There’s a powerful desire to believe that in a well-ordered society people deserve their fate. Give everybody an equal opportunity to thrive and be good, and devil take the hindmost. And there’s some truth in that. More equal opportunity would give us a better society.
But there are limits to that view. Even in a perfect meritocracy, the winners can end up with too much. Certain things, like access to clean air, clean water, medical care, and city parks, should not be distributed according to how smart you are, or how hard-working, or how good. If, for instance, you’re a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in prison, you should get the Covid vaccine sooner than a 35 year-old Buddhist monk in perfect health who is sheltering at home, because Covid vaccines are distributed solely on the basis of which populations are most at risk. It was wrong for the Pentagon to delay, after receiving some bad publicity, its planned administration of the Covid vaccine to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. So long as he’s in U.S. custody, the U.S. bears responsibility to feed him, clothe him, and protect him from contracting a deadly disease.
In the areas of racial and income inequality, people are always trying to change the subject from inequality of outcomes to inequality of opportunity. And the two are not unconnected. But economists have been unable to establish that the growth in income inequality dating to the late 1970s diminished economic mobility, even though it’s perfectly logical that it would. Similarly, it isn’t obvious that opportunities for African Americans, for women, and for other excluded groups have diminished over the past decades. In many ways, they’ve improved. So it’s difficult to justify addressing inequality of outcomes—what today is called “equity”—by redefining it solely as a problem of insufficient opportunity.
If you want to address crises like income inequality and mass incarceration of Black males and police killings of African Americans, you have to address them head-on. Andrew Sullivan says that Vice President Kamala Harris is promoting communism by talking about equity, but direct efforts to improve outcomes do not stand outside the American tradition of egalitarianism. (See, for instance, Eugene Debs, above.) That’s what my latest New Republic column is about.