INTRODUCTION
In the welfarist tradition of social-choice theory, egalitarianism means equality of welfare or utility.[128] Conservative critics of egalitarianism rightly protest that it is highly questionable that this kind of equality is ethically desirable, as it fails to hold persons responsible for their choices, or for their preferences, or for the way they process outcomes into some interpersonally comparable currency that one can speak of equalizing.
In political philosophy, beginning with Rawls (1958, 1971), this critique was taken seriously, and a new approach to egalitarianism transpired, which inserted personal responsibility as an important qualifier of the degree of equality that is ethically desirable. Thus, the development of egalitarian theory, since Rawls, may be characterized as an effort to replace equality of outcomes with equality of opportunities, where opportunities are interpreted in various ways. Metaphors associated with this view are “leveling the playing-field,” and “starting gate equality.” The main philosophical contributions to the discussion were, following Rawls, from Sen (1980), Dworkin (1981a,b), Arneson (1989), and Cohen (1989).[129] The debate is said to be about “equality of what,” and the philosophical view is sometimes called “luck egalitarianism,” a term coined by Anderson (1999).Economists (besides Sen) have been involved in this discussion from 1985 onward. Roemer (1993, 1998) proposed an algorithm for calculating policies that would equalize opportunities for achievement of a given objective in a population. Marc Fleurbaey and Franςois Maniquet contributed economic proposals beginning in the 1990s, and recently summarized in Fleurbaey (2008). Other authors who have contributed to the theory include Van de gaer (1993), Bossert (1995, 1997), and Peragine (2004). An empirical literature is rapidly developing, calculating the extent to which opportunities for the acquisition of various objectives are unequal in various countries, and whether people hold views of justice consonant with equality of opportunity (EOp).
There are various ways of summarizing the significance of these developments for the economics of inequality. Prior to the philosophical contributions that ignited the economic literature that is our focus in this chapter, there was an earlier skirmish around the practical import of equalizing opportunities. Just prior to the publication of Rawls’s magnum opus (1971), contributions by Jensen (1969) and Herrnstein (1971) proposed that inequality was in the main due to differential intelligence (IQ), and so generating a more equal income distribution by equalizing opportunities (for instance, through compensatory education of under-privileged children) was a chimera. Economists Bowles (1973) and Conlisk (1974) disagreed; Bowles argued that inequality of income was almost all due to unequal opportunities, not to the heritability of IQ. Despite this important debate on the degree to which economic inequality is immutable, prior to Rawls, economists’ discussions of inequality were in the main statistical, focusing on the best ways of measuring inequality.
The post-Rawls-Dworkin inequality literature changed the focus by pointing out that only some kinds of inequality are ethically objectionable, and to the extent that economists ignore this distinction, they may be measuring something that is not ethically salient. This distinction between morally acceptable and unacceptable inequality is perhaps the most important contribution of philosophical egalitarian thought of the last 40 years. From the perspective of social-choice theory, equal-opportunity theory has sharply challenged the welfarist assumption that is classically ubiquitous, maintaining that more information than final outcomes in terms of welfare is needed to render social judgment about the ranking of alternative policies—in particular, one must know the extent to which individuals are responsible for the outcomes they enjoy—whether those outcomes were determined by social (and perhaps genetic) factors beyond their control, or not—and this is non-welfare information.
One must mention that another major non-welfarist theory of justice, but a nonegalitarian one, was proposed by Nozick (1974) who argued that justice could not be assessed by knowing only final outcomes; one had to know the process by which these outcomes were produced. His neo-Lockean view, which proposed a theory of the moral legitimacy of private property, can evaluate the justness of final outcomes only by knowing whether the history that produced them was unpolluted by extortion, robbery, slavery, and so on.
Simply knowing the distribution of final outcomes (in terms of income, welfare, or whatever) does not suffice to pass judgment on the distribution’s moral pedigree. So the period since 1970 has been one in which, in political philosophy, non-welfarist theories flourished, on both the right and left ends of the political spectrum.
In this chapter, we begin by summarizing the philosophical debate concerning equality since Rawls (Section 4.2), presenting economic algorithms for computing policies which equalize opportunities—or, more generally, ways of ordering social policies with respect to their efficacy in opportunity equalization (Sections 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5), application of the approach to the conceptualization of economic development (Section 4.6), discussion of dynamic issues (Section 4.7), a preamble to a discussion of empirical work (Section 4.8), evidence of population views from surveys and experiments concerning conceptions of equality (Section 4.9), a discussion of measurement issues, and summary of the empirical literature on inequality of opportunity to date (Section 4.11). We conclude by mentioning some critiques of the equal-opportunity approach, and some predictions (Section 4.12).
4.2.