American Preferences for Equalizing Opportunities Versus Redistributing Outcomes

The American Dream is built on the idea that hard work and determination can enable anyone to succeed. These ideals underpin government policies that strive to equalize opportunity, such as affirmative action or equal employment opportunity laws. Yet there has been little experimental research into whether, and under what conditions, Americans prefer to equalize opportunities; instead, much of it examines preferences for redistributing economic outcomes. Economists Matthew Chao and Jonathan Chapman will develop a new, incentivized, experimental measure of preferences for equalizing opportunities. They will use this metric to examine preferences for equalizing opportunity in a large, nationally representative sample and measure the extent to which Americans are more supportive of equalizing opportunity than economic outcomes. They will also test whether Americans are more likely to leave unequal opportunities unchanged when those opportunities are assigned based on merit, such as by rewarding better opportunities to those who perform better on a test. Finally, they will examine whether merit-based opportunities remain unlikely to be equalized even when the one earning the better opportunity through merit had an advantage, such as access to a study guide.