Obviously feudal Korea was not alone in refusing to give people equality of opportunity. European feudal societies operated with similar systems, and in India the caste system still operates, albeit informally. Nor was it only along the caste lines that people were refused equality of opportunity. Until the Second World War, most societies refused to let women be elected to public office; in fact they were refused political citizenship altogether and not even allowed to vote. Until recently, many countries used to restrict people’s access to education and jobs along racial lines. In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the USA prohibited the immigration of ‘undesirable’ races, especially Asians. South Africa, during the apartheid regime, had separate universities for whites and for the rest (the ‘coloureds’ and the blacks), which were very poorly funded.
So it has not been long since the majority of the world emerged from a situation where people were banned from self-advancement due to their race, gender or caste. Equality of opportunity is something to be highly cherished.
Many of the formal rules restricting equality of opportunity have been abolished in the last few generations. This was in large part because of political struggles by the discriminated against – such as the Chartist demand for universal (male) suffrage in Britain in the mid nineteenth century, the Civil Rights movement by blacks in the US in the 1960s, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century and the fight by low caste people in India today. Without these and countless other campaigns by women, oppressed races and lower caste people, we would still be living in a world where restricting people’s rights according to ‘birth lottery’ would be considered natural.
In this struggle against inequality of opportunity, the market has been a great help. When only efficiency ensures survival, free-market economists point out, there is no room for racial or political prejudices to creep into market transactions. Milton Friedman put it succinctly in his Capitalism and Freedom: ‘No one who buys bread knows whether the wheat from which it was made was grown by a Communist or a Republican … by a Negro or a white.’ Therefore, Friedman argued, the market will eventually drive racism out, or at least reduce it significantly, because those racist employers insisting on employing only white people would be driven out by more open-minded ones who hire the best available talents, regardless of race.
This point is powerfully illustrated by the fact that even the notoriously racist apartheid regime in South Africa had to designate the Japanese ‘honorary whites’. There was no way the Japanese executives running the local Toyota and Nissan factories could go and live in townships like Soweto, where non-whites were forced to live under apartheid law. Therefore, the white-supremacist South Africans had to swallow their pride and pretend that the Japanese were whites, if they wanted to drive around in Japanese cars. That is the power of the market.
The power of the market as a ‘leveller’ is more widespread than we think. As the British writer Alan Bennett’s play-turned-movie, History Boys, so poignantly shows, students from disadvantaged groups tend to lack intellectual and social confidence and are thus disadvantaged in getting into elite universities – and by extension, better-paying jobs. Obviously, universities do not have to respond to market pressures as quickly as firms have to. However, if some university consistently discriminated against ethnic minorities or working-class kids and took in only people from the ‘right’ backgrounds despite their inferior quality, potential employers would come to prefer the graduates from non-racist universities. The narrow-minded university, if it is to recruit the best possible students, would have to abandon its prejudices sooner or later.
Given all this, it is tempting to argue that, once you ensure equality of opportunity, free from any formal discrimination other than according to merit, the market will eliminate any residual prejudices through the competitive mechanism. However, this is only the start. A lot more has to be done to build a genuinely fair society.
While there are still too many people with prejudices against certain races, poor people, lower castes and women, today few would openly object to the principle of equality of opportunity. But at this point, opinions divide sharply. Some argue that equality should end with that of opportunity. Others, including myself, believe that it is not enough to have mere formal equality of opportunity.
Free-market economists warn that, if we try to equalize the outcomes of people’s actions and not just their opportunities to take certain actions, that will create huge disincentives against hard work and innovation. Would you work hard if you knew that, whatever you do, you will get paid the same as the next guy who is goofing off? Isn’t that exactly why the Chinese agricultural communes under Mao Zedong were such failures? If you tax the rich disproportionately and use the proceeds to finance the welfare state, won’t the rich lose the incentive to create wealth, while the poor lose the incentive to work, as they are guaranteed a minimum standard of living whether they work hard or not – or whether they work at all? (See Thing 21.) This way, free-market economists argue, everyone becomes worse off by the attempt to reduce inequality of outcome (see Thing 13).
It is absolutely true that excessive attempts to equalize outcomes – say, the Maoist commune, where there was virtually no link between someone’s effort and the reward that she got – will have an adverse impact on people’s work effort. It is also unfair. But I believe that a certain degree of equalization of outcomes is necessary, if we are to build a genuinely fair society.
The point is that, in order to benefit from the equal opportunities provided to them, people require the capabilities to make use of them. It is no use that black South Africans now have the same opportunities as whites to get a highly paid job, if they do not have the education to qualify for those jobs. It is no good that blacks now can enter better (former white-only) universities, if they still have to attend poorly funded schools with underqualified teachers, some of whom can barely read and write themselves.
For most black kids in South Africa, the newly acquired equality of opportunity to enter good universities does not mean that they can attend such universities. Their schools are still poor and poorly run. It is not as if their underqualified teachers have suddenly become smart with the end of apartheid. Their parents are still unemployed (even the official unemployment rate, which vastly underestimates true unemployment in a developing country, is, at 26–28 per cent, one of the highest in the world). For them, the right to enter better universities is pie in the sky. For this reason, post-apartheid South Africa has turned into what some South Africans call a ‘cappuccino society’: a mass of brown at the bottom, a thin layer of white froth above it, and a sprinkling of cocoa at the top.
Now, free-market economists will tell you that those who do not have the education, the determination and the entrepreneurial energy to take advantage of market opportunities have only themselves to blame. Why should people who have worked hard and obtained a university degree against all odds be rewarded in the same way as someone, coming from the same poor background, who goes into a life of petty crime?
This argument is correct. We cannot, and should not, explain someone’s performance only by the environment in which he has grown up. Individuals do have responsibilities for what they have made out of their lives.