The Dead End of "Equity"
It's the Science
I’ve been reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It looks like it’s going to show us how, in the good old days of pre-agricultural society, there was equality all over the firmament. And that “inequality” is a peculiar invention of eevil white Europeans with an assist from Mideast agricultural empires. Really, darling, the indigenous peoples of the Americas had it right until we came and ruined them.
The whole arc of leftist thought seems to revolve around the question of equality, that inequality is a facet of the fundamental Wrong Turn of western society, whether we are talking about feudalism, colonialism, or capitalism.
And, of course, today, the fight against inequality is centered around the politics of “equity” and the fight against systemic racism. There’s a piece at American Greatness today by Edward Ring on “The Equity Paradox” and how “Equal opportunity rewards excellence. Equal outcomes require tyranny and are indifferent to excellence.”
In addition, of course, the current fight for equity involves equity for anyone that isn’t a white male. And right now, white males are 30 percent of the US, from Wall Street grandees and woke professors down to the white working class dying “deaths of despair.”
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.
But never mind.
The standard rhetoric of social justice warriors starts by pointing out disparities in group achievement and then immediately attributes those disparities to oppression.
And that takes us to the internal contradiction of all lefty politics, that to enforce equality you need a staggering inequality of power to enforce your vision of equality on the people. You end up with unparalleled inequality in order to enforce equality.
But there’s an additional problem, if you can understand the application of Claude Shannon’s theory of information entropy to economics, as George Gilder does in Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing Our World.
I know, who the heck understands “entropy,” let alone Shannon’s information theory.
My oversimplified definition is that everything decays into disorder. Unless.
Unless, as Gilder writes, there is a surprise. Someone invents a light bulb. Someone invents digital transmission of information to replace analog transmission. And that someone changes the world.
So Gilder says that economics is not about supply and demand, as we have believed from Adam Smith down to the Austrians and the Keynesians. Instead economics is about same-old-same-old vs. surprise. Same-old-same-old is what Marx was talking about when he said that capitalism would lead to the “immiseration” of the workers as profit was squeezed out of the market.
Marx was right. Until some yokel comes up with a new idea that works. Surprise!
Gilder tells the story of light. Used to be that humans lighted with candles. Then gas-light costing one-tenth of candlelight, and kerosene one-tenth of gas-light. Then electric light came along with a thousand-fold drop. But whatabout the candle-makers?
Back when I started out in computer control systems, you communicated at 2400 bits per second over analog phone lines, and thought it was cool. “In 2012 systems were launched with each wavelength carrying 100 billion bits per second.” Oops.
Of course, the government could forbid the new technology, because “equity.”
And that’s the point. When someone comes up with a crazy idea, do we let them do it, or do we stop them, because equity or climate or endangered species, or whatever the ruling class is all riled up about this year?
Let’s face it. Most of the time, we humans put a stop to crazy ideas, and there’s a good reason for that. Crazy ideas, especially in agriculture, can result in no food at the end of the winter. You can’t be too careful.
But the story of the last few hundred years in the story of crazy guys coming up with new ideas and implementing them before the powers-that-be could stop them. Back in the day in Britland it was forbidden to transmit new ideas to the North American colonies. And skilled mechanics were forbidden to emigrate.
See, if you live in the political world, life is all about fighting the dreaded racist enemy — or the runaway climate change. And then handing out goodies to the good little boys and good little girls that obeyed your orders. But in that kind of world, Marx’s doctrine of “immiseration” applies. Because when everyone is living by following orders nothing new gets invented. And slowly but surely, the entropy, the disorder and chaos increases, until one day…
Or there is this amazing kid.
Well, he’s dead now. Alas.
But there’s the choice. Do we allow kids like Kevin Cooper define the future, with improbable surprise. Or do we submit to gubmint DEI administrators creating a future of “equity.”