SOME PROBLEMS OF EQUALITY

...In theory, egalitarian policy would have to side with the newcomers, unless the incumbents can prove their argument that their contribution to society is so important that the rights of newcomers must be abridged...

...Consequently, more equality means, at least for me, that no person should have an income of less than 60 to 70 percent of the society's median, however income is defined...

...Also, many Americans are probably more concerned with equity than with equality...

...Here, equity and equality would coincide, for while everyone would earn the same income in a completely egalitarian society, equity could be provided by reducing the number of hours worked, particularly in SOME PROBLEMS OF EQUALITY jobs requiring great exertion...

...In practice, however, the decision is arrived at politically, sometimes favoring the newcomers, as in most changing neighborhoods, where they pay inflated prices for their rise in status...

...This issue is not limited to the university or to meritocracies generally...

...For example, equity would demand that a family with three children receive more income than a childless couple, but while a completely egalitarian society might make the same decision, it could also argue that if people have equal incomes, they can then decide to spend it on children or on whatever childless couples spend their income on instead...

...that given the small number of multimillionaires in American society, more would be lost by reducing people's ability to strive for the maximum than by expropriating most of the income of a few millionaires—although this does not negate the desirability and urgency of requiring the rich to pay higher taxes than anyone else...

...Also, equity is a subjective concept, because what people deem to be fair depends on their own evaluation of their effort as compared with that of others, and few people would downgrade their own exertions...

...It is perhaps possible to develop operational indicators of exertion to be used for public policy, such as number of hours worked, and equity would then demand, as it does now, that people who work longer hours receive more pay...

...Such an assumption is not realistic, however, for if equality of results were guaranteed, some people might work less hard...

...In this respect, equity is more desirable than equality...

...If all incomes were equal, it is doubtful that the most unpleasant and taxing jobs would be filled, and if all power were equalized, it is doubtful that any decisions could be made and any public activities could proceed...

...but there would be little equity to this arrangement if the physicist had been supported by government stipends all through his or her training period and did not make sacrifices to achieve that training for which equity demanded that he or she be recompensed later...

...it usually attaches to groups and roles...

...In addition, a corporate manager who can decide how many people will be hired or fired and where a plant will be located will always have more influence with a president, congressman, or mayor than one of his employees...

...Equity judgments thus require agreement about the major values of the society...

...no person should be so powerless that he or she has no control whatsoever over his or her own life, and no person should be so powerful that he or she can force others to do his or her bidding without taking these others into account...

...As such it differs from equality of results, which ignores the concept of effort and assumes that everyone is entitled to equal rewards regardless of effort, or rather, that everyone will exert equal effort because of equal results...

...Equality and equity both have virtues and vices, but equality is deficient without equity, and equity is deficient without equality...

...equity takes individual conditions into consideration more than equality...

...ble with the division of labor, with filling unpleasant jobs, and with economic efficiency generally...

...Most advocates of meritocracy fail to make this distinction, and in fact do not even consider that merit can be defined in different ways...

...This, however, assumes that the society is not interested in encouraging fertility...

...in a society that was not able or willing to stress scientific innovation, presumably the garbage man would get a higher salary...

...Consequently, they argue, it is wrong to suggest that X percent of jobs in a firm or university ought to be reserved for blacks or Y percent for women, particularly if this means that people who are not qualified will be hired...

...In theory, shirkers could be punished with job loss or income reduction, as they are in an equitable society, but in practice this would award a great deal of power to those people who decided who was shirking, with obvious dangers of regimentation and the possibility that people who did not get along with the decision-maker would be punished as shirkers...

...This may not even be undesirable, as long as the manager is elected by or is otherwise responsive to his or her constituents, but these should include not only the company's stockholders but also its employees, who must have some degree of worker control, its customers, and the general public insofar as it is affected by company decisions...

...Therefore, if merit is to be defined in terms of performance, the relevant qualifications are those of teaching performance in the classroom, not the possession of a researcher's credentials, for no one has yet proved that Ph.D.s are better teachers than M.A.s...

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...Equality between occupations is probably impossible in a society based on a complicated division of labor, but more equality is desirable both between and within occupations, for over 90 percent of the jobs paying $15,000 or more a year are held by white males...

...This should not be a matter of great debate, but opponents of "affirmative action" and quotas have recently argued, and with considerable passion, that in America resources should be allocated to people on their individual merits and not on the basis of their membership in some group, particularly one that is defined by ascription rather than achievement...

...With respect to political power, the achievement of more equality through the setting of floors and ceilings is impossible, since power is neither quantifiable nor an individual attribute...

...and insofar as the newcomers can affect the teaching program or the intellectual climate, the levels of both will be lowered, at least from the perspective of the incumbents...

...sometimes favoring the incumbents, as seems to be the case at least in private high-status universities...

...Equality has to do with sameness of results, while equity, or fairness, concerns the relationship between one person's work or other effort and the reward for that effort, and another person's effort and reward...

...Another problem of equity is that it requires many more judgments about what is equitable, whereas equality of results is more easily administered...

...If campaign expenditures were nationalized, as I suggested elsewhere, then the power to influence political candidates would be removed from the rich, but it would not necessarily be equalized...

...Some people will be deficient even on the basis of performance, although such a judgment should not be made until on-the-job training is provided for them...

...These are fundamental questions for egalitarian thought, and I can answer them only in very general terms...

...The major problem with the concept of equity therefore centers around the idea and measurement of effort...

...While the theoretical physicist may be important in pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge, the garbage man is more important in guaranteeing everyone's good health, including that of the physicist...

...Altering this statistic may take some time, and it must proceed more quickly in those occupations where total employment is rising, but even though more equality of results must be accompanied by equality of performance, this cannot be achieved by limiting women and blacks to inferior jobs...

...No one has yet computed the size of this minimum, although a long series of Gallup polls asking respondents how much they need to get along in their present community have shown that this minimum is about 70 percent of the median income, except that the poor, whose wants are more modest, have generally said they could get by with an income equivalent to 60 percent of that median...

...Conversely, the income ceiling ought to be determined on two other grounds...

...We print it with the publisher's kind permission...

...In real life, physicists earn more than garbage men because their work is considered more important by those who make public decisions, and because physicists have, until recently, been a scarce resource whereas the potential supply of garbage men far outweighs the demand...

...For example, defenders of meritocracy in the university argue that university standards would be lowered by hiring unqualified colleagues, but qualification is almost always defined by credentials, by having a Ph.D...

...Because power is primarily a group attribute, more political equality in fact requires the internal democratization of all groups, so that their members can have a greater say about the actions of their leaders...

...Moreover, such a society would need to be heavily regimented to prevent new inequalities from arising, and it would have to be static, straining toward a totally egalitarian end-state above all else...

...Putting it this way does not detract from the importance of equality as a goal, but it makes it possible to ask how much equality is feasible, and at what costs for the achievement of other goals...

...The university—or rather, the graduate school—illustrates the limited relevance of credentials, for although it trains its graduate students to become researchers, most Ph.D.s, whatever their field, do little research after graduation and perform almost entirely as teachers...

...Moreover, some kinds of work require more effort than others, so that equity would mean inequality for people whose jobs required less effort...

...Needless to say, unqualified people should not be hired, but qualification must be measured by performance and not by credentials...

...This training should be possible for almost any job, even in a university, and in many cases, it need take only a fraction of the time now required by prejob education...

...it comes up in changing neighborhoods and is generic to implementing more equality, for it requires a comparison of the benefits (for the newcomers) and the costs (for the incumbents) of egalitarian policies...

...People who fail to perform adequately after such training ought not be allowed to stay in a meritocratic institution such as the university, but until merit is measured by performance, a university cannot even claim to be meritocratic...

...Equity requires some degree of equality, for inequality is unfair...

...This consideration alone makes equity an important concept...

...The Subjects of Equality THE SUBJECTS of equality, the people or groups for whom more equality is desirable, are, in the most general sense, those who are now unequal, which I would interpret to mean unequal with respect to income and power...

...But more political equality also requires some equalization of power between groups, so that consumers do not always lose out to producers, or the poor to the rich...

...If effort is defined in terms of the outcome of exerted effort, equity would have more income going to those who are more productive or more important to the economy or to society...

...or rather, of the median income for a particular position in the life-cycle, and in the case of families, of the median income by family size...

...Both criteria can only be evaluated by economic analysis, and it may turn out that there ought to be no ceiling...

...This means, in practice, that all groups exerting some power ought to be led by elected leaders, chosen by their members and by those nonmembers whose lives are affected by that group, including not only corporations but also governmental agencies and voluntary associations...

...It is possible to establish total electoral equality, giving every person one vote and requiring that person to vote or cast a blank ballot, but this is only one kind of political equality and not the most important 410 kind by any means...

...To be sure, if faculty with poorer credentials are hired or students with a poorer educational background are admitted to a university, "standards" will decline...

...Much depends here on how equality is defined and what a society deems to be equal...

...In terms of equality of results, this simply means the continuation of the traditional discrimination, albeit for a different reason...

...Equality and Equity FINALLY, one must distinguish between the goals of equality and those of equity...

...Effort so defined is difficult to measure, for it is ultimately a personal attribute, and operational indicators of effort, physical or mental, are hard to find and to compare...

...The real issue, at least from the point of view of pragmatic social policy, is more equality, that is, how much present levels of inequality of income and power should be reduced...

...One is John Rawls's well-argued principle that above-the-median inequality is desirable only when it helps to reduce below-the-median inequality...

...But for the newcomers, who will have a chance to teach and learn at higher intellectual levels than before, the standards will be raised, and the real issue is whose perspectives are to be favored...

...but these criteria have little to do with equity...

...Moreover, when race and sex have been used for over a century as criteria for not hiring people, it is hypocritical to argue that they should not be used as criteria for hiring because this would be "reverse discrimination...

...Aside from the fact that in all firms or universities, unqualified people are sometimes hired because they have political influence or are in the right place at the right time, the distinction between ascribed and achieved characteristics strikes me as irrelevant...

...In theory, a society could decide that the benefits are worth the costs and that incumbents will have to learn to adjust to what is for them a decline in standards and also in status...

...Some of the critics of equality have made this point, hoping thereby to end any discussion of equality, but complete equality is a spurious issue...

...All this probably means that the federal government must become more powerful than all other groups if only to be able to implement greater equality among them...

...but when such com 412 promises are not possible, the group with greater political influence tends to win out...

...The problem here is the measurement of exertion...

...A manager's influence must be an outcome of group decisions...

...I suppose one can establish some general thresholds and ceilings...

...The continued sanctity of the work ethic suggests that they are reluctant to provide equality of results to those people who, for one reason or another, do not exert productive effort by working, even if their unemployment is not their own fault...

...Conversely, more equality would itself bring about greater equity, and once major inequalities were removed, individual cases that might require some new inequalities in the name of equity could then be dealt with more easily...

...The major defect of complete equality is the defect of all single-value conceptions: if equality is the all-encompassing goal, then all other goals, regardless of their desirability or necessity, become lower in priority, and no society can function by pursuing one goal above all others...

...What degree of political equality can be achieved in a large heterogeneous society that must inevitably be run by bureaucracies, and by political leaders who must represent—and thus in some ways be more unequal than—the citizens in whose names they act...

...A 100 percent tax on income beyond a certain point may be undesirable, but that does not rule out a 75 to 80 percent tax...

...but while that argument is politically persuasive, it is difficult to prove...

...To be sure, women differ from men with respect to their role in procreation, but equality of income and power, and occupational qualifications, have nothing to do with procreation, and the ma jor ascribed characteristic of women is therefore irrelevant, as is skin color in the case of blacks and other racial minorities...

...However, an egalitarian society—unlike an equitable one —must find methods of controlling shirking...

...And if the institution is publicly supported, it is particularly dubious for incumbents to suggest that prior occupancy justifies permanent control over standards...

...How much wealth may be passed on to the next generation through inheritance...

...Thus, greater equity could produce more inequality, for people who do not work would get less, although if equity were measured also HERBERT J. GANS by the effort taken to find work, then equality of results would also be an equitable solution...

...it might reside in those politicians and bureaucrats who oversee the expenditure of campaign funds...

...Of course, from another perspective, this problem is a virtue...

...While this is undeniably a disadvantage of a more egalitarian society, it seems unavoidable, and the net benefits in greater equality for the large number will outweigh the costs of a more centralized government, provided of course that this government is restricted in its own efforts to amass more power by HERBERT J. GANS a pervasive system of checks and balances and by frequent elections...

...they want society to be fair, not equal...

...Thus, the physicist with a light teaching load who did no research might earn considerably less than the garbage man, although this would by no means be unreasonable since the former was obviously shirking...

...Importance is even harder to ascertain because it requires answering the question, Important for what...

...The problem is how to define "productive" and "important...

...To be sure, some teachers should be hired for their research performance so that research will be conducted, and some teaching is better done by researchers, particularly that involving training and practice in research...

...And similar questions must be raised about minimum and maximum amounts of wealth: What should be done with the undistributed profit and other wealth of the large corporations, and with the old fortunes that still play such a central role in the American economy...

...Of course, equity can also be defined in terms of the amounts of training required for a particular effort, as it tends to be in America, so that by this criterion the physicist would earn more than the garbage man...

...The new faculty may teach at lower levels of abstraction, and the new students may sometimes be unable to comprehend what the incumbent faculty is teaching...

...No person should have less income than is necessary to pay for the minimal goods and services considered essential for the American standard of living— for the standard package, as Lee Rainwater puts it—or than is necessary for him or her to be a fully participating member of American society...

...The other ground is pragmatic economic efficiency: What is the lowest maximum at which people continue to be willing to do unpleasant or highly responsible work or take needed investment and other risks...

...surely the loan shark plays a productive role in the economy, but his rewards are not determined by equity...

...A completely egalitarian society strikes me as so utopian as to be beyond policyoriented discussion...

...Thus, inequity occurs when one person works harder than another but gets less reward, and equity would presumably equalize rewards on the basis of similar effort...

...Sometimes, compromise solutions are possible, such as providing remedial training to the newcomers or segregating them so that the incumbents can operate at their accustomed level...

...But until the defenders of meritocracy broaden their definition of merit and judge it in terms of performance, they are only defending the right to have their credentials serve as the prime indicator of qualification...

...What degree of income equality is compatiThis article, excerpted from a longer analysis of the problems of equality, is part of the author's forthcoming work, More Equality, copyright 1973 by Herbert J. Gans, and to be published by Pantheon Books, Inc., this fall...

...If equity is defined in terms of the willingness to exert effort, however—as it ought to be—then incomes should be based on that exertion, and the shirker, whether physicist or garbage man, should earn less...

...or SOME PROBLEMS OF EQUALITY the right kind of Ph.D., and not by classroom performance...