This is about as offensive a marker of the direction of policy as I have read. If you care about equal opportunity, you should be trying to draw attention to indicators of inequality of child opportunity so that you can convince more people to act /1 https://nyti.ms/2Q65ZHs 

The idea that drawing attention to indicators of inequality of opportunity is hurtful only makes sense if you think that somehow you can address the inequality of outcomes that will result in some other ways. So what are those possible other ways? /2

Mostly, they must involve de-linking outcomes and the differential income that accrues to those outcomes. Unconditional cash transfers, getting rid of SATs, off-the-charts minimum wages, redistribution through punitive wealth taxation, etc. /3

These solutions are lousy vs reducing inequality of opportunity for two reasons. Most importantly, they accept inequality of opportunity and then try to patch up the inequality of income that results, without any deeper appreciation for the non-income costs of low opportunity /4

"Sorry you were never going to become a lawyer, but here's a higher minimum wage." "Had bigger dreams than two kids and no spouse? Here's a child allowance." /5

And the second problem is that we link income and skills and allocate scarce educational & occupational roles on the basis of them for good reasons. Doing so grows the economy faster and promotes innovation, which raises everyone's incomes. /6

We can debate how well we actually do this (legacy admissions, rents received in spaces where competition is limited), but the theoretical basis hardly seems debatable. We can also debate how to remedy the income inequality that results, how strong incentives need to be, etc. /7

But what we can't debate is whether--if we could achieve greater equality of opportunity--we should allocate positions and income in accordance with the skills people bring to the labor market. /8

The view that identifying child deficits is harmful and should be avoided doesn't help kids except in some dystopian system where we think income & job redistribution solves all of life's problems and that politics will definitely accommodate that redistribution. /9

Most conservatives aren't playing in the equal-child-opportunity space at all (except for those doing important work on charters), while some liberals seem to be trending toward my dystopia rather than hammering home the realities of unequal child opportunity. /10

And I blame the new political correctness for the latter. I hope responsible folks on the left keep pushing back against that. And responsible folks on the right need to keep pushing conservatives to do more about child opportunities if they don't like my dystopia either.