It seems that when a debate about equality arises, especially when gender or race is discussed, income becomes the most relevant measure to determine if there is success in movement towards equality.
Why is income considered a better measure of equality, than say happiness, fulfillment, opportunity? I know that the latter items are more subjective, but do Warren Buffett or Bill Gates have more rights than me simply because they make more money than I do? I don’t think so, so why is higher income considered to be correlated with access to more liberty?
I thought you were going to suggest that income is not a very good measure of wealth.
These two are often confused, except by the wealthy.
I could be Warren Buffett, have a bad year, lose a few billion, and still be pretty wealthy.
Or here’s another idea. Amass a billion dollars in equities. Borrow 50 million against the equities, paying the note juice and paying expenses with the 50 million.
Income: negative.
Wealth: still close to a billion.
How come when discussing equality income is the most common measurement? Because most people don’t understand wealth.
There is an easy way of measuring whether the poor are happier than the rich. If this were true, people would know it, and the rich, to be happier, would give up their money.
As for liberty and freedom, though both have the same rights - theoretically - the rich have a lot more places they can go and things they can do. For the most extreme example, Bill Gates wants to help people, and he has the wealth to be able to. A poorer person couldn’t do nearly as much.
I’m frankly astounded by this, and would love it if you could expand a little. Certainly the basic rights as, say, a US citizen as enumerated in the Constitution are (in theory) not dependent on wealth. But surely you’re not suggesting that money cannot buy privileges, social and political, that are not accessible by the poor?
So when you hear debates about equality do you believe that is meant to be “income equality”? I don’t, and I don’t believe that MLK or the founders of the ERA saw it in those terms either.
Income, in the US, is highly correlated with a lot of other really important things- access to health care, ability to live in a safe neighborhood, ability to send one’s kids to a quality school, freedom to remove onself from a bad or abusive situation, etc. Income is a pretty useful proxy indicator for social inclusion as a whole.
In another society-- say a more socialist oriented one where healthcare, education and safety were not so deeply tied to income-- would probably need a different measure. But in the US, it works.
This does come up pretty often in international development, where GDP was once what people focused on. The flaw in this is that it doesn’t really show what is happening on a household level, so people started looking at GDP per capita. This was well and good, until they realized that you can have a great GDP per capital, and have a massively impoverished country with a tiny elite, so measures of income distribution started to become important. Then they realized that inequality on a household level is just as important as inequality on a national level- if you’ve raised household incomes but only the men are benefiting, you’ve left half the country out. So gender got measured. Somewhere in there, people decided that health, education, and a bunch of other stuff made sense to measure seperately, as it’s valuable and completely possible to improve a health system or education system without a change in the overall financials. And now, people are trying to figure out how to factor in culture, community, family cohesion, art, and all of those ephemeral things that add immense value to people’s lives but would be missed by existing measures.
But back to the OP, in the US income is a pretty good indication of how much opportunity you had in the past, and how much freedom you’ll have in the future.
Is it the end-all, be-all of equality discussions? No, and nobody is suggesting that.
By the same measure, it is silly to make the false equivalence that since it not the sort of strawman-like all-encompassing statistic you may prefer that it should be considered entirely irrelevant instead.
Yeah, it’s because income is much easier to objectively measure and get a somewhat meaningful result.
Consider what would be necessary if you wanted to measure “health”. What sort of units would you use? Healthons? Are diagnosed medical conditions worth a certain number of negative healthons? E.g. everyone starts with 100 healthons, and if they have diabetes, they lose 10 healthons. If they have any missing organs, they lose 5 healthons for each organ with a “bonus” of minus 20 healthons if they have lost both of a twinned organ (e.g. both kidneys). A BMI beyond a certain point is worth negative 1 healthon for each pound that the person is over. Or are we going to boil it down to a black/white “Is person healthy?” question? You lose a lot of subtlety with that - a lot of people have a minor or trivial medical condition that doesn’t affect their life much - I knew a guy who found out he had a rare blood condition when he tried to join the Army. It didn’t affect his day to day functioning - it was just this item on the background check that was marked “true”. Does that mean this guy is automatically “unhealthy”?
Measuring education is problematic because in order to measure it in a reasonable way, you generally have to go by formal credentials. You’re going to under-rate the really smart, self-educated folks who dropped out of college to start their own companies and over-rate the average, maybe a little below average people who bullshat their way through high school and got through college by being a great athlete and/or sleeping with instructors. One seemingly obvious way to get around that would be to administer exams to everyone, but where are you going to get this exam from?
There is plenty of other equality to worry about - voting rights, rights to not be excluded from certain neighborhoods and certain stores, equality of education (not that we have it, but we’re closer than 50 years ago.) In MLKs day income inequality was partially caused by job discrimination. And incomes were far more equal in the '50s than today, with CEOs making lots of money but not obscene amounts of money.
Measuring health in terms of life expectancy is not that hard. As for education, yeah there are some people who do well dropping out (though having rich parents helps) but on average education pays, and the impact can be measured.
I’m not that interested in the ERA, and Martin Luther King was operating within an unique and historically unusual situation (US racial segregation) that shouldn’t really shape the way we think about what ‘equality’ means more generally.
In most cultural situations, whether it’s the 1970s Soviet Union, modern-day Niger, or 16th century England, the most reliable indicator of social equality is going to be income equality.
If you look at your own life and think, “What contributes to my day to day well being”, how much money you make is probably going to be much more significant than whether or not you have the right to vote.
In developing countries, measuring health is a pretty mature field and done quite well-- doctors per unit of population, infectious disease rates, maternal mortality rates, infant and child mortality rates, etc. These are straightforward enough to obtain from public records and statistically valid household surveys.
Education can be tougher, but a mix of different attendance rates is typically where people start.
That depends entirely on what the people who do get to vote are like. There’s a reason black people were willing to boycott the bus lines in Montgomery, Alabama - and cost themselves a substantial amount of money in the process.