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The basic American cultural value is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, or predestination by social class. At least in theory, the American Dream
by beat 13y ago
The basic American cultural value is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, or predestination by social class. At least in theory, the American Dream means your success is the result of hard work and talent, not your birth or social class. And to a fair extent, this works - our current president is the mixed-race child of a teenage single mother, who grew up in obscurity and near-poverty. Barack Obama is the embodiment of the American Dream. Many of our political, business, and cultural leaders are entirely self-made.
So the modern failures of American society are the failures to provide equality of opportunity. Three stand out in particular for me - substandard primary education, crushing debt for secondary education, and a health care system that traps people into working for large corporations rather than small businesses or entrepreneurship.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoI would contest that anyone claiming America has equality of opportunity must necessarily show a correlation between recognizable Life Choices and the divergence of outcomes, and a lack of a correlation between personal background and the divergence of outcomes. Or in other words, equality of opportunity is measurable as social mobility (How many people wind up somewhere different from where they started?) and sociological significance of achievements (How are outcomes different between people who did X and people who did Y instead?).
- beat 13y agoTo be sure, it's an imperfect correlation - mostly in that those who start on second or third base have a much better chance at a home run. But the point is that anyone can, in theory, hit a home run. In most historic cultures, that was not true. To put it in presidential terms, someone like George W Bush becoming president isn't outrageous - he started on third base. But for someone like Barack Obama to become the most politically powerful figure would require an actual revolution in most historical situations.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoIn theory means absolutely nothing. Baseball metaphors tell us nothing about the real world. Stop regurgitating badly digested Americana claptrap. Statistics on economic mobility: put up or shut up.