Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

WIll Wilkinson has a thoughtful post about Rawls and equal opportunity that I’ll write a more about after I take a nap and read some chapters of the The Republic. Towards the end of it, he puts forward a bunch of egalitarian ideas which I don’t think he endorses, but still seem commendable:

Maybe this is how you approach it, and I do wonder why we don’t see more proposals like the following from those egalitarians who do tend to see the desirable positions as more or less fixed… How about a quota system for firms that limits hiring from high-status schools and mandates a certain number from low-status schools, so that it’s better to be the best kid from the University of North Dakota than the median kid at Princeton? Radical high school-quality affirmative action quotas for college admissions. No Supreme Court justice can have more than one clerk from a top-ten law school. It is illegal ever to hire someone who is a relative, or a friend, or a friend of a friend. Randomized assignments to a vast network of national boarding schools. Combat self-reinforcing prestige by picking an athletic conference at random and then mandating that all Federal Reserve governors for the next ten years be professors at schools from that conference. (So Harvard and MIT econ depopulates as everyone rushes to Creighton and Indiana State. Etc.) Examples of this sort can be multiplied. So would these strategies be “consistent with maintaining equal basic liberties”? Are they necessary for maintaining equal basic liberties, but egalitarians are simply missing the real issue by going on and on about income redistribution?

One reason why liberals may not approach egalitarianism this way is because many egalitarian liberals who even think about these issues are in a position where they would personally lose out if we promoted this type of radical institutional egalitarianism. I, for one, would like to see my kids have a better chance to get in at Northwestern, because I think that it would be good for them. Should I think this way? Probably not. But then again, if you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?

 But getting past the psychological barriers, I think proposals like those outlined by Will are good ones. Let’s take ivy league schools, for instance. I remember going to an info session at Yale and hearing that they could admit three different classes of qualified applicants with no overlap between them. At Harvard, the admissions officer said that 85% of the applicants could easily go there and do the work. In light of all that, wouldn’t some level of randomization seem like a good idea? Sure, you could impose quotas and guidelines to maintain some sort of social, ethnic or class balance. But considering the social and economic premium associated with going to a top flight school, I feel like it would be a basic requirement of justice to make them as accessible as possible. And not just by making them free for low and middle income students, but also by making the applicant pool as wide as possible by getting rid of ways to minutely distinguish between virtually identical applicants. I also think that there would be social benefits to making kids realize the luck involved in going to a top-flight school.

Another interesting thing to note about Will’s post is what a good case it makes for fairly confiscatory income redistribution so as to expand opportunity and the well-being of the poor. He makes a pretty good case that great success in life is contingent on factors that can hardly be attributed to the actions of individuals, which would lead people like me to think that high incomes are not really “deserved” and so society should not feel that bad about redistributing them. Of course, all the old Nozickian arguments against income distribution still apply to even those cases where some contingency is involved in amassing great wealth and power. But in light of that contingency, Nozick’s arguments become less convincing, and Rawlsian claims about luck become more so.*

*Of course, there are efficiency arguments against high levels of redistribution. And these are arguments I tend to agree with. But we have to clear the moral brush before we can start talking about specific polices.