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Bi-Weekly Discussion - Does America Offer Equal Opportunity?

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Brian B.
Bi-Weekly Discussion - Does America Offer Equal Opportunity?

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We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, not too far from our summer meeting spot in Washington Square Park. The cafe is near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.

Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.

The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.

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DOES AMERICA OFFER EQUAL OPPORTUNITY?

INTRODUCTION:

This spring, we've looked at a variety of political concepts like "personal freedom", "social progress", "happiness", "liberal democracy", and "public safety" which appear to be important to many people but are often left undefined in public debates, leading to people talking past one another. We've looked at how social science researchers have tried to precisely define these concepts so they can be quantified & measured in a variety of indices which - even when we disagree with the way they're constructed - suggest the possibility of addressing these issues in a more precise & rational way.

In a similar manner, this meetup will attempt to provide frameworks for analyzing the concept of "equality of opportunity" which is often contrasted with "equality of outcome". There are a range of moral philosophies that address distributive justice, and equality of opportunity tends to be a concern in the middle of this range, between libertarianism which is more concerned with voluntary choices & socialism which is more concerned with equality of outcomes. Keep in mind that equality of opportunity is just one facet of distributive justice -- it's possible to believe that people don't have a right to a certain type of employment opportunity but still have a right to some other type of economic redistribution (e.g. social security, food stamps, subsidized housing, basic income, etc.). It's also possible to believe businesses have a moral obligation to offer equal opportunity but that it's better if this norm is enforced through social pressures (e.g. protests, boycotts) rather than government intervention.

There appears to be roughly 6 roughly coherent positions on distributive justice, with different conceptions of "equality of opportunity" occupying Positions #2-4 (and possibly #5):

  1. Freedom of Association & Equality of Rights: Under this individualistic moral framework, people should be free to associate with whomever they want, and the government does not have to ensure equal opportunity, merely equal rights. In this case, equal rights is conceived of as "negative rights" that require others to abstain from interfering with your actions, as opposed to "positive rights" that entitle you to help from other people or the government. Property owners have the right to discriminate in who they choose to hire, so there is no justification for the government to intervene in hiring to ensure equality of opportunity. However, in a free market, property owners will get no special privileges or subsidies from government, and businesses must succeed or fail based on how well they serve the needs of their customers. Thus, libertarians tend to assume that businesses who discriminate for irrational reasons will be out-competed in the long term. In a laissez faire economy, a person's income will be a product of both their inherent abilities & life choices and unearned advantages (e.g. inherited wealth, social status), but libertarians often assume that free markets will have high economic mobility so that merit will generally outweigh privilege.

  2. Formal Equality of Opportunity: Under this moral framework, people have a positive right to an opportunity for employment. Property owners can discriminate based on a person's ability to perform a job, but the government will punish those who discriminate in hiring on the basis of characteristics that are judged to be irrelevant to a person's ability to perform the job (e.g. gender, race/ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc.). The assumption is that this relatively mild intervention will both ensure a just distribution of income and create a more competitive free market, unmarred by irrational prejudices. Formal equality is typically not concerned with righting historic injustices that led some people to be disadvantaged, but merely tries to ensure there is no active/direct discrimination in the present & future.

  3. Substantive Equality of Opportunity - Reparation & Affirmative Action: Under this moral framework, in addition to ensuring formal equality of opportunity, the government is also concerned with passive/indirect forms of discrimination and "disparate impact" that stem from active/direct forms of job discrimination in the past, as well as other types of historic injustices (e.g. slavery, expropriation, segregation, redlining, unjust imprisonment, etc.). Under this framework, the government may use tax revenue for reparations, either in the form of direct cash payments or indirectly through welfare programs, subsidized housing, scholarships, etc. The government may also require businesses to hire slightly less qualified job applicants in cases where their deficiencies are likely due to historic injustices. The assumption is that by providing these disadvantaged candidates with a job opportunity, they will acquire job skills & become equal in ability to more advantaged job candidates over time.

  4. Substantive Equality of Opportunity - Luck Egalitarianism: This moral framework is essentially identical to #3, except that it also calls for compensation for disadvantages or deficiencies which are deemed to be the result of bad luck rather than personal choices (e.g. being born into poverty, being mentally or physically disabled, etc.). To ensure substantive equality, the government typically takes steps to try to make job applicants more equal before they get to the point where they compete for a position through educational subsidies. Substantive equality efforts also typically involves trying to alleviate the effects of poverty on children. While this framework does not give a person a right to a job for which they are completely unqualified, it typically entails a responsibility on the part of employers to make "reasonable accommodations". Luck egalitarianism also entails using insurance to spread risk (e.g. disaster, disability, health & unemployment insurance) and taxation to redistribute income gained through sheer luck (e.g. lottery winnings, inheritance, windfall profits) or "rent-seeking" associated with monopolizing public resources (e.g. unimproved land value, mineral rights, spectrum bandwidth) to people who suffered bad luck. While substantive equality of opportunity is in some sense "altruistic", it is not permissive towards malicious or reckless behavior -- people who make poor life choices & squander their opportunities will be allowed to fail, and this is deemed just.

  5. John Rawl's Fair Equality of Opportunity & Amartya Sen's Equality of Autonomy: This framework is essentially identical to #4, but it is more compassionate towards those who've made poor life decisions, like dropouts, addicts & criminals. The rationale is that many social scientists believe that behaviors that lead to success or failure are often closely connected to one's natural propensities & upbringing (over which one has no control) rather than completely "free" choices. Thus, this moral framework is averse to trying to distinguish between the "deserving poor" and "undeserving poor", and holds that justice requires we create a minimum income which no one will fall below even if they have a poor work ethic or make poor life decisions. This approach favors using education, rehabilitation programs & "nudging" tactics from behavioral economics to steer people towards making better decisions. This framework requires large-scale economic redistribution, but moderate income inequalities are typically allowed insofar as they improve the lot of the worst off, namely by giving the talented an incentive to create more wealth which can be taxed (i.e. Rawls' "difference principle").

  6. Marxism & Equality of Outcome: Marxism often assumes that industrial societies that socialize the means of production will eventually reach a post-scarcity economy that will enable a moral framework like #5. However, before an economy reaches post-scarcity, there's a lot of necessary work to do and this creates a question of how this work should be fairly apportioned & goods fairly distributed. According to Marx's dictum "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," one's abilities are important for determining what & how much one is expected to contribute to society through work, but distribution of goods is based not on one's contribution but rather based on one's needs. The goal is for everyone to have roughly the same standard of living, and the standard solution for this is a command economy with either some type of vouchers or free access to basic goods. Unlike approaches that favor maximizing autonomy, collectivist philosophies often infringe on personal autonomy in order to ensure maximum benefit to society. Unlike the Rawlsian "difference principle" where it's assumed that the talented may need a mild profit motive to keep producing & innovating, utopian forms of socialism typically depend on society educating citizens to be fairly selfless & altruistic, so that they will work hard even though this will not grant them higher income. At most, exceptional social contributions may be rewarded with special recognition.

In economics, equality of opportunity is typically measured through social mobility, namely the percentage of people born to parents in a given income quintile who rise or fall to another quintile. Unfortunately, while this is an issue that quite a few economists have researched, I was unable to find any polls of economists on this issue that can give us a sense of the expert consensus in the field. In the absence of a clear expert consensus, we'll do our best to assess the existing research on 4 key areas where authorities often seek to intervene & increase equality of opportunity: childhood upbringing (incl. family upbringing & primary/secondary education), post-secondary education, hiring practices, and professional advancement & wages.

A QUICK REVIEW OF RELEVANT INFO FROM PAST MEETUPS:

This isn't the first time we've covered the difficulties with economic advancement in the U.S. We had a meetup last summer on wage stagnation, the meager results of the war on poverty (reducing poverty rate from 19% to 15% in 50 years), and the stubborn "cost disease" that keeps the cost of housing, healthcare & education high even as the costs of food, clothing & household goods has dropped. One of the major takeaways from this discussion was that poverty is mostly a result not of low wages but unemployment & part-time employment. The poverty rate for full-time workers is only 3%, but for those who only part time it's 16.6% and for those don't work at all it's 33%. Poverty is also tied to the decline of marriage and the two-parent family. Among two-income married couples, the poverty rate is virtually zero, and among marriages where one person works and the other doesn't, the poverty rate is just under 10%. However, among single-parent families, the poverty rate is quite high: 25% for single dads & 31% for single moms. This is tied to unemployment -- 41% of single parents don't work at all, and another 11% work only part-time.
https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/238805096/

At another discussion last summer, we covered the way questions of property rights, reparations, discrimination & taxation tie into the rights-based approach of classical liberalism. While most libertarians are averse to government intervention in the economy, some libertarian philosophers interpret classical liberal principles to justify things like reparations, land reform, land value taxes and/or a basic income guarantee that would increase substantive equality of opportunity.
https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/242037334/

We covered the effect of race on economic success in a meetup last fall called "Deep Culture and the American Dream". We looked at arguments surrounding the alleged "culture of poverty" that holds back both poor urban blacks & poor rural whites, and contrasted this with the cultural traits of "model minorities" like Jewish Americans & Asian Americans that allegedly lead them to be successful. We finished up by looking at the recent debate over whether or not "bourgeois values" (primarily marriage & work ethic) help Americans succeed. The general takeaway from this discussion was that experts are divided on the question of whether culture is the ultimate or merely proximate cause of an individual's economic success or failure -- in the latter case, it's assumed that history and broader socio-economic factors determine culture.
https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/zgmddnywnbcb/

We covered income & wealth inequality in a meetup back in February of 2017, specifically looking at some warnings about rising inequality from the economists Joseph Stiglitz & Thomas Piketty. In rebuttal, Mark Perry pointed our that debates over income & wealth inequality frequently overlook the fact that income mobility has not declined recently and has in fact remained about the same for the last 40 years in the U.S. Furthermore, most working Americans who were initially in the bottom 20% of income earners rise out of that bottom 20%, and more of them end up in the top 20% than remain in the bottom 20%. People who were initially in the bottom 20% in income have had the highest rate of increase in their incomes, while those who were initially in the top 20% have had the lowest. This is the direct opposite of the pattern found when following income brackets over time, rather than following individual people.
https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/jlzgxlywdbgb/

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DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos & articles you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of some of the major debates over gender, race & economics. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles & watch all the videos prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the numbered videos linked under each section - the videos come to about 37 minutes total. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I figure we'll spend about 30 minutes on each section.

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I. FAMILY UPBRINGING, NEIGHBORHOODS & INCOME MOBILITY:

1a) Raj Chetty, "Current Trends in Social Mobility" (video - 6:35 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05NeaG3d2A

1b) PBS, “Black men face economic disadvantages even if they start out in wealthier households” (video - 7:12 min.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix788WbSjXE

1c) The Atlantic, "Can the U.S. End Teen Pregnancy?" (video - 2:49 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRGPjWQOh4c

II. COLLEGE ADMISSIONS & EDUCATION AS AN OPPORTUNITY EQUALIZER:

2a) Vox, "The colleges where the American dream is still alive" (video - 3:30 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhN4wBfQ9yI

2b) Josh Barro & Bryan Caplan, “Is college a waste of time and money?” (video - 5:35 min.)
https://youtu.be/kTSLpT__Wts?t=11

III. DISCRIMINATION IN HIRING, DISPARATE IMPACT & AFFIRMATIVE ACTION:

3a) Newsy, "Hiring bias remains unchanged for black America" (video - 1:52 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FaHesNwcxw

3b) PBS, "Age, Gender and Race Discrimination in Hiring" (video - 1:10 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwpFehqLLVM

IV. RACIAL & GENDER WAGE GAPS:

4a) Vox, "What people miss about the gender wage gap" (video - 5:19 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13XU4fMlN3w&t=2s

4b) Bloomberg, "Why Asian Men Make the Highest Hourly Wage in the U.S." (video - 3:18 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfq7xlnLtr8

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Cafe Walnut
703 Walnut Street · Philadelphia, PA
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