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=                        Equality_of_outcome                         =
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                            Introduction
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Equality of outcome, equality of condition, or equality of results is
a political concept which is central to some political ideologies and
is used in some political discourse, often in contrast to the term
equality of opportunity. It describes a state in which all people have
approximately the same material wealth and income, or in which the
general economic conditions of everyone's lives are alike.

Achieving equal results generally entails reducing or eliminating
material inequalities between individuals or households in society and
usually involves a transfer of income or wealth from wealthier to
poorer individuals, or adopting other measures to promote equality of
condition.

One account in 'The Journal of Political Philosophy' suggested that
the term meant "equalising where people end up rather than where or
how they begin", but described this sense of the term as "simplistic"
since it failed to identify what was supposed to be made equal.


Political philosophy
======================
According to professor of politics Ed Rooksby, the concept of equality
of outcome is an important one in disputes between different political
positions, since equality has overall been seen as positive and an
important concept that is "deeply embedded in the fabric of modern
politics". Conflict between so-called haves and have-nots has happened
throughout human civilization and was a focus of philosophers such as
Aristotle in his treatise 'Politics'. In political philosophy, there
are differing views on whether equal outcomes are beneficial or not.
One view is that there is a moral basis for equality of outcome, but
that the means of achieving such an outcome can be malevolent.

Writing in the journal 'Foreign Affairs', analyst George Packer argued
that "inequality undermines democracy" in the United States partially
because it "hardens society into a class system, imprisoning people in
the circumstances of their birth". Packer elaborated that inequality
"corrodes trust among fellow citizens" and compared it to an "odorless
gas which pervades every corner" of the nation.

In his 1987 book 'The Passion for Equality', analyst Kenneth Cauthen
suggested that there were moral underpinnings for having equal
outcomes because there is a common good--which people both contribute
to and receive benefits from--and therefore should be enjoyed in
common. Cauthen argued that this was a fundamental basis for both
equality of opportunity as well as equality of outcome.

One view is that mechanisms to achieve equal outcomes--to take a
society and with unequal socioeconomic levels and force it to equal
outcomes--are fraught with moral as well as practical problems since
they often involve political coercion to compel the transfer.

According to one report in Britain, outcomes matter because unequal
outcomes in terms of personal wealth had a strong impact on average
life expectancy, such that wealthier people tended to live seven years
longer than poorer people and that egalitarian nations tended to have
fewer problems with societal issues such as mental illness, violence,
teenage pregnancy and other social problems. Authors of the book 'The
Spirit Level' contended that "more equal societies almost always do
better" on other measures and as a result striving for equal outcomes
can have overall beneficial effects for everybody.

In his 'A Theory of Justice' (1971), philosopher John Rawls developed
a "second principle of justice" that economic and social inequalities
can only be justified if they benefit the most disadvantaged members
of society. Rawls further claims that all economically and socially
privileged positions must be open to all people equally. Rawls argues
that the inequality between a doctor's salary and a grocery clerk's is
only acceptable if this is the only way to encourage the training of
sufficient numbers of doctors, preventing an unacceptable decline in
the availability of medical care (which would therefore disadvantage
everyone).


Writing in 'The New York Times', economist Paul Krugman agreed with
Rawls' position in which both equality of opportunity and equality of
outcome were linked and suggested that "we should try to create the
society each of us would want if we didn't know in advance who we'd
be". Krugman favored a society in which hard-working and talented
people can get rewarded for their efforts, but in which there was a
"social safety net" created by taxes to help the less fortunate. Many
have suggested that a society promoting equality of opportunity will
resultantly see a higher degree of equality in the outcome and that
equalizing a person's socioeconomic starting conditions will result in
a meritocratic distribution of economic influence. Such is the basis
for left-leaning market-based ideologies such as distributism,
ordoliberalism, the Social market economy, and some forms of social
democracy.

In 'The Guardian', commentator Julian Glover writes that equality
challenges both left-leaning and right-leaning positions and suggests
that the task of left-leaning advocates is to "understand the
impossibility and undesirability of equality" while the task for
right-leaning advocates was to "realise that a divided and
hierarchical society cannot--in the best sense of that word--be fair".

Conservatives and classical liberals criticize attempts to try to
fight poverty by redistributive methods as ineffective, arguing that
more serious cultural and behavioral problems lock poor people into
poverty. Sometimes right-leaning positions have been criticized by
left-leaning positions for oversimplifying what is meant by the term
equality of outcome and for construing outcomes strictly to mean
precisely equal amounts for everybody. In 'The Guardian', commentator
Ed Rooksby criticized the right's tendency to oversimplify and
suggested that serious left-leaning advocates would not construe
equality to mean "absolute equality of everything". Rooksby wrote that
Marx favored the position described in the phrase "from each according
to his ability, to each according to his need" and argued that this
did not imply strict equality of things, but that it meant that people
required "different things in different proportions in order to
flourish".

American libertarians and advocates of economic liberalism such as
Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman tend to see equality of outcome
negatively and argue that any effort to cause equal outcomes would
necessarily and unfortunately involve coercion by government. Friedman
wrote that striving for equality of outcome leaves most people
"without equality and without opportunity".

One left-leaning position is that it is simplistic to define equality
in strict outcomes since questions such as what is being equalized as
well as huge differences in preferences and tastes and needs is
considerable, therefore they ask: exactly what is being equalized?
Author Mark Penn wrote that "the fundamental principle of centrism in
the 1990s was that people would neither be left to fend for themselves
nor guaranteed equality of outcome--they would be given the tools they
needed to achieve the American dream if they worked hard". On the
topic of fairness, Glover writes that fairness "compels no action",
comparing it to an "atmospheric ideal, an invisible gas, a miasma" and
using an expression by Winston Churchill, a "happy thought".

Bernard Shaw was one of the few socialist theorists to advocate
complete economic equality of outcome right at the beginning of World
War One. The vast majority of socialists view an ideal economy as one
where remuneration is at least somewhat proportional to the degree of
effort and personal sacrifice expended by individuals in the
productive process. This latter concept was expressed by Karl Marx's
famous maxim: "To each according to his contribution".


Substantive equality
======================
The substantive equality embraced by Court of Justice of the European
Union focuses on equality of outcomes for group characteristics and
group outcomes.


Conflation with Marxism, socialism and communism
==================================================
The German economist and philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator
Friedrich Engels are sometimes mistakenly characterized as
egalitarians, and the economic systems of socialism and communism are
sometimes misconstrued as being based on equality of outcome. In
reality, both Marx and Engels regarded the concept of equality as a
political concept and value, suited to promoting bourgeois interests,
focusing their analysis on more concrete issues such as the laws of
motion of capitalism and exploitation based on economic and
materialist logic. Marx renounced theorizing on moral concepts and
refrained from advocating principles of justice. Marx's views on
equality were informed by his analysis of the development of the
productive forces in society.

Socialism is based on a principle of distribution whereby individuals
receive compensation proportional to the amount of energy and labor
they contribute to production ("To each according to his
contribution"), which by definition precludes equal outcomes in income
distribution. In Marxist theory, communism is based on a principle
whereby access to goods and services is based on free and open access
(often referred to as distribution based on one's needs); Marx
stressed free access to the articles of consumption. Hence the
"equality" in a communist society is not about total equality or
equality of outcome, but about equal and free access to the articles
of consumption. Marx argued that free access to consumption would
enable individuals to overcome alienation. In 'Critique of the Gotha
Programme', Marx also took into account how some were more capable
than others (such as in height, marital status, skills, etc.),
furthering his point against absolute equality.

As opposed to Marxists, George Bernard Shaw, a Fabian socialist, would
have socialists place more emphasis on equal distribution rather than
production. He developed his ideas on economic equality (and its
implications for social, democratic, legal, military, and gender
concerns) in lectures and articles in the ten years following the
writing of his 1905 play on poverty and power, 'Major Barbara', at the
same time as his Fabian colleague Beatrice Webb as the primary author
of the 1909 Minority Report on the Poor Law, along with her husband
Sidney Webb, was proposing to abolish poverty in industrial societies
by introducing what we now call the welfare state. In the 1907 preface
to 'Major Barbara', Shaw was probably the first to argue for what he
called "Universal Pensions for Life", now known as universal incomes.
Following major lectures on equality in 1910 and 1913, he gave his
fullest exposition of economic equality in a series of six highly
publicized Fabian public lectures at the end of 1914, "On
Redistribution of Income"--a phrase, as he put it at the time, that he
wanted to get into circulation. Although largely unacknowledged, most
of the terms of the equality debate since (such as for example, John
Rawls and many recent writers on inequality) are as outlined in some
detail in Shaw's 1914 series of lectures, where he argued for a
gradual incremental process towards equal incomes, mostly by
levelling-up from the bottom through union activity and labor laws,
minimum and basic incomes as well as by using such mechanisms as
income and wealth (inheritance) taxes to prevent incomes rising at the
top. In the end, the goal would have been achieved not at absolute
equality, but when any remaining income differences would not yield
any significant social difference. Like the later Fabian, W. H.
Tawney, who further developed the equality debate, Shaw considered
equality of opportunity as obsolete without economic equality. Shaw
later expanded his pre-World War One work on equality into his 1928
political treatise, 'The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and
Capitalism'.


                          Related concepts
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Equality of outcome is often compared to related concepts of equality,
particularly with equality of opportunity. Generally, most senses of
the concept of equality are controversial and are seen differently by
people having different political perspectives, but of all of the
terms relating to equality, equality of outcome is the most
controversial and contentious.

Equality of opportunity generally describes fair competition for
important jobs and positions such that contenders have equal chances
to win such positions, and applicants are not judged or hampered by
unfair or arbitrary discrimination. It entails the "elimination of
arbitrary discrimination in the process of selection". The term is
usually applied in workplace situations, but has been applied in other
areas as well such as housing, lending, and voting rights. The essence
is that job seekers have "an equal chance to compete within the
framework of goals and the structure of rules established", according
to one view. It is generally seen as a procedural value of fair
treatment by the rules.

Equality of autonomy is a relatively new concept, a sort of hybrid
notion that has been developed by philosopher Amartya Sen and can be
thought of as "the ability and means to choose our life course should
be spread as equally as possible across society". It is an equal shot
at empowerment or a chance to develop up to his or her potential
rather than equal goods or equal chances. In a teaching guide,
equality of autonomy was explained as "equality in the degree of
empowerment people have to make decisions affecting their lives, how
much choice and control they have given their circumstances". Sen's
approach requires "active intervention of institutions like the state
into people's lives" but with an aim towards "fostering of people's
self-creation rather than their living conditions". Sen argued that
"the ability to convert incomes into opportunities is affected by a
multiplicity of individual and social differences that mean some
people will need more than others to achieve the same range of
capabilities".

Equality of process is related to the general notion of fair treatment
and can be thought of as "dealing with inequalities in treatment
through discrimination by other individuals and groups, or by
institutions and systems, including not being treated with dignity and
respect", according to one definition.

Equality of perception is an uncommonly used term meaning that "person
should be perceived as being of equal worth".


Outcome versus opportunity
============================
Equality of outcome and equality of opportunity have been contrasted
to a great extent. When evaluated in a simple context, the more
preferred term in contemporary political discourse is equality of
opportunity (or, meaning the same thing, the common variant "equal
opportunities"), which the public as well as individual commentators
see as the nicer or more "well-mannered" of the two terms. A
mainstream political view is that the comparison of the two terms is
valid, but that they are somewhat mutually exclusive in the sense that
striving for either type of equality would require sacrificing the
other to an extent and that achieving equality of opportunity
necessarily brings about "certain inequalities of outcome". For
example, striving for equal outcomes might require discriminating
between groups to achieve these outcomes; or striving for equal
opportunities in some types of treatment might lead to unequal
results. Equality seeking policies may also have a redistributive
focus.

However, the two concepts are not always cleanly contrasted since the
notion of equality is complex. Some analysts see the two concepts not
as polar opposites but as highly related such that they can not be
understood without considering the other term.

In a lamp assembly factory, for example, equality of outcome might
mean that workers are all paid equally regardless of how many lamps of
acceptable quality they make, which also implies that the workers
cannot be fired for producing too few lamps of acceptable quality.
This can be contrasted with a payment system such as piece work, which
requires that every worker is paid a fixed amount of money per lamp of
acceptable quality that the worker makes.

In contemporary political discourse, the two concepts of equality of
outcome have sometimes been criticized as the "politics of envy" and
are often seen as more "controversial" than equality of opportunity.
One wrote that "equality of opportunity is then set up as the
mild-mannered alternative to the craziness of outcome equality". One
theorist suggested that an over-emphasis on either type of equality
can "come into conflict with individual freedom and merit".

Critics of equality of opportunity note that while it is relatively
easier to deal with unfairness for people with different races or
genders, it is much harder to deal with the social class since "one
can never entirely extract people from their ancestry and upbringing".
As a result, critics contend that efforts to bring fairness by equal
opportunity are stymied by the difficulty of people having differing
starting points at the beginning of the socio-economic competition. A
person born into an upper-middle-class family will have greater
advantages by the mere fact of birth than a person born into poverty.

One newspaper account criticized the discussion by politicians on the
subject of equality as "weasely" and thought that the term was
politically correct and vague. Furthermore, when comparing equality of
opportunity with equality of outcome, the sense was that the latter
type was "worse" for society. Equality of outcome may be incorporated
into a philosophy that ultimately seeks equality of opportunity.
Moving towards a higher equality of outcome (albeit not perfectly
equal) can lead to an environment more adept at providing equality of
opportunity by eliminating conditions that restrict the possibility
for members of society to fulfill their potential. For example, a
child born in a poor, dangerous neighborhood with poor schools and
little access to healthcare may be significantly disadvantaged in his
attempts to maximize use of talents, no matter how fine his work
ethic. Thus even proponents of meritocracy may promote some level of
equality of outcome to create a society capable of truly providing
equality of opportunity.

While outcomes can usually be measured with a great degree of
precision, it is much more difficult to measure the intangible nature
of opportunities. That is one reason why many proponents of equal
opportunity use measures of equality of outcome to judge success.
Analyst Anne Phillips argued that the proper way to assess the
effectiveness of the hard-to-measure concept of equality of
opportunity is by the extent of the equality of outcome. Nevertheless,
she described a single criterion of equality of outcome as
problematic--the measure of "preference satisfaction" was
"ideologically loaded" while other measures such as income or wealth
were inadequate and she advocated an approach which combined data
about resources, occupations and roles.

To the extent that inequalities can be passed from one generation to
another through tangible gifts and wealth inheritance, some claim that
equality of opportunity for children cannot be achieved without
equality of outcome for parents. Moreover, access to social
institutions is affected by equality of outcome and it is further
claimed that rigging equality of outcome can be a way to prevent
co-option of non-economic institutions important to social control and
policy formation, such as the legal system, media or the electoral
process, by powerful individuals or coalitions of wealthy people.

Purportedly, greater equality of outcome is likely to reduce relative
poverty, leading to a more cohesive society. However, if taken to an
extreme it may lead to greater absolute poverty, if it negatively
affects a country's GDP by damaging workers' sense of work ethic by
destroying incentives to work harder. Critics of equality of outcome
believe that it is more important to raise the standard of living of
the poorest in absolute terms. Some critics additionally disagree with
the concept of equality of outcome on philosophical grounds. Still
others note that poor people of low social status often have a drive,
hunger and ambition which ultimately lets them achieve better economic
and social outcomes than their initially more advantaged rivals.

A related argument that is often encountered in education, especially
in the debates on the grammar school in the United Kingdom and in the
debates on gifted education in various countries, says that people by
nature have differing levels of ability and initiative which result in
some achieving better outcomes than others and it is, therefore,
impossible to ensure equality of outcome without imposing inequality
of opportunity.


                              See also
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*Affirmative action
*Anarcho-communism
*Classless society
*Distributive justice
*Egalitarianism
*Equality before the law
*Equity of condition
*Income inequality metrics
*Inequity aversion
*Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard
*Relative deprivation
*Substantive equality
*Substantive rights


                           External links
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* [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equality/ Equality, from the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy] (2007)


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