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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 effo

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.

jjav 4y ago
> 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.
lazide 4y ago
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. But maybe we’re in violent agreement?
- aeternum 4y ago
  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.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    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.)
    - lazide 4y ago
      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.
      - aeternum 4y ago
        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.
  - chii 4y ago
    > 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.
mcv 4y ago
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.
- lazide 4y ago
  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 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. Talk about some Great Leap Forward type BS.
Slamidan 4y ago
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. Recently they found the negative effects of spanking is more related to genetics than the action itself. https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1516070970624249857 https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1516070970624249857 In the nurture over nature debate, nurture will only ever continue to lose ground.

jjav 4y ago

> 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.

lazide 4y ago

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. But maybe we’re in violent agreement?

aeternum 4y ago
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.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  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.)
  - lazide 4y ago
    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.
    - aeternum 4y ago
      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.
- chii 4y ago
  > 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.

mcv 4y ago

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.

lazide 4y ago
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 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. Talk about some Great Leap Forward type BS.

Slamidan 4y ago

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. Recently they found the negative effects of spanking is more related to genetics than the action itself. https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1516070970624249857 https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1516070970624249857 In the nurture over nature debate, nurture will only ever continue to lose ground.