Igualdade de Oportunidades vs. Igualdade de Resultados

Social mobility: an uphill battle, por Chris Dillow:

Could it be that efforts to improve social mobility just don’t justify themselves in cost-benefit terms?

The fact is that if a government wants to increase equality of opportunity - to weaken the influence of family background upon people’s life chances - it must fight against one of nature’s most powerful impulses, parents’ desire to do the best for their children. Because rich parents are better able than poor ones to do this, the battle to improve social mobility is a viciously uphill one.

Just consider the policies, some of which are sketched in the Cabinet Office report, necessary to improve equality of opportunity (...).

Many of these policies are just infeasible or enormously expensive.

And what would be the benefit of them - to give a handful of ambitious poor kids (I write as one who was once one of these) the chance to scramble up the greasy pole?

Here’s my question. Wouldn’t it be better, in cost-benefit terms - for egalitarians to focus more upon reducing inequalities of outcome?

More progressive taxation, allied to an attempt to dismantle organizational hierarchies, might be far easier ways of achieving equality than costly and vain efforts to improve social mobility.

The idea that greater equality of opportunity is somehow more feasible or more desireable than greater equality of outcome is, surely, a huge error.