Equal opportunity is about providing everybody with the same starting point and the same chance to succeed.
It focuses on eliminating barriers that might prevent certain groups from having the same opportunities as others, such as discrimination based on race, gender, or socioeconomic status.
The idea is that everybody should have an equal shot at success, but it does not guarantee that everybody will reach the same level of achievement. People’s outcomes will vary based on their individual abilities, efforts, and choices. In other words, capitalism.
In contrast, equal outcome aims to ensure that everyone ends up in the same place, regardless of their starting point or individual efforts.
This often involves redistributing resources or implementing policies to ‘level the playing field’, so that everybody achieves the same result. While this approach might appear more fair to some, it discourages individual effort and innovation, as success is not necessarily tied to one’s abilities or hard work. In other words, communism.
