The economy could use some unfairness |
There are a lot of reasons, some deserved and some not, for Americans' distrust of their institutions. Lately I have been thinking about one of the more counterintuitive ones: Our schools, governments and even employers are trying too hard to make things fair.
In so doing, they are not only setting themselves up for failure--and eventually mistrust--but they are also misunderstanding the galvanizing role that unfairness plays in a competitive economy.
Unfairness can be tempered but never eliminated. The decision of how much unfairness to tolerate is one for society as a whole to make, and we expect our institutions to enforce it. I fear that in the last decade or so, those institutions went too far in enforcing fairness without full buy-in from the public and at the expense of other values.
The first question is what fairness means. It certainly does not require that economic success be equally allocated and that people not be held back by things they cannot control. Some people are better at some things, some work harder, some are less neurotic. And of course a lot of people just get lucky. Where we are born and the family we are born into make an enormous difference. Parents who invest more in their kids in terms of time and resources give them a big advantage. This has never been fair, but has always been true.
None of this is an argument against institutions intervening to stop........