Say you had a race between two people, but one of them had been held captive by a madman for several years being force fed until he was 50 pounds overweight, and prevented from exercising.
Then you start the race and say “hey, the lanes are clear – they both have an equal opportunity to win.”
Family is important. However given loving parents, and equal intelligence, the child of a rich family is going to have a better life outcome than the child of a poor family. More life experiences, better schools, more tutoring. In fact I’d say that the dumber rich kid will do better than the smarter poor kid. I’m not worried about the outcomes when comparing kids with IQs of 80 and 120. Let’s not put obstacles like crappy schools, inadequate funding for college, enough food, and decent housing.
In my parents’ generation in NY tons of poor kids got an excellent education for free at City College, and a bunch of them went on to become famous. Why not today for everyone?
For basketball, don’t compare the tall guy with the short guy. Compare two tall guys, one of whom can’t afford a basketball. How is he going to do?
Good point. I agree. You can’t screw up a kids education all his life and then dump him in college and tell him to start learning. That counts as inequality of opportunity also.
The study you linked doesn’t say anything about the generation that are kids today (as in fact, no study could). If social mobility is no worse for that generation than for 20 or 40 years ago, then hey, great.
I think that increased income/wealth inequality strongly contributes to increased inequality of opportunity, as it seems like it almost has to. If half the population makes $50K and half makes $100K, how hard is it going to be for a child of the $50K to make it to $100K and vice versa? But compare that to if 98% of the population makes $10K and 2% makes $10M? And in fact you’ll note in my OP that my single biggest problem with income/wealth inequality is its effect on inequality of opportunity.
Yes, it certainly works both ways. I certainly didn’t say being rich is the problem, I said the inequality is the problem. Which doesn’t mean that I automatically blame the rich people for the inequality. But I think there are a variety of reasons (outlined way back in my OP) why society generally functions better with less (but not zero) inequality. (And this certainly doesn’t apply solely to inequality of wealth. There have been some interesting and troubling studies which suggest that people interact with their neighbors more, and form more social bonds, when society is racially homogeneous.)
If a company hires a new CEO for a ridiculously huge sum and that CEO makes a bunch of terrible decisions and then that company goes out of business 6 months later, I think it’s entirely reasonable for a sober analysis after the fact to decide that the company was hurting itself by paying the CEO that salary, although that’s obviously something that’s hard to really demonstrated in non-extreme cases. I think your point in general, that there usually isn’t a “right” price other than what the market sets, is a good one. But there are certainly circumstances in which markets are wrong. Bubbles. Monopolies. Etc.