Equality of Opportunity - a Literature Review

John E. Roemer and Alain Trannoy have posted a new paper at SSRN:

"Equality of Opportunity" (112 pages)

Abstract
"This forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Income Distribution (eds., A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon) summarizes the literature on equality of opportunity. We begin by reviewing the philosophical debate concerning equality since Rawls (sections 1 and 2), present economic algorithms for computing policies which equalize opportunities, or, more generally, ways of ordering social policies with respect to their efficacy in opportunity equalization (sections 3, 4 and 5), apply the approach to the conceptualization of economic development (section 6), discuss dynamic issues (section 7), give a preamble to a discussion of empirical work (section 8), provide evidence of population views from surveys and experiments concerning conceptions of equality (section 9), and a discuss measurement issues, summarizing the empirical literature on inequality of opportunity to date (section 10). We conclude with mention of some critiques of the equal-opportunity approach, and some predictions (section 11)."

John E. Roemer is Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. He is the author of "Theories of Distributive Justice" (Harvard University Press, 1996) and "Equality of Opportunity" (Harvard University Press, 1998).

Alain Trannoy is Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.