It occurs to me that there's a big problem with the concept of equity: that is there certain things that I don't know you can actually correct for.
As an example, the difference between the childhood of a child with two engaged caring parents and a dismissive single parent is so large as to be almost impossible to get past, even if you compensate for the difference in wealth that sometimes occurs. A caring parent has such a positive effect that it's extremely arguable you can't put a dollar value on that, but more on that in just a moment.
So let's say that you have two kids, one of them was born of a single parent crackhead who neglects them other than to abuse them, and the other was born of an intact family that is loving but is also poor so that we're correcting for wealth. The literature strongly suggests that the latter is going to be overwhelmingly better off than the former.
Once you have that fundamental inequity, the social engineers of the world would propose that you can cause it to disappear by spending more time and more government money on the child of a crackhead. Another hand, there's an archetype of the rich but neglectful father, who thinks that they can make things better by throwing money at their child. In the archtypical story, the neglected child may spend all the money, but is not improved by it. Eventually that child ends up addicted to drugs, or wrapping their Lamborghini around a hydro Pole, or otherwise just becoming a loser. And there is some truth to this archetype, typically the wealth of a wealthy individual is gone within three generations. And to be clear, sometimes this is just because the wealthy person is misusing the money and not spending it on things that are going to be helpful for the child, but I'm certain that there are plenty of situations where the Rich father is spending the money on tutoring and child care and all that other stuff that we are told is supposed to make two people from the same economic sphere who nonetheless have wildly different backgrounds equal.
So if we can take the rich, and they can't spend their way out of this problem, why exactly should the government be able to scale that up and magically make it work?
Seems to me that the answer is they can't. And according to the data, they aren't. There are places where the most money by far is spent in regions with significant problems with two parent households, and you end up with large amounts of money spent trying to teach kids to read and those kids end up illiterate.
I can't unsee it now, this idea that there's a major problem trying to government your way out of a culture problem. We have many examples from throat history of governments trying to stick their fingers into the lives of people who aren't doing the thing that the government wants them to do, and they can be well meaning, but incompetent.
That would be why around the world religion or ideology end up being so important. The government can't actually force you to love your children, but a strong ideology can give you reasons to look at the world through lens or your children are important. Confucianism is one of three powerful ideological forces in China even today, and it is the guiding reason that their society looks the way it does. The CCP might want things one way or another, but ultimately it is this secular ideology that nonetheless convinces people of how they ought to live.
Some people may point to equality between men and women as an example of where the government was able to step in and make things better. Something like equality between men and women is complicated because while it is true the government intervened to assist with that, is actually the civilization ideology of liberalism which allowed it to be successful. The government then comes in and tries to assist with the thing the civilization was already trying to do and then takes credit for it in the end. There have been similar attempts in other areas of the world, and when the Taliban recently took over Afghanistan again, the first thing sitting in the dumpster was all of the gender studies textbooks. The culture of Afghanistan simply wasn't compatible with Western liberalism.
Similarly, contrast efforts intended to reduce they used tobacco, which were largely successful to efforts intended to reduce the use of marijuana which were largely unsuccessful. In one case, the culture kind of wanted to quit smoking anyway, but in the other case the culture wanted to smoke marijuana. So when the state sees a reduction in smoking, and a large increase in pot smoking and so legalizes pot, in both cases they come around after the fact and claim that they've made a change when in reality the change was sort of forced upon them as much as society. If people wanted to keep smoking, it's highly possible that they would.
So essentially what we have here is a good example of where equality is not equity, but that really equity would be counterproductive. When two people are separated by circumstance, upbringing, genetics, or even choice (I'm one of six kids, and the one thing that is perfectly clear from that point of view is that everyone gets a choice as to what they do with their lives) trying to implement equity simply isn't going to work. All you're going to do is take money from everyone and throw it into a black hole. And if you do that, not only do you fail at equity, but you're going to end up tearing everyone else down in the effort to complete your personal project.
As an example, the difference between the childhood of a child with two engaged caring parents and a dismissive single parent is so large as to be almost impossible to get past, even if you compensate for the difference in wealth that sometimes occurs. A caring parent has such a positive effect that it's extremely arguable you can't put a dollar value on that, but more on that in just a moment.
So let's say that you have two kids, one of them was born of a single parent crackhead who neglects them other than to abuse them, and the other was born of an intact family that is loving but is also poor so that we're correcting for wealth. The literature strongly suggests that the latter is going to be overwhelmingly better off than the former.
Once you have that fundamental inequity, the social engineers of the world would propose that you can cause it to disappear by spending more time and more government money on the child of a crackhead. Another hand, there's an archetype of the rich but neglectful father, who thinks that they can make things better by throwing money at their child. In the archtypical story, the neglected child may spend all the money, but is not improved by it. Eventually that child ends up addicted to drugs, or wrapping their Lamborghini around a hydro Pole, or otherwise just becoming a loser. And there is some truth to this archetype, typically the wealth of a wealthy individual is gone within three generations. And to be clear, sometimes this is just because the wealthy person is misusing the money and not spending it on things that are going to be helpful for the child, but I'm certain that there are plenty of situations where the Rich father is spending the money on tutoring and child care and all that other stuff that we are told is supposed to make two people from the same economic sphere who nonetheless have wildly different backgrounds equal.
So if we can take the rich, and they can't spend their way out of this problem, why exactly should the government be able to scale that up and magically make it work?
Seems to me that the answer is they can't. And according to the data, they aren't. There are places where the most money by far is spent in regions with significant problems with two parent households, and you end up with large amounts of money spent trying to teach kids to read and those kids end up illiterate.
I can't unsee it now, this idea that there's a major problem trying to government your way out of a culture problem. We have many examples from throat history of governments trying to stick their fingers into the lives of people who aren't doing the thing that the government wants them to do, and they can be well meaning, but incompetent.
That would be why around the world religion or ideology end up being so important. The government can't actually force you to love your children, but a strong ideology can give you reasons to look at the world through lens or your children are important. Confucianism is one of three powerful ideological forces in China even today, and it is the guiding reason that their society looks the way it does. The CCP might want things one way or another, but ultimately it is this secular ideology that nonetheless convinces people of how they ought to live.
Some people may point to equality between men and women as an example of where the government was able to step in and make things better. Something like equality between men and women is complicated because while it is true the government intervened to assist with that, is actually the civilization ideology of liberalism which allowed it to be successful. The government then comes in and tries to assist with the thing the civilization was already trying to do and then takes credit for it in the end. There have been similar attempts in other areas of the world, and when the Taliban recently took over Afghanistan again, the first thing sitting in the dumpster was all of the gender studies textbooks. The culture of Afghanistan simply wasn't compatible with Western liberalism.
Similarly, contrast efforts intended to reduce they used tobacco, which were largely successful to efforts intended to reduce the use of marijuana which were largely unsuccessful. In one case, the culture kind of wanted to quit smoking anyway, but in the other case the culture wanted to smoke marijuana. So when the state sees a reduction in smoking, and a large increase in pot smoking and so legalizes pot, in both cases they come around after the fact and claim that they've made a change when in reality the change was sort of forced upon them as much as society. If people wanted to keep smoking, it's highly possible that they would.
So essentially what we have here is a good example of where equality is not equity, but that really equity would be counterproductive. When two people are separated by circumstance, upbringing, genetics, or even choice (I'm one of six kids, and the one thing that is perfectly clear from that point of view is that everyone gets a choice as to what they do with their lives) trying to implement equity simply isn't going to work. All you're going to do is take money from everyone and throw it into a black hole. And if you do that, not only do you fail at equity, but you're going to end up tearing everyone else down in the effort to complete your personal project.
@sj_zero
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt
That is a good read in this regard.
You can't have equality of outcomes unless all people are exactly the same. And since you can't bring people up to the highest level, you have to push everyone down to the lowest to acheive equality of outcomes.
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt
That is a good read in this regard.
You can't have equality of outcomes unless all people are exactly the same. And since you can't bring people up to the highest level, you have to push everyone down to the lowest to acheive equality of outcomes.
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