Some people have claimed that groups also differ genetically in their intellectual potential. Rather than sink into this quagmire of analytical complications and emotional cross-currents, we may say simply: We have no need of that hypothesis. That is, even if every group (or even every individual) had the same genetic potential, along with equal geographical backgrounds and equal cultural developments, differences in demographic characteristics alone would still make equality of performance virtually impossible. When demographic differences are instead added to other differences, the probability of equality of performance approaches the vanishing point. In addition, there are other reasons for doubting genetic explanations of intergroup differences.15 Here, however, it is sufficient to say that we have no need of that hypothesis.
ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF “EQUALITY”
Thus far, we have considered a few of the innumerable causes of inequality. We need to consider also some of the consequences of the concept of equality itself, especially where it is a pervasive and often passionate ideology applied to the real world. Among these consequences are difficulties in providing incentives for people to do their best work and dangers of even greater inequalities, both economic and political, as a result of trying to apply the vision of equality to the real world.
Pay Differentials
Among the economic consequences of the passionate pursuit of equality has been a reluctance or unwillingness of institutions or individual employers to pay employees doing the same job a pay differential sufficient to reflect the differences in productivity with which they perform the same duties. Merely a difference in the amount of supervision that employees require can be a considerable economic difference, even if the workers’ own individually measured output is the same, since supervisory time is not free—and is in fact likely to be more expensive than the time of those being supervised. But, whatever the source of the differing value of particular employees to a business, letting one secretary be paid three times the salary of another secretary with the same duties is seldom feasible, for morale reasons, if nothing else. The same is generally true in many other occupations.
The net result is that attempts to reflect productivity differences with pay differences, in order to retain people who might be able to get more money elsewhere, often take the form of promotions, real or nominal. An outstanding secretary may, for example, be reclassified as an administrative assistant, while doing the same work as before. Such purely nominal promotions do less harm than genuine promotions which remove an employee from the job he performs in outstanding fashion to take on a new job which he may not perform as well, or even adequately.
“Redistribution” of Income
The “redistribution” of income is not only an ideological corollary of the passion for equality, it shares similar qualities of moralistic loftiness and analytical vagueness and confusion. As a Fabian socialist, George Bernard Shaw defined socialism as “a proposal to divide up the income of the country in a new way.”16 However, most income cannot be redistributed because it was not distributed in the first place. It is paid directly for services rendered and how much is paid is determined jointly by those individuals rendering the service and those to whom it is rendered.
This is obvious in the case of those who shine shoes or practice dentistry, but it is true also of those paid a salary for their work, rather than being paid separately for each given service rendered. Some income is in fact distributed, whether as Social Security checks, disaster relief aid, agricultural subsidy payments, or the like. But these are two very different processes, and the nature of those processes and their consequences must be understood before deciding to switch from one method of payment to another.
No one decides how much a shoe-shine boy or a dentist is “really” worth. In each case, the sum total of their fees is their income, after subtracting their respective costs. In short, each customer decides individually how much it is worth to him to have his shoes shined or his teeth fixed. No collectivized or political judgment is necessary. Thus the competition of the marketplace produces individual fees that add up to annual incomes not predetermined by anybody. Those who benefit directly from these services can determine how much the benefit is worth to them in each instance, rationing their usage according to the market price, their own pocketbooks, and the principle of diminishing returns (since few want their shoes or their teeth polished every day).
This more or less ideal type of market determination of incomes is modified, but not changed essentially, when people are employed at set salaries. Those more in demand, or less in supply, are likely to have their salaries set at higher levels. Moreover, those doing a better job are more likely to be retained during layoffs and down-sizing, and to receive promotions, real or nominal, and pay increases. In short, here too money is paid for services rendered by those directly benefitting and in accordance with the value of those services, as judged individually by those directly involved. Even in the case of salaried employees, income is not always determined solely by those salaries, as various income-earning options are often available after working hours, whether by moonlighting in the same field or some other, or by investing in various ventures from the stock market to real estate to writing the great American novel.
What all these various forms of market determination of income have in common is that the income is not distributed. It is directly earned in accordance with its value to others and in the light of competition from other available sources of the same services. To advocate a policy of income “redistribution” is to advocate not merely a change in statistical outcomes but a more profound change in the whole process by which people receive pay. The word “redistribution” is very deceptive insofar as it implies that we simply have distribution A today and should change to distribution B in the future. We are talking about collectivizing and politicizing the economic level of each individual. Such a massive institutional change should stand or fall on its own merits, not be quietly drifted into by soothing words or an innocuous prefix like “re-”.
The idea that third parties can determine what someone’s work is “really” worth involves not only incredible arrogance but intellectual confusion. The very fact that an exchange takes place at all is inconsistent with the existence of any “real” value that can be objectively discerned by anybody. Someone who pays a quarter for a morning newspaper does so because the value of the newspaper to him is greater than the value of the quarter. But the seller accepts the quarter only because the quarter is worth more to him than the newspaper. If there were any such thing as an objective value of a newspaper, one of these transactors must be a fool.
The same is true of any other transaction undertaken in a free market, whether what is being bought and sold are television sets or soybean futures. The medieval notion of a “just price,” discernible by third-party observers, commits the same fundamental fallacy as “comparable worth” today. The hollowness of the pretentious formulas used in determining the latter is revealed when the relative rankings of the same occupations differ markedly from one jurisdiction to another. There is no “real” worth to compare and the arbitrariness of the process is revealed whenever different individuals operate independently and reach different results.
The economic problems likely to arise from having political or bureaucratic authorities determine people’s income may be serious, but they are not half the story. A society in which some authorities can weigh millions of their fellow human beings in the balance, determine their worth, and unilaterally dispense their livelihoods as largess from the government is a profoundly different kind of society from that created and maintained in the United States of America for more than two centuries. As so often happens, a staggering political inequality can be created in the name of economic equality or social equity.
As with so many questions involving equality, the desired state of equality itself is not the real issue, especially since such a state of equality seems very unlikely to be achieved. What is cr
ucial are the processes set in motion in hopes of approaching that state. To allow any governmental authority to determine how much money individuals shall be permitted to receive from other individuals produces not only a distortion of the economic processes by undermining incentives for efficiency, it is more fundamentally a monumental concentration of political power which reduces everyone to the level of a client of politicians. Even aside from what this means for freedom and human dignity, it makes virtually inevitable a constant and bitter struggle among all segments of the society for the favor of those who wield this massive power to determine each person’s economic well-being. It is a formula for economic, political, and social disaster. Such power has, in a number of countries, led to a nomenklatura whose personal privileges have been a mockery of the very ideals of equality that led to such a concentration of power in pursuit of a mirage.
A question must also be raised as to how important—and to whom—it is to turn the whole economic and political system inside out, in order to produce numbers more pleasing to observers. Even some passionate advocates of equality have conceded that this is not an overwhelming concern of the general public. R. H. Tawney’s landmark book, Equality, condemned the “violent contrasts” of economic inequality in England and the “sharp disparities of circumstance and education” to which they led, as well as other social evils he perceived—and yet he saw no groundswell among the English populace for equality. On the contrary, he declared that there was in England a “cult of inequality as a principle and an ideal,” that inequality was “hallowed by tradition and permeated by pious emotions,” that even the poor had a “tenderly wistful interest in the vacuous doings of the upper ten thousands,”17 toward whom they should presumably be feeling bitter resentment instead.
More recently, Professor Ronald Dworkin has proclaimed that “a more equal society is a better society even if its citizens prefer inequality.”18 This is at least a tacit admission that issues of equality arouse no such passion in the general public as among the intelligentsia. That is one of the reasons why vast inequalities of political power must be created in pursuit of economic equality. The only sure winners are those who exalt themselves as the arbiters of the fates of millions.
“Equality” Promoting Inequality
The casual assumption that the ideology of equality in theory promotes a more equal society in fact is not only unproven but is a social time bomb. A more unequal and more embittered society can result instead.
One of the ways of promoting the ideology of equality is by defining various inequalities of performance out of existence. Thus cultural relativism refuses to classify some societies as civilized and others as backward or primitive. Whether comparing nations or subgroups within nations, cultural relativists proclaim all cultures and subcultures to be “equally valid” and entitled to “equal respect,” as we “celebrate diversity.” Immigrants, for example, are encouraged to continue speaking their foreign languages and preserving their separate cultures, while those black Americans who speak “black English” are likewise encouraged to continue to do so.
Cultures have consequences. Ignoring those consequences while proclaiming equality as a self-justifying ideal does nothing to benefit the less fortunate, and in fact tends to freeze them into their backward position while the rest of the world moves forward. The bitter irony is that all this philosophical self-indulgence widens the empirical gap in the name of narrowing it. Hispanics who speak Spanish earn lower incomes than Hispanics who speak English. Poor countries that cling to their cultural ways remain poor, while those that seize upon the things that produced wealth elsewhere tend to become wealthy themselves—Japan being the classic example. No nation was more painfully conscious of being technologically backward than Japan in the nineteenth century. That is what spurred them on to overtake the West. To have defined their backwardness out of existence would have been to condemn them to unnecessary poverty and thus to contribute to more economic inequality in the world than we have today.
While the children of affluent and well-educated parents can usually meet high educational standards better than the children of the less fortunate, lowering those standards, or discarding them completely, in the name of equality is likely to be especially harmful to the children of the poor and disadvantaged. Children from the homes of educated people with the money to afford books, computers, and other accessories of learning are likely to acquire much fundamental information and behavioral norms at home, even if both are neglected in their schools. It is the less fortunate for whom the public school classroom may be the only place in which they are likely to get the basic intellectual and social equipment that they will need for success as adults. Lowering the standards in the public schools may conceal disparities at the moment but is virtually certain to cause them to be greater in adulthood, at a point at which few can repair their deficiencies.
An even deadlier consequence of the quest for equality has been the development of a “non-judgmental” attitude toward beliefs and behavior. One of the most important social lessons of parents to their children in previous generations was to avoid people with bad behavior and not even to listen to them, for fear of being fatally misled. Today, schools not only spend more time on classroom discussions of social behavior, they do so non-judgmentally. This means that the ideas of delinquents and hoodlums are put on the same plane as the ideas of students raised to the strictest moral standards. Not only are the latter exposed to the ideas and experiences of the former, they are exposed in a setting where their overt rejection of such ideas and experiences would encounter the condemnation of the teacher. This is only one of many settings in which all people and all ideas are supposed to have “equal respect” so as not to threaten anyone’s “self-esteem.”
The only way to have “equal respect” is to have respect divorced from behavior and performance—which is to say, to have the word “respect” lose its meaning. One can dispense self-esteem as the Wizard of Oz dispensed substitutes for heart, courage, and brains. But printing any currency promiscuously destroys its value and there is no reason to doubt that the same principle applies to the currency of respect. Indeed, the transparent fraudulence of elaborate pretenses of respect are an added insult.
In a world where every society and every civilization has borrowed heavily from the cultures of other societies and other civilizations, everyone does not have to go back to square one and discover fire and the wheel for himself, when someone else has already discovered it. Europeans did not have to continue copying scrolls by hand after the Chinese invented paper and printing. Malaysia could become the world’s leading rubber-producing nation after planting seeds taken from Brazil. Yet the equal-respect “identity” promoters would have each group paint itself into its own little corner, with its own insular culture, thus presenting over all a static tableau of “diversity,” rather than the dynamic process of competition on which the progress of the human race has been based for thousands of years.
There is yet another way in which the mirage of equality promotes inequality in the real world. Ideological crusades in the name of equality promote envy, the principle victims of which are those doing the envying.
THE HIGH COST OF ENVY
Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, “social justice.” Under either name, it has costs as well as benefits. For some, envy can act as a spur to match the achievements or rewards of others currently more fortunate. This can happen in the case of individuals or in the case of whole nations, such as Japan, whose generations-long drive to catch up to the industrialized Western nations achieved success in the twentieth century. On the other hand, envy can also engender social strife, whose consequences include the possibility that the society as a whole can end up worse off, both materially and psychically, as a result of mutually thwarting activities, including mob violence and civil war. Among nations, a drive to achieve “a place in the sun” militarily
can end in disaster, as happened to Japan in the Second World War and to Germany in both world wars.
The first kind of envy—the more or less natural and potentially beneficial envy that spurs self-development and achievement—creates few incentives for third parties to try to mobilize and heighten it for their own benefit. It is the second kind of envy, expressed in hostility toward others, that is useful for third parties pursuing careers as politicians, group activists, or ideologues. It is this kind of envy which can have high costs to society at large and to the poor especially. It is not simply that the poor may suffer psychically from having less than others and from being encouraged to dwell on their current situation, rather than concentrating on improving it. The very terms of the discussion encourage them to attribute their less fortunate position to social barriers, if not political plots, and so to neglect the kinds of efforts and skills which are capable of lifting them to higher economic and social levels.
Poorer Groups
For the currently less fortunate members of society, the costs of envy can be especially high when it misdirects their conceptions and energies. Where poorer people are lacking in human capital—skills, education, discipline, foresight—one of the sources from which they can acquire these things are more prosperous people who have more of these various forms of human capital. This may happen directly through apprenticeship, advice, or formal tutelage, or it may happen indirectly through observation, reflection, and imitation. However, all these ways of advancing out of poverty can be short-circuited by an ideology of envy that attributes the greater prosperity of others to “exploitation” of people like themselves, to oppression, bias, or unworthy motives such as “greed,” racism, and the like. Acquisition of human capital in general seems futile under this conception and acquisition of human capital from exploiters, the greedy, and racists especially distasteful.