Reviving the classics

A little while back, we heard that Neil DeGrasse Tyson was going to be hosting a new Cosmos series, perviously hosted by his mentor Carl Sagan.

Now it looks like we'll be getting more of Milton Friedman too (HT - Peter Boettke)! Unfortunately, it will only be a three part series, but it will still be a great celebration of the 100 year anniversary of his birth.

I'm most suspicious of the third in the series, differentiating between "equality of opportunity" and "equality of outcomes". Of course, as I've discussed here before, the distinction between the two is complete hogwash. The world is a lot more complex than that, and some of the most important inequalities of opportunities are the product of someone else's inequality of outcomes. It's impossible to concieve of a situation where you'd actually equalize opportunity and not have to equalize a lot of outcomes too.

The idea is on the right track, if the two could be separated. But more and more I think perpetuating this mythical dichotomy creates more problems than it solves.

The first two look much better - the importance of the market, followed by the dangers of government intervention.