9 ms·

Has anyone traced the history as to when equity, which has historically meant fairness, got corrupted to mean "equality of outcome", which is really the opposit

by sreque 5y ago

Has anyone traced the history as to when equity, which has historically meant fairness, got corrupted to mean "equality of outcome", which is really the opposite of fairness? I've recently discovered Thomas Sowell and I'm really itching to find time to read his book on the subject: Discrimination and disparities.

ARandomerDude 5y ago
Good question. It's interesting that we also use the word in the sense of a profit or return on an investment (e.g., "equity in your home"). I take that as a nod to its former meaning of "justly conducted," since without proper methods (in that sense "fair") business accounting would be impossible.
endisneigh 5y ago
Who says equity means equality of outcome?
- corty 5y ago
  Almost everyone nowadays who dabbles in the social justice business. Most people are already equal before the law, do have equal chances, do get equal treatment. But that wasn't enough, so now the demand is equal outcomes, not matter if it leads to inequality in chances, law and treatment.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    The social justic argument is that this is explicitly not true and reforms are neccesary to make it more true: “most people are equal before the law, do have equal chances, do get equal treatment”.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      But this argument often rests on inequality of observable outcomes.
      - germinalphrase 5y ago
        Which would be logical evidence if - for instance - laws were selectively enforced.
        inglor_cz 5y ago
        This evidence is far from iron-clad, though. Especially its real meaning. It is like seeing a red spot on a table. Is it strawberry jam? Is it blood? Is it result of someone injecting insulin? Is it the only evidence of a murder?
    - dcow 5y ago
      Yes you are echoing the GP not contesting it.
      - germinalphrase 5y ago
        I’m not addressing the GP. The parent comment asserts that social equality has been achieved and the social justice movement (as a monolithic group) wants more than equality in opportunity, they want equality in outcomes. I’m merely saying that the initial assumption the parent makes is believed to be incorrect by the social justice movement (that equality of opportunity has been achieved). But all opinions under the sun are available at our fingertips, so if we judge those who disagree with us by the most extreme of their similars, we’re not going to throw much light on these issues.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Who are "almost everyone?" Who are examples of prominent academics, for example, who say equity is equality of outcome? I'm not talking about randos on twitter. I'm also curious to what your own personal definitions of equity and equality are,
  - larkost 5y ago
    Where do you get the idea that people "have equal chances"? I and my wife both have great jobs that both pay us well, and allow us to have the time to spend with our children where we are not stressed out about making end meet. We had the money to not think twice about sending our children to daycare, and then when the lockdowns hit, to a service that saw to them both being successful in online learning and with the ability to socialize with a pod of other children. I send my kids to piano, dance, swimming, and gymnastics lessons every week, and we will be back to German class once a week in the fall (maybe Hungarian again as well). All of those things are absolutely giving my kids unequal chances above some of the kids in their school whose parents may be working several jobs an even then just barely making ends meet. And the fact that my parents could provide much of what I am providing my kids to me was a big contributor to setting me up with the chances that allowed me the path I had to this successful career. Certainly I worked along the way, but others who worked just as hard (and were just as talented) did not active the finial stability that I now enjoy. And there is every reason to believe that the chances I am giving my children will wind up paying off in enhanced chances for their children. On a statical basis (there are always outliers) wealth creates wealth. And the slaves that were released 150-odd years ago were released with nothing. Then we spent most of the time since that trying to make sure they had no voice (clear voting suppression), no property rights, no way to buy a house (redlining), inferior schools, and so many other hurdles and outright barriers to their advancement. Not to mention clearly unequal policing. Looking at this pattern, how can I not credit, in some way, that my family is white? That in the 1950's and onwards they benefitted from the GI bill that help guarantee their mortgages, where black veterans were almost completely denied those same benefits? Because my family immigrated to the midwest initially, we were not one of the few families that directly benefited from slavery, but surely we benefited in aggregate from the work that was the only work available to black people at unequal pay. We have made great strides in making the letter of the law more equal. On painting a patina of equality across our society. But the moment you scratch that surface and look at the outcomes it becomes very obvious that the real work of making a just society is far from done. The one that always gets me the most are the repeated studies where they send the same resumes to companies, but change out the names from white sounding ones to black sounding ones, and suddenly the call-backs on them drop precipitously.
  - groby_b 5y ago
    That is a flat out lie. Please, do bring evidence for the claim that "almost everyone" considers equity as "equality of outcome". And no, you do not have "equal chances" right now. Nor do you get "equal treatment". It depends on money, skin color, religion, sexual orientation, and many other factors.
JPKab 5y ago
I first encountered the topic when I was in university in the early 2000s, and decided to focus all of my humanities requirements into Black Studies and Black Literature. The professors in these departments were early adherents of the current ideology, and back then it was a lot easier to see where the ideology came from. My (admittedly shitty) take on it is that these professors benefited tremendously from race-based affirmative action policies, and gradually a set of ideas that were immune from attack and questioning evolved to justify it. The "equity" concept came from that. My favorite memory from these classes was being shouted at by a famous Black poet who was a guest speaker because I questioned her view that poor whites shouldn't be treated any differently than rich whites when it came to admissions. The level of instantaneous emotional reaction was something I had only previously seen when arguing with Biblical creationists. This was when I realized this was quasi-religious ideology that was so firmly attached to the identity of it's adherents that it rendered them incapable of properly assessing reality.
kevingadd 5y ago
What is your basis for equality of outcome being a bad thing? Can you give some examples of what you're talking about? To me, equity should mean that (for example) a paraplegic can still access most or all of the spaces that a person who can walk can access, which means making sure they have access to a wheelchair and public spaces have wide enough unobstructed aisles for those in wheelchairs to get through. This requires us to examine outcomes, not impartially treat all people the same (since the vast majority of people with the ability to walk wouldn't need the same assistance a paraplegic would). In a society like ours this also means some people have to make sacrifices - the owner of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant may face difficulties because their current capacity comes at the cost of having narrow aisles, and making their shop accessible would reduce capacity. In some countries (like the US) this is illegal and they can get sued for it. For the owner this is very bad, but the alternative (society is inaccessible to people in wheelchairs) is worse.
- lazide 5y ago
  Equality of outcome tends to skew towards ignoring decisions or actions that individuals take (as they can and are influenced by the environment), and looking at the environment. The tricky part is, the real world can’t be quantified or modeled in a way that is tractable to humans in a larger way (near as I can tell anyway), so the people and environment get squashed into coarse buckets like skin color, education level, etc. which not only don’t reflect any individuals actual circumstances, but can be gamed in various ways. Since individuals also respond to the pressures they are under, it makes it easier and easier to see folks who become more and more helpless and take on a victim mindset (aka there is nothing I can do to get better, hold on while I finish this liter of vodka) - because it works in very real ways, and it’s the easy path. And you can’t reliably quantify something like that, it’s usually too subtle or subjective. This can easily lead (without very careful and mindful leadership - which doesn’t scale, and often doesn’t get selected for either) to essentially co-dependence. If they try to improve, they lose support and/or get kicked out. If they get worse, they get more help. There are of course plenty of examples of failure and dysfunction the other direction - insisting that someone who is fundamentally screwed by the environment ‘get better’ while not providing any support and/or dishing out beatings for every minor infraction. And if you set your metric to ‘everyone has the same outcome/rewards’ - well, it is REALLY hard to do well. Fundamentally, you’ll never get a population to all perform the same. As a species we have a wide and diverse set of skills, predispositions, upbringing/parental influences, resources, and other attributes, and there is literally no way to make everyone equally successful at everything without maybe somehow making everyone equal on all those other fronts - which plenty of dystopian novels on THAT. So if you can’t make everyone equally successful or identical or have the same upbringing/influences or resources, you can get ‘equal outcomes’ another way - anyone who sticks up above the pack gets smacked down until everyone is equal again, or any venue or opportunity that can’t be made equal gets banned. And that does scale, and also has the benefit of being easily measurable and doable. Which is why you see it so often. Which is also pretty dystopian, as it’s enforced ‘lowest common denominator’ by definition, and tends to destroy any innovation or improvements and slowly (or not so slowly) suffocates the society. It’s easy to go down, it’s hard to go up. For your example, if we wanted to be 100% sure that everyone in a wheelchair had equal access to everything without some massive improvement in technology - we’d need to pave every backcountry hike (and ban the ones that we didn’t want to spend the money on), ban rock climbing, ban most skydiving, etc. Which would essentially destroy the experience one was theoretically trying to make equally available.
csa 5y ago
Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome has been a debate for a long time. Check out commentary on Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian thinking for discussion that is more intellectual and less emotional. Example: https://www.hoover.org/research/what-does-created-equal-mean https://www.hoover.org/research/what-does-created-equal-mean

by sreque 5y ago

ARandomerDude 5y ago

Good question. It's interesting that we also use the word in the sense of a profit or return on an investment (e.g., "equity in your home"). I take that as a nod to its former meaning of "justly conducted," since without proper methods (in that sense "fair") business accounting would be impossible.

endisneigh 5y ago

Who says equity means equality of outcome?

corty 5y ago
Almost everyone nowadays who dabbles in the social justice business. Most people are already equal before the law, do have equal chances, do get equal treatment. But that wasn't enough, so now the demand is equal outcomes, not matter if it leads to inequality in chances, law and treatment.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  The social justic argument is that this is explicitly not true and reforms are neccesary to make it more true: “most people are equal before the law, do have equal chances, do get equal treatment”.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    But this argument often rests on inequality of observable outcomes.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      Which would be logical evidence if - for instance - laws were selectively enforced.
      - inglor_cz 5y ago
        This evidence is far from iron-clad, though. Especially its real meaning. It is like seeing a red spot on a table. Is it strawberry jam? Is it blood? Is it result of someone injecting insulin? Is it the only evidence of a murder?
  - dcow 5y ago
    Yes you are echoing the GP not contesting it.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      I’m not addressing the GP. The parent comment asserts that social equality has been achieved and the social justice movement (as a monolithic group) wants more than equality in opportunity, they want equality in outcomes. I’m merely saying that the initial assumption the parent makes is believed to be incorrect by the social justice movement (that equality of opportunity has been achieved). But all opinions under the sun are available at our fingertips, so if we judge those who disagree with us by the most extreme of their similars, we’re not going to throw much light on these issues.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Who are "almost everyone?" Who are examples of prominent academics, for example, who say equity is equality of outcome? I'm not talking about randos on twitter. I'm also curious to what your own personal definitions of equity and equality are,
- larkost 5y ago
  Where do you get the idea that people "have equal chances"? I and my wife both have great jobs that both pay us well, and allow us to have the time to spend with our children where we are not stressed out about making end meet. We had the money to not think twice about sending our children to daycare, and then when the lockdowns hit, to a service that saw to them both being successful in online learning and with the ability to socialize with a pod of other children. I send my kids to piano, dance, swimming, and gymnastics lessons every week, and we will be back to German class once a week in the fall (maybe Hungarian again as well). All of those things are absolutely giving my kids unequal chances above some of the kids in their school whose parents may be working several jobs an even then just barely making ends meet. And the fact that my parents could provide much of what I am providing my kids to me was a big contributor to setting me up with the chances that allowed me the path I had to this successful career. Certainly I worked along the way, but others who worked just as hard (and were just as talented) did not active the finial stability that I now enjoy. And there is every reason to believe that the chances I am giving my children will wind up paying off in enhanced chances for their children. On a statical basis (there are always outliers) wealth creates wealth. And the slaves that were released 150-odd years ago were released with nothing. Then we spent most of the time since that trying to make sure they had no voice (clear voting suppression), no property rights, no way to buy a house (redlining), inferior schools, and so many other hurdles and outright barriers to their advancement. Not to mention clearly unequal policing. Looking at this pattern, how can I not credit, in some way, that my family is white? That in the 1950's and onwards they benefitted from the GI bill that help guarantee their mortgages, where black veterans were almost completely denied those same benefits? Because my family immigrated to the midwest initially, we were not one of the few families that directly benefited from slavery, but surely we benefited in aggregate from the work that was the only work available to black people at unequal pay. We have made great strides in making the letter of the law more equal. On painting a patina of equality across our society. But the moment you scratch that surface and look at the outcomes it becomes very obvious that the real work of making a just society is far from done. The one that always gets me the most are the repeated studies where they send the same resumes to companies, but change out the names from white sounding ones to black sounding ones, and suddenly the call-backs on them drop precipitously.
- groby_b 5y ago
  That is a flat out lie. Please, do bring evidence for the claim that "almost everyone" considers equity as "equality of outcome". And no, you do not have "equal chances" right now. Nor do you get "equal treatment". It depends on money, skin color, religion, sexual orientation, and many other factors.

JPKab 5y ago

I first encountered the topic when I was in university in the early 2000s, and decided to focus all of my humanities requirements into Black Studies and Black Literature. The professors in these departments were early adherents of the current ideology, and back then it was a lot easier to see where the ideology came from. My (admittedly shitty) take on it is that these professors benefited tremendously from race-based affirmative action policies, and gradually a set of ideas that were immune from attack and questioning evolved to justify it. The "equity" concept came from that. My favorite memory from these classes was being shouted at by a famous Black poet who was a guest speaker because I questioned her view that poor whites shouldn't be treated any differently than rich whites when it came to admissions. The level of instantaneous emotional reaction was something I had only previously seen when arguing with Biblical creationists. This was when I realized this was quasi-religious ideology that was so firmly attached to the identity of it's adherents that it rendered them incapable of properly assessing reality.

kevingadd 5y ago

What is your basis for equality of outcome being a bad thing? Can you give some examples of what you're talking about? To me, equity should mean that (for example) a paraplegic can still access most or all of the spaces that a person who can walk can access, which means making sure they have access to a wheelchair and public spaces have wide enough unobstructed aisles for those in wheelchairs to get through. This requires us to examine outcomes, not impartially treat all people the same (since the vast majority of people with the ability to walk wouldn't need the same assistance a paraplegic would). In a society like ours this also means some people have to make sacrifices - the owner of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant may face difficulties because their current capacity comes at the cost of having narrow aisles, and making their shop accessible would reduce capacity. In some countries (like the US) this is illegal and they can get sued for it. For the owner this is very bad, but the alternative (society is inaccessible to people in wheelchairs) is worse.

lazide 5y ago
Equality of outcome tends to skew towards ignoring decisions or actions that individuals take (as they can and are influenced by the environment), and looking at the environment. The tricky part is, the real world can’t be quantified or modeled in a way that is tractable to humans in a larger way (near as I can tell anyway), so the people and environment get squashed into coarse buckets like skin color, education level, etc. which not only don’t reflect any individuals actual circumstances, but can be gamed in various ways. Since individuals also respond to the pressures they are under, it makes it easier and easier to see folks who become more and more helpless and take on a victim mindset (aka there is nothing I can do to get better, hold on while I finish this liter of vodka) - because it works in very real ways, and it’s the easy path. And you can’t reliably quantify something like that, it’s usually too subtle or subjective. This can easily lead (without very careful and mindful leadership - which doesn’t scale, and often doesn’t get selected for either) to essentially co-dependence. If they try to improve, they lose support and/or get kicked out. If they get worse, they get more help. There are of course plenty of examples of failure and dysfunction the other direction - insisting that someone who is fundamentally screwed by the environment ‘get better’ while not providing any support and/or dishing out beatings for every minor infraction. And if you set your metric to ‘everyone has the same outcome/rewards’ - well, it is REALLY hard to do well. Fundamentally, you’ll never get a population to all perform the same. As a species we have a wide and diverse set of skills, predispositions, upbringing/parental influences, resources, and other attributes, and there is literally no way to make everyone equally successful at everything without maybe somehow making everyone equal on all those other fronts - which plenty of dystopian novels on THAT. So if you can’t make everyone equally successful or identical or have the same upbringing/influences or resources, you can get ‘equal outcomes’ another way - anyone who sticks up above the pack gets smacked down until everyone is equal again, or any venue or opportunity that can’t be made equal gets banned. And that does scale, and also has the benefit of being easily measurable and doable. Which is why you see it so often. Which is also pretty dystopian, as it’s enforced ‘lowest common denominator’ by definition, and tends to destroy any innovation or improvements and slowly (or not so slowly) suffocates the society. It’s easy to go down, it’s hard to go up. For your example, if we wanted to be 100% sure that everyone in a wheelchair had equal access to everything without some massive improvement in technology - we’d need to pave every backcountry hike (and ban the ones that we didn’t want to spend the money on), ban rock climbing, ban most skydiving, etc. Which would essentially destroy the experience one was theoretically trying to make equally available.

csa 5y ago

Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome has been a debate for a long time. Check out commentary on Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian thinking for discussion that is more intellectual and less emotional. Example: https://www.hoover.org/research/what-does-created-equal-mean https://www.hoover.org/research/what-does-created-equal-mean