Opportunities ARE Outcomes

There's a battlecry from the right that goes something like this: "Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome!" The argument, such as it is, is that social programs take money from people who earned it and give it to people who didn't, thus equalizing life's outcomes, and that's not fair. The argument for "equality of opportunity" is broader than that, going into discussions of Substantive Equality of Opportunity, but I had a different realization:

Every opportunity is an outcome.

As the Wikipedia article quotes Ha-Joon Chang, "We can accept the outcome of a competitive process as fair only when the participants have equality in basic capabilities; the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair if some contestants have only one leg." That's a fine way to state it, but let's look more closely: having both legs is the outcome of some combination of serendipity and circumstance. The one-legged people may have been born that way, or a precarious life may have caused an injury wealthier people typically avoid.

Some opportunities in my life are the outcomes of serendipity, sheer luck that I happened to have an orthogonal interest that made me a better hire, but even those are the result of my having had the time and energy and unusual brain that let me know a little Japanese, a little transcoding, a little EPUB-2, a little genetics. Enough that I wasn't an idiot coding for people who needed me not to be an idiot. Those things take circumstance, and circumstance is an outcome of prior circumstance.

It all goes back to my parents being upper middle class and having the time, attention, and energy to point me in good directions, and not having the impetus to leash me too hard to their chosen vision. (They wanted me to be a banker. No kidding. Computer Engineering / Accounting was as far as they were willing to go. I was a much better programmer than I was an accountant.)

So the opportunities in my life are outcomes. The opportunities in all lives are outcomes. We don't exist de novo. We come into this world mired in circumstances; some of them propel us, other restrain us. Those circumstances are the outcomes of parental opportunties and state policy decisions.

"Equality of opportunity" is a deceit. Don't fall for it.