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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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