Another Argument for an Equitable Society
Chapter Three: Another Argument for an Equitable Society (from the Case for the Equitable Society — unpublished)
Why does it matter whether or not we have an equitable society?
This may seem a strange question. We have already pointed out that an equitable society would require putting pressures in place that pull people away from our innate need for hierarchal deference. That will require significant work. If we’re to undertake that work, we should be certain that the effort we put in produces an improvement worth the effort. To explore this, let’s look at the social benefits offered by unequal societies first, by examining several aspects of inequality from our past.
Traditional gender roles in western society, and increasingly in eastern as well, typically require that the man leave the home to work and the woman stay home to be the caregiver. In our modern sensitivities, many are suspicious of the idea that “separate roles” has a benefit, but in the interest of showing that we’ve considered the topic properly, we must point out that knowing a designated role that a member must play in society from as early as birth (hence, as soon as sex can be determined), allows members who work in that society to develop highly-skilled expertise over the course of a lifetime of learning.
Considering that it takes roughly a thousand hours at any particular task to become an expert at it, learning skills since birth can produce experts inside and outside the home earlier than might otherwise be achieved in a lifetime. In former times, this would have made quite a bit of sense. Specifically, when individuals were not expected to live past thirty, time is of the essence. Gaining expertise inside and outside the home sooner, by training earlier, would have helped perhaps at that time in history.
Today, wherein people live typically more than sixty years in the United States, there’s less of a rush and the benefit is smaller. What we have discovered in modern times is that when individuals are more drawn to a particular task, either because they are inherently good at it or if they just enjoy doing it, then they perform better at said task than others who are forced to do the tasks. By not enforcing specific gender roles from birth, we become less certain who will fulfill particular duties in society. This uncertainty is offset because specialization by motivation produces better, more efficient workers.
Slavery is another concept that we must treat with care. There’s a reason that slavery lasted for thousands of years, and even exists to some extent today. Were there no benefit to society from slavery, this would not be the case. To look at the benefit, we only have to look at the massive wealth that was generated in the Southern States of the United States. This money bought ships and ammunition to wage war against England and established the United States as a major world player. The reason is simple: humans are the most flexible “machines” that exist.
However, the necessity of wages limits the employment of humans toward doing certain work. Slavery removes that limitation. Enough free poor workers (and can workers who are forced without pay to do others’ bidding be anything but poor workers) can offset the cost of paid labor.
There’s a conundrum here. Any nation which institutes slave labor has a problem: slavery removes jobs from industry. In fact, in the United States, there used to be (when slavery was legal) two parallel labor markets for agriculture: full-time slave labor and part-time wage labor. This meant that the agricultural labor force outside of slavery was predominantly part-time. So even while outperforming other nations which had only paid labor, the job impact at home kept wage farm laborers in something we would recognize as a gig economy today. When we see slavery end, then we see labor unions rise from the ashes and for a brief moment in history, equity was on the horizon.
One perspective we might take away from the above is “so what?” Does it really matter if agricultural work is a gig economy? And why should we care if some are less fortunate than others?
National survival depends on us caring.
Nations with excessive inequality experience higher crime. This has been well studied. The safety of the members of society is related to the sense of equality among the members of that society. Case in point, consider the cost to keep people enslaved. How many sleepless nights after the Haitian revolution in 1804 did enslavers spend wondering whether the revolution would spread to the United States? How many uprisings happened among slaves in the United States, anyway?
Have you heard of the food riots in England and even in the United States? Women’s suffrage movement? There is nothing docile about people who occupy an inequitable position in society. Nations are toppled because of inequity, crime expands as mentioned early on in this text as well. In summation, inequality yields instability, and instability, as those of us witnessing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, yields economic ruin. A nation with high inequality is on borrowed time.
Unless that nation, like North Korea, can find enough support to lead an information campaign and convince the citizens that they have it better than anyone. Like in the Middle Ages before (and Nazi Germany among other examples), nations that control the message can control the people. But why should we care about that? If we look to examples of North Korea as an example of how to form nations, with their widespread hunger and poverty, then we must ask if that arrangement gives us an advantage over living outside of society. The answer is yes. Of course, even the most destitute civilization doesn’t relegate its citizens to dying of exposure (usually).
This is why such empires manage to continue.
But recall that North Korea has a 60% poverty rate, while the United States has roughly a 10% poverty rate at the time of writing this. This means for the average person, odds are that they will live in poverty in North Korea, but won’t in the United States. For an individual, the odds are simply better for a better life in a more equitable society. If we look at Norway, an even more equal society and the poverty rate is 0.40% at the time of writing this document. As one in a few hundred million individuals, it’s better for each individual person to live in a more equitable society, and better for that society’s stability.
This essay is part of a series. Search on the tag “equitable society” for related essays. The evolution of society should always be pushing forward, always toward the most equitable solution for us all. There is a way forward that doesn’t involve violence, but it may involve a reimagining of the world we must create together.
