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One thing I learned in my many years in this life: you can't fix inequity by inching slowly in the "right" direction. However, the "right" stopping point is too

One thing I learned in my many years in this life: you can't fix inequity by inching slowly in the "right" direction. However, the "right" stopping point is too often controlled by the same oppressors. You have to be like a pendulum and swing waaayyy too far past "equity". Then the pendulum will eventually energy out at a more reasonable equitable point. This is a lot of anchoring point bias built in. This overcomes it.

ithkuil 5y ago
What would be in your opinion the best historical example of a inequity that wasn't righted by moving slowly and one of an inequity that was righted by overshooting the target?
- rectang 5y ago
  Not the OP, but I'd cite the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose enforcement provisions would not be necessary in an idealized democratic society which has come to terms with diversity. (Sadly, the consequences of the Roberts Court gutting the act demonstrate that those enforcement provisions are still very much needed today.)
boppo1 5y ago
I think 'equity' is such an unfortunate choice of term. This usage popped up in the mainstream and then exploded all over in the last couple of years. I'm sure it was chosen for its phonetic adjacency to 'equality'. I haven't seen and concrete definitions for the usage, just borderline-meme webcomic illustrations of people looking over a fence at a baseball game. I believe understand the meaning, that being that equality before the law does not account for material quality of life imbalances arising from unquestionable historical wrongdoing. It seems to be most frequently used in describing the relationship of Black and Indigenous Americans to Americans of European "white" descent. My big issue with it is that the word 'equity' has an extremely important financial meaning that many of the people wielding the new usage are unfamiliar with or don't know at all. There are lots of young people who don't have 'nu-equity' and are woefully ignorant of the overwhelming influence the accounting equation and cash flow valuation has on their lives. Teaching this new vague definition of 'equity' is going to divorce so many people from ever having productive conversations about wealth. Already, lots of people I follow in finance (white and nonwhite, male and female, immigrants and natural born) are dismissing this kind of language out-of-hand. Or, perhaps I am wrong. Maybe this new usage of equity points, in fact, to exactly the same thing as the legacy financial definition. The activists want shares and they demand them now. I have not seen anything to support this identity, but maybe the meaning isn't too far off.

ithkuil 5y ago

What would be in your opinion the best historical example of a inequity that wasn't righted by moving slowly and one of an inequity that was righted by overshooting the target?

rectang 5y ago
Not the OP, but I'd cite the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose enforcement provisions would not be necessary in an idealized democratic society which has come to terms with diversity. (Sadly, the consequences of the Roberts Court gutting the act demonstrate that those enforcement provisions are still very much needed today.)

boppo1 5y ago

I think 'equity' is such an unfortunate choice of term. This usage popped up in the mainstream and then exploded all over in the last couple of years. I'm sure it was chosen for its phonetic adjacency to 'equality'. I haven't seen and concrete definitions for the usage, just borderline-meme webcomic illustrations of people looking over a fence at a baseball game. I believe understand the meaning, that being that equality before the law does not account for material quality of life imbalances arising from unquestionable historical wrongdoing. It seems to be most frequently used in describing the relationship of Black and Indigenous Americans to Americans of European "white" descent. My big issue with it is that the word 'equity' has an extremely important financial meaning that many of the people wielding the new usage are unfamiliar with or don't know at all. There are lots of young people who don't have 'nu-equity' and are woefully ignorant of the overwhelming influence the accounting equation and cash flow valuation has on their lives. Teaching this new vague definition of 'equity' is going to divorce so many people from ever having productive conversations about wealth. Already, lots of people I follow in finance (white and nonwhite, male and female, immigrants and natural born) are dismissing this kind of language out-of-hand. Or, perhaps I am wrong. Maybe this new usage of equity points, in fact, to exactly the same thing as the legacy financial definition. The activists want shares and they demand them now. I have not seen anything to support this identity, but maybe the meaning isn't too far off.