The Equity ParadoxEqual opportunity rewards excellence. Equal outcomes require tyranny and are indifferent to excellence.
By Edward Ring
January 3, 2023
If a society strives to achieve “equity” for every citizen merely by providing equal opportunity, it would need to accept unequal outcomes. If a society does not accept unequal outcomes, it would need to provide unequal opportunities. That is a circle that cannot be squared. Societies must choose one or the other.
Every major institution in America denies this paradox. Implicit in that denial is the fantasy that designing a society to favor certain groups in order to achieve equality of outcome will not fatally undermine the cohesion and vitality of the overall society. Theoretically, it might have worked several decades ago when “disadvantaged” groups constituted a minute percentage of the American population. Offering special benefits and privileges to a small fraction of the population might have been a manageable burden. But today, the vast majority of Americans belong to a “protected status group.”
The magnitude of this shift in just six decades bears enumeration. In 1960, at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, the population of the United States was 89 percent white. The social justice programs that were launched at that time, affirmative action and the war on poverty, had a limited impact. If affirmative action released unqualified students into elite universities or unqualified engineers and executives into upper management, it only represented at most a 10 percent displacement. If welfare and other programs initiated by the war on poverty destroyed the work ethic and broke up the families of the so-called beneficiaries, at least only 10 percent of the U.S. population was so victimized.
Today, almost everyone belongs to a protected status group. Social justice advocates now demand proportional representation be extended to include not only blacks but all nonwhites, as well as all women. They demand this “equity” be applied to all university admissions, all hiring and promotions, all government contracts, and even in the number of criminal prosecutions and prison populations.
For America’s black population, social justice advocates are demanding, via direct “reparations” payments, a leveling of individual net worth. The only people left in the American population who are not protected and offered special privileges are non-Hispanic white males. These men now constitute less than 30 percent of all Americans. Among minors, the percentage of non-Hispanic white males in America is less than 25 percent.
How America moved from extending civil rights to a disenfranchised tenth of the population to extending special privileges to 75 percent of the population is a tale for the ages. It represents a shift from something noble and mildly disruptive into a movement today that is nefarious and catastrophically destructive.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/03/the-equity-paradox/
