritocratic" competition that actually just conditions outcomes on starting-points.
Related to the last point, this would seek to normalize the achievement by "boosting up" those that haven't demonstrated aptitude, while limiting the opportunity of those that would benefit from a more rigorous program.
> * Supporting trade unions and other institutions that regularize wages/salaries/incomes.
For non-specialized labor, maybe. If the idea is that the base salary would need to increase, that would just increase the costs of goods "across the board", which doesn't do much except broaden the divide between the full-time employed and the unemployed.
Would you be willing to give up a percentage of your salary to someone else in your department that earns less, even if he/she doesn't work as hard or isn't as skilled? If yes, why aren't you doing that now?
> * Taxing inheritance heavily.
Why are others more entitled to the results of my labor after I'm dead versus when I'm alive? It's not my job to posthumously give advantage to the kids of strangers against my own in a competitive world. Also, if you try to implement this, you'll end up getting the government involved in interpersonal gifting (as the logical workaround would be to give the maximum tax deductible gift per year or sell assets to family at well below their value, if not just creating new avenues to tax avoidance).
> * Enforcing anti-trust law.
Agreed.
> We're looking to defy that natural process, cut a natural link, and thus regularize certain statistical structures.
This suggestion makes my brain feel fuzzy. If the thought is that it's a natural process for the above-average to create advantages for themselves and their own, isn't this asking for more laws to compel them to act against their own interests?
I don't think that there's anything natural about how much money your parents have. If we go back into history, the only "naturally capable" advantage some people had was a natural capacity to stick a sword through peasants and take their grain. "Natural" advantages came from violence, not from intrinsic individual greatness.
Actual individual greatness, like that of Einstein (for instance), is often just thrown into the general lot of human advancement.
>Assuming you mean "citizenship in the community" to be "I live in state X, that means I have a better chance of access to X State University", over a generation, this would just mean that for higher achieving state X, students from state Y would be locked out of better opportunities based on geographic residency.
Yes, that is a problem. However, the capacity limits you mention don't disappear when we just say, "Open University of California to the whole planet". The only real solution is to build up more top-quality universities in Missouri and Alabama.
Now, I know that trying to multiply one fish into thousands of fish and feed the masses can sound miraculous, but the amazing thing about education and technology is that they enhance productivity. Once you've committed to making Missouri and Alabama more productive, the process helps itself along, so it's actually nowhere near miraculous.
>Would you be willing to give up a percentage of your salary to someone else in your department that earns less, even if he/she doesn't work as hard or isn't as skilled? If yes, why aren't you doing that now?
Actually, the last place I worked, everyone earned the same salary. We functioned pretty well.
>Why are others more entitled to the results of my labor after I'm dead versus when I'm alive?
Because you can't enjoy things when you're dead, and we've seen in history that inheritance leads to aristocracy, social instability, and mass destruction.
>This suggestion makes my brain feel fuzzy. If the thought is that it's a natural process for the above-average to create advantages for themselves and their own, isn't this asking for more laws to compel them to act against their own interests?
Is it in your interest to defect in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma? Was it in the interest of Marie Antoinette to say, "Let them eat cake"? Your long-term rational interest can differ from short-term selfishness.
No, passing resources from generation to generation is not what leads to "mass destruction", etc. Familial/generational resources have been the sustenance of almost all free humans since time immemorial. They would live on tribal [read: familial] lands for their entire existence, cooperatively sharing the wealth to ensure that the needs of family members were supplied.
We're still dependent on generational wealth for the first couple decades of our lives at a minimum, and there's no reason to cut it off there except a) jealousy that some people are able to do so; and b) a desire to lessen the interdependent bonds between sympathetic family members and strengthen the dependency on the cold, hard creditors, standing at the ready to collect interest and increase the cost of all durable goods by 1.5x-3x.
The fact that some things, like thrones and other official positions, may not be good fits for straight inheritance models doesn't mean that all inheritance is evil or that parents shouldn't be allowed to provide a resource pool that will persist after their deaths.
I hope that I can leave an estate that provides for the housing and basic needs of my children and grandchildren and I fully intend on passing it down to them. This has nothing to do with "aristocracy, social instability, and mass destruction", and the claim that it does is plain class hostility.
That's unrealistic, otherwise there would be a top-quality university in Missouri and Alabama. Our existence is one of constraints.
> Once you've committed to making Missouri and Alabama more productive, the process helps itself along, so it's actually nowhere near miraculous.
Education is the immediate antithesis of productivity -- we're on hacker news and you know that pair programming is either a code-quality, knowledge-sharing, or bug-avoidance issue, and specifically never a means for immediate gains nor all three. You can't throw cash at university and get smarter students -- I went to a top 50 school where the top administration is compensated better than the top 10.
> Actually, the last place I worked, everyone earned the same salary. We functioned pretty well.
What about now? Do you ask junior QA if you can give them the earning difference? If you oppose this notion based on separation of duty, do you think union politics would be better at making this differentiation?
> Because you can't enjoy things when you're dead, and we've seen in history that inheritance leads to aristocracy, social instability, and mass destruction.
You avoided the issue of removing inheritance being untenable. If I die, my nephew gets all of my wealth and I hope it brings him happiness and fulfillment. If you try to legislate that, I will simply route around you.
What mass destruction? What social instability? My partner comes from a communist nation and his/her (not interested in disclosing sexual details) experiences add color to the reality that political dispensation of resources is a terrible machinery.
Socialism/communism does not result in a more "equal" society. If hard numbers don't do it for you, find the nearest Chinese/Russian emigrant area and buy an older person a drink and ask if it's alright to pick his/her brain.
> Is it in your interest to defect in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma? Was it in the interest of Marie Antoinette to say, "Let them eat cake"? Your long-term rational interest can differ from short-term selfishness.
I have no obligation to your kids, will always pick my own kids over yours, and it's not a prisoner's dilemma -- if you try to tax me to the extent that I'm providing luxury for others, that changes the moral algebra for resources that I very well could shield from taxation.
Are you really claiming it's impossible to have good educational institutions anywhere except where we already do? This sounds like an overly-general claim: "anything that can be accomplished, already has been".
Opportunity is the probability distribution over outcomes. You can't equalize opportunity without reducing the variance of outcomes.