Ruari Yes, there's a limit to how much handicapping I'm willing to do. But compensating for the state's failure to provide an equal education for all is well ahead of that limit. Yes, ideally we "just fix education", but that's something that takes years. Applying a fudge factor can happen immediately. (And a reminder: I believe that the net result of what I'm proposing is a decrease in "affirmative action", not an increase. School leaver are being handicapped right now. I think they're being handicapped too strongly right now, and would like to see that strength reduced, just not to zero.)
It's an important part of my argument (even if I haven't emphasized this before) that it's the state itself that's failing to provide equal (educational) opportunities to all children. The same state that I'm proposing has a moral duty to "make good" for its failure by holding school leavers to an equal standard (which requires either fixing education immediately and retroactively, an impossibility, or applying a handicap to compensate for its failure to provide an equal education).
It's precisely to advance that we should do everything we can to maximize intergenerational economic mobility. Societies advance fastest when one's fortunes rely most strongly on one's own successes and failures and not on one's parents'. That's why we should not hold people's futures hostage to whether they had the bad luck to be born in Alexandra rather than the good luck to be born in Constantia.