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Equality of Opportunity vs Equality of Outcome

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#2
Syne Offline
Equality of outcome ultimately means that no one can do any better than the least achieving, no matter how much harder they work. Everyone's outcome must match the couch-jockey stoner, so everyone ends up putting in as much effort as the couch-jockey. Innovation and productivity are complete stifled. Those graphics showing kids watching a game are disingenuous. Watching a game is an opportunity, not an outcome. There is no competition or merit involved in watching a game. It's just a way to confuse people on the subject. "Fair" divorced from a metric of effort is not fair at all.

Equality of opportunity means that your personal effort means something and benefits you.
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#3
C C Offline
Ed Rooksby Wrote:. . . wrong to discriminate on the grounds of ability or intelligence. Does an intelligent individual deserve higher rewards simply because they are bright? Why? Surely, they have no control over this any more than they have over their sex or skin colour. This doesn't mean that ability ought to be irrelevant in allocation of jobs – nobody wants to be treated by a brain-damaged brain surgeon. It does, however, suggest that there is no good reason why higher rewards should be distributed on the basis of these criteria.[1]

No one is born a brain surgeon (i.e., inherently "bright" in a skill sense without needing years of deep learning / training). If neurosurgery offered no more payment and rewards than manual ditch digging, then only those with an acute love of it ("starving artist's passion") would invest so much time and effort to become members of a profession that offered such a heavy imbalance in terms of returns. The latter source might be sufficient if a particular skill-set or vocation isn't in much demand, but otherwise the combination of need and shortage is going to amplify what companies, organizations, and recipients of services are willing to offer.

In turn, just as the US government initially demonstrated during the Cold War and G.I. Bill days with respect to acquiring more physicists and other scientists[2]... If there is a great demand and deficiency in an expertise area, then forces ranging from administrations to businesses to academic institutions will expand their net of recruitment and aid into even the hinterlands, in search of overlooked aptitude and talent (to bolster the confidence of).

However, given that there may be a variety of executive positions, jobs and careers that are over-salaried and excessively compensated due to the impetus of knee-jerk traditions, good ol' boy echelon beliefs / customs, and older eras of need which are no longer the case... Then offshoots of a circling "equality of outcome" buzzard could have legitimate purpose in surgically tending to that meat on the carcass (cost and efficiency adjustments). Few should be guaranteed a certain level of wage / profits and lifestyle because they expended a fraction of their life grooming for an occupation or skill-set which may eventually be passé in terms of actual value slash contribution. (Exceptions would be if that was originally the incentive offered, and a formal agreement was set, that such would indeed be the case in return for pursuing and accomplishing _X_achievement, and working _Y_ years for _Z_).

Sometimes one wonders if bureaucrats and their precursor accomplices (wonks who either invent political concepts and policies or analyze existing ones down into finer intricacies) are trying to ensure their own job security and lifestyle by churning-out new targets of interest for "creating utopia" or repackaging old, exhausted ideas under new labels and descriptions. As Ed Rooksby himself seems to openly suggest in the last sentence below (minus the clandestine timidity of his fellows) "equality of outcome" is another component of a roundabout device for further backdoor socialism.

Centralized government should have the job of holding its scattered regions up to a lofty standard, and criticizing and finding ways to chastise them if they're falling short of that duty. But local communities should have the flexible freedom of many options (along with that former responsibility) to address solutions to their problems as they contingently see fit for their particular situations and resources (i.e., minus the restrictions / limitations of a "master plan for utopia" dispensed upon them by a central government in its "be good little robots" fashion).

That micromanaging flexibility at the local level can include even trying out whatever approaches fall out of an "equality of outcome" POV. But the federal level itself should not haughtily foist political and moral experiments universally upon its population, using the whole lot of them them as test-rats for a tentative philosophy or a questionable nuance of an older one. Tossing an idealistic / unseasoned monkey-wrench (born on any side of the social thought-orientation spectrum) into the clockwork machinery of a nation, to see what happens, is sophomoric management at its finest.

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[1] ED ROOKSBY: All of these commentators assume that when the left talks about equality it means absolute equality of everything. This is a common assumption among those hostile to egalitarianism: that the left want everyone to be exactly the same. [...] Equality for the left is a complex concept, which bears little resemblance to the caricatures drawn by the right. [...] Equality of opportunity requires that each individual has an equal starting point in competition for particular social goods – outcomes reflect ability and effort. The problem is that outcomes are also starting points. A child's starting point, for example, might be to be born into an affluent family – but this is the outcome of the parents having successfully made use of their opportunities. This suggests that if we really think it's important to equalise opportunities we need to equalise outcomes too.

Martin O'Neill brings out something of equality's complexity and usefully draws our attention to the distinction between two conceptions of equality often conflated by the right – equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. The former focuses on the equalisation of opportunity for those with the requisite capacities or abilities to obtain a particular advantaged social position – it focuses on the elimination of arbitrary discrimination in the process of selection for such positions and, by definition, justifies certain inequalities of outcome. This, by the way, is what Glover appears to favour – he's not actually against equality per se, but against a certain (caricatured) version of equality (of outcome).

One can see something of this tendency of liberal ideals to go beyond themselves in the way in which equality of opportunity, on close inspection, slides into equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity requires that each individual has an equal starting point in competition for particular social goods – outcomes reflect ability and effort. The problem is that outcomes are also starting points. A child's starting point, for example, might be to be born into an affluent family – but this is the outcome of the parents having successfully made use of their opportunities. This suggests that if we really think it's important to equalise opportunities we need to equalise outcomes too.

We need, also, to question what counts as morally arbitrary criteria in the equality of opportunity view. There is no logical reason, in terms of justice, why if it's wrong to discriminate against people on the grounds of race or gender, it's not also wrong to discriminate on the grounds of ability or intelligence. Does an intelligent individual deserve higher rewards simply because they are bright? Why? Surely, they have no control over this any more than they have over their sex or skin colour. This doesn't mean that ability ought to be irrelevant in allocation of jobs – nobody wants to be treated by a brain-damaged brain surgeon. It does, however, suggest that there is no good reason why higher rewards should be distributed on the basis of these criteria.

The logic of liberal thinking on equality and justice always points towards equality of condition and, since it is difficult to see how such radical equality is compatible with capitalist relations of power, the logic of liberal thinking points beyond itself, towards socialism. This, by the way, is something in relation to which liberal political philosophers expend an extraordinary amount of effort pretending not to have noticed.
--The complexity of equality

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[2] DAVID KAISER: “Big science” has usually been considered along two axes: funding and the scale of experimental apparatus. Both the source and the scale of funding for scientific research changed dramatically with World War II. By 1953, the level of spending for “fundamental” physics research within the United States was 20 to 25 times greater than it had been in 1938, even after adjusting for inflation, and the vast majority of this spending came from defense-related agencies within the federal government. This outpouring of defense dollars paid for instruments and equipment on an unprecedented scale.

Yet there was a third axis of “bigness” that rarely appears in these accounts: big enrollments of graduate students in the sciences. The number of new physics doctorates granted each year within the United States ballooned immediately after the war, growing at a faster rate than any other field. The growth in graduate-student enrollments took on an explicitly political formulation. Some physicists and government bureaucrats advanced a Cold War logic according to which the training of exponentially-increasing numbers of professional physicists was used to justify all the other “big” expenditures commonly associated with “big science.”

For others, graduate-student training assumed equal importance with the other “bigs.” For more than two decades after World War II, most physicists, government officials, and nationally-syndicated journalists equated the nation’ s security with the production of young physicists. Most American physicists did not spend the bulk of their time working on weapons during the 1950s. Yet they received money from defense-related bureaus to create an “elite reserve labor force” of potential weapons-makers in the ranks. The Cold War logic of wartime requisitions and physicist-manpower points to a less overt, yet longer-lasting form of politicization for the nation’ s physicists than those usually considered by historians.

More was at stake than the visible signs of American physicists’ political engagement after World War II, either as elite government consultants or as special victims of McCarthyism. The demands for physicist-manpower were tied directly to the contours of the Cold War, rising immediately after the war, receiving a strong jolt with the United States’ entry into the Korean War and again after the surprise launch of Sputnik, and crashing only with détente, Vietnam-era protests against defense-related research on campuses, and massive cuts in defense spending.

Questions of pedagogy and scientific “manpower” provide a framework within which to re-examine the vexed question of whether the sudden sea-change in source and scale of funding matter to the content of postwar physics. Did military-derived “big science” leave a lasting epistemic impression? The question can be addressed from the everyday exigencies of training students and pursuing research. The man- power question also allows consideration of the effects of the Cold War mobilization on theoretical physics, and not only on the experimental physics with which most previous literature on “big science” is concerned.

The new demands for training ever-rising numbers of students helped to solidify American physicists’ style of work after the war. Physicists’ attitudes and judgments about what counted as appropriate topics for research and teaching make most sense when set within the context of the postwar escalation in manpower. [...] Several mentioned the aid provided by the G.I. Bill among the many factors which had prompted them to pursue a Ph.D. in physics.
--(PDF) Cold War requisitions, scientific manpower, and the production of American physicists after World War
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