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by IQunder130 1837 days ago
>That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society

That might be what we expect from a perfectly egalitarian society, but expecting any free, democratic society to come even close to perfect egalitarianism is completely delusional.

2 comments

That is not egalitarianism (which would mean something closer to everyone owning the exact same amounts), it is the standard definition of "equality of opportunity".
Where do you place the cutoff for opportunity? Are things like innate ability, motivation, interest in lucrative pursuits for their own merits, luck of the draw not also just another kind of opportunity? There is no standard because nobody can agree on a standard. The only thing we can say for certain is that the kind of society you propose will never be attained through free and democratic political processes. Make of that what you will.
There is no standard definition of "equality of opportunity"; and many definitions that are regularly-used focus primarily on an absence of unreasonable discrimination in application processes rather than fairness in the Rawlsian sense.
Besides we could only expect it in a society of clones. Genes matter.