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Notes -
The Virtue Theory of Money
Recently, Freddie deBoer published an essay called "What Would a Functioning System of Equal Opportunity Look Like for the Losers" complaining about how unfair "equality of opportunity" is. The main point is that since talent is partially heritable, if we reward people based on their abilities then people who have been unlucky in the genetic lottery will be left worse off. It's a little hard to tell exactly what way of distributing resources Freddie would prefer instead, but he seems to have the opinion that it is unjust for luck to play a significant role. In Freddie's words: "it’s hard to see how rewarding talent falls under a rubric of distributing resources to people based on that which they can control."
I think Freddie's essay is a good example of a misunderstanding about the benefits of equality of opportunity—a misunderstanding I've come to think of as the Virtue Theory of Money. Basically, this is my name for the belief that the main purpose of money is to reward people for being good.
In my experience, many people seem to have some sort of implicit belief that people should be rewarded by society according to how virtuous they are. This takes different forms: some people emphasize hard-work, conscientiousness and so on. Others emphasize the difficulty or social value of the job that someone is doing. For example, some people argue that affirmitive action is bad because it prevents talented, hardworking people from getting the jobs/university spots that they deserve. As another example, some people argue that teachers should be paid more because of how important their jobs are. The labor theory of value also seems to be partially motivated by this idea.
Read in this light, Freddie is basically complaining that talent is not a virtue and so we should not reward people for being talented. (He also seems to believe that the reason talent is not a virtue is because it is influenced by genetics, which is outside our control. I find that idea somewhat incoherent—all sorts of other apparent virtues like generosity or open-mindedness are also influenced by genetics, but that's irrelevant to my main point.)
However, I think this idea is almost totally wrong. In my view, the main reason to reward some people more than others is if doing so leads to better social outcomes. The point is not to provide personal benefit to the people rewarded but to incentivize behavior that benefits the entire society.
As an example, I believe that the best argument against affirmitive action is not that it personally hurts the individual people denied positions because of it (though I do feel sympathy for them) but because it deprives society of having the most capable people in the most important jobs. The reason that we want to select the most talented people to become doctors is because it's good to have good doctors not because being a doctor is a nice reward for being a top student. Likewise, the best argument for paying teachers more is if doing so would lead to better educational outcomes of enough magnitude to be worth the extra cost. I agree that plenty of teachers (though far from all) are nice, hard-working people who do a demanding job. But again, a job is not supposed to be a reward for being a good person, it's supposed to be a way to get something useful done.
I also think this is a serious issue. Basing hiring decisions and salaries on how virtuous people seem can cause resources to be poorly allocated in a way that hurts everybody. If we followed the Virtue Theory of Money then too many people would want to be teachers (it's already a popular job even without a major salary boost) and not enough would want to be middle managers or accountants. We would have worse doctors, engineers and scientists.
So my main response to Freddie complaining about "equality of opportunity" leading to talented people being rewarded more is: that's exactly the point! We want talented people to be incentivized to apply their talents instead of doing some routine job that almost anyone else can do. Stop trying to use the virtue theory of money and think about the long-term conseuqences of policy decisions.
Now, I do want to add a couple caveats to this. First, I think it's bad to let people suffer a lot when society has sufficient resources to help them. So I think it's reasonable for the government to give some help to people who don't have the ability to get high quality jobs. But I think we should be aware that the government is only able to do this because of how rich our society is and that this wealth depends on incentivizing talented people to use their talents. Second, I do think that there is some value in rewarding people purely for their virtue. I want to live in a society of virtuous people and so I would like virtue to be incentivized even if the economic benefits are not always easy to measure. However, I think this should usually be a secondary concern.
One thing I would add is that it is very hard to measure opportunity. How do you know two people have equal amount of it? You may coast on the idea for a few years or decades - we are equalizing opportunity, just wait for it. But after some time people will be tired of it, in the end increased opportunity should lead to increased outcomes in some way. Equality of outcomes is really the only way to measure equality of opportunity, I think people are falling into a trap even mentioning equality of opportunity. Because if the outcome will not improve, you will end up being the guy telling people that they had plenty of opportunity that they squandered, so they should stop complaining.
The fact that it hurts people's feelings to tell them that they squandered their opportunities to make something of themselves doesn't mean that they didn't squander said opportunities.
Admittedly there's a bit of equivocation betweeen societal opportunities and biological opportunities. No amount of social engineering will ever give a 90 IQ person the same opportunities as a 110 IQ person. But at a societal level, proponents of "equality of opportunity" are generally advocating that society should place no artificial barriers to pursuing opportunities: your race, sex, sexuality, religion etc. should not stand in the way of personal fulfilment. But even if we abolish all of those barriers, you're still left with the uncomfortable fact (qua deBoer) that some people are naturally smarter, taller, faster, stronger, more charismatic etc. than others and will inevitably have better outcomes as a result, and there's precious little that social engineering alone can do about that.
Perhaps you think that actually we're all born as blank slates and g is a pseudoscientific myth and perfectly equal outcomes are entirely achievable without radical wealth redistribution. If that's the case, I don't really know what to tell you.
Sure, but this begs the original question. You didn't make it, so you had to squander your opportunities because we removed all the obstacles such as religion, race and so forth. This is basically restating my original position - if the outcome are not equalized it is hard to argue that opportunities were equalized.
Sure, however the messaging is different. You are genetically one of the useless lumpenproletariat and equality of opportunity will do nothing for you or your kids. The best you can get is to equalize the outcomes, meaning you have to basically extract rent from those more successful somehow. Be it political action for more welfare - maybe using low level violence to extort them to cough up the money, up to actual crimes. Those are avenues available to you.
Which BTW kind of questions the whole idea of merit as well, if somebody is successful it has to be somehow related to some merit, he may be the best programmer or best hustler or best drug dealer or whatever. To me it really is not that clear that a programmer developing one of the addictive gacha games shows more merit than literal criminal or that some unemployed person who uses his money to do graffiti has less merit than somebody who has ability to worm herself into liberal arts academia financed by government dole.
No, it's not hard at all. If the person with poor outcomes cannot present convincing evidence that their progress in life was impeded by artificial and unfair barriers (e.g. racial discrimination, classism, insufficient disability accommodations etc.), it's reasonable to conclude that they had comparable opportunities to people who had better outcomes but squandered these opportunities or were never capable of fully pursuing them (perhaps through no fault of their own). If two people do the exact same anonymised exam at the same time (and they went to the same school, had the same study aids etc.), and one of them fails, it's weird to say that this is a failure of "equality of opportunity" because the exam was too hard to be completed by person of X intelligence. The whole point of exams is to discriminate between those who can and those who can't, and not everyone can do everything. You seem to be saying that "equality of opportunity" means that everybody passes the exam (or perhaps that there are no statistically significant differences in the rates at which different groups pass the exam); I'm saying that being black, a woman, gay, disabled etc. doesn't prevent you from sitting the exam or giving you adequate opportunities to prepare for it - without any guarantee that you'll pass, or that group X will pass at the same rate as group Y.
The alternative to this is the Ibram X. Kendi god-of-the-gaps definition of racism, in which any unfavourable disparity between white and black outcomes is taken as ipso facto evidence of racism at some point in the causal chain, which requires swift and totalitarian public intervention to remedy. (Disparities between blacks and whites which favour blacks are taken as evidence of whites squandering their natural advantage in the hierarchy of a white supremacist society, and require no remedying whatsoever).
Yes, and this is unfair, but no amount of social engineering will fix it. This is why I'm an advocate, not for equality of outcomes, but for equality of opportunity (as far as is practicable) complemented by a strong cradle-to-grave social safety net. The strong social safety net is only feasible because of the surplus wealth and resources generated by high performers afforded the opportunity to live up to their full potential, which is impossible in a socialist state which practises wealth expropriation.
The word "merit" can be used in conflicting ways. In the word "meritocracy" it's being used more or less synonymously with "talent". The programmer in your example has a talent which is rare and valuable enough that employers will pay a premium for it. You seem to be using the word "merit" more or less synonymously with "virtue". I would agree that a programmer designing an addictive Skinner box game is not using his talent virtuously, but it's important to bear in mind that most talents are strictly virtue-neutral. The same talent that allows one programmer to design a super addictive Skinner box game could equally allow him to design medical software which would vastly improve numerous patients' quality of life.
We can debate until the cows come home whether an individual drug dealer is making society worse than the guy who designed an addictive video game. What's not open for debate is that the drug dealer has no special talent - just about anyone within reason can be a low-level drug dealer.
If your objection to meritocracy is that some talented people will use their talents for unethical ends - well, yeah. I was about to say that it's a problem inherent in free markets, the solution to which is governmental regulation - but really, I think it's a problem inherent in the human species, and it won't just disappear in a socialist state with nominal equality of outcomes.
Hard agree. It disgusts me that someone can get paid a government stipend by passing off their paedophiliac masturbation habits as "auto-ethnographic research", and I think academic reform is long overdue.
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