MAIN IDEA:

This book discusses the core American idea of equality of opportunity as it was the subject of indirect debate between Left and Right for the last century. The authors define the book this way:” we ask what has happened to equality of opportunity, a term that came to the fore in the Hoover-Roosevelt era. Hoover described and defended the American system as one based on rugged individualism coupled with equality of opportunity. On the other hand, Roosevelt, in his famous Commonwealth Club speech in 1932, said “equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.” The doctrine has had its ups and downs, its defenders and attackers, over the years, but it is still alive and an important part of the conversation today.”

The book reviews the key historical points of this idea as it was implemented in the constitution at the very foundation of the USA, its expansion across race lines after the Civil War, and the progressive movement of the early XXth century. The main milestones such as the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Reagan revolution, were reviewed in more detail.  Finally, the book discusses contemporary attacks against this idea and attempts to substitute equality of opportunity with equality of results.

MY TAKE ON IT:

Unlike most people who discuss the contemporary challenges to equality of opportunity, I do not believe that it comes from some noble ideas providing a better life for everybody. I think it comes from a completely different motivation: transfer resources generated by other people to the bureaucratic machinery of the state so credentialed bureaucrats could use these resources for their own consumption and control over other people by providing or denying them access to these resources. A simple example would be the difference between the behavior of a teacher in a private school when the teacher’s income and work conditions depend on resources provided by parents or the teacher in a government-controlled school when resources confiscated from parents by the government, moved through the bureaucratic hierarchy of the state and provided to a teacher on condition of compliance with requirements of educational bureaucrats. In the first case, the objective of the teacher is the transfer of knowledge and skill to students so they would be effective in future productive activities because that is what parents would require in exchange for provided resources. In the second case, the objective is to satisfy the requirements of bureaucrats, whatever they are, with the overriding requirement being to condition students to support resource transfer to bureaucracy. It is clear, that such motivation necessitates rejection of the idea of equality of opportunity and its substitution with the idea of equality of results because the equality of opportunity means resource allocation outside of the bureaucratic machine, while equality of results could be produced only by resource transfer through the bureaucratic machine. In reality, the final result is never equal results because the bureaucrats at the higher level of the hierarchy would always get more resources than bureaucrats at the lower levels, and those will get more than people outside the bureaucracy. The implementation of equalization of results always means the more unequal allocation of fewer resources.