Equality of outcome8/5/2023 ![]() Meanwhile, the likelihood that a Black male would be incarcerated, which always exceeded the likelihood of a white male being incarcerated, rose from 13.4 percent in 1974 to 32.2 percent in 2001. It’s doubtful that police treat African American suspects more brutally than they did in the past, but the technology of police cameras has made police abuses much more difficult to sweep under the rug. Similarly, the Black Lives Matter movement highlights racial equity problems that are getting worse, or at least much harder to ignore. That would suggest growing income inequality is a more urgent problem than the deficit of economic opportunity. during the steady increase in income inequality over the past four decades it merely stayed kind of bad. (See my 2012 New Republic article, “ The Mobility Myth.”) But economic mobility didn’t worsen in the U.S. mobility ranked behind that of most other countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. A 1992 paper by the economist Gary Solon showed that the United States enjoyed significantly less economic mobility than economists had previously assumed and that, far from being a Horatio Alger-ish inspiration to the world, U.S. But at least as measured by income, opportunity doesn’t appear to have diminished over the past few decades. No sensible person would question that improving equality of opportunity is an important liberal goal. And Donald Trump’s presidency demonstrated that appeals to racial prejudice were hardly a dead letter. Even after Occupy’s protest in Zuccotti Park, my friends at liberal foundations were telling me their funders steered them away from disparities in income to focus instead on disparities in opportunity. The right’s demonization of the Biden administration over its emphasis on equity suggests that policies to encourage greater equality of outcomes remain at least somewhat controversial. As late as 2018, a majority of voters opposed the Black Lives Matter movement, but an accumulation of horrific news stories about police killings of African Americans compelled the majority to recognize that while, yes, all lives mattered, Black lives were in particular peril from policing practices, and required particular attention. But that started to change in 2011 with the Occupy movement’s powerful equity slogan, “We are the 99 percent.” A few years later, the equity slogan “Black Lives Matter” had a similar galvanizing effect. For many years, Democrats were afraid to argue too openly for greater equality of outcomes. The equity argument lost political support starting in the 1970s because of resistance to affirmative action programs, Ronald Reagan’s demonization of welfare, and a property-tax revolt that evolved into a full-scale rebellion against progressive income taxation. He said Pullman was “as greedy as a horse leech.” Eugene Debs didn’t complain that George Pullman provided insufficient opportunity for railway workers to advance within the Pullman Car Company. Dismal working conditions were the main reason, but workers also recognized that the robber barons, in amassing great wealth relative to everyone else, were accumulating too much power. Yet the Gilded Age (unlike our own) ushered in an era of often-violent class warfare. That’s a stark difference from the past 40 years, when median income has mostly stagnated. ![]() ![]() Large disparities in economic circumstance have always been judged a departure from the Declaration of Independence’s claim that all men are created equal, regardless of whether these disparities arose from unequal opportunity.ĭuring the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, for instance, opportunity-with the usual, grim exceptions for women, for African Americans, and for other groups denied full participation-increased across the board, a fact reflected in rising incomes. Conservatives try to argue that calling for greater equity represents some sort of departure from American ideals, but throughout history, Americans have always recognized the importance of both equity and equality. ![]()
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