I suggest that most humans would agree striving for equal opportunity is a universal goal (although hard to measure and perhaps impossible to fully achieve)
I suggest that many humans see equalized outcomes as more a dystopian nightmare. In todays world it seems equal opportunity, equity.. and equalized outcomes often conflated with one another.
When you treat equality as equality of outcome, you necessarily destroy:
1. Equality of effort.
2. Equality of opportunity.
3. Equality of personal freedom.
4. Equality of justice.
All of these are the right ones to defend while accepting equality of outcome will necessarily force you to embrace behavioral engineering: the industrialization of being manipulative at scale. Basically the wet dream of every power grabbing seeker and wannabe authoritarians in disguise.
Not at all. By definition, power grabbing is the opposite of equality of outcome.
History shown many times that past dictatorships made people in power very wealthy very quickly.
Within this totalitarian framework, the power would be given to the state, acting on behalf of all the people. c.f. Stalinist/Maoist mode
It is also, of course, all done in the name of the people.
Everything is always done in the name of ‘the people’ if it helps sell the lie. Always has been that way.
Most of the feuding they do is not with each other, but with their subjects. Capital owners usually act in unison when it comes to their class interests, it's the rest of us that are busy being divided by culture wars and the gaffe of the week.
No one who was under their sphere of influence would classify Stalin or Mao as tinpot. They killed nearly 100 million of their own people between the two of them.
Khmer Rouge being a third example.
I’ll take squabbling (but still competing) landlords over ‘great leaps forward’ or holodomor any day of the week.
They don't even attempt to solve the problem. The decentralisation of power isn't even being considered.
As studied, and as the logic would follow the elite simply transfer from system to system as performance disparities persist through the generations because of genetics. Through revolutions under different systems tracked family lines out performed others regardless of system. A look at "communist" china. Persistence through Revolutions http://www.bristol.ac.uk/efm/media/workingpapers/working_pap...
That's pretty much by definition.
So whoever promises the wonderland has to get ultimate power, of course, to guide everyone to utopia.
It’s literally what keeps happening with communist countries.
If some subset of parents work super hard primarily to give their kids a better life, you must either subvert the effort of the parents and give all kids an equal chance or must admit that kids do not have equality of opportunity.
If the efforts those parents are putting in makes those kids fundamentally better at whatever is important for success, than those kids will (statistically) do better than their peers.
If everyone had an opportunity to do that same education/training/effort, but chose not to do so, that isn’t an issue with opportunity.
Equality of opportunity and equality of effort just can't coexist unless we create some kind of dystopia where kids are taken away at birth and raised in actual similar conditions.
Under equality of effort, additional effort produces rewards/benefits which by definition produces inequality. If we allow any of that inequality to pass to one's children, then clearly you have unequal opportunity when looking at that generation of children.
If you insist that everyone have exactly the same chance (equality of opportunity), then sure. Might as well make a lottery.
If you’re saying equality of effort means one persons 1 hour products the same output as someone else’s, then that also is pretty absurd. If for no other reason than people are not or cannot be identical.
But maybe we’re in violent agreement?
Society just doesn't have the resources to provide a private tutor to each student, but rich parents can. How do you close the equality of opportunity gap there?
For someone interested in sailing, opportunities are quite limited unless your parents have a sailboat, in which case you almost learn by default.
There are going to be kids who learn to sail, ski, fly, surf, or take ocean-crossing vacations 4x per year. You don’t gain as much from trimming the top as you do from putting in a solid floor. (It also costs a lot to put in an effective floor.)
Specifically, the baby being a reasonable level of equality that gives everyone a chance to do well, and the bath water being the reality thar people still do badly regardless, and many supposedly ‘good enough’ opportunities are actually just well disguised shittiness/scams. Like poorly run school districts in many areas, which tend to correlate with a lot of minorities.
Any motivated individual can now access not just average content for each grade-level, but in most cases even better content than is taught in most schools.
One could learn to code or even learn a specialized trade with the right websites/youtube videos.
i dont think that's what equality of opportunity means though.
The private tutor is giving the child an opportunity to learn. But a child that doesn't have a tutor will still receive an education from a publicly funded school. So both child will have an education. The assumption that having a private tutor automatically gives that child a better education is not really established in evidence imho.
> For someone interested in sailing, opportunities are quite limited unless your parents have a sailboat
so if schools and tertiary institutions have a sailing club, then the student could join that, rather than having to have the capital to own a sailing boat. Of course, today we don't truly have equality of opportunity, so some people don't get to sail, but i think as time progresses, it would get better.
So does simple access to the internet provide equality of opportunity when it comes to learning? At least beyond something like 6th grade?
And each college having a sailing club seems pretty unrealistic. Consider something even more niche like being a dolphin marine biologist. Easy if your parents own something like SeaWorld, otherwise get in line.
and that's why i am against equality of outcome. You've just disguised an outcome based metric as an opportunity.
The opportunity isn't "to become whatever they wish". The opportunity is the possibility of getting a job, and not rely on social security to live.
Which is really about wealth distribution and power blocs.
Which, historically, requires significant effort and adjustment from ANY demographic to get into said power bloc, or make that wealth. And a whole lot of adjustment from them for it to work and everything to not just collapse into ruin. This tends to happen organically. A new student thinks x is cool.
They go into it, but most burn out, or figure out the actual work (or actual people who also like the work) isn’t to their liking and leave.
The small percentage that remain usually have some kind of cultural or parental support, or a particular mindset, that makes them a fit for the situation. If it continues to fit, they find success.
Over time, industries in certain areas then have certain demographic/attitude/background patterns.
It is not uncommon for people who aren’t succeeding using whatever existing system or patterns exist, if the industries are seen as valuable and desirable, to grow resentful, try to weaken/capture them, and/or attempt to destroy and replace them.
It’s also not uncommon for people who ARE successful to setup barriers (explicit and implicit) to perpetuate what they saw as creating the success and protect their (and their kids/whatever) ongoing success.
Both of these responses have evolutionary pressures in their favor.
Kumbaya, cycle of life, etc.
Perfect equality of opportunity is probably as impossible as any other kind of perfect equality, but I think you can get a lot closer to it than you can get to equality of outcome, by ensuring that at least all the important opportunities are accessible to everybody. If we notice that certain groups of kids from certain environments have less access to certain opportunities that have a big impact on the rest of your life (like education) we should work to fix that.
Now if the kids from successful parents end up waterskiing a bit more while the kids of less successful parents go camping in the woods instead, I don't see that as a very big problem.
Politics, power, etc. are often avenues for improvement once you get past the basic ‘put food on the table’ situation. Sometimes before that, and are required to put food on the table. They aren’t exclusionary. They are typically more ‘rubber meets the road’ though.
Politics isn’t about making a boss happy after all, it’s about getting a bloc what it thinks it needs (or fooling them into thinking that’s happening, which is usually what it actually looks like on the ground).
If a bloc of people is getting discriminated against, for instance, then one avenue to fix that is to get enough political power to stop it. Which is using political power to get more opportunity. And no one else is likely to agree on what they think ‘enough’ opportunity looks like.
If there was any enforcement of any ‘you can’t give your kids a leg up over anyone else’ that would, however, definitely favor the r- side. Which certainly provides a lot of cannon fodder and favors Malthus more.
One could be in favor of an estate tax that removes some of the really outsized distortion possible with fabulous wealth (50% tax per generation?), without removing the invencentive to invest in higher quality, fewer children.
Any sort of block on trying to improve your children’s education though? Yikes. Guys will have zero incentive ever marry or show up (just locks you in to someone pointlessly and makes you tired when hey, the system will pick up the slack), women will have little incentive to do anything but pawn them off to the system (they’d get punished if they tried to do more than that, at some point), etc.
Talk about some Great Leap Forward type BS.
I'm at a complete loss why you think r/K selection has any relevance to issues like freedom, opportunity and politics.
‘an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic’
You could not block the parents who wish from expending outsized effort to improve their children’s life or opportunities without pretty significant authoritarianism.
At large scale, organizations go off coarse metrics. Even the US Department of Labor won their settlement against Google because Google didn’t have the exact percentage of representation based on the course DOL racial selectors.
The easiest and most common way any large organization would comply with such a mandate is not by attempted to educate or lift up the poor, but by crushing any notable examples of people going above the mean anywhere. I can point you to numerous examples of this if you want.
Removing the ability for people who want to make things better to do so, if they were able to do so better than anyone else will result in massive suffering. All in the pursuit of equality.
And it’s fertile ground for growing totalitarian dictatorships because the goal sounds good but is impossible, but no one is able to say why without being the enemy.
Would you know to ensure every HS student needs access to a computer and programming classes in the 90s?
Would you make sure every student takes a course on blockchains and NFTs today? Does each student need to know ML? Should each kid get Oculus hardware and learn 3d modeling so they can design for the metaverse?
Should we have a class on how to make TikTok videos? If you take the number of newly minted millionaires from the youngest generation, this is probably the one to pick but most people considered social media a scourge and the antithesis of what you should teach in order to provide equality.
However, that is beside the point: everybody should have access to quality education. There is nothing new or revolutionary about that concept. Education has consistently been proven to have massive benefits for both the recipients and the society they live in. (Except maybe the expensive for-profit education that sends people deep into debt while cutting costs on quality teachers.)
Furthermore children are likely adapted to be parented by their parents.
The "Three Identical Strangers" documentary on the twin study they buried over likely inconvenient conclusions could only hint at it. The triplet that came to a bad end had a parent very unlike themselves in disposition.
Adopted children also do not gain the full benefit of natural children of good parents.
Recently they found the negative effects of spanking is more related to genetics than the action itself. https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1516070970624249857
In the nurture over nature debate, nurture will only ever continue to lose ground.
Perfect equality of opportunity is certainly impossible, but we can do much better than the US system. For instance, if all schools were funded equally and given good facilities and skilled teachers and all kids regardless of wealth went to these well-run public schools, opportunity would be quite fair. See e.g. Finland.
The US has the worst possible system in this regard. Poor kids live in poor neighborhoods, where schools have no funding and (often) worst teachers (and even the great ones are so overworked that they can't provide the attention they want). Classes are overcrowded and administrators abuse the children with all kinds of zero-tolerance horrors. Meanwhile the rich kids go to top private schools where the kids are given every opportunity to learn and also make connections with their future CxO peers.
The point is to lift the floor, not lower the ceiling.
Stuff like homelessness, malnutrition, illiteracy, and so forth stunt natural healthy development, denying those children the opportunity to realize their potential.
Neglecting the least fortunate is bad for everyone. Socially and economically.
Helping kids help themselves is good for everyone. Almost biblical, morality wise.
Said the other way, is it true equality of opportunity if this history is ignored? Seems odd to suddenly say, "ok, now the playing field is level, so we're all good".
Let's just forget about equality of outcome. There is no such thing.
The dishonest argument that equality = equality of outcomes will harm us in the long run and push us towards unhealthy and draconian social policies.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
Who is “we”?
I wish the correlation/causation and replication crisis crowd would update their priors on that paper.
They published a correction (notably after all the press coverage) because they weren't measuring what they said they were measuring, but it was still a pretty lousy study, and of course demonstrates nothing about causation. [1] has a commentary, but maybe other people have better coverage.
[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/srichard/files/richardson_...
Propensity is when you normalize the value to the base rate of graduates for men and women. 53.55 / 62.7 is the women in STEM divided by women getting degrees, 46.45 / 37.3 is the men in STEM divided by men getting degrees. This gives you the rate of stem degrees normalized by how many of each gender gets tertiary degrees.
53.55 / 62.7 /(53.55 / 62.7 + 46.45 / 37.3) = 40.7%
And conversely same equation for men:
46.45 / 37.3 /(53.55 / 62.7 + 46.45 / 37.3) = 59.3%
So basically they wrote that paper not knowing anything. But I can see why a group of gender studies professors would write that piece anyway for political reasons, as this paradox is very uncomfortable for them.
> But I can see why a group of gender studies professors would write that piece anyway for political reasons, as this paradox is very uncomfortable for them.
Oh yes, professors of gender studies, anthropology and psychology should stick to their soft sciences and not critique hard science written by *checks notes* professors of psychology who write pop science books and articles.
That is why you have to compare women who choose STEM to women who choose to study something else. An anti equal society would be expected to push women into feminine fields and away from masculine fields. But as the study showed that didn't happen, gender unequal societies seemed to do the opposite. All this counter study showed is that you can mask this bias by also weighing in that unequal societies also bars many women from entering college at all.
Spot on. Even the most hardcore progressive fanatics I’ve spoken to aren’t pushing for a totally equal experience across humanity. It’s about giving everyone a fair shot at a quality life. Some may have terrible ideas for how to achieve that, but they’re not trying to cut all flowers to the same height.
It’s a good reminder that intelligence is used to achieve goals, it’s not used for setting goals. When someone’s values are so different it’s hard to have any sort of meaningful conversation.
I thought grit was more important than intelligence?
This is something I spend a lot of time thinking/worrying about.
I deeply believe that to make meaningful progress, we all need to start listening to each other. Not just what others are saying outwardly, but looking for the underlying reasons they’re saying it - their values.
When someone’s position on policy is drastically different than my own, a conversation about values often reveals that we’re not so far off in terms of what we believe. They just got stuck on their particular implementation detail.
But when values are worlds apart, what then?
On the plus side, I’ve encountered far more people who fall into the former category - disagreement on policy - then I’ve encountered in the latter - a true chasm between our value systems.
The frustrating part is that the same group of people in the policy disagreement category are quick to lump me in with the value extremists without stopping to make sure that’s what I really believe.
And such is the state of modern political discourse, where championing equality is derided as a fanciful dream about equity, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Why didn't the US make that a goal in 1793?
I recommend having 'deep' conversations. Dig down into definitions, in to differences perceived, find where your perceptions differ. Then you can propose experiments that would change one perception or another.
Most people do not have the time for that for one reason or another(including myself sometimes), but it has worked for me and might for you.
This is usually the point in the conversation where they share the cartoon of a group of people staring over a fence watching a baseball game, with each person standing on a different sized stepladder such that their overall height is equal. So yes, I would argue that is exactly what they are trying to do.
If you really want to tackle this issue, you need to look at why men live shorter than women. Do they die violent deaths more often? Trying to make society less violent could benefit everybody. Do they harm their health by working more often in unhealthy situations? Maybe improve those work situations. Are they more likely to commit suicide? Maybe invest in better mental healthcare. Does testosterone make them more likely to engage in risky behaviour that gets them killed? Well, at some point you've got to decide whether the higher risk and resulting shorter life expectancy is a matter of personal choice or not. I suppose education can play a role here.
Data suggests that more gender equality in society also leads to more gender equality in life expectancy[0]. But we should also remember that the goal of equality has to be to lift people up. Of course we could close the gender life expectancy gap by reducing life expectancy for women (maybe reducing maternity health care?) but I hope everybody agrees that would be a terrible idea. We should tackle the issues that cause men to die earlier.
Well one obvious factor is that society has a bias towards over investing in women's health. Look at cancer research. Pancreatic cancer kills a similar number of people to breast cancer but receives something like 1/100th of the research funding. If we reallocated breast cancer funding to pancreatic cancer, that could reduce the gender lifespan gap while still saving a similar number of lives (or even more) overall.
That's pretty clearly sexism against men, e.g. viewing men as disposable. Remember we test drugs on mice before humans, and that's not because we like mice; it's because they're cheap and disposable.
Imagine we only tested drugs on women. People would definitely see that as sexism against women, if not outright abuse of women! There would be endless news articles about women who suffered permanently debilitating effects of the drugs that were tested on them. There would be feminist protests to stop testing drugs on women.
The drugs aren't being tested on men instead of mice, they're being tested on men instead of women. The reason for that is that men have more stable hormone levels that don't fluctuate over the month and therefore give more reliable test results, but that also means that these treatments don't account for the fluctuating hormone levels of women.
I don't know where you live, but in most countries people aren't being forced into these sort of tests against their will. You make it sound like you're living in a totalitarian dictatorship where people are dragged off the street for dangerous experiments that haven't gone through a rigid testing process yet.
For example, if you read about the history of the Trail of Tears and slavery, those were long-term instances of oppression to specific groups. Not that Indians or East Asians haven't had periods of poor treatment, but the government had a hand in making it almost impossible for the aforementioned groups to accumulate wealth or property in America over the centuries.
If you look at the reason why Title IX exists, it is not because "men are too successful", if that makes sense.
Not consistently. If you point out there are outcomes where "minorities" do better, e.g. women living longer than men on average, and suggest we fix this by e.g. spending more government funding on men's health research, suddenly the "pro-equality" people try to change the topic, or claim that the difference is "biological" and therefore shouldn't be meddled with (an attitude they would of course call sexist if the advantage were in the other direction).
But, please feel free to point to the sophistry in the study. Where's the flaw?
It also seems to seems to suggest that if marginalized groups have drastically worse outcomes, it's because of some characteristic within those people. It seems a roundabout way of saying that all outcome disparities can be explained with, "Well, they're just lesser people in regards to intelligence/work ethic/whatever."
There are many non-intrinsic reasons for groups of individuals to not be equally represented.
The most obvious is human ethnic group migrations, and the most consistently studied is career-choice differences between men and women.
Equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcomes - especially in only one or two generations after a migration. ...and in the case of gender differences in career interest, forcing equal outcomes is counter-productive. Humans are different. Different outcomes are evidence of diversity, not malice.
Thats a perfect example of unequal opportunity. As much as we try to make excuses around it, the single biggest predictor of someone's lifetime income is their parents income. The fact of the matter is being rich provides opportunities and advantages being middle class doesn't and definitely not being poor, and there is little evidence to suggest that this corrects itself after a few generations. The fact is historically poor populations tend to stay that way, with those who escape being outliers.
> there is little evidence to suggest that this corrects itself after a few generations
On the contrary. The vast bulk of modern American citizens emigrated to America as poor, even destitute, people. Look what happened to their descendants.
This is, in fact, the opposite of true. As noted below, pretty much every wave of American immigrants until recently (Irish, Germans, Italians, Southeast Asians) came here desperately poor and eventually attained economic parity with the groups that were already here. Indeed, that process continues with Hispanic immigrants: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 ("Hispanic Americans have rates of intergenerational mobility more similar to whites than blacks, leading the Hispanic-white income gap to shrink across generations.")
In the U.S., structural poverty affecting a discrete minority affects Black and Indigenous people, and certain white sub-groups such as Appalachians and Cajuns. It's not a good default model for thinking about income mobility in general.
I would have guessed it would be incarceration. Do you have some numbers to support your belief? Wealthy parents likely were not incarcerated, so there may be overlap.
As for numbers, here's some: https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-succ...
There are a massive number of examples of this being untrue in America. Jewish Americans, Cubans, Irish, Asian Americans, Poles - all these groups started out poor, and regarded as something other than and lesser to "white" people, and now have at least the same incomes and often more.
The people you are likely referring to for the chattel excuse history also under perform in country after country where such things were never allowed. Diversity is difference, and difference will lead to persistent disparity.
Welding is overwhelming a male profession. At least 85 percent of professional welders are male.
Is it a goal to make 50 percent of welders male and female? Why? How about equal representation between asian and white welders ? again why?
In todays world women welders are encouraged and hired with little difficulty. You could argue that they have close to an equal opportunity as anyone to become a welder (perhaps more so).
Just because this metric group does not work out proportionally to the population base does not necessarily indicate oppression.
It is possible that many women for some unknown reason just don’t want to be welders… maybe that’s okay.
Are we supposed to equalize all of these?
No, but we are supposed to remove the barriers that prevent men becoming nurses and teachers, women becoming truck drivers, etc., etc.
Is there a point when you can say it's done?
Unfortunately, I think this no longer appropriate to suggest. I think certain circles would cancel you for suggesting this.
The actual cause of the decline is usually identified as the risk of false claims of sexual abuse, which are taken far too seriously by the system and unfortunately too many parents/teachers take the stance of guilty-until-proven-innocent.
I think this is a dangerous example in certain professions.
For example, someone I know was a volunteer fire fighter in a specific area that regularly required high risk fire suits + masks + oxygen tanks + supplemental gear. This is a huge amount of weight to be carrying around in sweltering temperatures, before even helping victims, or swinging an axe.
Likewise combat loads in the armed forces are regularly exceeding 40 lbs not to include crew served weapon systems. Add a stinger, a machine gun with a tripod+ full load, a Javelin, or a disassembled mortar and you have some serious weight. Armed forces have to remain mobile even when loaded.
Physics and engineering problems prevent the simplistic modification of these jobs to those that cannot meet the grueling physical requirements.
I think it is far better to define certain occupational requirements by certain requirements for entry. Now I know 95% of jobs don't require these, but for those that do it is a life & death matter.
This is where you go off the rails. I know two women that are journeyman electricians. The amount of bullshit they have to continuously turn the other cheek on is incredible. They're put in a lose lose situation where sticking up for themselves will backfire, but not being confrontational means they continue to get thrown all sorts of harassment, abuse, and a lot of nonsense about who works what task on big jobs.
When we see disparities this huge, in jobs that are definitely desirable, it's smoke. Then you actually go talk to women in these industries, and they will indeed confirm that there's a huge fire.
This is not some great philosophical question about equality of outcomes and the sad unknowable complexity of how it relates to equality of opportunity. That's just an excuse to tell people trying to put out an obvious fire that they should just stop.
In particular I'd suggest you read the history of what happened to women that learned industrial fabrication skills during WW2 and wanted to keep working with them.
That said, I don't think this is something that can be entirely addressed by government action. Government can take action against overt harassment, but you can't pass a law against your grandma thinking your job means you're gay (true story, in the case of a friend of mine).
People will always have various pressures and cultural biases that inform what occupations are picked. Humans are not the same, not every difference of opinion needs to be stamped out however misguided you believe them to be.
I remember reading a story about such a case some years ago. The male teacher in it had eventually proven his innocence and that the child was a malicious liar, but the process had wrecked his family and made him unemployed. He wasn't going back into teaching and stated to the press, very clearly, that no man should ever work with children because the female-dominated profession would always find a man guilty until proven innocent, regardless of the merits of any case. I remember it clearly because his view was so stark, so bleak and yet so well articulated and justified. I decided right there and then that I'd take his advice and stay well away from teaching.
Not that things change much as adults, of course. Every time there's a run of men proving their innocence in false rape cases (in the UK), feminists go nuts and insist the law is changed to prevent men using that tactic to prove their innocence in future. The "females must always win" mentality is pervasive and makes working in female dominated professions risky.
If it's too difficult to guess the "unknown reason", imagine an extreme case: being the only woman on a fishing boat, maybe from a developing country.
There is no statement in the comment that there is currently "some semblance of equality of opportunity" only that "most humans would agree striving for equal opportunity is a universal goal". This is a directional statement, not a statements about current progress in that direction.
Nor do I see any statement that group outcomes are explained entirely "because of some characteristic within those people."
I felt that was more vile racism than anything I have ever heard come out of Trump's mouth. I was appalled by the blatant racism that would have to thoroughly permeate your world view to allow you to proudly say something like that.
But, at the same time, Biden doesn't think he's racist. I believe that he truly despises racism. He's just got himself tied up into conceptual knots and self-contradictory values and beliefs, and rationalizations that he doesn't want to examine too closely. I don't think that's uncommon among academics and intelligent people in general.
But why can't this be true? Numerous studies have shown that genetic and particularly cultural traits produce vast differences in cognitive ability. Most recently for instance in a story about Korean twins separated at birth[1].
Research also shows that these differences can account for an overwhelming majority of the disparity in outcomes. This has been an active area of research for decades, and academia isn't at all in agreement that "marginalization" is the culprit here[2].
> marginalized groups have drastically worse outcomes
Not all "marginalized groups" do though, do they? Unless you only include groups with poor outcomes in your definition of "marginalized", in which case it's a bit circular isn't it?
1. https://www.psypost.org/2022/05/psychologists-found-a-striki...
Let's be honest, the reason so many people are opposed to this view is because it has been wrongfully used in the past to justify very real oppression and inequality of opportunity. At the very least, it is a very dangerous mindset historically, and even now it's not very well understood.
For example, in the study you mentioned around Korean twins, one was raised in a fairly standard Korean household while the other was tossed around the foster care system and had multitudes of setbacks given to them. And yet people will still use it as evidence that these differences are inherent and unchangeable. Do you not see how this reasoning can lead us to ignore our own blindspots and biases?
That doesn't mean that the view is factually inaccurate though does it? I think the best way to avoid oppression is to define and prohibit the practice of it, rather than measure the outcomes. This is what civil rights seems to be all about.
> differences are inherent and unchangeable
I never said that, I said that different childhood circumstances, cultural practices, and domestic environments clearly produce vastly different outcomes. I also think that using authority to standardize how children are raised would be tyrannical.
Most fundamentally, if you want to raise your children without, for instance, an emphasis on educational attainment, you should have the right to do so. Also, no one should be surprised that children raised in such circumstances don't go on to have equality of economic outcome. And no one should get bent out of shape about these facts in combination, as they are not a product of "marginalization".
Perhaps that's true if you believe that parents should be the only ones responsible for their children's fate, but that puts a lot of power in parents' hands and doesn't leave much with the kids themselves.
I think there's a middle ground between complete standardization and complete reliance on one or two individuals that prevents the worst outcomes, although it may also prevent some of the best possible outcomes. But generally getting input from a number of different sources is a good thing, and even if "authority" may not be great at comprehensive development of varied individuals, it can still set minimum standards and make sure the child isn't entirely subject to their parents' whims.
Edit: More generally, parents are responsible to a large degree for their children's fate, as the importance of domestic environment in the research repeatedly shows. The question is what (if anything) we should do about this, exactly?
Edit 2: Come to think of it, using authority over parents in this way could constitute cultural genocide, for instance as it was perpetrated by the Canadian residential school system. Funny how casually it can be suggested.
Just in case you have not noticed, we do that nowadays, to combat child abuse. Giving parents 100% unrestricted power over their children would enable horrific child abuse, selling your children for slavery etc ... Funny how casually it can be suggested.
The answer lies in the middle, as the parent post suggested :)
Child abuse is pretty well bounded and defined. Ranking of cultural values is certainly not.
And the denial of that view has historically been used to impose the most tyrannical societies that have ever existed, in the form of totalitarian communist states.
> culture, genes, cognitive abilities, etc. are inferior
No one said they are inferior, only that they seem produce different results. It's you who is characterizing these as inferior. Equality of opportunity is apparent through the fact there is no policy (that I'm aware of), explicitly targeting people by, say, race (whatever that means), and that such policies are illegal.
This fact alone however provides no guarantee of economic equality, nor was it ever intended to, nor has economic equality ever been a goal of legal equality. The reasons for economic inequality are myriad and complex, and people have devoted their entire careers to their study. Did you watch the video I linked? What do you think of Dr. Sowell's perspective?
I didn’t mention anything specifically about economic outcomes, although obviously money can have a big effect on important outcomes like nutrition and medical care.
> No one said they are inferior, only that they seem produce different results. It's you who is characterizing these as inferior.
Someone did say this. The comment I’m responding to used the terms “drastically worse outcomes” and “lesser people.” Also, I’m not here to quibble about questions like “is it really worse to be starving than to be well-fed?”
Which is why women have their own sports leagues instead of being forced to compete with men.
It is you that is injecting the idea of "inferiority". Women and children cannot compete athletically with men, and that's okay. I don't think that you would try to suggest that women's and under 18's football leagues were the result of "society being controlled by people who have concluded that these groups are genetically inferior".
How can something like that be even called a "study".
If they have equal opportunity, how can they be marginalized? Why can't remaining differences in outcome be explained by cultural or character differences? Given the opportunity to do what they want, people who don't value the same things probably aren't going to do the same thing.
What about minority groups that have drastically better outcomes?
For a non-US-controversial example, Chinese people in Malaysia, probably the only country that has affirmative action ("Bumiputera") for the majority ethnic group.
The historical experience says that disproportionally successful minority groups tend to live under a persistent shadow of violent retribution / ethnic cleansing / genocide at the hands of the majority, so their "privilege" is often very two-edged. But this situation, actually fairly common across the world, is rarely discussed in modern racial narrative.
We’re all born equal, but take different paths. It’s a lazy answer to say “<“They”> are just a bunch of lazy rabble”, but it’s equally lazy to declare that we’re all prepared to do anything, given the opportunity.
Coming to a middle ground that respects human dignity and improves society as a whole is truly difficult.
Consequently, the policy eventually targets the measured metric, and we get policies intended to increase opportunity that instead directly target outcomes.
At which point, policy wonks pat themselves on the back for hitting their metrics.
Isn’t that what happens with women and causes misogyny?
I'm not sure what you mean.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...
Let's assume that all gender-unequal job distributions are due to discrimination (which is highly unlikely, btw), then by definition forcing equal outcomes (e.g. a 50% women quota) will harm the previously dominant group by reducing their share of the distribution.
The discussion shouldn't be if equality might harm some groups (it definitely does), but instead which level of harm we're willing to accept for the greater good (of more equality).
Compare two worlds: in one, because of discrimination, there are fewer engineers, scientists, talented statesmen, teachers; in the other, without discrimination, there are more of these professions. The second world is more beneficial to everyone, even those of the advantaged groups of the first world. In the second world, people are more likely to discover beneficial technologies, economic approaches, medical breakthroughs, whatever.
In most universities there is a fixed number of PhD slots determined by the available budget. Then each person getting one of those jobs is blocking someone else from getting that job.
The economy expands to accommodate talent. Jobs are bounded by it. Magically double our collective intelligence, and what we understand as a "job" would cease to have meaning. Suddenly double the number of engineers, and our economy would boom.
But for the student finishing a master's degree, the only metric that matters is "PhD openings available this year". And short-term, job openings are zero sum.
That said - whenever you bring this up, probably worth mentioning the important caveat of 'historical injustice'.
For example, some 'underperforming group' may technically have 'equal access' to education, but if their parents are absent, gangs everywhere, no role models, over policed, and become cynical and standoff / thuggish by age 15, and fallen so far behind there's 0% chance of them leveraging supposed educational opportunities ... well ... then is it really 'equal opportunity'?
Definitely one could make economic and plausibly racial arguments.
Second - there are issues of visible representation.
Even if we took 'the most competent and qualified people' to be in US Congress, would it be good if they were 100% Black Women, or 100% Asian Men? Probably not. In some cases 'representation' is a form of 'qualification'.
Similarly for TV readers, some high profile things.
I don't think that it matters that much in private things and the issue is pushed too hard.
...
So we should not be dismissive or lacking in intellectual rigour or even empathy with the issue.
That said, yes, 'forcing equal outcomes' is going to be dystopian.
Also, I fear that it's really easy to push the idea of 'equal outcomes' and it's as 'ugly populist' as 'ultra nationalism / my country first' etc..
For example, we aren't risking the other equalities if we say "nobody in a civilized country should starve" or "nobody should go without basic healthcare."
The results in the study can be explained by:
1) Nearly everyone, whether in the minority or the majority, believing that the majority will be harmed; and
2) People in the majority rationally opposing those policies based on that premise and people in the minority rationally supporting those policies based on that premise.
Two ways to look at this statement. One, that those who advocate for pro-equity policies are doing the conflation. The other is that those who make that assertion are doing the conflation.
In general, I'd say it's more of the latter. That is, because the measures must necessarily be remunerative, it can give the sense of advantaging the historically disenfranchised at the expense of others. The conclusion is then drawn that this is overly corrective (i.e. inequitable in the other direction), thus equality of outcomes must be the goal.
It's easy to fall victim to this conclusion if you believe that finally implementing equitable rules after, say, 400 years of one group's disenfranchisement truly represents equal opportunity for that group.
The ruling class never wants equal rights as a group.
For real though, “equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity” is a classic example of a false dichotomy. Today’s outcome is tomorrow’s opportunity.
And besides, the whole question is premised on a defective understanding of “fairness”. Justice is not about everyone having an equal amount of stuff, it’s about power.
If one family emphasizes reading and math and another family emphasizes dance and music, they will provide different (non-equal) opportunities to their children, but one is not necessarily "better".
(I am hesitant to argue outcome should always be equal, but it seems that's what I've done.)
With equal opportunity people are free to make choices on how they live their lives. With equal outcomes nothing an individual does matters. Failure is as valuable to society as success. We learn what works and what doesn’t.
What is important in a free society is that everyone has a chance to try and that we have adequate safety nets in place so failures aren’t ruinous.
I do agree with everything you said. I think I'm arguing philosophy and you're arguing more concrete economic policies. In realm of policy, I agree with you, in the realm of philosophy, I'm not sure I see a distinct difference between outcome and opportunity (see my first question).
To continue your example, I think the outcome of the people's meals would be how the meal makes them feel. This is a real outcome rather than the illustrative "salad good, meat bad" dimension you propose. The people who ordered healthy food feel more energetic, and thus they have more opportunities for several hours, because they have energy while their colleagues are bloated and lethargic. Their equal opportunity resulted in unequal outcomes, which resulted in unequal opportunity.
So, I'm still seeking a desirable outcome (beyond red bracelet / blue bracelet, and "salad good, meat bad") which does not also increase opportunity. My original question remains.
What does "invest in your future" mean? I think a good definition would be "increasing your future opportunities". Given that definition, what you're saying is that a good outcome also requires having opportunities. Another example of how outcome and opportunity are deeply intertwined.
There is more than enough opportunity in the USA for someone to be born with relatively little and work their way up to a middle-class lifestyle EASILY. Many people do.
Let person A practice Chess 2 hours a day. Let person B practice Chess 2 hours a week.
Person A makes the cut to join the high school Chess team, while Person B doesn't.
Most people would say if both person A and person B had the same opportunity to practice Chess that's sufficient. It seems like you are saying they should both be allowed to join the team. Regardless of the effort they expended.
Am I misunderstanding your point?
I guess I'm saying that unequal outcomes lead to unequal opportunities. "Equal opportunity, not equal outcomes" sounds nice, but it's inherently unstable, because the unequal outcomes will result in unequal opportunities.
I think:
1. It's an impossible ideal, but that's ok. It's not the only impossible ideal.
2. Sometimes, we should just focus on concrete ways we can help equalize opportunities.
3. Sometimes, we can talk about the difficult philosophy behind it all, and probably wont come up with concrete solutions in the process, but it might be a worth while thought exercise.
(I'm doing 3 right now.)
The term you're looking for here is Free Will or Determinism, in respect to the State. Different folks have different views on these. Your views seem to place a large weight on Determinism. I personally think Determinism in the State is a philosophical dead end based on the evidence of the last century.
What if person A and person B had, in theory, equal opportunity to practice chess, but person B has a whole lot of other things demanding his time and energy due to lower socioeconomic status? Or, what if person B never really considered trying out for the chess team a viable thing, because "people like him" don't become serious chess players?
That's the thing that gets tricky here. Equality of opportunity is a nebulous concept. And to the extent that it's tilted towards some, it tends to stay that way in subsequent years and in subsequent generations.
But putting our finger on the scale to favor those who we are guessing had less opportunity to try and even it out screws up in lots of ways, too.
At the same time, when student B shows up, and is nearly as good as A despite almost certainly having less chance to practice... maybe B is actually a better talent and will be better overall.
Making qualitative decisions sucks. But sometimes a holistic, qualitative decision captures better what is going on than the strict quantitative "fair" measure. It's all fuzzy and difficult.
I will say, especially with youth: my "fair" measures have been rubbish at predicting performance. Some of the strongest students on my robotics teams and in challenging classes have been the ones that did not look like it on my first measures.
That's how I see it at least :)
But I wonder just how much equalization of "opportunity" would be needed to reach an acceptable equality of outcome.
As an extreme example, could it go so far as to prevent some parents from passing on their values to their children?
E.g. if being of a certain religious viewpoint was negatively correlated with whatever measure of "outcome" was currently in vogue, would equality of opportunity mean barring its adherents from having or adopting kids?
The fact that i graduated as a software engineer says nothing about my other opportunities that i _chose_ not to persue. At scale i can see those effects averaging out somewhat, but i see no evidence that a a fully egalitarian society would produce entirely representative outcomes across all subgroups/occupations.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-abou...
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Ok, I read it, and pretty much nailed it, but the other factor is that men tend to drive faster, and so simply complete more rides in the same amount of time.
None of the factors explaining the 7% pay gap seem to have anything to do with (a) Uber or (b) Customers. It's all seems to be based on choices by the driver.
That is only confusing if you also assume that all people have equal skills, desires, preferences, physical characteristics and so on. They don't and so there is no reason to think that equal opportunities presented to a collection of unique individuals will result in equal outcomes. Instead there will be a unique outcomes based on what the individuals bring to the opportunities.
I would assert though that in a world of unique individuals there won't ever be "equal outcomes" regardless of the distribution and nature of opportunities, which is not a statement about how to improve or maximize opportunities.
I would also assert that there is no agreement that "equal outcomes" is a desirable goal nor is it even a well-defined goal.
Why do you think this? Why do you think that genders have equal preferences, for example? What about different age groups? The age distribution of various groups is quite different and so that alone will result in different outcomes without any unfair limitations being involved.
What do you propose to do about gender differences in mining, logging, car mechanics, etc.? Are you going to force women to enter those occupations? Why do you think the gender imbalance is evidence of unfairness that needs to be remedied? How much power would you have to give to government in order to achieve "fairly statistically equivalent outcomes" in these cases?
This focus on group "equality" can seemingly only come at the expense of limiting individuals. IMHO we should focus on maximizing individual liberty and not focus on statistical outcomes for groups.
That's a big claim to make without a citation. And it really doesn't even make a ton of sense given the other factors at play in a modern workforce.
I posit that the majority of employers out there are trying to pay as little to their employees as they can possibly get away with. If women do the same work and I can get away with paying them less, wouldn't the prudent business decision be to hire tons of women and build a culture that women find appealing? And yet somehow most workplaces are male-dominated.
(I don’t feel that way, but we’re not far removed from that being a common sentiment.)
Are there companies out there who are hiring a bunch of women and kicking ass because of it? And if so, why hasn't that success story been told and started propagating in business circles?
There are absolutely lots of companies that have diversity and inclusion programs, and spend lots of money on these issues.
If your metric of success is "What are the successful companies doing" then you have to admit that basically every major corperate environment these days, has diversity programs, so by your own definition, they are important.
Also, nobody promotes diversity because diversity it reduces payroll costs. They do it because it allegedly produces better results.
Ok great. Then you agree that diversity programs are good and competitive.
That is good enough of a concession to satisfy most people on this topic, no matter how you got to it!
So that's the success story. You demanded a success story, and at the very least, this shows that diversity programs are good and do produce better results, because basically every successful company does then.
I presume you think striving for statistically equivalent outcomes is good; I think it's pernicious nonsense. Since you haven't bothered making your case, I won't either.
But also...
Somehow those otherwise impactful differences have ZERO bearing on someone's interest in (or even aptitude for) specific career paths?
How do you explain that?
Say group X prefers job 1 to job 2 by a 3:2 ratio, and group Y prefers job 2 to job 1 by a 3:2 ratio. Assume that equality of opportunity exists, and equal numbers and qualifications of both groups X and Y.
The expected outcome is that the X:Y ratios would be 3:2 in job 1 and 2:3 in job 2.
If job 1 pays more than job 2, then the "equality of pay" outcome is not achieved. Group X is paid more than group Y.
You ever been to a gym or a basketball court? Plenty of equal opportunity vastly unequal outcomes. How big of a society are you talking about?
There is also the problem that different people hear different things when they think about equality of outcome.
Equality of outcome for everyone to have a jetski and a ski chalet? No.
Equality of outcome for everyone to have food clothing shelter and healthcare? Yes.
Let me elaborate. I think there should be a minimum level of outcome that every single person in the world should be able to attain with minimal or even zero individual effort. This level should cover basic human rights, plus the ability to live a safe healthy life. For example, the ability to afford food, water, shelter, full quality medical care, clothing, heating, safety, education, childcare, local transport, and having some money left over for entertainment, etc, perhaps some other basics I've forgotten. I would be happy to live in a society that had these things definied as clearly basic minimum requirements and no matter how badly any individual messed up their choices, or even just felt particularly lazy and just decided to stay in bed all day the society would always provide this base minimum level that everyone had available to them, guaranteed. It should be enough to provide for a safe and mostly worry free life. But not so high as to discourage most people from wanting to put in greater effort for greater rewards.
On the other end of the scale, I would be equally happy if there was some maximum level of wealth, beyond which no matter the effort put in no further personal gains could be made. I wouldn't like to guess what level that would be to make sense, although I'm reasonable sure that the existence of billionaires is pretty unnecessary. A progressive tax that at some point around a billon pounds just reaches 100% marginal taxation rate. If you earn further wealth beyond that you are just required to give it all to society.
Let's just say for the sake of argument that my described minimum level was assessed to cost £50k per person per year, and at the top end we were to decide to cap total personal wealth at £1b. What we've done there is introduce a maximum permitted inequality of outcome of 20000x. That is, the poorest person in our society can at the most extreme be at most 20000 times poorer than the wealthiest. This isn't total equality of outcome, we aren't saying everyone has to have exactly equal wealth, just that no matter the difference in opportunity or effort, there is a proscribed limit on the level of inequality.
I think this society would be a much better one to live in. Everyone would be happier knowing that even if things didn't go their way, there are some basics they would never need to worry about.
Equally, once you pass a billion pound wealth, are you really motivated by making more £££ anyway, I don't think it should be an issue for society to pressure those wealthiest individuals to seek other motivation rather than just continuing to generate personal wealth.
(Just to note, I fully understand the difficulty of actually implementing a wealth tax that works like the one I described, I know that taxing income and wealth are different and it would be nigh on impossible to do what I'm suggesting. I'm merely using this extreme example as a way to discuss the idea that some level of equality of outcome is good in my view)
That's not correct.
First: even in conditions of equal opportunities, outcomes almost always include a percentage of randomness.
Practically all developed societies understand that and employ forms of progressive taxation and wealth redistribution. This is widely supported by economists except few fringe libertarian extremists.
Second: difference in outcomes are seen as justified only within reasonable ranges.
Polls show that people find acceptable for top performers across various jobs to earn 2x, 3x, 10x the average income. Not 10000x.
If some business (say, SpaceX) is 10 000 times as big as another business (Joe's Plumbing Co.), why shouldn't the earning scale too?
If Musk drives SpaceX into the ground, he will be hated universally and possibly jailed, given how much the U.S. now relies on his technology for access to space.
If Joe drives his plumbing Co to the ground, he likely won't make it to the local evening news, much less be infamous forever, across the entire planet.
Polls tell us clearly the public would prefer equality of condition with regard to health, education, and access to food of nutritional substance, by their support for policy that enables agency to those ends.
What they don’t care about is policy providing everyone TVs and McMansions.
We can be a bit more specific than the hand wavy, traditional narratives. How much less duplication of effort is there if stability and a casual life is available to the masses keeping truly useful work moving along and not mired down in administrative matters because people need to compete for jobs?
We don’t know because we can’t try. Tacitly making our system unfalsifiable.
When asked privately, opinions diverge wildly from public consensus. No one wants to publicly be the person who blinks.