Equality¶

Note

This article was inspired by a comment from my friend Josh Swanson which got me thinking about the topic. What started as a Facebοоk discussion of the cabinet selected by Justin Trudeau in Canada lead to a more interesting (in my opinion) discourse on the general topic of equality. I’ve taken some of that discussion and cleaned it up into a more formal essay.

One of the most beautiful things about the world is it’s diversity. I haven’t been everywhere but I’ve been around the world some and one of the reasons I love doing so is to see what’s “different”. The unique cultures that have grown up across the world—each with their own good and bad and subtlety and nuance and idiosyncrasies—are exactly the reason I love traveling. Nowhere is perfect, no place has a claim on some form of perfect superiority; everywhere is beautiful in a unique intangible way.

This diversity and it’s varying forms of beauty is a direct result of the constraints and differences in experience. In a realistic sense this is the opposite of equality. Ireland has fences made of stone all over because the act of clearing a field to farm it meant removing lots of rocks. The constraints of the land led directly to a beautiful aesthetic. What would that have looked like in a world where all farmers are equal in all ways? Would no farmer have started to farm a field that was rocky? Would everyone have to start with a rocky field and clear it? Were that the case, other strategies for fencing wouldn’t have naturally emerged in other parts of the world.

Hint

In this article I refer to “diversity” a lot. I’m not intending it to be read in a particular way or in a particular form. Diversity for the purposes of this article might be ideological, ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, interests, personas, appearance, cultural, and any other of the ways that people can be diverse.

Each human experience is unique with it’s own advantages and disadvantages. Some disadvantages are impossible to overcome and people die without having had a chance to see what they would have become. Others are lucky and born into wealth or royalty. The diversity of starting points is an infinite spectrum and leveling that is both impossible and—I would argue—undesirable.

A podcast series I recently listened to touches nicely on the challenges of enforcing specific outcomes. It’s the story of an attempt to apply modernist thinking to the concept of building a city. I’d highly encourage you to listen (really listen) to the following two links:

The designers of the city in the aforementioned podcast made a lot of assumptions about how people “should” live. The vision was enforced through tenant agreements and the homogeneity of the city plan itself. Each apartment was identically outfitted so the way of life for all those in the city would be functionally identical from person to person. Equality in living style and space would eliminate obvious social classes. The architects and modernist designers involved felt they knew what was best for the cities inhabitants and resisted any attempts to alter the original “pure” vision. This turned out to be hubris; their plans didn’t net the desired results.

Once the idealistic project had been recognized as a failure there were many attempts to fix the district. One of the solutions was to sell apartments that were completely barren. They had no fixtures or interior of any sort and so everyone who moved in had the opportunity to remake the space as they desired. Instead of each apartment existing as an expression of the buildings architects, the apartments became expressions of the tenants. In this case the equality of outcome was abandoned and the equality of opportunity was pushed. The result was diversity—humanity in all it’s varied forms. The area is now an extremely diverse multi-ethnic region that is wholly different from the original vision. It is… more human.

These buildings happened to produce a situation where creating opportunistic equality was relatively easy. In the broader world, not everything is quite so cut and dry. A person living in a rural community will necessarily have a very different starting point than a person living in a city center. Their experiences are unique and so the opportunities differ and that’s okay. Attempts to enforce specific outcomes runs into the same issues that the city planners do. People are wonderfully diverse and trying to enforce a preordained plan that matches a small groups vision of how things ought to be is antithetical to diversity.

This doesn’t mean that it’s a bad goal to push for equality of opportunity or diversity. Let’s take racial quotas for higher education as an example. They help alter the course of historic inertia. This helps take some sandpaper to rougher edges of capitalism. You can’t make 100% of all opportunities perfectly equal but you can look around at the places where problems are more obvious and work on those. The next question that arises then is how to judge the value of any particular intervention. How do you know they are “working”? One of the main ways that people try to decide if they are working is by judging it based on outcome.

The problem with judging based entirely on outcome is that even with quotas, the opportunities weren’t identical.

Differences between students might still include:

Parental differences
Quality of initial schooling
Health Social
Support groups
Personality differences
etc…

How do you account for all of these? They all have some bearing on the overall outcome. Measuring the outcomes isn’t going to really give you a whole picture of what your intervention in opportunities did.

You could apply this in a lot of ways. Let’s just assume that by some miracle we fully fund our education system and invest heavily in pre-k education. We also give free college to all. I think those are really great things to do! But what would their effect be? How do you know that what you did worked? Test scores? Would you suddenly have 50/50 women in tech fields? Would racial diversity be reflected more in the workforce? You’d have a change but it doesn’t mean that everything would still come out to be equal. If you give a diverse group of people choices then they will have a broadly diverse set of outcomes. While there are outliers in all walks of life it’s possible and even probable that there would be some statistical patterns that emerge in those outcomes based on all kinds of factors.

One of the most contested factors is gender. Consider the following study:

https://unstats.un.org/unsd/gender/Finland_Oct2016/Documents/UNFPA_ppt.pdf

Lots of very conservative countries think that women should have less of a right to a job than men when jobs are scarce. Persons living under liberal democracies in Europe (particularly Scandinavian countries like Norway, Finland, and Sweden) and the USA definitely don’t buy that concept at all. Yet, paradoxically it doesn’t result in the outcomes you might expect. The Nordic countries often have gender quotas, more access to education, more equal opportunity than in the USA. Despite this, the USA (and even those more conservative countries I mentioned earlier from those surveys) often have more women in higher positions than the Nordic countries.

The problem isn’t the attempt to provide more equal opportunity but rather the attempt to measure that success by means of measuring outcome. Outcome is only one of many factors that need to be considered and a singular focus on that can be disillusioning and even antithetical to desired results.

The political right wing often reads this as a failure of the intervention in opportunity but we really need to take a second to think about what our goals as a society actually are. Do we want to enforce gender or ethnic or racial parity? Is that the actual goal? Or is the goal to make people feel like they have the ability to manifest more control over their destiny? If it’s the latter then using outcome as the only measuring stick potentially muddies the debate rather than clarifying it. Another issue is that certain factors influence everything at a social level through complex feedback loops. If as a child you only see people who fit a certain profile (race, ethnicity, whatever… ) in certain roles, then you’re going to make associations between those roles and those profiles. That in turn is going to affect how you perceive yourself. So if you have no women visible in technology then you’re less likely to have “I’m going to be a technology worker” enter the mind of a young girl because they simply don’t see it. If you let people sort themselves without any attempts at intervention (beyond normal market forces) then statistical differences will emerge and those will have a rebound effect on what people decide they want to do with their own futures. What people choose now (if given the opportunity TO choose) will have some effect on what people choose in the future.

The whole thing should be based not around the idea of the outcome but around the idea of enabling diversity of thought so that people have more internal concepts to seriously consider as they lay out the framework for their own future.

Suppose you grow up in a small isolated medieval village somewhere. You think—I could become a blacksmith, a miller, a baker, etc… your conceptualization of your opportunities is based solely on your experience. Having no idea that on the other side of the world you could become a Buddhist monk or something has limited your “opportunity” because you don’t conceive of anything you’re not seeing. Nor do you think you could become an astronaut because that’s not a thing that exists at all yet. Now suppose a traveler through town tells you about an exotic place in the Orient where you could take on a trade you’d never heard of until that moment. You’ve been provided a concept that there is more out there, but it’s still going to seem far away and probably impossible to achieve. This is still because you’re not experiencing it directly or tangibly the way you can see the smith at the end of the street hammering away. Your opportunities are limited not just by location in space and time and the wealth of your family, but also internally by the things you seriously consider yourself capable of.

This is why we should strive to have more diversity in the workplace and public office, while acknowledging that it will always be incomplete and imperfect. It gives people an opportunity to tangibly see things as feasible within their own mind and expands their landscape of opportunities. This doesn’t make the judgment that a person should choose a particular one but rather opens more doors so that they have more choices. As long as we’re not interfering in a way that tries to enforce a particular role on someone (when I say we here I mean the organizational units of society like governmental bodies) then encouraging is still valuable.

We shouldn’t strive for perfect equity because that limits free choice and is only feasible through problematic enforcement processes. We should encourage diversity because it makes people more free by opening them up to a broader more diverse world where they can more readily discover who and what they may become.