Don’t Lower the Ceiling, Raise the Floor

Threading the needle between equity and equality

Photo credit Henrik Sorensen

In left-wing political circles, talk of equity — the equality of outcome — is all the rage these days. The traditional American ideal of equality — the equality of opportunity and equal treatment under the law — is falling out of favor. A new generation has come of age, having lived their formative years through the Great Recession, ballooning income inequality, a stagnating middle class, the rise of the gig economy, and the most polarized political atmosphere since the Civil War. Now, they are adults in a landscape of diminishing purpose and opportunity. Several decades of over-parenting and lies, like “you are special” and “you can be anything you want to be”, are marinating in the decline of organized religion and meaningful employment, putrefying like leftover gas station sushi in a hot dumpster.

At the age their folks were owning homes, getting promotions at work, starting families, and forming healthy identities, many young people today are still living with their parents, working dead end jobs without benefits, and wondering who they are and where they fit in. They were told they needed college degrees, so they went out and became the most educated generation in American history. They also became the most indebted for their age, and the least confident that they would be better off than their parents — a belief that is backed up by the data. They live vicarious lives through the Internet, deluged in a warped reality of bad news and incentivized radicalism, convinced that the world has gone to hell and that the only thing left to do is burn it down and remake it anew.

All of this has left under-40s disillusioned with capitalism and liberalism. “Neoliberal” has become a pejorative term, and socialism in the West is enjoying a renaissance. History apparently never got the memo when Francis Fukoyama declared it to have ended, back in 1992. Even younger Republicans are open to levels of government social spending unimaginable to their predecessors. While Martin Luther King Jr is still grudgingly venerated, the colorblind universalism he stood for is now disdained, replaced by a politics of grievance that pits one group against another in a vicious battle to the death. In many circles, invoking the principles of reform or pragmatism have become the intellectual equivalent of wearing a propeller hat.

Source: Gallup

The debate between equality and equity is no longer an academic exercise taking place in grad schools and ivory towers — it is now being argued in earnest within public discourse. To be clear, equality is still much more popular across society, but the gap has shrunk, and the generational divides are stark. The young today do not seem to be growing out of their radicalism quite as thoroughly as the Boomers did after the 1960s, and it cannot be said with total confidence that equality will still be the prevailing view in 15-20 years.

While equity and equality present sharply different visions for society, there are areas of overlap. Rather than clashing, the proponents of these respective schools of thought might be better served by finding common ground and working together toward shared goals. In finding consensus, however, we must take the realities of public opinion into account. Splitting the difference between equity and equality simply will not do, because equity is the vision to which far fewer people subscribe. Equality of outcome is not an ideal on which society agrees — but equality of opportunity is widely considered a worthy goal, and has been for generations.

Even so, while we have made great strides over the decades, it remains a goal we have not yet fully achieved, and an ideal we have not yet lived up to. This is a key point. Advocating equality is not simply a ruse for backward-looking “old man yells at cloud” obstructionism that would have society remain the same in the face of needed progress. Bold and ambitious changes are needed to realize a true equality of opportunity, which in turn would shrink many societal disparities and thereby move us in the direction of equity. To the minority who prefer equity, pursuing equality of opportunity can be seen as a first step, and one that will deliver some measure of the results they are after. Whatever one’s ideal vision of a well-formed society may be, the consensus position should be the establishment of equality of opportunity.

In exploring how best to achieve this goal, we must define two concepts. The first is lowering the ceiling — policies and ideas aimed at functionally capping how wealthy, successful, or powerful individual people can become. Some examples of lowering the ceiling in the economic realm are wealth taxes, or the idea that we ought to tax billionaires out of existence. In the cultural sphere, ideologies such as critical race theory (CRT) or so-called “anti-racism” racially essentialize entire swaths of society into a crude binary of oppressor/oppressed. Some, like Ibram X. Kendi with his proposal for an unelected Department of Anti-racism, even insist CRT practitioners be given sole authority to micromanage every aspect of life, in order to forcibly rebalance these scales according to the dictates of their belief system.

Similarly, factions within queer theory and radical branches of trans activism aspire to deconstruct the idea of biological sex to lower the “ceiling” of cisgender privilege. Though obviously not as deadly in practice, ideologically, this effort is reminiscent of the Stalinist or Maoist denouncements of the theory of evolution and genetics as capitalist lies — all because those models emphasize competition between individuals rather than a Marxist focus on cooperation and community.

This comparison is an excellent example of why this kind of enforced social equity can lead to disastrous consequences. Both regimes caused tens of millions of deaths by pushing agricultural policies rooted in the teachings of Trofim Lysenko, seeking to eliminate existing cultural practices and replace them with new ones that conformed with the approved dogmas — leading to widespread starvation. Even as famine spread due to this denial of traditional knowledge and material reality, farmers and scientists who dared to disagree with the approved theories were stripped of their social positions, shot, and/or sent to prison. In other words, we must be aware of how often attempts to lower the ceiling, to upend the so-called elite, are fundamentally zero-sum: where every gain for those at the bottom must be made at the expense of another, and those at the top are far too often assumed — incorrectly — to have both limitless resources and malevolent intent.

The second concept is raising the floor — policies and ideas aimed at elevating the minimum standards of living and dignity so that no one can fall below them. Raising the floor is not only more effective as a strategy to reach equality of opportunity, it also advances equity more than lowering the ceiling, in addition to being more politically achievable.

There are many ways to raise the floor. One is through universal basic income, where everyone gets equal and regular sums of money sufficient to alleviate extreme poverty. This would guarantee all people access to a modest but unconditional source of passive income that can be saved, spent, invested, and supplemented by work. Another way is through universal healthcare, as the exorbitant cost to the individual in our current system creates disparities that preclude equality of opportunity. The list goes on: ensuring all people have access to clean drinking water, broadband infrastructure, grocery stores, public transportation, banking, and related resources; guaranteeing adequate access to police, fire departments, paramedics, and other first responders for all areas of society; making higher education more affordable, and enabling high schools and community colleges to offer free courses available to anyone for financial literacy, personal finances, home economics, handiness, computer literacy, and other practical and essential life skills.

Culturally, raising the floor in the pursuit of equality means reinvigorating the ideal of universal dignity, equal treatment, and equal opportunity, regardless of skin color, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sex, or sexuality. It means stressing the cruciality of viewing all people not as cogs in a collective or avatars for a group, but as individuals. Equity, by contrast, seems to demand heavy-handed top-down measures to openly favor certain identity groups over others — a path that can lead to disastrous consequences. Injustice will not be remedied by injustice, nor discrimination by discrimination. The way to break a negative cycle is not to reverse its flow, but to transcend it. We must foster the ethos that we are all human, that we all gain more working together than at each other’s throats.

As with so much in politics, the equity/equality debate has become wrapped up in our culture wars. Culture wars are where ideas and discourse go to die. They have a way of sucking the oxygen out of the room as they slither into your head like brain-eating amoebas. They are a distraction from what politics are supposed to be about: governance, problem-solving, and tackling the big issues of the day. The irony is that all the infighting they engender prevents progress on cultural issues, too. There is something refreshing, even wholesome, about the idea of working together with others to solve tangible problems through consensus. Once put in place, a higher floor with more robust equality would alleviate much of the abject want, misery, resentment, and frustration that fuels our culture wars. A healthier, more secure population, with less stress and greater access to opportunities, is less likely to get stuck in the politics of blame, identitarianism, and division. Just the mere act of pursuing these policies and ideals would have culturally therapeutic effects.

Many younger people in society profess to be interested in politics, when in fact they are only plugged into the culture wars. This is like thinking you are a philosopher because you attend toga parties. Once you refocus your political priorities on achieving quantifiable concrete results through compromise, you immediately realize how diseased most of politics is, and how much healthier it could be. Equality is not a project that everyone in society will agree on, but it is one that enough can agree on to enact in due time, and to channel our energy into a more positive, productive, and cooperative effort instead of perpetuating a zero-sum game. Equality, unlike equity, has a proven track record of success, and with more unified backing, it can achieve so much more.

We cannot change hearts and minds through legislation. What we can do is help give everyone a fair shake at success through access to a higher level of resources and a renewal of our commitment to equal treatment and dignity for all. The downstream effects would be profound. Once we sufficiently raise the floor, we will have finally made good on our promise of true equality of opportunity, shrinking many of the disparities tearing society apart, dialing down the worst of the culture wars, and threading the needle between equality and equity.

A version of this piece was originally published in Queer Majority in 2022. You can read the original here.

See also: “Global Basic Income: Ending World Poverty Now”

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