Merit in a Society of Unequal Opportunity

Equality of opportunity, a central part of the meritocratic ideal, is rarely attained in reality. In a society of unequal opportunities, meritocrats face a novel tradeoff between compensating for bad luck and rewarding hard work: opportunities are randomly assigned, but people who are assigned superior opportunities are incentivized to exert more effort. Using a worker-spectator framework, we study whether individuals are more willing to accept inequality driven by randomly assigned opportunities than inequality driven by randomly assigned outcomes. Second, we explore when information is incomplete, whether individuals tend to misattribute the impact of unequal opportunities to the innate productivity of workers, and how belief biases further affect inequality acceptance. Third, we compare people's fairness views in the U.S. and Scandinavia to understand whether the meritocratic view, which is the most popular fairness view in both regions, diverges when opportunities are unequal.