The Lost Opportunity Cost

The purpose of this study was to determine the importance of equal opportunity. To assess equality of opportunities among people, social scientists are using intergenerational mobility- a person’s position on the income ladder relative to his or her parent position. All citizens have roughly the same chance to be success regardless of their gender and race. But people who were born impoverished tend to have fewer opportunities in life. This is a huge difference in privilege for people who were born in poorer families. The author submitted his thesis in three difference parts. The first part of thesis was the inequality of opportunity among Americans from different family backgrounds. The second part of the thesis was inequality of opportunity

In the early part of the essay, the author said that “And one of the United States’ Major successes in the last half century has been its progress toward ensuring that its citizens get roughly the same basic chances in life, regardless of gender and race”. This is a normative statement because it is a judgement from the author. The author raised this issue in his essay but he did not prove it to readers. I strongly disagree with the author about this point. There is still a gender bias between male and female, especially in sports. Even if female athletes received opportunities and recognitions to develop and perform, there are still barriers for them to gain success and attention from society. According to research in Sport Management, “Opportunities for female athletes have increased in certain areas in the past 30 years, but females continues to lag far behind their male counterparts.” For example, most of NBA players received recognition from people around the world, people were excited to watch them play. On the other hand, there are also a basketball league for woman which is WNBA. It received far less recognitions, people had known about the WNBA

Author did a good job in this section to contribute to his thesis statement. But he still needs more research evidences to prove his point. He said “Low-income parents are not able to spend as much on goods and services aimed at enriching their children… Low income parents also tend to read less to their children and provide less help with school work”. This is a normative statement and a positive statement, because it is a judgement and also base on a fact about poor family. This is a good observation by the author, his tone was strong and confident about it. But to make it better and more persuasive to reader, he needs to give credible research or data on his point to strengthen his argument. Furthermore, the author gave quantitative data and researches to contribute to his argument. “About 88 percent of children from high-income homes grow up with married parents. That is down from 96 percent four decades ago… That has hurt poorer children’s chances of success, since children who live with both of their parents are more likely, even accounting for income, to fare better in school, stay out of trouble with the law, maintain lasting relationships, and earn higher incomes as adults.” This is useful data for his argument, however this is not good enough for his thesis. Because his data is from unknown source, where did it he gets it from? Was