Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

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Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

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Zeitlin: Will equality of opportunity ever be achieved?

The Occupy Wall Street protests present a stark description of American inequality. At the heart of the movement is the claim that a narrow slice of Americans is hoarding the nation’s wealth as the rest of the country suffers from joblessness and stagnant wages.

The claim that the great wealth of the 1 percent is illegitimate and reflects a non-functioning economic system is not one that conservatives like. They don’t like talk of inequality or disparate outcomes at all. Paul Ryan, the House budget committee chairman and leading policy thinker in the Republican party, gave a speech last week that can be seen as the mainstream conservative response to increased concern with inequality. For him, the concern of conservatives was not so much that the rich are too rich, but that instead we, as a society, should aim to achieve equality of opportunity.

But equality of opportunity is actually a radical notion that, when examined, no one supports. Especially not Republicans, and no Democrats, really.

What’s strange is that many conservatives style themselves as defenders of equality of opportunity, as their opponents are defenders of “equality of outcome.” In this world, liberals get upset that the rich are getting ever richer and so punish them with high taxation and redistribute the rest to everyone else so that all people have more or less the same income.

But does anything today, or historically, indicate that America is uniquely dedicated to equalizing opportunity? The educational system should be the place where those who are disadvantaged from birth can acquire the skills and knowledge that will allow them to gain the great wealth that America affords to the successful.

Our educational system, however, does little for the poor and magnifies the advantages of the educationally and financially well-off. For example, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a child whose family income is in the 25th percentile and who gets high 8th grade test scores has a 29% chance of completing college, while a child whose family income is in the 75th percentile and gets low test scores has nearly the exact same chance of graduating from college.

It’s hard to see what the Paul Ryan agenda of maintaining low taxes on the rich indefinitely, lowering domestic discretionary spending to unprecedented levels, and converting Medicare to a voucher program would do to address that inequality. More importantly, the Obama agenda of Clinton-era taxation on the wealthy and universal health care also does little to address equality of opportunity. That’s because our opportunities are so thoroughly bound up with the circumstances of our birth that truly “equalizing” them would require a level of intervention that no one would be comfortable with, especially a Republican.

For example, I had the advantage of my parents’ wealth, which gave me access to a high quality public school and then private high school and college. My parents also modeled hard work and intellectual pursuit, and instilled in me that doing well in school and educating myself was the most important thing I could do.

For someone coming from a broken family, where education was not a priority, to be on an equal playing field with someone from my background would require much more than allowing us to go to the same excellent school. It would require a way of giving the other child something like my own “human capital.” Do we then not allow lackadaisical parents to raise their own children in the name of educational equality? Or, do we give drugs to people like me to make us care less about school?

Of course not. Equalizing opportunity clashes with our intuitions about autonomy, freedom and most other values. Instead, we do the best we can with the inequalities that will inevitably arise. The question is whether Paul Ryan’s approach is really our best.

Matt Zeitlin is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected]

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Zeitlin: Will equality of opportunity ever be achieved?