Today I read an article at Time magazine by Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist, who talks about the liberal and conservative definition of fairness. He discussed the difference between Mitt Romney's approach to the idea of fairness and President Obama's reference to the idea of fairness. Past the zest a l'orange, I have a few points to make about Haidt's article, to fill in some of the things left unsaid.
Haidt begins this discussion by asking us to name the one who uttered a quote:
So guess which man said, “At the heart of this country, its central idea is the idea that in this country, if you’re willing to work hard, if you’re willing to take responsibility, you can make it if you try”?
The answer is Obama, but it could just as well have been Romney. Both men try to establish their credibility by showing that their family embodies the American Dream. Both men extol the virtues of hard work, self-sacrifice and devoted parenting. The only difference is that for Obama, the government was a crucial partner at every step, giving his grandfather the GI Bill to pay for college and a Federal Housing Administration loan to buy a house and giving his mother a variety of grants and scholarships to pay for her education. For Obama, the government offers a helping hand, making the American Dream accessible to anyone willing to work for it. For Romney, a good government hangs back and lets people succeed or fail on their own merits.
The quote that Haidt quizzes us on is one that, to a lot of Americans, defines fairness, defines what it means when we get a "fair shake". If we're willing to work hard, if we're willing to take responsibility, we can make it, if we try. Or, at least, get a reasonable shot.
Haidt discusses three definitions for fairness: fairness as proportionality, fairness as equality, and procedural fairness. Fairness as proportionality he defines as "people getting benefits in proportion to their contributions". In discussing this definition there is a graphic that correlates political persuasion with whether one agrees with three questions:
1. “Employees who work the hardest should be paid the most.”
2. "Ideally, all should have the same amount of money".
3. "[American society should] Create equal opportunity"
What the graphic shows is that for question #1, as you move across the spectrum from left to right, from very liberal to very conservative, agreement with this statement gradually increases. This is the statement that the "very conservative" people surveyed agree with the most. Regarding question #2, this is the idea that starts out with the least amount of support among the very liberal and the slope of the line drops sharply the further left you go. Regarding question #3, creating equal opportunity is the idea that the "very liberal" agree with the most, and it also has a negative slope as you move rightward on the political spectrum until it gets slight support from very conservative people.
All of us who frequent the Daily Kos website should not be surprised by the results of this survey. It largely affirms the beliefs that we have about people of different political persuasions. Haidt continues a discussion of fairness as proportionality by digging more into the gathering where Romney uttered his famous "47%" statement. He highlights one of the attendees using the phrase "killing ourselves" because they work so hard.
My question to you is, Why don’t you stick up for yourself? To me, you should be so proud of your wealth. That’s what we all aspire to be — we kill ourselves, we don’t work a 9 to 5. We’re away from our families five days a week. I’m away from my four girls five days a week and my wife. Why not stick up for yourself and say, Why is it bad to be, to aspire to be wealthy and successful? You know, why is it bad to kill yourself?
In other words, the fact that many of the superrich work superhard, almost to the point of killing themselves, justifies their extraordinary wealth. The people who work the hardest should be paid the most.
Is that really true? Do the superrich really work superhard, almost to the point of killing themselves? I for one rather doubt that. Let's get real about the people who do "work a 9 to 5": they do not in reality work any less than the superrich; like everyone else, they have family obligations and other personal responsibilities to take care of. I think I work pretty damn hard, often working six days a week, though not always from the office, and I don't make nearly as much as the "Mr. 1 %" who attended the Romney event. Unlike "Mr. Killing Myself", my schedule is not my own, either. I have customers and co-workers to take care of whose operations usually run 24 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week, and who can call me at any time if they're having a problem with the software systems I'm responsible for. I don't have servants to take care of my household, and my wife doesn't have a nanny to take care of our kids while she's out playing tennis (Actually, she doesn't play tennis, though she wishes she could!).
We are the ones responsible for taking care of our kids and our home, and it takes up a lot of our time.
A lot of the people who are wealthy contributors to the Romney campaign are wealthy not because they work so damn hard, but because they inherited their wealth! If they inherited their money in the last 25 years, then Hallelujah! They got it with the lowest top tax rates in the last 80 years and got to keep more of their money. If they inherited it in the last 10 years, then Mazel Tov! You might even have been able to take advantage of an estate tax holiday. The middle and working class don't see the benefits of lowering tax rates on the wealthy as a matter of "Fairness == Proportionality" because we know the wealthy elite started way ahead and really don't make much of a contribution to the overall society besides having their name on the door and paying the taxes.
Regarding Fairness as Equality, Haidt points out that this is not a popular notion, if we're talking about income inequality. What his survey implies is that even liberals don't put as much emphasis on this as bolstering hard work and equal opportunity. Haidt mentions the difference between the Occupy movement and the Tea Party on this:
But even if Obama never talks about redistribution anymore, many liberals do. I visited Zuccotti Park, home of Occupy Wall Street, in October 2011. Among the most common themes on the protest signs was the need to raise taxes on the rich to create greater equality.
At Tea Party rallies, one never sees signs extolling equality. Fairness is a major theme, but it is almost always fairness as proportionality. Tea Partyers may not be enthusiastic about Romney, but they share his conception of fairness, in which progressive taxation is a punishment for success and social programs are a reward for failure.
What is the point of Fairness as Equality? It is not just an end in itself. It is not some perverse punishment for success or reward for indolence. The purpose of fairness is
to ensure that we can maintain a democracy that does not dissolve into a plutocracy. The Founding Fathers saw this as the path back to despotism. Also, for those who are interested, fairness helps
to maintain the viability of the corporate capitalist system that is the American economy in its present form. You see, if people don't have money, they can't buy the goods and services you are producing, unless you aim to create a plutocracy with a large underclass of serfs! Serfdom is not a popular concept in the U.S.; after all, we fought a civil war over slavery, which was seen as an institution incompatible with a country founded on the ideals of freedom and equality.
Finally, for the idea of procedural fairness, which Haidt defines as a setting where " honest, open and impartial rules are used to determine who gets what". Haidt describes the differences between Obama's and Romney's agreement with the government enforcing procedural fairness (aka equality of opportunity):
The green line in the graph shows how much people agreed with the statement “Our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.” It slopes down sharply. Liberals strongly agree, which is why Obama invoked the government programs that helped his and his wife Michelle’s parents succeed. Conservatives are ambivalent, which is why Romney praised his and his wife’s forebears, who succeeded despite the odds stacked against them, with no help from government.
Romney looks back at his forbears through the cultural lens of Mormons who settled in the American West, where the interests of railroads and mining companies were often seen as equally valid as those of the government. In addition, for the Mormons, they sought to create a theocracy in Utah that fulfilled their vision of Zion-- and part of that vision precluded statehood until 1890. Often the federal government was not just unhelpful, but antagonistic, toward the Mormons.
In the case of Obama, it was the federal government that helped him and his family secure an education, housing, and good jobs that allowed for a middle class lifestyle. Because of the experiences of Obama and his family, he sees a positive role that the federal government can play, and according to Haidt, this comes down to a matter of trust:
It’s not that conservatives don’t value procedural fairness. They surely want everyone to play by open and impartial rules in their workplaces or when they go to court. It’s rather that they trust corporate America more than the federal government, and they are suspicious of government efforts to level the playing field, which they see as a covert way to achieve social justice. Conservatives reject social justice as liberal code for enforcing equality of outcomes despite inequality of inputs.
This is what I find offensive about the conservative point of view: "inequality of inputs" comes down to how much money or "value added" one has to "input" into the economic system. The reason they don't trust the government is that they fear the government will take away some of their money and diminish the idea of fairness as proportion. But folks, we are all not piles of money, and the ways in which people are able to contribute to society are numerous. And as far as trusting corporate America, after witnessing what it has done to our country and much of the rest of the world for the past 30+ years, a lot of average Americans have no trust of corporations, have no trust of a financial system leveraged to the hilt, and have no trust of "the invisible hand of the free market" that is inclined to reach into your pocket and steal everything you've got.
"Inequality of inputs" is another way of denigrating the working class, denying the valid contributions that people of all walks of life make to our society. It's not just well-heeled business people who like to think of themselves as the "job creators" that should or do matter; it's the laborers, the mothers, the teachers, the restaruant workers, and yes, even the IT guys who also make an invaluable contribution to society. We should have an equal opportunity to live in safe communities, afford our own home, educate our children, have transit and livable cities and towns, deal with effects of climate change in a constructive manner, and transition to an economy that is less dependent on fossil fuels and more reliant on alternative energy. We need a society and a government that is based in reality and deals in real solutions to problems.
It's important to articulate the progressive point of view for the big ideas, and I believe we don't get up on the soap box quite enough. Having read all the way to the end, I hope that you found this diary to be food for thought.