We can’t give everyone an equal opportunity

Inequality of opportunity will get out of hand if we do nothing. But we cannot give everyone an equal opportunity at everything. In this article we will look for a golden mean.

People are not equal, we can't change that, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, the fact that one person becomes poorer or richer than the other, or has more opportunities, makes some people feel more uncomfortable. But as differences accumulate over generations, a class society can emerge. That is bad, because of the risk of exploitation and hopeless poverty, and because people from the underclass are more or less determined at birth that they cannot develop themselves, regardless of their talents and efforts. 

In the next episode we will see that people have an ingrained need for autonomy, relatedness and competence. If we are structurally hindered in this, we will give up. It makes us frustrated, rebellious or depressed. This also happens to people who notice that they do whatever they can, but never reach their potential. They drop out, their world becomes smaller, they become pessimistic and no longer feel connected to society. If we are stuck in an underclass, that can easily happen to us. And a class society has other major disadvantages: there is less dynamism, and the potential of a large part of the population remains untapped.

What can we do about that? In the previous episodes I talked about redistribution and the pursuit of equal outcomes. The latter is not a good idea, and we have to be careful with redistribution, I wrote.

Now we're going to talk about equal opportunities. So it is not about equal outcomes, because they do not take efforts into account. With equal opportunities, efforts are rewarded. So you won't be rewarded if you don't do your best. But if you do your best, you shouldn't be held back by things you can't do anything about. 

In the previous episode, John Rawls' A theory of justice (1971) has already been extensively discussed. I announced that I would discuss his ideal of fair equality of opportunity here. Rawls formulated his moral ideal as follows:

Those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system.

— John Rawls, A theory of justice (1971) 

A nice ideal. But for Rawls it wasn't just an ideal, a dot on the horizon, like no traffic deaths, or everyone happy. Rawls really wanted to realise the ideal. Society had to be organised in such a way that his ideal would become reality. Only then will we have a just society.

It sounds reasonable, but in this article we will see that it sounds simpler than it is:

• What do we do with innate differences?

• If everyone deserves equal opportunities, should we also interfere with the upbringing that children receive from their parents?

• What to do with inheritances?

• Should we also compensate people for other coincidences and for stupidities they do?

• We cannot force people to give everyone equal opportunities.

• Mere equal treatment often does not solve the disadvantages of groups.

• If we believe that everyone deserves equal opportunities, we must also determine of what people have an equal opportunity. And that is quite difficult.

Based on these reservations, I will conclude that complete equality of opportunity is an unattainable ideal. For fully equal opportunities we would have to set up a totalitarian society. But we can still go quite far by maintaining everyone's autonomy. I mainly see opportunities in education.

Unequal outcomes

Not everyone can fry an egg, identify the key of a song, or become a neurologist. Everyone can learn the first. For the second, one needs absolute pitch — you either have it or you don't. Becoming an internist is the most difficult category. To do this, you first need to know what an internist is and know that you want to become one. You also need a good mind, a lot of perseverance, and a lot of help from people who think you would be a good internist. Does everyone in the world have an equal chance to become an internist? Unfortunately not.

In Japan only a quarter of the doctors are women, compared to three-quarters in Latvia. It's unlikely that Japanese women would make worse doctors, so there's something else going on.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the population groups of African and Indian descent are approximately the same size: about forty percent each. However, more than seventy percent of senior government officials are Afro-Trinidadian. The police and armed forces also consist of more than seventy percent Afro-Trinidadians. So something strange is going on there: the Indo-Trinidadians are missing out. 

In 1066 Normans under Guillaume le Conquérant took over power in England. Some 950 years later, those old Norman surnames are still over-represented among Oxford's elite student population, who, almost a thousand years later, are still pulling the strings more than average. In the British class system you still have about a seventy to ninety percent chance of ending up in the same socio-economic class as your parents. What should that opportunity be if there were no class system?

There can be all kinds of causes for unequal outcomes:

• Hereditary or biological factors. Children of parents who are gifted in certain respects have a good chance of inheriting that giftedness. Intelligence, for example, is partly hereditary. Defects are also often partly hereditary; many conditions such as diabetes, autism and colour blindness, physical characteristics, and probably also certain personality traits such as introversion or neuroticism.

• Social and cultural differences. As a child you learned certain social skills from your parents that would influence your future social position. Family may also have had certain expectations of you and prepared you for them. Or you take over your parents' social network. Society can also transfer certain expectations to you. For example, as a woman you do not get a high education and you stay at home to take care of the children. Or consensus that there are typically male or female professions.

• Institutional factors. Powerful groups in society prevent certain population groups from entering certain social or professional positions. For example, by not giving jobs to married women, or not opening certain positions to women, ethnic or religious groups, or social classes. This does not always have to be done overtly or deliberately; institutional discrimination can be subtle yet very effective.

Innate differences

In all kinds of experiments it has been shown that those who have success in life attribute it to talent and effort; those who are not successful attribute it mainly to chance. But who is right?

According to statisticians, the rest of the life course of thirty-year-olds is already pretty much set in stone. Based on your education, your income and your socio-economic status as a thirty-year-old, they can easily predict which income class you will be in for the rest of their lives. And statisticians can then calculate back: which factors determined your position at the age of thirty?

You can make a distinction between factors that people did or did not have influence on at a young age. There are several factors that significantly influence our position as a thirty-year-old at a younger age, and over which we had no influence: