Equality of Opportunity: a Progress Report
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Soc Choice Welfare (2002) 19: 455–471 99209092 Equality of opportunity: A progress report John E. Roemer Yale University, Department of Political Science, 124 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520-8301, USA (e-mail: [email protected]) Received: 5 January 2001/Accepted: 4 December 2001 1 Introduction Probably the most universally supported conception of justice in advanced societies is that of equal opportunity. What does this mean, and how can it be formalized? The first treatment of this problem in social choice theory involved interpreting equality of opportunity as equality of opportunity sets, that is, rendering the sets of choices available to di¤erent individuals the same. In my view, this literature was too abstract – it failed to take su‰cient cues from popular and long-standing conceptions of equality of opportunity. A consequence of this over-abstractness is that no empirical work, on what equal-opportunity policies should be in real-world situations, has followed from this work, as far as I am aware. Those popular conceptions have, in contrast, influenced greatly the recent literature in egalitarian political philosophy, particularly the idea that in the equal-opportunity ethic, there is, as well as a desire to equalize something, an insistence that individuals be held responsible for what happens to them. This is popularly formulated in the ‘level-the-playing-field’ metaphor: equal- opportunity policy must create a level playing field, after which each individ- ual is on his own – what outcomes finally occur will reflect individual e¤ort, and outcome di¤erentials are ethically acceptable, if the playing field was ini- tially level, and if they are due to di¤erential e¤ort. John Rawls (1971), in his path-breaking work, certainly understood, and supported, the idea that the social mandate to equalize outcomes across indi- I am grateful to my collaborators, listed in the references, for permitting me to report some of the results of our joint work in this paper, which was read as the Arrow Lec- ture at the bi-annual meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, in Alicante, July 2000. 456 J. E. Roemer viduals was rightfully constrained by how responsibly individuals had behaved, but his model of souls contracting behind the veil of ignorance failed to cap- ture the intuitions correctly (see Roemer 1996, Chapt. 5). Ronald Dworkin, in two articles published in 1981, came much closer to getting it right. Dworkin (1981a,b) distinguished between a person’s preferences and his resources, where the latter comprised endowments which the individual had no role in choosing. He argued that the ethically attractive notion of equality entailed equalizing resources across individuals, but allowing di¤erences to emerge in final conditions due to the exercise of choice following from di¤erential pref- erences: thus, Dworkin said people should be held responsible for their pref- erences but not their resources. A moment’s thought will convince you that it is not so easy to make the cut between preferences and resources, at least if one wants preferences to be attributes for which the individual is rightly held responsible. (For example, resources clearly influence preference formation, so if one is not responsible for resources like family background, should one be responsible for exercising preferences induced by childhood nurture?) Never- theless, Dworkin’s contribution was path-breaking, and other philosophers took Dworkin’s work further. Dworkin even proposed an economic model of his idea, what economists would call a market for contingent claims behind a veil of ignorance conceived di¤erently from Rawls’s, in which souls know the preferences of the persons with whom they are associated, but not the resource bundles those persons will receive in the birth lottery. The general structure of Dworkin’s theory is that a person’s attributes (endowments, preferences, actions) can be partitioned into two sets – those for which we think it is morally correct to hold him accountable or responsible, and those for which we think it is not so. Call the first set responsible factors and the second, arbitrary factors. An egalitarian should seek to equalize the final conditions (perhaps, welfares) of individuals to the extent that those con- ditions are due to di¤erences in the sets of arbitrary factors, but allow di¤er- ences in condition to the extent that such are due to di¤erences in responsible factors. It is this conception of ‘responsible’ and ‘arbitrary’ factors which, I think, is key to the notion of equal opportunity. I will now adopt a somewhat less general approach, and say that the outcomes individuals sustain are the con- sequence of circumstances, e¤ort, and policy, where circumstances are aspects of an individual’s environment and actions which are either beyond his con- trol, or for which we (society) wish not to hold him responsible, e¤ort com- prises the actions he takes for which we do wish to hold him responsible, and policy is the instrument by which society (or the planner) influences outcomes – perhaps some allocation of a publicly owned resource. Equal-opportunity policy aims to level the playing field. What are the troughs in that metaphor- ical playing field? They are the disadvantages that some persons face, with regard to achieving high levels of welfare – or, more generally, the condition about which the planner is concerned – due to unfortunate circumstances. Thus, leveling the playing field means choosing that policy that will make it the case that an individual’s final condition will be, as far as possible, only a Equality of opportunity 457 function of the e¤ort he makes. In particular, equality of opportunity finds no moral bad in inequality of final condition across individuals ascribable to dif- ferential e¤ort. In this way, it di¤ers from the equality-of-outcome ethic. 2 A formalization We can formalize this view as follows. Suppose the condition for which we desire to equalize opportunities – the opportunity equalisandum – is measured by a function uðC; e; jÞ, where C denotes the individual’s circumstances, e his e¤ort, and j the policy of the intervening agency or planner. u need not mea- sure welfare in the economist’s sense: it could be income, or life expectancy, or wage-earning capacity. I further specialize by assuming that an individual’s type is the value of his C, that the population has a finite number of types, and that there is a continuum of individuals in each type. From now on, we denote types 1; 2; ...; t, with the generic element t. We denote the set of types by T, and the set of feasible policies by F. We assume, as well, that, for any policy j implemented by the planner, t there will be a distribution of e¤ort in each type, denoted by Fj, which is a probability measure on the set of non-negative real numbers – the domain of e¤ort. (Thus, we here make another assumption, that e¤ort can be captured by a one dimensional variable.) Letting P be the set of probability distribu- tions on Rþ, we take the mapping F : T Â F ! P as a primitive of the model. An economist would say that e¤ort responses are the consequence of utility maximization facing policies, but that does not here concern us, and there is no reason to further complexify by modeling that process. Let me give two examples. Let u be wage earning capacity, a person’s type be the socio-economic status (SES) of his parents, e¤ort be the number of years of school he attends, and policy be the per-pupil educational expendi- tures of the state, which, we assume, may be varied according to the socio- economic characteristics of the neighborhood in which the school is located. In this conception, we do not hold a person responsible for his parents’ SES, but we do hold him responsible for the number of years of school he attends. Equal-opportunity policy entails distributing an educational budget among schools so that, so far as possible, the wages individuals eventually earn are, on average, equal across SES types of child who attended school similar numbers of years. Intuitively, that policy would spend more per pupil in low SES neighborhoods than in high SES neighborhoods. The policy would be used to compensate individuals with disadvantaged circumstances so that, finally, at each level of school attendance, the wages of individuals, in the various types, would be equal. Here is a second example. Let u be life expectancy, type be, again, the eco- nomic class of the parents of the individual, e¤ort be a measure of ‘life-style quality,’ in the sense of exercising, eating healthily, not smoking, and so on, and policy be some allocation of medical care services to the population. Here, the equal-opportunity goal is to choose the policy so that the life expectancies of 458 J. E. Roemer individuals of di¤erent types are equal for cohorts of those types whose mem- bers have lived equally healthy life-styles. Of course, the distribution of e¤ort within a type, in these two examples, may well respond to the policy, which is why we predicated that distribution, above, on both the type and the policy. There is, however, an inconsistency between the model, as I have thus far described it, and the intent of the modeler. Everyone knows that the distribu- tion of e¤ort is, indeed, a characteristic of the type. If schools spend $5000 per student on upper middle class children, we will observe a di¤erent distribution of years of school completed, our proposed e¤ort measure, than if they spend the same amount on poor, ghetto children.