Brad de Long picks up my post on opportunities and outcomes in which I argued that the achievement of meaningful equality of opportunity in a society with highly unequal outcomes would require extensive government intervention to prevent the development of inherited inequality, and says that I’m falling into Irving Kristol’s trap, which he describes, accurately enough, as
an ideological police action designed to erase the distinction between Arthur Okun and Mao Zedong, and delegitimize the American left.
I agree that many people, particularly critics of social democracy like Kristol ,use the outcome/opportunity distinction in a dishonest way. This is particularly true in the American context, since anyone honestly concerned with the issue would have to begin with the observation that the United States performs just as badly on equality of opportunity (as measured by things like social mobility) as it does on equality of outcome (see the book by Goodin et al, reviewed here for one of many demonstrations of this). So if Kristol were genuinely concerned about equality of opportunity he’d be calling for at least as much intervention as the liberals and progressives he’s criticising.
On the other hand, there is a genuine debate within the social democratic/socialist movement[1] which I was addressing. On the basis of fairly limited knowledge, I identified Blair and Brown as proponents of equality of opportunity and outcomes respectively. In a long comments thread, no-one picked me up on this point, so maybe my judgement on this was accurate. My comments were addressed to the fairly large group of social democrats who genuinely think that, as long as you equalise opportunity, for example by providing good-quality schools for all, it’s not a problem if income inequality increases. To restate my point, that might be true for one generation, but in the second generation the rich parents will be looking to buy a headstart for their less-able children, for example by sending them to private schools where they will be coached in examination skills and equipped with an old school tie. Given highly unequal outcomes in the previous generation, it’s much harder to prevent the inheritance of inequality, and the achievement of equality of opportunity requires more, and more drastic, intervention rather than less.
In the real world, no-one advocates either perfect equality of outcomes or perfect equality of opportunity. My point is that, in the same real world, these two are complements, not substitutes. The more progress you make on equalising outcomes in one generation, the easier it is to equalise opportunities in the next. I don’t expect Irving Kristol to embrace this insight with hosannas, but then it’s a long time since I expected anything positive from Irving Kristol.
fn1. I’ll post more on this distinction soon, I hope.
John Quiggin 
There are a few points proponents of this argument don’t adequately address, in my opinion.
The first is that equality is a worthwhile pursuit. As long as people have their needs taken care of, does it really matter if we’re unequal? I’ve said this before, but the difference between myself and Bill Gates is vast, yet I can more than adequately afford everything I need.
Lifting the poor out of their misery is a noble aim, but mass equality across society is a different kettle of fish altogether.
Your position is ideological, and you’re advocating state intervention to follow your ideology, regardless of that of the general populace. Social engineering by the state has a long and violent history. Good intentions can quickly lead to pretty nasty outcomes. I’m sure I don’t have to give you examples.
Secondly, any state intervention for social aims inevitably means a reduction in the freedom of citizens. Higher taxation means the state choosing how my money is spent, not me. Enforced public schooling means the state chooses how my children are taught, not me.
Freedom of the individual is a hard-won victory, and one which most people would be loathe to give up quickly. While social democrats feel this is a worthwhile cost, not everyone agrees with them.
To give an example of how many would feel with this kind of increased ideological intervention, imagine the outrage most social democrats would feel if they were forced to send their children to religious conservative schools where creationism was taught as truth and evolution as a lie. This is no different to what you are advocating.
You also ignore that there is plenty of evidence that the free-market can increase inequality and increase poor citizens’ incomes at the same time, while increased government intervention often increases equality at the cost of increased incomes.
Is it better to make everyone richer with increased inequality? Or should everyone be poorer but more equal? This is the choice we seem to face, and you should deal with it in your arguments. Ignoring it altogether gives the impression that you’re hiding something.
Differences in the lifespan, income and happiness of individuals result from an inextricable mixture of opportunity, effort and luck. I don’t think too many people want society to compensate others for not having made an effort; and insurance is supposed to take care of the luck part. This leaves opportunity. We can operationalise the idea of opportunity by defining it as the predictable part, the part that is statistically explainable by other variables. For example life expectancy at age twenty is correlated with parental income, education and so on. Income and happiness are in partly predictable in this sense as well.
If social policy concentrates on the variables that cause unequal outcomes in this statistical sense, we don’t need to get hung up on the distinction between opportunities and outcomes.
As a somewhat reconstructed social democrat, I would affirm the goodness of constructing social insitutions that equalise economic opportunity. This is the only way that meritocracy can be achieved. Only a monster would deny the value of that ideal.
It is also the case that in capitalist societies, the longtitudinal transfer of property rights will entrench subsequent “functional” inequalities. It follows that continual socio-political intervention is required to bring all members of a cohort back to the same social inheritance starting line, in the race for success. I don’t have a problem with this, so long as incentives are not unduly blunted and administration is not overly intrusive.
As a somewhat constructed “socio-biologist” (ie Darwinian) I would affirm that some of the heritable inequalities (phsyical aspect, rational aptitude and emotional attitude) will be, biological, rather than sociological, in origin. This distribution of biological disparity is the motor of adaptive-selective change, is sigificant in social status terms and cannot be easily dealt with by traditional social democratic interventions.
How does Pr Q propose to deal with the uderlying Darwinian reality of inequality generation?*
*Denying it’s reality is not an option.
An economy including a large proportion of publicly-owned assets strikes me as a good way of improving both equality of opportunity and of outcomes. Well-functioning schools, public libraries, national estate, well-planned cities etc. all conduce to equalising opportunity (though the generational advantage of “choosing the right parents” will still operate), and at the same time count in some sense towards the total income of each citizen, thereby supplementing the incomes of the poorer citizens more than those of the richer.