Equality of outcome

[2] 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.

[4] Conflict between so-called haves and have-nots has happened throughout human civilization[citation needed] and was a focus of philosophers such as Aristotle in his treatise Politics.

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".

[5] Packer elaborated that inequality "corrodes trust among fellow citizens" and compared it to an "odorless gas which pervades every corner" of the nation.

[6] 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.

[8] 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.

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".

[13] 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".

[10] Bernard Shaw was one of the few socialist theorists to advocate complete economic equality of outcome right at the beginning of World War One.

[15][non-primary source needed] 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.

Depending on its angle or agenda, substantive equality and non-discrimination aim to redress existing or historical disadvantages; to address stigma, stereotyping, prejudice or violence; to enhance voice and participation or to accommodate differences and achieve structural societal change.

[16] The German economist and philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick 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.

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.

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.

[29] 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.

[34] 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".

[38] 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.

[38] 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.

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.

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.