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Comment by Trundle | Hacker News Reader

So there's a lie being told to the rest of us that life is supposed to be reasonably fair and that we're supposed to work toward keeping it that way. Keeping that lie while many people are intentionally trying to subvert the concept by having kids start life at different points is an unnecessary cruelty.

By all means hand them advantages, but don't then go and try to mingle them with the lower classes. Don't act like we're all in this together. Don't force my poor past self to listen to the girl sitting next to me in class talk to her friend about owning 7 houses.

If we're going to settle for feudalism can we at least just call it feudalism and set the bar at appropriate heights for each class? Why the hell do I need to be put up against your performance enhanced kid when it comes to success? Just have me toil in your lands where I compete against all the other serfs instead. If you're going to start people off in life ahead of me at least give me the courtesy of degrees of separation.

Pretending at equality while everyone is rigging the game is trying to have your cake and eat it too.

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> So there's a lie being told to the rest of us that life is supposed to be reasonably fair and that we're supposed to work toward keeping it that way.

Whoever told you that did you a massive disservice. You're not entitled to what others have; you get what you create.

> Why the hell do I need to be put up against your performance enhanced kid when it comes to success? Just have me toil in your lands where I compete against all the other serfs instead. If you're going to start people off in life ahead of me at least give me the courtesy of degrees of separation. Pretending at equality while everyone is rigging the game is trying to have your cake and eat it too.

Drop the histrionics; at least in the US and Canada, the game isn't that rigged, especially in fields where merit and effort matters (and within tech, I've noticed PR, marketing, other non STEM to be where the 'connected' get promoted). I grew up relatively poor and my kids will grow up significantly better off because you can earn your way into better opportunities (and I say this not being particularly smart).

>(and within tech, I've noticed PR, marketing, other non STEM to be where the 'connected' get promoted).

I think you hit on something important, this merit and skills based promotion is something unique to tech where there is a culture of meritocracy. That doesn't exist in many fields and in many fields people get where there are solely because of who their parents were rather than what their parents taught them, and that applies even in the United States and Canada

>So there's a lie being told to the rest of us that life is supposed to be reasonably fair and that we're supposed to work toward keeping it that way. Keeping that lie while many people are intentionally trying to subvert the concept by having kids start life at different points is an unnecessary cruelty.

The goal is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Even that is loose, because of course no one has exactly the same advantage profile (and no one has exactly the same disadvantage profile either).

As upsetting as tactless people can be, the fact that children from a family that is struggling to make ends meet freely mingle with children from families that have abundance, even excess, is a very positive and rare thing. We should treasure it.

The belief that everyone has something important to contribute and that people from all backgrounds, creeds, and prosperity levels working and learning together will result in a better world is unique, and we absolutely should not be longing for its more conventional opposite: a world where everyone is divided up so that their feelings are protected from heterogeneity.

>The goal is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.

If that truly were the goal, 100% inheritance tax would be the policy.

You're conflating opportunity with outcome. Opportunity is abstract; it's a system that doesn't create artificial barriers to success, and in which your average person won't be actively disallowed from amassing resources. Opportunity basically means that everyone has the same rights of access to the marketplace. It doesn't make any guarantee about anyone's success once they enter that marketplace. While I'm sure we're not perfect here, we're pretty good overall.

Outcome is bona fide; it's the resource access that allows people to do the things they wish to do, not the market access that allows one to generate those resources.

Since we don't have a substantial, legally-enforced caste system or other artificial limitations on success in America, it doesn't look like opportunity has anything to do with money (unless you're referring to the excessive fees and qualifications which the government imposes to engage in some types of business (licensing bodies, etc.)), so I'm not sure why you say that confiscating a family's resources will ensure opportunity for anybody.

>Opportunity basically means that everyone has the same rights of access to the marketplace. It doesn't make any guarantee about anyone's success once they enter that marketplace.

Having money (derived from inheritance or anywhere else) gives you privileged access to the marketplace since it helps you get over natural as well as artificial barriers to entry.

This is exactly why the unifying feature of entrepreneurs is not a greater appetite for risk (quite the opposite), but access to cash - often from parents:

http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf

>Since we don't have a substantial, legally-enforced caste system or other artificial limitations on success in America,

Access to wealth is an artificial limitation on success and it's largely what the American caste system is geared around.

>I'm not sure why you say that confiscating a family's resources will ensure opportunity for anybody.

Opportunity flows from resources.

You can act like you don't care about equality of opportunity or you can support a 100% inheritance tax (and no private education) but you can't really have it both ways.

>Having money (derived from inheritance or anywhere else) gives you privileged access to the marketplace since it helps you get over natural as well as artificial barriers to entry.

You're re-defining opportunity to mean the same thing as outcome.

If all outcomes must be equal for opportunities to be equal, which is the argument you're making when you say that both artificial and natural barriers must be equally surmountable and that any potential benefit, direct or indirect, from one's access to and deployment of resources is inherently unfair, then you're in an argument that fundamentally opposes private property and the hard physical realities that dictate human behavior.

If you have a specific complaint, like that the qualifications to be admitted to the bar in almost every state require graduation from a school accredited by the ABA and that this constitutes an unfair monopoly and presents an unduly burdensome artificial constraint which was installed only to limit competition in the law profession, then that's a totally valid example of opportunity gap that should be fixed.

But saying "Someone with more resources could potentially derive more benefits, either direct or indirect, than someone without an equivalent quantity of resources, as long as they deploy them efficiently" is only stating the obvious. Suggesting that this is an inequity to be resolved is simply suggesting that individuals should not be trusted to participate in a real marketplace at all.

>The goal is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.

Opportunity is the probability distribution over outcomes. You can't equalize opportunity without reducing the variance of outcomes.

Is your assertion that we should seek to normalize outcomes in order to address differences in opportunity?

I'm just giving a quantitative way to think about the issue. If we said, "Anyone has the opportunity to win the lottery, and the actual outcome isn't relevant", everyone would acknowledge that we're talking about a probability problem. If we mean what we say about equal opportunity, then we're essentially talking about cutting the probabilistic link between one's background and one's distribution over outcomes. Ways to do this include:

* 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.

> If we mean what we say about equal opportunity, then we're essentially talking about cutting the probabilistic link between one's background and one's distribution over outcomes.

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?

>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.

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.

>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.

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.

There's no private-message interface for hackernews (so I'm unable to communicate this out-of-bound), but I wanted to tell you that even though we recently disagreed in a different thread, I appreciate your perspective.

> 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.

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.

>That's unrealistic, otherwise there would be a top-quality university in Missouri and Alabama.

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".

>The point is to ensure that random events like which family you're born into can't strongly affect the course of your life.

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).

"Opportunity is the probability distribution over outcomes."

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.

>No, it's not. You aren't accounting for choice at all.

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.

"Only in the sense that I consider individual choice to be "marginalized out" here."

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.

Looking at the graphs in the article, the "Ivy plus" line is at about 70% for the "top 5% parental income" bucket on the "top 20% income" graph.

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.

I'm not sure if I should upvote this or not... I mean, I went to a "less competitive" college to start out with, then ended up at a major university for a masters and then another major university for a PhD. I have definitely been upwardly mobile due to my education and it didn't cause me much debt. No, I'm not a 1%er, but my station in life improved greatly from the humble place I started from. That's the American Dream, right? No guarantees, just maybe a chance at something better.

I would stress about all these legacy rich folks--a lot of them don't amount to much. They party, do drugs, flame out young.

And then again, in some ways I totally agree with what you're saying--it isn't fair to tell a kid they can become a CEO when in fact the people who become CEOs are picked from a very select, elite group.

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