As an addendum, equal opportunity is necessary, but not sufficient for a just outcome (at least, according to what most reasonable people would agree to be just).

You could have a theoretical society where everybody is taxed 10% of their income and that income is given to a randomly selected person each year. This society has absolutely equal opportunity, but it's also pretty unjust, because why should that one person suddenly be rich?

Keep that in mind when discussing (more) equal outcomes vs. equal opportunity. Equal opportunity is insufficient.

How do you define ‘just’? How can equal outcomes ever be attained? I played a lot of baseball, but there are only so many slots on the Yankees.

GP's lottery example was meant to show that even if equal opportunity is achieved, it's entirely possible to decouple compensation from work.

One example of a proposed solution is a limit on the difference between the lowest and highest salaries in a company.

By some random chance, that much like any form of luck, is well understood by most people.

What value is this proposed solution and how is it ‘just’. Sounds a lot like people don’t understand the lessons of capping salespeople’s commissions.

Sales commissions are an interesting example. A hard cap can probably have bad psychological effects. But squeezing commissions down overall (by reducing the percentages or some other approach) is unlikely to have the same bad effect.

You know, all of your solutions try very heavily to discourage people for actually doing things. Forcing equality of outcome seems to require punishment for any hard work. I would rather not live in the world of Harrison Bergeron.

Where do you get the "very heavily" from? I think you're imagining things that aren't there.

Apart from that, you may be suffering from Status Quo Bias.

"squeezing commissions down overall" is very heavily discouraging people, ask IBM.

Nope, "equality of opportunity" is a great thing. I just don't believe "equality of outcome" is achievable and further believe it is detrimental to society as a whole. We should teach our children not to envy and working hard is a component but not a guarantee of success.

>The main goal in my mind is equal opportunity, not equal wealth.

There are a significant number of people who want to go beyond equality of opportunity. Look at the hiring programs of Google, etc. that attempt to hire larger ratios of minorities than the ratios graduating from CS programs.

I would understand this type of affirmative action as an attempt to provide equal opportunity by correcting for the existing inequality of opportunity. The ratios graduating are disproportionate to the general population ratio, and may be a sign of a perceived lack of opportunity. There are advantages to a diverse workplace too, so opportunity aside there are good reasons to prefer diversity over the ratios coming out of school.

"identical sized piles of money" is a strawman, but lots of people support, and would like more of, tax-financed income transfers and high quality public services to reduce economic inequality.

> "identical sized piles of money" is a strawman

No it's not. The entire premise of this article is that equal sized piles of money is not what people want - the presumption is that equality means equal wealth. He went through multiple specific examples using toys, cookies, grapes, and money, explicitly. When the title said "People Don't Actually Want Equality, They Want Fairness", the definition he's using there for "equality" is equal sized piles of money.

Yes it's the premise of the article, but I still think it's a strawman.

You can have more or less equality, and equality increasing measures are fairly popular.

Ah, okay, yes then I agree with you. Sorry for assuming you were talking about me. I also agree with the article that people want fairness more than literal equality, but my reaction is that literal equality is more than just strawman, it's an odd premise to start from. I'm sure there are some people who do propose literal equality, but I don't think that the general argument against inequality is one in favor of literal equality, by and large.

My takeaway from my experiences reading and talking about this is that when people talk about equality, they are talking about equality of opportunity. The idea being that things would be better if everyone had a basic level of needs covered, things like food, shelter, education and health care.

It is possible to be in favor of equality increasing measures and still not have the long term goal of equal sized piles of money. What we have right now is both really unfair and really unequal. And it's getting worse, not better. So equality metrics may be the simplest way to measure whether things are improving (they're not). That doesn't automatically mean that getting everyone to balance out is the ideal, right? Perhaps it's a blunt metric precisely because anything else is more subtle and leads to nuanced debate that most people won't bother with?

I know quite a few who think equal should mean exactly equal. These are the same individuals who hyper focus on metics which solely measure outcome.

Just curious, but do these people agree and say explicitly they want exactly equal, or is that what the goal seems to be based on metrics that solely measure outcome?

I don't doubt that such people exist, but I think that metrics which measure outcome don't necessarily implicate literal equality. Outcomes are just the simplest, most accessible way to highlight the (real) problem. But like affirmative action, outcomes as a metric make sense at times of great inequality, and they won't make sense if/when we are nearer to either exact equality or to equality of opportunity.

Right now, we are losing ground with equality, not getting closer to it, and that's why (in my mind) outcomes are an acceptable way to look at it for the time being. I think looking solely at outcomes would become wholly inappropriate if/when equality policy started holding people back from getting any more than someone else regardless of the quality or amount of their efforts.

Some people on the extreme ends of the political spectrum, and some very wealthy people, do try to argue that taxes and other policy are holding them back now, but I don't even want to broach that. Right now we do have a few extremely rich people, and a lot of extremely poor people, and the gap is growing. Until that gap is shrinking and closer to what it used to be, it does make sense to me to use outcome as a metric.