Equal opportunity is a lot different than equal outcome. The first does not guarantee equal outcomes, as individuals vary in all sorts of ways, including skill and ambition. Achieving equal outcome almost certainly means a serious reduction of liberty, because you can't allow people to be free to do better than others.

> like women not being able to have their own bank account up until the 1970s

I am surprised to learn this!

Don't be surprised, it is simply a lie!

Not a lie, but it was a simplification of a nuanced fact that I used for the sake of brevity and quippyness.

So, for actual factual nuanced details, it depends on where you are and what you're specifically talking about. E.g. in canada it was 1964 when women became legally entitled to open a bank account without their husband’s signature.

I can't find a specific date that women were able to access basic non-credit banking services without a cosigner everywhere in the US. It happened in California in the 1800s, but there seem to have been significant obstacles for women accessing banking tools up until some time in the 1960s - without a legal requirement, it's up to the individual banks, some would have been easier than others.

The 1970s bit was a reference to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, passed in 1974 - “Prior to the law, for car loans or financial transactions, a woman was expected to have someone — a father or husband, typically a male — co-sign for that transaction,”

So yes, what I said was only true about access to credit-baring accounts, not all accounts. But before you dismiss how that would have impacted the presence of women on corporate boards - it was 1988 when the Women's Business Ownership Act of 1988 passed and put an end to state laws that required women to have male relatives sign business loans.

So yeah, the reality is both better than what I said, and worse than what I said.

I did not mean to pick on you, but I have heard this "women not being able to have their own bank account" trope many times.

You have to qualify it with married.

A single woman could open a bank account without anyone's permission! A married women was considered a part of a partnership with her husband.

Could a husband open an account without his wife's permission?

There is a difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.

In this context there really isn't any difference between the two. Different opportunities lead to different outcomes and vice versa. So if you want same opportunities for everyone you'd have to accept, that to achieve that, same outcomes are also needed.

You need to do a lot more reading if you think equality of opportunity and equality of output are the same. Saying that everyone should have equal rights and treatment under the law is a far cry from saying that everyone deserves the same outcomes in life.

I assume that you're conflating equal opportunity( via rights and treatment under the law) with equal starting points, but they are far from the same things. Equal starting points are going to be impossible, literally a pipe dream without creating some form of dystopian nightmare that prevents people from having children, and instead farms genetically equal embryos who are then raised by the state. Which will also necessitate monoculture and risk humanity due to the lack in individual variation.

Public schooling, a non-rights based government program that provides everyone with education regardless of the economic circumstances they were born into, does not create equal starting points - but it is an improvement in the equality of everyone's starting point. Hardly a dystopian nightmare. Seems to me that there is a lot more we could do while still avoiding your dystopian nightmare scenario

No, you're mixing up concepts. Public schooling is to do with equality of opportunity.

What set of rules did you use to draw the line between an opportunity and an outcome there? Why does it stop at highschool, and not continue on to university, jobs, or board seats?

Because you might just as well frame public school as the government stepping in to mandate that there are seats in elementary and high school for everyone.

Everyone has access to public school (hopefully of decent quality). Not everyone learns the same amount. Not everyone gets A's. Even more, not everyone is valedictorian.

Hmm, should we just take everyone's wealth every few years and split it evenly? After all wealth is opportunity. Hmm, or maybe set inheritance tax and gift tax to 100%. After all that is also equal opportunity.

> set inheritance tax and gift tax to 100%

Would anyone leave inheritances or give gifts after that? People would just spend everything they have, targeting a $0 or negative net worth at death.

That’s kind of the point.

The point is that people spend what they have? What would that do?

Well, it'd be great for the economy.

Such a society would not fly. Imagine being a parent and unable to be able to give your kids an advantage. It would devolve into pure chaos.

You just described the situation of millions of parents in the US today.

Why does your kid need a financial advantage? If society provided an equal footing for every child, the advantages you could provide to them would be love, advice inspiration, and bettering society so that there was more for them.

You say “that’ll never fly”, but I say if we’re going to imagine a better world why not imagine it radically better not just incrementally better.

It's not radically better. Giving people who at the age of 50 have enough money to live on no way of passing anything on will disincentivise a giant number of things you take for granted.

Like what? I'm interested in disincentivizing the accumulation of more wealth than you can spend in a lifetime, and the continued sequestering of that wealth into family lines. We abolished the monarchy for a reason - we don't want to be ruled by people who were born into their position.

There is a big difference between wealth and monarchy. You aren't ruled by people with money, although one of them might offer you a job.

They literally shape the world around us. Money = speech, so they speak louder than us. It may not be quite so restrictive as a lord-surf relationship, but “giving you a job” is a power dynamic that edges towards feudal when the choice is homelessness and starvation or work.

It is a sad world in which the only thing one could give his children is money/property.

This is the situation for a huge - possibly majority - of parents.

an unjust world where some nosy stranger decides "intergenerational wealth is bad" and "everyone is fed, housed and educated" takes precedence over you working towards your children or your children's children's future because they feel justified in using political oppression to take what you've earned for your family.

Not sure what kind of dystopia you're setting up where politicians will always use the greater good of everyone else to justify any actions against individuals.

You can't just pass a law against inter-generational wealth. It's too easy to work around, too many ways of passing money without directly inheriting it. The only way it could possibly work is if had cultural buy in. If everybody thought it was a good idea and believed in it, at that point the laws just codify and re-enforce the existing beliefs.

So I'm not setting up a dystopia where politicians swoop in and rob the elderly. I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.

>The only way it could possibly work is if had cultural buy in.

disagree. there are lots of unpopular laws that get passed as part of other bills, under the urging of activists or lobbyists against popular opinion, etc.

>I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.

The details matter. Big sweeping statements like the above don't mean anything until you get to details - they sound like moral soundbites but they ignore the details of the actions required to get to that point. That way you never have to deal with negatives arising from your ideas, because you never discuss the details enough to get to the negatives, just the platitudes.

> disagree. there are lots of unpopular laws that get passed as part of other bills, under the urging of activists or lobbyists against popular opinion, etc.

Not saying it couldn't be made a law without cultural buy-in, I'm saying the law wouldn't be effective. There are too many workaround. You can give your child your stuff while you're still alive. You can put it all into a trust. You can create a scholarship where the criteria is being this one person. You can put it all in gold bars and bury it in the backyard. Etc. etc. etc. but if there is a cultural consensus that doing that is WRONG, people will by-and-large not do it.

> The details matter.

Indeed they do. But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details. It seems that there are a lot of people on here who don't think we should be seeking to create a society that actually provides equal opportunities - in that context, debating how to achieve that goal is pretty useless. If we all agree that it would be good, then we can discuss specific plans and proposals to get closer to that goal.

>Not saying it couldn't be made a law without cultural buy-in, I'm saying the law wouldn't be effective.

The bureaucracy would expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, and enforcement mechanisms would be created like every other tax rule, enforced at the end of a gun like every other tax rule.

>But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details.

On the opposite - without the details the goal is just a meaningless sound bite, used as a weapon to justify things many won't agree to by saying 'but didn't you agree goal x is important?'.

The answer is 'depends on the cost'. If the cost is empowering equality of outcome proponents, or creating communist style political commissar enforcement mechanisms, then no, not worth it.

That's why I say details of plan first, not last. it's easy to say "what if we had equal opportunity" and get head nods but ultimately meaningless. The details are what matter, and if you can't present what you think is a good plan, you don't have one - you just have a platitude to justify wide future actions that I probably wouldn't support.

> enforced at the end of a gun like every other tax rule.

Ahh, like every other tax rule - so not really at all for rich people and quite heavily for poor and middle class people? Sounds about right.

> That's why I say details of plan first, not last

I hope that's not the approach you take with everything in life. "Do you want to go out to eat?" ... "What restaurant? I'll only say if I want to go when the venue has been selected." That's not measured caution, or the ideal - a collaborative approach to solving problems - that response is a trap where every suggestion is met with disdain. Saying "Yes I would like to go out to eat, what restaurant did you have in mind?" doesn't mean you have to go if the selected venue turns out to be chuck-e-cheese.

>I hope that's not the approach you take with everything in life.

It is from blatant political rejiggering that use these platitudes to gain artificial buy in from the uninformed.

I mean, if you just ask hitler his goal was to restore germany to greatness. Why can't you just agree with his goal before you know his plan? I hoped that's not the approach you take to political platitudes.

If you have reason to suspect someone is using these platitudes to gain buy in their plans would never gain, its important to ask for the details. If they don't have details, they're just a useful idiot. If they do have details, they're the thing that separate good and bad.

So lets not pretend "lets agree to my incredibly vague goal without any mention of how we get there" is a reasonable thing to try and thrust on strangers EXCEPT for the express purpose of manipulation and echo chamber buy ins.