[MD] The Quality of Equality

[david buchanan]

Richard Wilkinson wrote: 


 ...why some societies are healthier than others...what they have is more equitably shared...worse in unequal societies.


Craig replied:

There is an equivocation here between 'equitable' & '(un)equal'. 'Equitable' means "fair or just to all parties".  That is not necessarily the same as equal.



dmb says:

That's not true. In that context "equal" and "unequal" is all about fair and unfair treatment. In that context "equality" means equal treatment under the law, equal opportunity in civic society, which means nobody gets excluded arbitrarily from schools and jobs and stuff. 
It seem that sometimes people are against "equality" precisely because of this kind of misunderstanding. I mean, social equality is mistakenly believed to mean that everyone is identical to everyone else. They take social "equality" to mean nationwide "uniformity" or "conformity". This converts a term denoting "fairness" or "justice" into a term denoting "totalitarianism" or even "the Borg". Yikes! That's not even close! 
When you're talking about weights and measures, "equal" does mean "identical" because two cups equals one pint. But when we say Adam and Steve were treated equally, we mean the treatment was fair and just. 

With money it's a little more complicated because equality in that realm is taken to mean that everyone ends up with the same amount of wealth and inequality is about the gap between rich and poor. And that's almost true because because the aim of economic equality is a more even distribution of wealth. But this is not just a matter of taking cash from some people and giving it to others. Economic equality is about making the rules more fair in the first place so that re-distribution isn't even necessary. Economic equality is not about doing a Robin Hood thing perpetually but rather altering the conditions that produced the gap between rich and poor in the first place. I'd even argue that this is not a matter of rigging the game. The game is already rigged so it's a matte of un-rigging the game. One example springs to mind. I forget the real numbers but it's close enough to make the same point that the real numbers would. A kid from a poor working class home goes to kindergarten on his first day having heard 100,000 word in his life up to that point. A middle class kid goes to school on that same day having heard 250,000 words and the rich kid shows up with 500,000 words in his experience. The financial situation of the poor kid is correlated with the impoverished cognitive environment so that he doesn't just show up with a bad breakfast or no breakfast or with cheaper clothes that aren't as comfortable or warm and he doesn't just show up with a cheaper, less nutritious lunch or show up having never seen a doctor or a dentist in his life. He also shows up way behind academically - on the first day of kindergarten. 

That is injustice. That is unfair. That is how economic inequality perpetuates itself. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say this game is rigged against such kids even when they're still kids. Poor kids go to the worst schools at far as test scores go not because the teachers there are less competent than they are at the rich kids' schools. Low test scores are just a reflection of the economic and cognitive poverty of the students that afflicted the students before they ever showed up and continues as long as they live at home. The differences in scores both reflect and perpetuate these demographic and economic realities. 

 

  		 	   		  
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