Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

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>> I would like to live in a world where every child has an equal opportunity to make their own way in life.

Your wording is very specific, so I'm quoting it here. I see some of the replies missed the subtlety though, so I'd like to emphasise that.

You are specifically pointing out the opportunity to "make their own way". You are not implying that every child has the same opportunities.

Every child is born different. To different parents. In different communities. In different countries. Those differences are material, and will shape both opportunities and abilities.

Genetics means I'll never be a pro athlete. I play sports but no one has (or ever will) give me spotting 'opportunities'. My sporty friend can't draw, and no one us offering her the opportunity of a gallery show.

This is probably a good thing as I have no desire to he an athlete and she has no desire to be an artist.

That does not negate the opportunity we both have to live in a country, and time, when we can both pursue the life we (realistically) want. 100 years ago, her, not so much.

Life is not fair. I was blessed with a good education, a brain to get value from it, and some luck to turn it into a living. In turn we give opportunities to others.

Of course all children everywhere do not have the right to choose their own path. Indeed that's a -very- recent development, and is still not universal. External factors still collide all too often.

No child wants to be born into poverty, or famine, or war. Or be told their sexuality is offensive. Or be economically excluded because they're not white enough, or too white.

Life is not fair. It never will be. And I can't fix most of that. I'm ahead of fair, only because of accidents in genetics, heritage and timing. All I can strive to do is create opportunities for others, and try and play fair, overcoming some of the prejudices that got me here.

I am encouraged by the progress of the last 100 years. I hope that progress continues for the next 100.

I mainly agree with what you’re saying - though I do think we should strive, at a societal level, to better raise opportunity for the less fortunately born. And despite much nihilism, we’ve actually been doing that for a long time now (universal education, public access to roads, electricity etc., less gender discrimination - the list is almost endless). We just have further to go.

Genetics means I'll never be a pro athlete. I play sports but no one has (or ever will) give me spotting 'opportunities'. My sporty friend can't draw, and no one us offering her the opportunity of a gallery show.

I do want to pick this out. I’m of the belief that a lot of political arguments are because people simply don’t understand each other. I think this highlights something.

I don’t (and I don’t think this is unusual) mean by ‘equal opportunity’ that everyone should be just e.g. allowed to be a pro athlete or artist simply because they decide to do so. I mean that they should have the same opportunities to do it if their innate talents mean that they could do it.

I don’t think that anyone means, by ‘equal opportunity’, that we should e.g. abolish qualification requirements (or entry requirements) for med schools - just that kids should all be able to become a doctor if they have the talent and do the work. Now, many people have the talent but don’t even have the opportunity to do the work.

Again, we’ve come a long way on this over the past few hundred years. To use the med school example, there are obviously thousands of good doctors nowadays that would never have even been allowed to try to be a doctor in centuries past. On the other side, I pretty much agree that differences in the circumstances of someone’s birth, family etc. probably mean we’ll never achieve equal opportunity fully. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still strive for it though.

> I don’t (and I don’t think this is unusual) mean by ‘equal opportunity’ that everyone should be just e.g. allowed to be a pro athlete or artist simply because they decide to do so. I mean that they should have the same opportunities to do it if their innate talents mean that they could do it.

If so, then the term "equal opportunity" is a lie. One could also claim that our world already provides equal opportunity, as long as your parents are rich enough, and it would be just as accurate.

You're using a different definition of what ‘equal opportunity’ means than the vast majority of people then. If you don’t change what you think it means (or, if you want to be intransigent, at least what you think others mean by it) you’re just going to misunderstand people and probably cause needless conflict.

If you hear someone say ‘every American child should have the opportunity to become a doctor,’ do you really believe they’re likely to mean regardless of capability or study?

> That does not negate the opportunity we both have to live in a country, and time, when we can both pursue the life we (realistically) want.

This is a very narrow and simplistic view of opportunity, both in the present and historical contexts.

I assume that you (a man) and your friend, a sporty woman, live in a country and time (the US?) where she enjoys some of the wins of early feminist movements in the US, namely the right to vote, to have a bank account without her husband's permission, etc etc. Life is in perfect harmony and institutional bias has been solved, hooray!

It's possibly true that women in the US have it better now than they have at any other time in history. However, the opportunities of women are still not equal to that of men. Perhaps your friend has opportunities to pursue passions in women's sports, but what if she wanted to enter the corporate world and work her way up to management, C-level, etc? She will find it more difficult to pursue this opportunity than you would. Even in women's sports she will have a different (and subjectively worse) experience than a man would have in his sporting career: to this day women in sports earn less than men and are often treated not as athletes but as sexual objects that compete for the attention of male viewers -- for example, in 2021 the European Handball Federation imposed a fine on the Norwegian women's team because they wore shorts instead of bikinis during their match, like the men's uniform.

> Of course all children everywhere do not have the right to choose their own path. Indeed that's a -very- recent development, and is still not universal. External factors still collide all too often.

Children not having the right to choose their own path is not a recent development, it is a fact which has long been historically true and in the context of this history draws a throughline to reduced opportunities to this day. To give one oft-cited example, consider generational wealth disparities between white and black Americans. White families have had generations to accumulate relative wealth, comfort, and security, dating back to the founding of the United States, wealth in many cases built from slave labor, in other cases from discriminatory laws such as the Homestead Act and redlining. This wealth gives them access to opportunities, such as economic access to higher education, but also access to better (more expensive) neighborhoods with better schools and so on. Black families in the US have been historically unable to build generational wealth due specifically to this history of racism, and today a black child has significantly reduced opportunities for these reasons among others (institutional racism in other forms is still a big deal in the US). A black family has never been able to choose the same paths as a white family in the United States, now and throughout the history of the country.

> I am encouraged by the progress of the last 100 years. I hope that progress continues for the next 100.

We don't really live in a progressive moment, in the US but also generally. Women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and others, are regressing right now.

I think we are in agreement.

You elaborated on my point about women well. Certainly there are still issues to be solved - I focused on the progress made, but your point on equality stands. However I hold up feminism (small f) as an example of how far we've come in a short time.

This progress gives me hope that we can progress across other spaces as well. LGB rights have become mainstream. TQ have a ways to go. As we add more marginalised communities there will be more fights to win.

Re-reading my example on children- my original post was unclear - I was trying to say that children choosing their own path at all is a very recent change. It's not so long ago that sons did what their fathers did (and daughters were married off.)

I concur that in this moment in history there is a revival of nationalism, barely-disguised racism, and so on. It evokes a time from 1930-1945. Regressions though are inevitable, but don't let that detract us from continuing to push forward.

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