Well, except trying to stop parents from using their resources, time,
and effort to better the lives and increase the opportunities for their children in concrete ways is pretty much the definition of dystopia, and goes against pretty much every ‘good’ evolutionary pressure we can identify (aka K strategy). [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory]
Politics, power, etc. are often avenues for improvement once you get past the basic ‘put food on the table’ situation. Sometimes before that, and are required to put food on the table. They aren’t exclusionary. They are typically more ‘rubber meets the road’ though.
Politics isn’t about making a boss happy after all, it’s about getting a bloc what it thinks it needs (or fooling them into thinking that’s happening, which is usually what it actually looks like on the ground).
If a bloc of people is getting discriminated against, for instance, then one avenue to fix that is to get enough political power to stop it. Which is using political power to get more
opportunity. And no one else is likely to agree on what they think ‘enough’ opportunity looks like.
If there was any enforcement of any ‘you can’t give your
kids a leg up over anyone else’ that would, however, definitely favor the r- side. Which certainly provides a lot of cannon fodder and favors Malthus more.
One could be in favor of an estate tax that removes some of the really outsized distortion possible with fabulous wealth (50% tax per generation?), without removing the invencentive to invest in higher quality, fewer children.
Any sort of block on trying to improve your children’s education though? Yikes. Guys will have zero incentive ever marry or show up (just locks you in to someone pointlessly and makes you tired when hey, the system will pick up the slack), women will have little incentive to do anything but pawn them off to the system (they’d get punished if they tried to do more than that, at some point), etc.
That is not the definition of dystopia at all. But it's also not what I'm proposing: I'm not suggesting we block opportunities, I'm proposing we make sure everybody has access to them, and we put extra effort in ensuring disadvantaged groups get better access to them.
I'm at a complete loss why you think r/K selection has any relevance to issues like freedom, opportunity and politics.
‘an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic’
You could not block the parents who wish from expending outsized effort to improve their children’s life or opportunities without pretty significant authoritarianism.
At large scale, organizations go off coarse metrics. Even the US Department of Labor won their settlement against Google because Google didn’t have the exact percentage of representation based on the course DOL racial selectors.
The easiest and most common way any large organization would comply with such a mandate is not by attempted to educate or lift up the poor, but by crushing any notable examples of people going above the mean anywhere. I can point you to numerous examples of this if you want.
Removing the ability for people who want to make things better to do so, if they were able to do so better than anyone else will result in massive suffering. All in the pursuit of equality.
And it’s fertile ground for growing totalitarian dictatorships because the goal sounds good but is impossible, but no one is able to say why without being the enemy.
You are not reading what I'm writing, and instead projecting your own rather scary ideas onto the discussion. I'm arguing to lift people up, to create more opportunities, and to make those opportunities accessible to more people, instead of less.
The biggest issue with this idea that we can achieve universal access is that we are notoriously bad at predicting the future.
Would you know to ensure every HS student needs access to a computer and programming classes in the 90s?
Would you make sure every student takes a course on blockchains and NFTs today? Does each student need to know ML? Should each kid get Oculus hardware and learn 3d modeling so they can design for the metaverse?
Should we have a class on how to make TikTok videos? If you take the number of newly minted millionaires from the youngest generation, this is probably the one to pick but most people considered social media a scourge and the antithesis of what you should teach in order to provide equality.
I felt back in the 1980s that highschool students should have access to programming classes, and I'm appalled that this is still not universal.
However, that is beside the point: everybody should have access to quality education. There is nothing new or revolutionary about that concept. Education has consistently been proven to have massive benefits for both the recipients and the society they live in. (Except maybe the expensive for-profit education that sends people deep into debt while cutting costs on quality teachers.)
Politics, power, etc. are often avenues for improvement once you get past the basic ‘put food on the table’ situation. Sometimes before that, and are required to put food on the table. They aren’t exclusionary. They are typically more ‘rubber meets the road’ though.
Politics isn’t about making a boss happy after all, it’s about getting a bloc what it thinks it needs (or fooling them into thinking that’s happening, which is usually what it actually looks like on the ground).
If a bloc of people is getting discriminated against, for instance, then one avenue to fix that is to get enough political power to stop it. Which is using political power to get more opportunity. And no one else is likely to agree on what they think ‘enough’ opportunity looks like.
If there was any enforcement of any ‘you can’t give your kids a leg up over anyone else’ that would, however, definitely favor the r- side. Which certainly provides a lot of cannon fodder and favors Malthus more.
One could be in favor of an estate tax that removes some of the really outsized distortion possible with fabulous wealth (50% tax per generation?), without removing the invencentive to invest in higher quality, fewer children.
Any sort of block on trying to improve your children’s education though? Yikes. Guys will have zero incentive ever marry or show up (just locks you in to someone pointlessly and makes you tired when hey, the system will pick up the slack), women will have little incentive to do anything but pawn them off to the system (they’d get punished if they tried to do more than that, at some point), etc.
Talk about some Great Leap Forward type BS.