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.
Kids born to a well-off set of parents can absolutely provide opportunities that other kids do not have access to.
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.
Notably their genetics. These things tend to go together.
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.
> 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.
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.
It depends on how far the power of effort can reach. Do the fruits of your effort buy luxury for yourself? That's not a problem to equality of opportunity. But does it buy you political power? Then it might. Does it buy you opportunities for your children? Then that directly violates equality of opportunity.
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.
Well, except trying to stop parents from using their resources, time,
and effort to better the lives and increase the opportunities for their children in concrete ways is pretty much the definition of dystopia, and goes against pretty much every ‘good’ evolutionary pressure we can identify (aka K strategy). [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory]
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.
That is not the definition of dystopia at all. But it's also not what I'm proposing: I'm not suggesting we block opportunities, I'm proposing we make sure everybody has access to them, and we put extra effort in ensuring disadvantaged groups get better access to them.
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.
You are not reading what I'm writing, and instead projecting your own rather scary ideas onto the discussion. I'm arguing to lift people up, to create more opportunities, and to make those opportunities accessible to more people, instead of less.
The biggest issue with this idea that we can achieve universal access is that we are notoriously bad at predicting the future.
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.
I felt back in the 1980s that highschool students should have access to programming classes, and I'm appalled that this is still not universal.
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.)
I think you’re confusing some concepts here? Or being absolutist ad-absurdum?
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.
I don't think you can even come close to providing equality of opportunity if you let ppl spend money on their children.
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.
> 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?
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.
Sure, with enough perseverance, a smart kid could get a better education than a tutored kid just by via the internet. As you point out, the tutor may actually be a crutch and the self-taught kid might actually be better off.
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.
When you really boil down a lot of the arguments, it seems to work out to ‘x demographic should have y percent of this high paying industry/powerful position because I say so’.
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.
I agree with you; I think the solution is to try to create a floor of opportunity that is accessible to 99.9+% of people.
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.)
I agree. The problem I think is a lot of the discussion is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
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.
In that case, I'd argue the internet is sufficient.
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.
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.