Matt Yglesias had a good post yesterday about the rhetorical clash politicians are trying to force between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. His ultimate point in the piece is that opportunity is simply not enough. Outcomes, especially for those at the bottom, matter as well.

Interestingly, although concern for equitable outcomes is now an almost exclusively left-wing thing, conservative defenders of the American economic system actually used to think outcomes matter. In the middle of the century, when incomes for the bottom and middle were rising faster than incomes at the top, the equitable distriubtion of goods was touted as a necessary component of a just economic system, and a component that our system featured. However, as our system has become increasingly unequal and income growth has flowed almost exclusively to the top, the conservative move has been to reject equitable distributions as unimportant. Equality is out and opportunity is in.

The problems with rejecting distribution in favor of opportunity are many, but the most obvious is that the two things have literally nothing to do with one another conceptually.

Opportunity pertains to the chances people have to capture all the various positions created by our economic system, while equality pertains to what kinds of positions we should create for people to capture. Basically everyone believes that people should have equal and fair chances to capture extant economic positions. So the opportunity stuff is mutually agreed upon. The dispute is therefore only about what kinds of positions we should create for people to have an equal opportunity to capture.

So for instance, when we levy taxes on high incomes and transfer the money to those with low incomes, this is a total wash when it comes to opportunity. As long as everyone has an equal shot at being the high-income person that gets taxed and an equal shot at being the low-income person that receives the transfer, equality of opportunity has been satisfied. Thus, an opportunity analysis tells us nothing about whether or not we should have an economic system with taxes and transfers (and thereby the economic positions it creates). The question of how to construct our economic system, which is the question distributive equality deals with, is just a totally different inquiry altogether.

When asked whether we should have equal opportunity or equal outcomes, a person could answer neither, one or the other, or both. Opportunity and equality are simply not in conceptual competition with one another and rhetoric that suggests otherwise is either totally confused or calculated to provide cover for unnecessarily constructing our economic system so as to deliver extremely unequal outcomes.