We have a good discussion ongoing in the “Will Trump win in 2020?” thread, which, while vigorous and valuable, completely derails that thread, so I wanted to try to redirect it here instead:
Conservatives often accuse liberals of conflating “equal opportunity” with “equal results.” Some liberals, though, say that equal opportunity *means *equal results, and if you don’t get equal results, then people never had equal opportunity to begin with.
I would challenge that for a few reasons:
[ul]
[li]Everyone has different interests. You may love math, I may hate it. If given the same opportunity to get a math scholarship, you may put far more effort into it than I would, simply because I have no interest. And you’d probably be much likelier to get the scholarship than me.[/li][li]Different cultures value different things. ** Some cultures value athletics, some may put more focus on academia. [/li][li]Everyone has a different work ethic. Some students are perfectionists and want straight A’s. Some are happy with B’s. Some just want to pass and would be okay with a D. Some don’t even care to pass at all.[/li][li]Everyone has different amounts of talent. Some people are simply gifted with artistic, musical, or theatrical talent. Some could never play an instrument or act any role on stage to save their lives. Some are physically much stronger, taller, weaker or slower than others.[/li][li]Even if everyone has equal talent or work ethic, sometimes opportunities are limited and will exclude the majority. **A football team can only have 53 players on its roster. Even if a school has a thousand athletes who are all equally fit, strong, fast and agile, it can only field 53 players on game day. As a result, there is by definition bound to be unequal outcome. (An even more extreme example of this would be the Powerball or Mega Millions: Every ticket, by definition, has an equal chance of winning, but only one or a few tickets - out of many millions - will ultimately win.)[/li][/ul]
You are misstating the liberal position. Nobody, and I mean nobody literally believes that if every human started out with the exact same opportunities, then everyone would have the exact same outcomes. Nobody argues that, nobody asserts that, it is the very definition of a straw man.
This is closer:
If we can help make every person able to have the same opportunity for success (access to medicine, education, food, stable home etc), then we would, as a society, expect to see on average better outcomes for everyone. This does not mean everyone would have a great outcome, it just means terrible outcomes wouldn’t be guaranteed by having zero opportunity to succeed.
If you don’t think we have many people in this country that have never had an opportunity to succeed in life, then you are living on a different planet. Bad choices can lead to failure in life, but someone failing in life does not mean that they made bad choices that caused that to happen. Some people are just screwed from birth. Trying to fix that would tend to lead to better outcomes for those people.
I don’t believe equality of opportunity would lead to equality of outcome for every individual – there are indeed different levels of talent, drive, etc. But I do believe it would lead to no gross, massive differences in outcome for things like race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, etc.
But this would be impossible to test without actual equality of opportunity. Since we’re obviously not there yet, then I think we can focus on trying to achieve true equality of opportunity, and then we can see what kinds of outcomes it leads to.
sigh liberals never say anything about equal results. This is a time-worn conservative strawman argument. Just because you think you have a new spin on it doesn’t make it any less of a strawman.
We’ll never have equal opportunity until we have equal education, free to all up to college level. There’s no reason only the elite and those willing to go into long term debt should have a proper education. There’s no reason poor black kids and immigrants should have a worse education than anyone else K-12. Properly fund the schools instead of using those funds for another bullshit war.
Yep, equality of opportunity is what we should strive for.
Equality of outcome is not something we should strive for, even if certain groups are not equally represented we should not seek to engineer the conditions so that they are.
Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realize everyone on the left or who considers themselves liberal is responsible for everything any other random person on the left says.
Hoo boy are you guys on the right responsible for some horrible and awful things then! Yikes.
Equal opportunity means equal access to education, along with medical care, job opportunities, and so many other things. So yes, equal opportunity means equal opportunity.
Conservatives don’t believe this nonsense about equal results, they are against equal opportunity because it levels the playing field and takes away the advantages that conservatives keep working at carving out for themselves. One of the cornerstones of this so-called conservatism is the fear of competition and finding any excuse to rig the system to avoid it.
Even with equal education, there is still a gap in motivation and work ethic. Some students simply work harder or are more motivated than others. Some just want to pass and don’t care if it’s a D+.
There is still a gap in talent. There is still a gap in parenting - some parents are great at giving their kids a good attitude about academics, some parents are terrible, and some kids are single-parent or orphans.
Consider how we try to measure equality of opportunity, though. Developing objective measurements of opportunity itself can be challenging, so we use equality of outcomes as a proxy measurement. We look at some population grouping (school attendees, CEOs, prison inmates, hobby groups, whatever) and inquire as to what degree the demographics of the grouping correspond to the demographics of the general population. If there is a significant difference, we assume there is inequality of opportunity. Then, we try to reduce those differences in outcome by providing additional opportunities for supposedly-underserved groups (affirmative action, outreach programs, additional opportunities open only to those specific underserved groups, etc…)
But there’s no particular reason to believe that the demographics of some grouping should correlate to the demographics of society at large. For example, there’s no particular reason to believe that workers in STEM fields should be something near 50% men/50% women (and no particular reason to believe that they shouldn’t be, either). But we look at the relative lack of women in STEM fields as a sign that we need to provide additional opportunities for women to pursue STEM-related interests. Now, maybe it’s actually true that women suffer from a relative lack of opportunity (that’s certainly my personal view). But pointing out the inequality of observable outcomes isn’t a reasonable way to infer that lack of opportunity. Yet that is what we do, at least in part.
You do realize that this isn’t a black and white thing right? We can make sure that nobody fails simply due to circumstance and also understand that even if we do ensure that everyone gets at least a chance that not 100% of people will avoid failing in life.
You are absolutely right-We should never have appointed TimeWinder to be our official spokesperson. If you could ask the Mods to put a hold on this conversation until the General Liberal Convention in Dubuque on May 17th it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
You’re arguing like those are perfectly correlated and wanting to compensate for any of them means wanting none of them to influence outcome. Which is rubbish even within the framework of the tiny-minority-view/strawman you set up.
Equal opportunity means that things like ethnicity shouldn’t matter for what opportunities you get. Someone saying equal outcome means we haven’t achieved equal opportunity is extremely unlikely to mean we don’t have equal opportunity until every person becomes a doctor. They’re saying they believe the factors you mention aren’t correlated with e.g. ethnicity, so an unequal outcome on group level, means equal opportunity hasn’t been achieved.
I’m sure you’d be able to find someone somewhere who wants people to wear weighted pants and blurry glasses to make everyone absolutely equal, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sensible thing to discuss.
If everything and everyone was absolutely equal, we’d have nothing but mediocrity in all fields. Give all people an equal education and let them achieve what they can.
How can you tell whether there has been equal opportunity? If there were truly equal opportunity, then you would expect equal outcomes, regardless of income level, race, ethnicity, etc. But, we don’t have equal outcomes, right? Poor people don’t succeed as often as rich people, for example. So, one way to measure whether there really has been equal opportunity is to look at outcomes – if poor people or black people or first generation people, or urbanites, or suburbanites, or whatever, don’t do as well, then why should we assume they had equal opportunities?
I don’t even know how you could guarantee equal opportunities across all those groups other than randomly assigning kids at birth to different parents or something. Then, on average, maybe you get equal opportunity across races and ethnicity, at least. (Note, this isn’t something I’m advocating or am willing to defend)
So, of course there’s a gap in talent and motivation, but why do we see a gap in talent and motivation between, say, poor people vs. rich people? Shouldn’t they be roughly evenly distributed among groups? Shouldn’t we expect roughly the same number of poor people as rich people in Harvard, if there’s equal opportunity?
You should be asking TimeWinder to explain himself rather than asking why all liberals believe something that we’re all telling you that we don’t believe.
This seems a lot like suggesting that outcomes can’t ever be the same, so there’s no point in addressing the horrendous difference in opportunity. Let’s equalize opportunities, and then see what the actual achievement gap is, and then have whatever conversation is necessary around that.
I would humbly suggest that if a child’s academic performance suffers due to being an orphan or a single-parent household, those are some unequal opportunities that should be compensated for. Children shouldn’t be academically penalized if their parents are dead, or if their mother had to split from an abusive/deadbeat spouse. We should be helping those families compensate for whatever those disadvantages are.
If you give women and men equal opportunities to live and work exactly how they choose with no barriers at all, I would be very surprised if we saw gender participation in all activities at 50/50