A Review of Joseph Fishkin's Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity

In Bottlenecks (Fishkin, 2014), Joseph Fishkin offers a new way of thinking about equality of opportunity which he calls opportunity pluralism. Rather than aim to equalize opportunities, opportunity pluralism strives to shift society towards a pluralistic model in which individuals are able to pursue a variety of different goods, roles, and paths in the pursuit of diverse competing conceptions of the good life. In such a society, individuals are in the best position to decide for themselves what constitutes a good life, and they are able to pursue paths to human flourishing with minimal bottlenecks constraining their unique life paths. A bottleneck is any "narrow place in the opportunity structure through which one must pass in order to successfully pursue a wide range of valued goals" (Fishkin, 13). Fishkin notes that opportunity pluralism differs from traditional egalitarian conceptions of equal opportunity. Nonetheless, Fishkin argues that opportunity pluralism provides powerful arguments in support of many of the most acclaimed egalitarian changes throughout history. In short, Fishkin presents opportunity pluralism as a new theory of equal opportunity which, although not egalitarian in the orthodox sense, is nonetheless within the mainstream of egalitarian political theory. In this thesis, I will argue that opportunity pluralism is not as friendly to egalitarianism as Fishkin suggests by showing that the theory is fully consistent with social outcomes typically viewed as antithetical to egalitarianism. Focusing on Sweden's gender segregated workforce and the college degree bottleneck in the US \u2014 which are discussed in the final part of his book \u2014 I argue that Fishkin's applications of opportunity pluralism only follow on the basis of certain questionable assumptions. On the basis of different assumptions, however, opportunity pluralism is consistent with Sweden's de facto gender segregated workforce and a society in which higher education is much less affordable and accessible than it is currently \u2014 outcomes that most mainstream egalitarians would oppose. In my analysis of the college degree bottleneck I use economist Bryan Caplan's book The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Caplan, 2018), to argue that under certain empirical assumptions in the economics of education, certain inegalitarian policy prescriptions are consistent with opportunity pluralism. In the final part of my thesis I argue that opportunity pluralism is consistent with inegalitarian outcomes because it is built on different foundations compared to other egalitarian theories of equal opportunity. Because opportunity pluralism recognizes that deep and lasting inequalities persist so long as the state allows families to remain intact, and that achieving equality of opportunity is not the best approach to help individuals pursue their own good in their own way, certain inegalitarian outcomes are not problematic from the point of view of opportunity pluralism.