If you haven’t yet read Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, Harrison Bergeron, you’re missing out. It’s a smart, humorous way to push our thinking on the limits of equality. It’s available for free in several places online. Here’s one. Published in 1961, it begins like this:
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
In Vonnegut’s imagined society, people who are “too” [smart, attractive, graceful] are required to limit their natural abilities. That could mean wearing [a contraption that interrupts their thoughts with disruptive noises, a hideous mask to hide physical beauty, or weights around one’s neck to make graceful movement difficult].
Vonnegut’s story centers around Harrison, a teenager who attempts to rebel against these restrictions, and his parents. Early in the story, we learn:
Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she [an announcer] said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."
As absurd as the premise may be, the story of Harrison Bergeron is a great way into the topic of inequality more generally. After all, if there’s a widespread sense that his world doesn’t sound like one we want to create or live in, then how much inequality is or should be tolerable?
Thoughtful discussions about inequality require us to be clear about what we mean. For instance, we tend to think about inequality in the distribution of resources—wealth, income, jobs, for instance—differently than we think about inequality in access to those resources. In general, policies that try to advance the former are more contentious than those that attempt to advance the latter. [Note: One way to understand the dystopian world of Harrison Bergeron is as a place where innate ability is considered a type of resource that needs to be equalized.]
Equality in the distribution of resources tends to be more contentious politically in part because it often focuses on the outcome rather than on the process. For instance, if I run the HR department at a company, I might decide that the way to know that we’re not discriminating on the basis of sex is if half the employees are women and half are men—at every level.
This, of course, is rooted in the assumption that, absent any discrimination, representation would be the same across the two groups. Which makes sense if I believe that men and women are essentially interchangeable in any preferences, abilities, and behaviors that pertain to the job at hand. Is that assumption reasonable? Maybe. At a minimum, it helps explain why using the observable distribution of resources as a metric of success is controversial.
When it comes to equal access to resources, however, support from across the political spectrum is more common. And, yet, have we ever stopped to test its limitations? Have we asked the question of what the world might look like if we truly decided that equal access to opportunity was our highest value?
The seed for the following thought experiment came my way via a student in one of my classes in Fall 2023.
Imagine a world where, at the age of three, children are taken from their parents. They are well-sheltered, cared for, and educated by publicly-provided facilities. Each child receives the same quality instruction and none has access to special tutors, additional help, or extra curricular activities that the others don’t.
Parents are free to visit regularly, but they are not allowed to bring their children anything from the outside world. In this manner, all children have the same opportunity to succeed.
Because this is just a thought experiment, we can set aside the many reasons we’d never want to do such a thing. [Including, there are in utero differences that matter, anything before the age of three could vary, it would have a devastating emotional impact on the children and the parents, etc...] We can simply give ourselves the freedom to ask: If we created such a system, what consequences might there be?
In such a world, inequality would still undoubtedly emerge. Some children would grow up and be more successful than others. And when that happened, to what would we attribute any failure? In a hypothetical world of completely equal access to opportunity, I suppose there would be nothing left to blame failure on other than deficiencies in the person him or herself. And because there’d be nothing left to attribute success to either, we’d eliminate the idea of privilege as an explanatory factor.
So, here’s the question: Does having some inequality in access to opportunity serve the important purpose of letting us save face? If we could wave a magic wand and instantly create equal access to opportunity, how would we then think about success and failure? Would you wave that wand?
I think it's a Michael Lind (or Michael Sandel?) book where he has the following complaint about a meritocratic society:
In an aristocracy, the day laborer could at the lord and think "But for the accident of birth, there go I". And the lord could think the same thing. The laborer could maintain some essential human dignity even if his economic worth was low. And the lord had some nagging doubt about his worth that forced him to have a bit of humility. In a meritocracy, that's lost. If you're on the economic bottom, that's on you. And if you're successful, pat yourself on the back.
This is a real problem. All people and all work has dignity, but that's hard to focus on when CEO-to-worker wage ratios are so high.
I've been reading "Democracy In America", and Tocqueville talks about how everyone is obsessed with getting rich, that America is the "land of opportunity" (obviously ignoring slavery). But at the same time, he says that the gregarious nature of American society forces everyone to recognize that they do exist in a society, where people associate (across cultural and class boundaries) to accomplish social goals, so no one can completely think that their success was solely the result of their own efforts.