1) As returns to IQ increase, meritocracy (liberty) will increase inequality.
2) The most important form of equality today is the breakdown of social norms. Belmont vs Fishtown. Giving wage subsidies to FIshtown will not in and of itself solve the fact that Fishtowners don't get married for instance.
Hollebecque called this "the extension of the domain of struggle". Basically, the applying of meritocracy to the family and sexual relations (which naturally causes huge inequality, Christian marriage is not biologically natural but a form of sexual socialism).
Extending liberty to the social realm has mostly made things more unequal. When you tell people they can have all the drugs, sex, and implicitly violence and crime that they want it turns out Fishtown is a hellhole. This gets worse and worse the more you try to liberate the aberrant.
This is something that libertarians* can't quite come to grips with. The answer seems to be "well, if they implode that's their own problem. This never really works out (when they implode it affects everyone around them, and its empirically inevitable that the government ends up getting involved.)
*Murray is more a conservative that respects libertarian solutions in many cases. He may or may not favor legalized pot, but he would probably scold rather than encourage people in Fishtown to smoke pot.
There are of course many reforms to laws we could make on these issues, but fundamentally I think that the current divide between the Upper/Middle/Lower makes a kind of sense. The Upper wants relaxation of the old standards so they can indulge, but generally this doesn't destroy them (I'd argue it lessens them, but the effect is more in opportunity cost than gutter). The middle would prefer the old standards. The lower wants no standards even if it destroys them because they can't plan ahead and they see little hope anyway. Government and cultural outcomes therefore tends to favor the upper (that can manipulate it) and the lower (which can ignore it and get paid off), though not always to long term benefit.
This is possibly the most elegant defense of puritanical authoritarianism that I've seen in a long time.
The basic problem with it is that countries that enforce social norms to any great extent tend to stagnate - and then face social revolution (c.f. everything from the repeated collapse of feudal stuctures almost everywhere, to the social revolution in the U.S. between the high-social-norm-enforcing 1950s to the anything-goes 1970s that were the virtually inevitable result). So that doesn't work either.
“The biggest contradiction in liberalism is between its main two values: liberty and equality.” A misunderstanding surely? True Liberals know the only equality it is possible to ensure is equality (and equity) before the Law under the Rule of Law. Liberals (true) understand that social and economic equality is not possible without force and thus contrary to the principle of Liberty - which is freedom from arbitrary control, obligation, restrictions, limiting of choice. There is no contradiction in liberalism, just those who don’t know what it is.
That was my thought as well: since when does "equality" mean everyone has the same stuff? It is equality before the law that matters, what people have is determined by their choices, and not everyone makes the same choices.
The assumption is that everyone has equal ability and thus if we have equal opportunity everyone should end up basically equal. If you don't get equality of results then you must not have had equality of opportunity. If you think you have equality of opportunity then your eyes must be lying.
Maybe not literally EVERYONE. But every permutation of every single way of slicing people up into ever finer groups on ever more arbitrary lines all of those groups should be equal. Otherwise racist/sexist/etc.
The invention of the spreadsheet and cheap data storage makes it very low cost to come up with new grouping and measure their inequality with each other.
Worse, even if somehow everyone had equal abilities outcomes would still never be equal based solely on choices. Maybe some people want to spend more time working and advancing in their career while others prefer to spend more time with their family. Different income levels result. Different amounts of family strength too, but of course leveling that is harder :)
But in Socialist paradise, people don’t have choices - what they will have, what they will do are decided for them by the central planners and controllers. We are seeing this with our choices being reduced: the cars we drive, lightbulbs, we use, our stoves, what kind of bag we carry our groceries in, what food we can eat, how much water we can use, what we may see/hear/say, for whom we may vote… we are well down the road to serfdom.
They misunderstand (wilfully?) equality of opportunity (social equality) and take it to mean everyone has the same opportunity, whereas it means equal access - that is, nobody is prevented from undertaking economic activity based on social status such as race, sex, class. In other words, nobody can be stopped from entering the race if they wish, but that’s no guarantee they can run as well as others, or will win or even finish it. It is best seen in the light of the Guilds of pre-Industrial Revolution. A person couldn’t, for example, start making and selling furniture, they had to be a member of the appropriate Guild. Membership was strictly controlled to keep competition down and prices up. Guilds operated under Royal Warrants - sold by the King and a good source of income - and so trying to work outside a Guild would be prevented by the authorities. Guilds lost their power in the UK which helped the Industrial Revolution. Ironically - the Trades Unions are the biggest obstacles to social equality. The powerful ones can operate a de facto closed shop, and of course bribe politicians with campaign financing, to keep non-union members out of jobs, to keep wages (and costs to consumers) up. There is a rise in the US of permits for all sorts of economic activity, like florists, beauticians, realtors. This stops equal opportunity and of course expands scope and scale of bureaucracies and provides and income for government bodies.
And paradoxically, the Left who are big on equality of outcome, have no time for equality before the law. The law for the Left is to be applied with inequality to give favoured group A an advantage over out-of-favour group B, in order to achieve equality.
The whole point of leftism seems to be to create a class of credentialed "experts" and give them the powers nobility used to have, without any qualification or test except tests of group loyalty. The nonsense beliefs of intersectionality are one such test, just as those of communism were during China's Cultural Revolution.
"True Liberals know the only equality it is possible to ensure is equality (and equity) before the Law under the Rule of Law. Liberals (true) understand that social and economic equality is not possible without force and thus contrary to the principle of Liberty"
True Liberals are a diminishing fraction of the Church of Liberalism. In today's world they are the heretics.
The challenge of Liberty and Equality is really just one example of the broader tension between Liberty and Virtue. Equality just happens to be the one virtue that remains for many progressives.
Liberty and Virtue are both necessary for a stable pluralist society, and there is an inherent tension between the two. Ideally, and maybe this was the case earlier in US history, Liberty and Virtue serve as checks on the other to maintain a balance. For example, Liberty ensures that laws are not passed that violate the beliefs of minority groups. And Virtue checks Liberty to ensure decency, safety, and institutions that lead to a healthy and prosperous society.
Today, except perhaps in the modern sense of equality, Virtue has been cast to the side and Liberty has taken on distorted proportions. You might also say equality as the sole remaining virtue has itself taken on distorted proportions. Now we have two monsters, twisted forms of their original nature, battling for supremacy.
Note that I’m in agreement with Arnold’s main point. Liberty used to be the means for achieving equality. The fact that the two are being pitted against each other indicates that the nature of the concept of Liberty and/or Equality has changed.
In a world were 90%+ of people don't have liberty, increasing liberty tends to be beneficial on the margin. Especially amongst a group high in virtue (which I think we can agree European society had in the time liberty exploded).
The old world was also a world in which measuring merit was hard (no standardized testing) and returns to merit weren't strong (malthusian environments mean dominance and not productivity are what matter long run). It's notable that only after the Industrial Revolution gets going do we see a push towards more inclusion and meritocracy (baby steps in Europe before that, but only really when we break Malthus does it take off).
Like all things it has diminishing returns. By the time you are talking about trans rights you are talking about 0.X% of the population and not exactly a group super high in Virtue.
Liberating the serfs follows "the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few". Imposing trans stuff on the rest of the population is "the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many."
It really really really surprises me that you don't openly call out Torenberg's nonsense. Liberalism has never, and can never, value equality of outcome. There is no tension, other than balancing everyone's equal liberty.
I would argue, quite seriously, that giving women the vote did indeed create a tension between liberty and equality -- because politically, the century that began in 1920 has been a century of nanny-statism, and women voters have had everything to do with that fact, from Prohibition onward. The suffragettes and temperance movement were mostly the same people. Indeed, the only reason the 18th Amendment preceded the 19th was that several large states, including New York, had already given women the vote before the 19th was enacted.
I do not believe the trade-off was worth it in this case. YMMV.
Maybe I have been too immersed in Razib and Robin Hanson, but it would seem that sometimes Liberty and Equality seem to go together and sometimes they are in too much tension. That there is an epicyclical movement between the two and there is a story to be told with regard to the construal level and status with regard to when they become closer and when they are moving apart.
I have trouble with the portrait of the past and the characterization of the present that underlies the predictions. As I see it, the past linked status with responsibility under a system of peer accountability mixed with upward accountability. Revolutions openly aimed at some 'downward accountability' to balance the upward accountability, which had led to abuses. However, revolutions in due course turned to instead 'flattening' the status structure permanently [or equality] rather than simply purging the elites of bad actors. Later accounts suggest the revolutions were mostly aimed at status inversion by subsections of the elites that were discontented with their own strata within the elites. Unfortunately, these flattening revolutions tended to also break the systems of responsibility (liberty) which the status systems had supported. The idea had been to loose the bonds of the oppressed, so to speak, but as new elites, those former oppressed should have shouldered the load of the community. Instead, the new elites were unoccupied by caring for dependent subordinates, and were only busy evading responsibilities as if they were somehow oppressive.
In short, the idea of having people who pay taxes also have the right to vote has nothing to do with oppression or inequality. Votes could even be proportional to taxation, and it satisfies the battle cry of the American Revolution. It creates a peer group of the financial contributors to the community, with rights and responsibilities to match. Having only rights and no responsibilities...
An irony is that there's arguably an untapped slice of the liberty/equality-promoting venn diagram, that could in principle (but doesn't in fact) get consensus across the red/blue divide: zoning reform, occupational licensing reform, school choice/charters, progressive consumption taxation.
If you believe that people all have equal ability, the persistence of unequal outcomes begs the question. You might as well believe an invisible miasma of racism and bias is going it have eliminated basically every other explanation. Like when you eliminate 3/4 answers on a multiple choice test so you decide the final answer must be correct even though you can't actually solve for it (the idea that the test is bogus is crime think).
You have to bite the bullet on human inequality, and then further bullets on what that implies. Way too much of both the ideology of the left and its flat out self interest (whose going to pay to "educate" low IQs if its pointless) is tied up in this denial.
There are tradeoffs, but I don't think they are what mainly stand in the way of polices to promote growth and prosperity: taxes on CO2 emissions, congestion taxes for streets and roads, skilled based immigration, lower fiscal deficits, less restrictive land use policies. And redistributionist measures like higher EITC or CTC have low growth inhibiting effects.
It is unfortunate that _equality before the law_ gets shortened to _equality_. We want the former. We can even approach it, such that we can inhibit the powerful from legally oppressing the weak.
A similar thing was at work with economic regulation. Only very late in the day did it occur to anyone that the state would regulate _in favor of_ a poorer or less powerful group. But today we actually have to look at things case by case.
Early Gen X-ers at least had real civics classes that included some foundational philosophical concepts. I don't remember if it was jr. high or high school, but I remember talking about utopias and equality of opportunities vs. outcomes.
That's all been thrown out the window and even some of the silent generation conveniently forget what they've learned. It really grates the nerves when Biden talks about "3 co-equal branches of government".
Throughout my lifetime, probably much longer, liberty and equality have been increasing and decreasing in various ways, both via government and the actions of other groups and individuals. The extent to which these changes are net positive or negative is not only highly subjective but also based on individual experience. To me, it seems obvious the changes are a net positive for the vast majority even if the trend is bad in some ways and for some groups or individuals. Whatever one's opinion it is important to remember we can't be certain whether liberty or equality is increasing or decreasing except maybe in rather extreme circumstances. I don't think it can be argued we've had an extreme drop in liberty or equality in the US in a very long time, if ever.
It's worth noting that when people are surveyed about various harms in the world they often have a rather negative view because they believe others have been harmed more than themselves. This suggests a rather profound misperception of the world in which we live.
"To effectively reduce inequality in income and education, we cannot simply add to liberty of people at the bottom. We would have to take away liberty from people at the top."
Which is exactly what we are in the process of doing, with one caveat- those in the government exempt themselves.
Maybe those in government try to exempt themselves and have some success at that but I'd argue what they exempt themselves from is a rather small part of the whole.
I think "at the top" is more interesting. I'd argue very little liberty gets taken from those at the top. For example, most kids eligible for gifted programs have lots of opportunities in the absence of those programs. I'd say the ones most likely to lose liberty are closer to average and not necessarily always someone we'd even think of as above average.
Nearly every state gifted program is composed almost entirely of fresh off the boat Asian immigrants or others that fit their profile (for whatever historical reason their parents income/wealth was lower then their IQ would normally merit). My own magnet high school fit this profile, high IQ kids with middle or lower middle class parents (mostly immigrants) that are upwardly mobile.
Rich kids don't go to magnet high schools, they go to prep schools.
"Lots of opportunities" masks a lot. My magnet high school afforded many opportunities I didn't have at my local high school. And when I went to college my SAT score netted me a full scholarship. Today its not clear I would have had either of those things.
"I think "at the top" is more interesting. I'd argue very little liberty gets taken from those at the top."
I would argue that Kling and you are definining "at the top" differently in these comments. Very little gets take away from people at the top of the income scale since they can afford to send their childrent to top private schools. I think Kling is talking more about people at the top of the intellectual talent scale. There, taking away opportunities hurts if they are stuck in the public school system because their parents are middle income or lower.
My comment here was about "at the top" of the intellectual scale, not income scale, though there is quite a bit of overlap. First, this all depends on whether you are referring to something like the top 10% who typically go on to very successful careers even if they don't attend Ivy League type schools, the top 1%, or the top 0.1% who are most likely to get little or nothing from an "average" classroom.
I'm not suggesting there aren't a few kids who lose out by their school dropping gifted classes but I'd bet most at the top of the intellectual scale have involved parents and lots opportunities outside of school. Second, I'd bet that they are more likely than not to be in a private school or a rather high performing public school.
Not that this anecdote proves anything but my daughter was in gifted or advanced classes throughout K-12. My son was not. In hindsight I think that was the best option for each. But how did it affect their opportunities? I'd say not at all. He was a slower developer but eventually caught up. They are now both successful engineers with graduate degrees. It doesn't seem gifted classes would have worked for him and I doubt my daughter would have suffered much in a regular classroom.
Murray noted two things on inequality:
1) As returns to IQ increase, meritocracy (liberty) will increase inequality.
2) The most important form of equality today is the breakdown of social norms. Belmont vs Fishtown. Giving wage subsidies to FIshtown will not in and of itself solve the fact that Fishtowners don't get married for instance.
Hollebecque called this "the extension of the domain of struggle". Basically, the applying of meritocracy to the family and sexual relations (which naturally causes huge inequality, Christian marriage is not biologically natural but a form of sexual socialism).
Extending liberty to the social realm has mostly made things more unequal. When you tell people they can have all the drugs, sex, and implicitly violence and crime that they want it turns out Fishtown is a hellhole. This gets worse and worse the more you try to liberate the aberrant.
This is something that libertarians* can't quite come to grips with. The answer seems to be "well, if they implode that's their own problem. This never really works out (when they implode it affects everyone around them, and its empirically inevitable that the government ends up getting involved.)
*Murray is more a conservative that respects libertarian solutions in many cases. He may or may not favor legalized pot, but he would probably scold rather than encourage people in Fishtown to smoke pot.
There are of course many reforms to laws we could make on these issues, but fundamentally I think that the current divide between the Upper/Middle/Lower makes a kind of sense. The Upper wants relaxation of the old standards so they can indulge, but generally this doesn't destroy them (I'd argue it lessens them, but the effect is more in opportunity cost than gutter). The middle would prefer the old standards. The lower wants no standards even if it destroys them because they can't plan ahead and they see little hope anyway. Government and cultural outcomes therefore tends to favor the upper (that can manipulate it) and the lower (which can ignore it and get paid off), though not always to long term benefit.
"The Upper wants relaxation of the old standards so they can indulge, but generally this doesn't destroy them"
That is exactly right. Vice isn't an equal opportunity destroyer. There isn't an equal distribution of self-control.
This is possibly the most elegant defense of puritanical authoritarianism that I've seen in a long time.
The basic problem with it is that countries that enforce social norms to any great extent tend to stagnate - and then face social revolution (c.f. everything from the repeated collapse of feudal stuctures almost everywhere, to the social revolution in the U.S. between the high-social-norm-enforcing 1950s to the anything-goes 1970s that were the virtually inevitable result). So that doesn't work either.
"Why wasn’t the trade-off between liberty and equality more obvious two hundred years ago?"
It was obvious two hundred years ago. Tocqueville wrote a great deal about this and predicted equality would eventually triumph over liberty.
“The biggest contradiction in liberalism is between its main two values: liberty and equality.” A misunderstanding surely? True Liberals know the only equality it is possible to ensure is equality (and equity) before the Law under the Rule of Law. Liberals (true) understand that social and economic equality is not possible without force and thus contrary to the principle of Liberty - which is freedom from arbitrary control, obligation, restrictions, limiting of choice. There is no contradiction in liberalism, just those who don’t know what it is.
That was my thought as well: since when does "equality" mean everyone has the same stuff? It is equality before the law that matters, what people have is determined by their choices, and not everyone makes the same choices.
The assumption is that everyone has equal ability and thus if we have equal opportunity everyone should end up basically equal. If you don't get equality of results then you must not have had equality of opportunity. If you think you have equality of opportunity then your eyes must be lying.
Maybe not literally EVERYONE. But every permutation of every single way of slicing people up into ever finer groups on ever more arbitrary lines all of those groups should be equal. Otherwise racist/sexist/etc.
The invention of the spreadsheet and cheap data storage makes it very low cost to come up with new grouping and measure their inequality with each other.
Worse, even if somehow everyone had equal abilities outcomes would still never be equal based solely on choices. Maybe some people want to spend more time working and advancing in their career while others prefer to spend more time with their family. Different income levels result. Different amounts of family strength too, but of course leveling that is harder :)
But in Socialist paradise, people don’t have choices - what they will have, what they will do are decided for them by the central planners and controllers. We are seeing this with our choices being reduced: the cars we drive, lightbulbs, we use, our stoves, what kind of bag we carry our groceries in, what food we can eat, how much water we can use, what we may see/hear/say, for whom we may vote… we are well down the road to serfdom.
They misunderstand (wilfully?) equality of opportunity (social equality) and take it to mean everyone has the same opportunity, whereas it means equal access - that is, nobody is prevented from undertaking economic activity based on social status such as race, sex, class. In other words, nobody can be stopped from entering the race if they wish, but that’s no guarantee they can run as well as others, or will win or even finish it. It is best seen in the light of the Guilds of pre-Industrial Revolution. A person couldn’t, for example, start making and selling furniture, they had to be a member of the appropriate Guild. Membership was strictly controlled to keep competition down and prices up. Guilds operated under Royal Warrants - sold by the King and a good source of income - and so trying to work outside a Guild would be prevented by the authorities. Guilds lost their power in the UK which helped the Industrial Revolution. Ironically - the Trades Unions are the biggest obstacles to social equality. The powerful ones can operate a de facto closed shop, and of course bribe politicians with campaign financing, to keep non-union members out of jobs, to keep wages (and costs to consumers) up. There is a rise in the US of permits for all sorts of economic activity, like florists, beauticians, realtors. This stops equal opportunity and of course expands scope and scale of bureaucracies and provides and income for government bodies.
And paradoxically, the Left who are big on equality of outcome, have no time for equality before the law. The law for the Left is to be applied with inequality to give favoured group A an advantage over out-of-favour group B, in order to achieve equality.
The whole point of leftism seems to be to create a class of credentialed "experts" and give them the powers nobility used to have, without any qualification or test except tests of group loyalty. The nonsense beliefs of intersectionality are one such test, just as those of communism were during China's Cultural Revolution.
OK call it something else. Progressive taxation/redistribution is a restriction of the liberty of the person whose net income is reduced.
"True Liberals know the only equality it is possible to ensure is equality (and equity) before the Law under the Rule of Law. Liberals (true) understand that social and economic equality is not possible without force and thus contrary to the principle of Liberty"
True Liberals are a diminishing fraction of the Church of Liberalism. In today's world they are the heretics.
Just as nowadays Conservatism is best describes as Socialist-lite.
The challenge of Liberty and Equality is really just one example of the broader tension between Liberty and Virtue. Equality just happens to be the one virtue that remains for many progressives.
Liberty and Virtue are both necessary for a stable pluralist society, and there is an inherent tension between the two. Ideally, and maybe this was the case earlier in US history, Liberty and Virtue serve as checks on the other to maintain a balance. For example, Liberty ensures that laws are not passed that violate the beliefs of minority groups. And Virtue checks Liberty to ensure decency, safety, and institutions that lead to a healthy and prosperous society.
Today, except perhaps in the modern sense of equality, Virtue has been cast to the side and Liberty has taken on distorted proportions. You might also say equality as the sole remaining virtue has itself taken on distorted proportions. Now we have two monsters, twisted forms of their original nature, battling for supremacy.
Note that I’m in agreement with Arnold’s main point. Liberty used to be the means for achieving equality. The fact that the two are being pitted against each other indicates that the nature of the concept of Liberty and/or Equality has changed.
In a world were 90%+ of people don't have liberty, increasing liberty tends to be beneficial on the margin. Especially amongst a group high in virtue (which I think we can agree European society had in the time liberty exploded).
The old world was also a world in which measuring merit was hard (no standardized testing) and returns to merit weren't strong (malthusian environments mean dominance and not productivity are what matter long run). It's notable that only after the Industrial Revolution gets going do we see a push towards more inclusion and meritocracy (baby steps in Europe before that, but only really when we break Malthus does it take off).
Like all things it has diminishing returns. By the time you are talking about trans rights you are talking about 0.X% of the population and not exactly a group super high in Virtue.
Liberating the serfs follows "the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few". Imposing trans stuff on the rest of the population is "the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many."
It really really really surprises me that you don't openly call out Torenberg's nonsense. Liberalism has never, and can never, value equality of outcome. There is no tension, other than balancing everyone's equal liberty.
I would argue, quite seriously, that giving women the vote did indeed create a tension between liberty and equality -- because politically, the century that began in 1920 has been a century of nanny-statism, and women voters have had everything to do with that fact, from Prohibition onward. The suffragettes and temperance movement were mostly the same people. Indeed, the only reason the 18th Amendment preceded the 19th was that several large states, including New York, had already given women the vote before the 19th was enacted.
I do not believe the trade-off was worth it in this case. YMMV.
Maybe I have been too immersed in Razib and Robin Hanson, but it would seem that sometimes Liberty and Equality seem to go together and sometimes they are in too much tension. That there is an epicyclical movement between the two and there is a story to be told with regard to the construal level and status with regard to when they become closer and when they are moving apart.
I have trouble with the portrait of the past and the characterization of the present that underlies the predictions. As I see it, the past linked status with responsibility under a system of peer accountability mixed with upward accountability. Revolutions openly aimed at some 'downward accountability' to balance the upward accountability, which had led to abuses. However, revolutions in due course turned to instead 'flattening' the status structure permanently [or equality] rather than simply purging the elites of bad actors. Later accounts suggest the revolutions were mostly aimed at status inversion by subsections of the elites that were discontented with their own strata within the elites. Unfortunately, these flattening revolutions tended to also break the systems of responsibility (liberty) which the status systems had supported. The idea had been to loose the bonds of the oppressed, so to speak, but as new elites, those former oppressed should have shouldered the load of the community. Instead, the new elites were unoccupied by caring for dependent subordinates, and were only busy evading responsibilities as if they were somehow oppressive.
In short, the idea of having people who pay taxes also have the right to vote has nothing to do with oppression or inequality. Votes could even be proportional to taxation, and it satisfies the battle cry of the American Revolution. It creates a peer group of the financial contributors to the community, with rights and responsibilities to match. Having only rights and no responsibilities...
An irony is that there's arguably an untapped slice of the liberty/equality-promoting venn diagram, that could in principle (but doesn't in fact) get consensus across the red/blue divide: zoning reform, occupational licensing reform, school choice/charters, progressive consumption taxation.
Left liberals get it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/opinion/science-evidence-merits.html
Post-liberal progressives don't:
https://www.newsweek.com/removing-mcat-could-improve-diversity-medicine-opinion-1775471
If you believe that people all have equal ability, the persistence of unequal outcomes begs the question. You might as well believe an invisible miasma of racism and bias is going it have eliminated basically every other explanation. Like when you eliminate 3/4 answers on a multiple choice test so you decide the final answer must be correct even though you can't actually solve for it (the idea that the test is bogus is crime think).
You have to bite the bullet on human inequality, and then further bullets on what that implies. Way too much of both the ideology of the left and its flat out self interest (whose going to pay to "educate" low IQs if its pointless) is tied up in this denial.
There are tradeoffs, but I don't think they are what mainly stand in the way of polices to promote growth and prosperity: taxes on CO2 emissions, congestion taxes for streets and roads, skilled based immigration, lower fiscal deficits, less restrictive land use policies. And redistributionist measures like higher EITC or CTC have low growth inhibiting effects.
It is unfortunate that _equality before the law_ gets shortened to _equality_. We want the former. We can even approach it, such that we can inhibit the powerful from legally oppressing the weak.
A similar thing was at work with economic regulation. Only very late in the day did it occur to anyone that the state would regulate _in favor of_ a poorer or less powerful group. But today we actually have to look at things case by case.
Once you regulate in favor of the less powerful group, that group is no longer less powerful. A fact that seems lost on all lefties.
Really? On any policy dimension and in any amount?
Early Gen X-ers at least had real civics classes that included some foundational philosophical concepts. I don't remember if it was jr. high or high school, but I remember talking about utopias and equality of opportunities vs. outcomes.
That's all been thrown out the window and even some of the silent generation conveniently forget what they've learned. It really grates the nerves when Biden talks about "3 co-equal branches of government".
Throughout my lifetime, probably much longer, liberty and equality have been increasing and decreasing in various ways, both via government and the actions of other groups and individuals. The extent to which these changes are net positive or negative is not only highly subjective but also based on individual experience. To me, it seems obvious the changes are a net positive for the vast majority even if the trend is bad in some ways and for some groups or individuals. Whatever one's opinion it is important to remember we can't be certain whether liberty or equality is increasing or decreasing except maybe in rather extreme circumstances. I don't think it can be argued we've had an extreme drop in liberty or equality in the US in a very long time, if ever.
It's worth noting that when people are surveyed about various harms in the world they often have a rather negative view because they believe others have been harmed more than themselves. This suggests a rather profound misperception of the world in which we live.
Kling wrote:
"To effectively reduce inequality in income and education, we cannot simply add to liberty of people at the bottom. We would have to take away liberty from people at the top."
Which is exactly what we are in the process of doing, with one caveat- those in the government exempt themselves.
Maybe those in government try to exempt themselves and have some success at that but I'd argue what they exempt themselves from is a rather small part of the whole.
I think "at the top" is more interesting. I'd argue very little liberty gets taken from those at the top. For example, most kids eligible for gifted programs have lots of opportunities in the absence of those programs. I'd say the ones most likely to lose liberty are closer to average and not necessarily always someone we'd even think of as above average.
Nearly every state gifted program is composed almost entirely of fresh off the boat Asian immigrants or others that fit their profile (for whatever historical reason their parents income/wealth was lower then their IQ would normally merit). My own magnet high school fit this profile, high IQ kids with middle or lower middle class parents (mostly immigrants) that are upwardly mobile.
Rich kids don't go to magnet high schools, they go to prep schools.
"Lots of opportunities" masks a lot. My magnet high school afforded many opportunities I didn't have at my local high school. And when I went to college my SAT score netted me a full scholarship. Today its not clear I would have had either of those things.
"I think "at the top" is more interesting. I'd argue very little liberty gets taken from those at the top."
I would argue that Kling and you are definining "at the top" differently in these comments. Very little gets take away from people at the top of the income scale since they can afford to send their childrent to top private schools. I think Kling is talking more about people at the top of the intellectual talent scale. There, taking away opportunities hurts if they are stuck in the public school system because their parents are middle income or lower.
My comment here was about "at the top" of the intellectual scale, not income scale, though there is quite a bit of overlap. First, this all depends on whether you are referring to something like the top 10% who typically go on to very successful careers even if they don't attend Ivy League type schools, the top 1%, or the top 0.1% who are most likely to get little or nothing from an "average" classroom.
I'm not suggesting there aren't a few kids who lose out by their school dropping gifted classes but I'd bet most at the top of the intellectual scale have involved parents and lots opportunities outside of school. Second, I'd bet that they are more likely than not to be in a private school or a rather high performing public school.
Not that this anecdote proves anything but my daughter was in gifted or advanced classes throughout K-12. My son was not. In hindsight I think that was the best option for each. But how did it affect their opportunities? I'd say not at all. He was a slower developer but eventually caught up. They are now both successful engineers with graduate degrees. It doesn't seem gifted classes would have worked for him and I doubt my daughter would have suffered much in a regular classroom.