“Equality of Opportunity” Will Not Lead Us to the Utopia We Think It, Will
By: Jeff Valdivia
Tags: Meritocracy, Politics, Discrimination, Wealth, Economy

“Equality of Opportunity” Will Not Lead Us to the Utopia We Think It, Will

Photo by Fezbot2000 on Unsplash

Today, it’s inexcusable that artificial barriers to success exist. They block people from achieving their potential due to characteristics like race, sex, and sexual orientation.

Equality of opportunity is the moral and political ideal that is meant to address this problem. In theory, this idea proposes that people should gain benefits, such as employment or education, based on merit. For example, if I applied to a university, I should gain entry based on my past accomplishments and not because my parents give large sums of money to the university each year.

Ultimately, the goal of equality of opportunity is to make the selection process fair so that people get what they deserve. This includes removing dumb luck from the equation. After all, just as no one chooses their race, sex, or sexual orientation, no one chooses to have wealthy parents who donated to the university. Why should anyone gain or be denied benefits for things over which they had no control?

This is called formal equality of opportunity or the nondiscrimination principle. But, you can take this idea one step further.

Suppose we choose the most deserving candidate for each position in a fair selection process. You might still wonder, is it fair that some of the candidates gained a massive advantage over others because their parents could afford tutors and private schools?

This is where people’s moral intuitions tend to part ways. While most of us agree that people should be treated without discrimination in a selection process, many dislike the idea of “equalizing” life experiences leading up to that selection process. This more expansive approach is often called substantive equality of opportunity.

But, whichever version of equality of opportunity you prefer, it will move society toward a better meritocracy. This is a political system that directs economic goods and political power to the people most deserving of them through a fair selection process.

Doesn’t this sound exactly how an efficient and effective economy should work?

Yes, having the most qualified candidate chosen in any selection process would, I think, ensure that economic productivity is at its peak. However, equality of opportunity fails to address the other side of the fairness coin, which is, what do we deserve economically?

Equality of opportunity only has the power to rearrange the structure of society so that there is an equitable distribution of people on each rung of the social ladder. It will swap people’s locations on the social ladder, but it won’t shift society, in general, up the social ladder.

This means that equality of opportunity, and meritocracy in general, won’t bring about the utopia we think it will. It may make society less discriminatory based on factors like race, sex, and sexual orientation, but it will make society more discriminatory based on others. And, as a result, we might be in an even worse place than we are today.

The dark side of meritocracy

Imagine that artificial barriers have been removed from society. People now move up and down the social ladder based on their demonstrated abilities.

Imagine further that experiences leading up to any selection process have been “equalized”, in so far as this is possible. Regardless of the social class into which anyone is born, each person receives the same quality and quantity of life experiences, education, and training.

This more extreme version of equality of opportunity would ensure everyone is on an equal playing field. It would also open the opportunity for people to move upward who otherwise would not have been able to.

This produces a fair society, right?

To answer this question, there are at least two things we need to consider.

#1 The genetic lottery

Now that we’ve done virtually all we can to equalize the playing field for candidates in a selection process, who gets the position? What’s left to distinguish one person from another?

There are only two elements that can contribute to a candidate’s performance: nature and nurture. We have already equalized “nurture” as best as we can. Therefore, the remaining difference among any group of candidates must be due to their genes.

But, just as no one chooses their race or sex or to be born into a wealthy family, no one chooses their genes. If we are selecting a candidate based on their genes, in what sense can we say that person “deserves” the position? What did they do to earn it?

Does this seem fair to you?

Ultimately, this leads us to another kind of discrimination: genetic discrimination. True, this might result in a more efficiently run economy but that in and of itself doesn’t mean it’s fair, and it certainly doesn’t answer the question, what do people deserve?

All this effort at equalizing the playing field has brought us right back to where we started – discriminating against people based on characteristics they didn’t choose and have no power to change.

#2 Attitudes towards the poor

In a society where candidates are chosen solely based on merit, consider how perspectives would shift toward the people on the lower rungs of the social ladder.

If you achieved success in this society, you’d believe you had earned it and deserved it. You would have a really good reason to think you are better than the people below you. You would look down at the poverty around you and think it’s fair and just — because, in a meritocracy, people get what they deserve.

On the flip-side, the people who had achieved little or no success would also believe that they deserved their meagre lives. They would know that they were given the same opportunities as everyone else and that they weren’t able to capitalize on them. Their lives would amount to a constant reminder that they had no value, neither to the economy nor to society.

Why would anyone in this society care about the people at the bottom of the social ladder? After all, they would deserve to be there. Wouldn’t we feel justified in turning a blind eye to their plight?

In some ways, this outcome is even worse than our situation today. At least today we all have the nagging intuition that a lack of fairness is at least partially responsible for our positions on the social ladder. Without this intuition, don’t we risk losing a significant reason to have empathy and compassion for those at the bottom of the ladder?

What’s the deeper problem?

The closer we move to a true meritocracy, the more certain we are that people are getting the economic benefits they deserve.

What we often overlook, however, is the benefits people receive are defined by the rules and regulations that govern our political and economic systems. For example, someone decided that capital gains tax should be lower than income tax. Someone else decided to create a progressive tax structure. Rules and rates like these weren’t set by some magic formula that gives each one of us exactly what we deserve. They were set by mere mortals, each having their own biases, assumptions, and motives.

In short, we decide how wealth is distributed in society — and there is no reason to believe that people actually get what they deserve. So, even if you don’t want to think about how wealth is distributed, someone else is deciding for you.

So, what do people deserve? Isn’t this the million-dollar question? Unless we answer this question and then adjust society accordingly, won’t some groups of people remain in abject poverty forever?

And, yes, this is a tough question to answer. But, our intuitions do point us toward a solution. For example, if I told you that the 16 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest 50% (3.8 billion people), what does your intuition tell you? Does that seem a little imbalanced to you?

The same is true in the United States, where the top 1% (3 million people) hold more of the total wealth than the entire middle class (200 million people). Does this seem fair?

These are facts that people tend to ignore because they don’t know what earth to do about them. The rich and powerful often don’t want to acknowledge these facts because they fear they will lose their riches and their power. The rest of us are made to believe that if we change this imbalance, we’d all be worse off. Plus, don’t we all secretly hope that one day we will be the ones at the top of the social ladder, reaping the benefits of all that wealth and power?

We need to start talking about this because it’s a problem. And it’s not just a problem for the poor and middle class, it’s a problem for the wealthy, too. Because the economy works best when people have money to spend. Henry Ford understood this when he doubled the pay of his workers so they could afford the cars they built.

Where do we go from here?

While equality of opportunity, and the meritocracy it promotes, resolve some of the discriminatory practices we see today, ultimately, they just replace some forms of discrimination with another. Also, these ideals might very well lead to even greater apathy toward the less fortunate than exists today.

The problem is not just how to fairly select candidates, but how to fairly distribute society’s scarce resources. The second point is missed completely by equality of opportunity and meritocracy.

The question we need to ask ourselves is, what do we deserve, economically?

Whether we like it or not, we must decide how wealth is distributed in society. Some distributions are fairer than others. Unfortunately, it’s not clear where we should draw the line. Incentivizing people to perform their best obviously works. Thus, we wouldn’t want to remove that incentive by, say, turning to communism.

But, if we care about incentivizing people, we need to be wary of too much inequality. When the likelihood of people achieving prosperity falls below a certain threshold, the incentive to work hard and take risks is lost. This is bad for everyone.

In the end, capitalism with extreme wealth inequality results in the same thing as communism — a disillusioned workforce that has no incentive to use their talents, intelligence, perseverance, or creativity toward productive ends.

Neither of these options sounds particularly good to me.

Let’s start talking about a middle way.