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>>In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world...

Every time I make this argument on HN I'm met with two responses

1) I worked my ass off when I was young to get to where I am, why should we make this easy for anybody, it will just create a lazy society

2) why should MY money go towards helping anyone else

Both are really hard to argue against no matter how much statistical data you pull out showing that improving equality of opportunity improves the society overall, because both are very emotional arguments. People feel that way and it's hard to change.

PS - the "funniest" response I had to this was someone saying that US has "perfect" equality because literally anyone from any walk of life can become rich or a president. Yeah he acknowledged that some people have it much harder than others, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the day anyone can get rich so everything else is irrelevant.

> Yeah he acknowledged that some people have it much harder than others, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the day anyone can get rich so everything else is irrelevant.

I mean, isn't that applicable everywhere? Even the most totalitarian country really only requires a military coup or revolution and, if you've worked really hard, you too could be King Dictator God Emperor for life.

People completely take for granted all the good luck, good fortune, opportunities, advantages, etc. (whatever you want to call the things that give them an upper hand as they go through life). We start and go through the first few years of life with zero input about where we are, where we go, what we eat, etc. As we get older, our choices don't increase all that much until we get to adulthood. Even when we do have choices, our choices have already been narrowed by someone else. Nearly every piece of information a person consumes was produced by someone else. Nearly everything that happens to a person is a result of something outside of their own mind. If you're doing well for yourself, then you can thank everyone around you because the world is more responsible for your accomplishments than you are. You may have worked incredibly hard, studying, reading, networking, and all that was probably necessary, but it accounts for a very small part of what got you there. If we're assigning percentages, it's in the single digits. For every person like you, there are 20, 30, 100 others who were just as willing and just as able to do the things you did, but maybe they didn't have the right information at the right time, maybe they didn't have the same networking opportunities, maybe they had to take care of their ailing brother, maybe they had more pressing issues.

Hardly anyone who has done well wants to accept this reality. They would have to change their perception not just of the world, but of themselves. They might feel very guilty, and people don't like that feeling.

People forget about bad luck too. Everyone gets the same amount of good luck in life. A few (ie Bill Gates) are at the right place at the right time and can go far, but nobody gets any more lucky breaks that anyone else, though a few breaks can go a lot farther than most of our breaks could.

For most people their luck is about equal to anyone else. which means you can't get a head because everyone else is moving as fast as you. However you are still moving forward.

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world...

That’s only if you assume there isn’t a generic component to traits that influence (broadly defined) success. But of course that’s not true.

We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park. Ditto for many other traits. Therefore it’s much more likely that his children posses these traits compared to children born in trailer parks.

Genetic or learned behavior?

The behaviors that help you successfully move between lower rungs may (spoiler: they do) hinder you at higher rungs.

I'm inclined to agree with this, but could you elaborate on some of these behaviors? The ones that come to my mind are punctuality and subservience. Absolutely critical for a bottom-tier laborer, but nobody is upset if the CEO is late for a meeting.

> We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Even if there are genes for success, being successful is not proof of having those genes, and being unsuccessful is not proof of not having them.

Furthermore, if we assume that someone swapped Bill Gates' baby with a baby born in a trailer park, do you truly think that Bill Gates' genetic child will have a much better chance at success than the child Gates raised as his own?

> n a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure.

Maybe aspirational, but it's not reasonable to expect this.

More educated parents both earn more money and educate their children more (and not per se due to their higher earnings).

It's hard to compensate for that.

> It's hard to compensate for that

A good public education system goes a long way. At the moment in the US, rich kids benefit not just from the education their parents give them directly (which let’s face it is not necessarily that great just because they’re rich - how much has Ivanka benefited from Donald’s insights?) but also from the expensive schools that their parents can afford to send them too. Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society. It can largely be legislated away given the social and political will to do so.

> Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society.

It is a fundamental feature in class-based societies like USA, the UK and much of the rest of the Anglosphere. Maintaining the class structure and preserving the accrued intergenerational wealth from the upper strata of society means that the kids of those wealthier classes must acquire distinctive social manners and culture which sets them apart from the commoners.

This is absolutely correct. Suspect you started with a Tabula Rasa society where everyone began with the same resources. You would still see differentiation after n generations: wealth and influence can compound over time and groups of people would gain influence, power, and money. And this is the expected outcome of a perfectly meritocratic system.

> wealth and influence can compound over time and groups of people would gain influence, power, and money. And this is the expected outcome of a perfectly meritocratic system.

It is not. In a meritocratic system, children wouldn't inherit resources, access to education would be conditioned purely by merit, and so would access to jobs, finance opportunities etc.

The nepotism rampant (edit: was "inherent") in corporations, government, the finance industry etc. are exactly the things that keep the rich rich and the poor poor.

This is interesting, and I've never heard this definition of egalitarian. It certainly does solve the philosophical problem I've raised. I'm curious (genuinely) if large numbers of people are seriously suggesting such a system. How would it even be implemented? Well-off parents cannot buy their children clothing or food? They cannot give their used car to their children? Etc? That rich parents could not pay extra for the health care needs of their children? I could understand (if potentially not really agree with) something more limited, such as a specific inheritance tax. But I don't see how you prevent rich parents from sharing their resources with their children in the broad sense.

Here's an old-school socialist vision for this (say, something along the lines of what Noam Chomsky would advocate):

- society (through local community funds etc) would ensure that everyone, regardless of anything else, has access to basic livelihood (food, shelter, clothes, transport, healthcare)

- society would ensure that everyone has access to the same educational institutions, including required resources (manuals, computer access etc.)

- people would strive to evaluate others based on actual aptitude, rather than class markers (e.g. someone speaking with a heavy "uneducated" accent or wearing low quality clothes wouldn't be looked down upon being evaluated for a professorship or top management position)

- inheritance would be heavily taxed; this would be set up in such a way that people would have a right to the human elements of inheritance - e.g. the home where they grew up, their parents' memories etc. - but huge transfers of wealth, such as inheriting your parents' Amazon stock would not be profitable.

Better off parents will still be able to give a better life and resources to their children, but the impact of that care on the ultimate outcomes will be much less. A "perfectly meritocratic" system would likely be horribly dystopic, such as entirely separating children from parents at birth, Brave New World style.

I'm surprised that you mention food, clothing and healthcare. It's absolutely possible to ensure that every child has access to these things, so that the children of rich parents do not have a large advantage in these respects.

There's an embedded cultural assumption in all of this: children are the property of their parents, rather than members of a community raised by the community as a whole.

The latter rings dystopian to the modern US ear, because our civic society has so thoroughly broken down. It's not just the ultra-wealthy who distrust their local public schools or wouldn't have a random neighbor keep an eye on the kids for a couple hours.

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child.

A reasonably fair society shouldn't allow for children to be born and raised in trailer parks in the first place. State policies should be directed towards strengthening the family unit and improving the conditions for the average working class people. Once you have eliminated the precarious forms of existence in society and have established decent cultural norms for working class people by which they value education, upward social mobility will happen much more widely.

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child.

I don't agree with this. You are measuring equality of outcomes, not of opportunities. They are different.

No, I said equality of opportunity: both Bill Gates' child and the child born in the trailer park should, at birth, have the same chance to become extremely rich or extremely poor. That would mean that they have the same opportunities.

If you believe in a strong genetic component, than you can complicate the formula a bit.

>That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society

That might be what we expect from a perfectly egalitarian society, but expecting any free, democratic society to come even close to perfect egalitarianism is completely delusional.

Besides we could only expect it in a society of clones. Genes matter.

That is not egalitarianism (which would mean something closer to everyone owning the exact same amounts), it is the standard definition of "equality of opportunity".

There is no standard definition of "equality of opportunity"; and many definitions that are regularly-used focus primarily on an absence of unreasonable discrimination in application processes rather than fairness in the Rawlsian sense.

Where do you place the cutoff for opportunity? Are things like innate ability, motivation, interest in lucrative pursuits for their own merits, luck of the draw not also just another kind of opportunity? There is no standard because nobody can agree on a standard. The only thing we can say for certain is that the kind of society you propose will never be attained through free and democratic political processes. Make of that what you will.

How about high income through athletics or modeling? Should any two children be equally likely to make it professionally?

Sure, genes and other accidents of birth make the model more complex. But still, in our current society, if you were to take two identical twins and separated them from birth and made various income families raise them, and repeat this experiment 100s of times, you would still see remarkably little mobility.