If you play silly games, you get silly prizes. The same applies to foolish, dangerous games. Ordinarily we should reject doing this. But it is instructive to dive in, purely to demonstrate the internal inconsistencies – Reductio Ad Absurdum in other words. To show how silly ideas implode under their own lack of logic. How rapidly they cause terrible outcomes.
Let’s use the equity game. This is not about a healthy attempt to avoid denials of human rights. That is equality. Equity demands that we identify any example of differences in outcome and eliminate them.
Equity
If you take the time to read the rules of the game, three assumptions are needed for equity.
- We must uplift groups;
- We can uplift groups; and
- Only stipulated groups matter.
The first point above seems okay at first glance. It isn’t. The burden of proof is heavy. Where is the obligation? Liberalism doesn’t necessarily create it. Certainly not without a favourable cost-benefit analysis. Western legal traditions don’t either. To use the popular first-year university example, if you see a child drowning in a pond as you hurry across campus, you’ve committed no crime by letting it drown rather than ruin your new shoes or risk arriving late for class. (That is not to say this doesn’t make you a very bad person.)
We also know very well the risks of banding together to “help” different classes of people en masse. Marxism can only “succeed” by resorting to force. The only economic outcome it is capable of causing is widespread squalor with a tiny elite who live less well than janitors in a free economy.
Second, the equity lot demand we assume that we are even able to help chosen groups. Thomas Sowell has most convincingly demonstrated that this is not the case. “Affirmative-action policies,” he says, “assume not only a level of knowledge that no one has ever possessed but also a degree of control that no one has ever exercised.”
Sowell compiles irresistible empirical evidence that affirmative action does very little good and plenty of bad. It turns out giving money, things and positions to identity groups rarely helps more than it harms. It externalises the problem. It fosters resentment. It distorts market forces for the worse.
But we’re playing their game. For now, let’s assume we must and can help disadvantaged groups. In the third point we get on to identifying these groups. Who are they? The DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) clergy have decided on the groups. They are almost exclusively defined by race, sexual preference, and gender identity.
Downtrodden
Many races have been systematically downtrodden by other races (and by their own). Gay people, similarly, have been legally and illegally discriminated against. I think we can also assume that the “gender non-conforming” suffer from some bigotry.
But why have the show runners focused almost all attention on three chosen ones? If we apply their rules, we ought to hunt everywhere for inequitable outcomes. But they ignore the fact that short people, on average, earn significantly less than tall people. As Forbes puts it, interpreting one study out of China, “each additional centimetre of height is associated with a 1.30% increase in annual income. In other words, a person who is 5 feet 6 inches making $50,000 per year would expect to make about $2,000 more if they were 5 feet 7 inches, and $4,000 more if they were 5 feet 8 inches.”
Women also make less money if they are overweight. “Women who weigh as little as 15 pounds more than their peers saw an average annual income drop of $1,600, and were less likely to own cars or homes, or be employed,” explains Money.com.
But, the woke will retort, short people haven’t been systematically downtrodden. First, why is that the criterion? The equity brigade will have to demonstrate why someone is less deserving of special assistance if their hardship is not caused by official societal and/or legal bigotry.
The struggles (we) shorties face are the result of far more potent forces than that: evolutionary psychology. The little guys had a physical disadvantage in fighting off lions. Other men would rather be allied with a big dude. Potential mates would prefer their offspring have the big, strong dad to protect them. So, short guys have to do extra work to gain status in the tribe. It’s less of a moral issue than it is a basic fact of evolution. In a modern services economy, this bias may have run out of usefulness. We can address that. But we can’t remove the ingrained biology.
If we play the equity game, short people ought to be included as a disadvantaged group, given special treatment to undo the unfairness caused by an immutable part of who they are. So now it is gay people, black people, transgender people, and short people. We’d best add in fat women, too.
Why stop there? If we are truly into equity, and not just some particular brand of vengeance, we need to consider all causes of inequity. People with asymmetrical faces have a harder time than those with symmetry. People with blue eyes are perceived as less trustworthy than those with brown eyes. IQ varies widely. As does athletic ability.
Vary by degree
Many of these things vary by degree, too. The equity game – properly played – should demand we give more help to the 5ft3 man than we do to the 5ft6 man. This example has the benefit of a quantifiable “solution”. But how do we assign oppression points between black and lesbian? How much money does the straight Indian dude get compared to the gay white bloke? Which jobs do we need to reserve for short black women with perfectly symmetrical faces and fantastic IQ?
As a striking CNN interview this week laid bare, there is also the impossibility of determining who did the harm. Don Lemon suggested to British royals commentator, Hilary Fordwich, that the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II’s death has justifiably revived calls for reparations paid by the former colonial power. Now we have to consider the joint venture of slaving: black Africans rounding up their neighbours and selling them to white slavers to transport across the ocean.
Fordwich explains to Lemon: “Where was the beginning of the [slave] supply chain? That was in Africa. Which was the first nation in the world that abolished slavery? The British. Two thousand naval men died on the high seas trying to stop slavery. If reparations need to be paid, we need to go right back to the beginning of that supply chain and say, ‘Who was rounding up their own people and having them handcuffed in cages?'”
This all varies over time and geography, as well. Large numbers of “European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780”. Middle Eastern slavers had more barbaric policies than white Americans, for example. Male slaves were frequently castrated before arrival. The procedure not only ended a bloodline, but more often than not killed the victim slowly and painfully.
Of course, all of those slavers are long gone. Reparations would have to be paid by people who have done nothing wrong to people who may or may not suffer from injustices in past generations.
These are not my rules. Not my game. But all we have to do is apply their rules of equity and it all crashes down into gibberish and blatant unfairness. If only the world was as simple as goodies, baddies, and obvious tools of righteousness.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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