Equality vs. Equity

 I did not know there was another tempest in a tea pot controversy between equality and equity until I read Matt Bruenig's The “Equality vs. Equity” Distinction Doesn’t Explain What Matters for Social Justice in Jacobin. Having read it, I agree with the writer, here is another example of academic language being used by people who have no understanding of its proper, limited usage. Bruenig has an illustration that explains it quite well for those having difficulty understanding words.

For those who can handle words and ideas, this is for you:

At times, people try to boil this move down into just being a linguistically novel way to advocate for equality of outcomes over equality of opportunity. Proponents of “equity” consistently reject this simplification and, from what I can tell, those proponents are actually correct to reject it. “Equity” is not used to promote any particular unit of equality — whether outcomes, opportunities, boxes, sight lines, luck-adjusted outcomes, primary goods, income, wealth, or capabilities — but is instead a word that you invoke any time you object to the unit of equality someone else is using, regardless of what, if any, your preferred alternative unit of equality is.

A good case of this I saw recently was when, back in COVID days, the United States Postal Service (USPS) announced that it would be sending four COVID tests to each household in the mail. In a wildly popular tweet, a prominent “equity” advocate said that this was a perfect case to illustrate why “equality” is so inferior to “equity.” They elaborated that this program was “equal” because it sent the same number of COVID tests to each household but “inequitable” because different households have different numbers of people in them.

Of course, in more natural language where we don’t keep flipping back and forth between two words, what you would say, using just “equality,” is that the USPS program was equal on a per-household basis but unequal on a per-person basis, and that, in the case of distributing diagnostic tests, the per-person basis is the more appropriate one.

The point that whether something is considered “equal” or not is sensitive to what unit you use to measure equality is a pretty introductory concept in egalitarian thought. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy spends a huge chunk of its article on egalitarianism detailing the issue. In egalitarian thought, it’s generally referred to as the “equality of what” question, which is also the title of a famous Amartya Sen lecture on the question from 1979. In the lecture, Sen rejects “utility” and Rawlsian “primary goods” in favor of his own “basic capabilities” as the best unit of equality.

In the law, equity means fairness. So, fairness in equality is determined by the unit of what is being equalized. None of this seems like a bad idea, does it?

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