Is Equity Insanity?
Simple answer: Yes, because we do not live in a zero-sum game.
Example: If everyone gets to eat from “the apple tree” irrespective of their capabilities, their contributions to securing the land, planting the apple tree, watering and cultivating the apple tree, then everybody will try to get an apple. But there are not enough apples and the apple tree will run out of apples. Also, those doing all the work supporting the apple tree will stop. The apple tree will dry out or get infested with insects and it will die. And then NOBODY will get to eat from the apple tree. Ergo, NOT a zero sum game.
But what about group identity politics and “equitable representation”? Is it rational? Is it possible? Or is it complete insanity? More specifically, can we have “equity” or equal representation of everybody in all fields of society? This is what the woke are demanding and there are whole political movements based on this. Well, is this even possible? If not, why?
Best to take an example. Consider a University in the US, a Department of X-Engineering is accepting 50 students every year. The Department wishes to enforce an “equitable representation of races” (I wonder if the Black History Department is seeking for 60% white students or if the Hispanic Studies is looking for 10% Asians but I digress) (I also wonder if they realize the irony of seeking for equity when in fact races are a “social construct”, but again I digress).
This is easy enough right? There are two groups, B (Black) and W (White), and so 25 white and 25 black students, right? No, because we need to represent the percentages in the general population (but what about regional differences in race % in the population, oh well) (hey, what about considering the acceptance distribution compared to the applicants pool instead of the general population? Too complicated? Or just rational) for a fair equitable representations.
Ok, great. So let’s assume a 4:1 ratio leading to 40 white students and 10 black, right?
No…. you see there are many other ethnic groups. We have Hispanics, we have Asians which can be split into SE-Asians, Indians, Middle East, we have native Indians, we have the Inuit, we also have Blacks from Africa, also people north of the Sahara, and maybe we can even split White from Europe to Mediterranean and NW Europeans, and so on and so forth.
Since in the US there are many races (yes they might be “social constructs” BUT they SELF-IDENTIFY as an ethnic group and we are following this logic as far as possible) we will just limit the number to 10 (other ethnic groups DO exist but simply have minimal political power to ever be able to cry bias and discrimination).
Ok, we have 10 races (maybe one is “miscellaneous”) and we conduct a survey over the US and find the population distribution. For example the percentages might be (55, 19, 13, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1) rounded to the nearest integer. Ok, that means we need to have 100 bins (i.e., positions for students) to ensure equitable representation of ethnic groups. If all percentages were even integers then it could be reduced to 50 but then again we could also look at the first decimal say (55.1, 18.8, 13.1, 3.2, 2.8, 2.4, 1.6, 1.3, 1, 0.7) then you would need 1000 bins. But let’s take the easy approach and just consider 100 bins for each variable (in this case “ethnic group”). (We have additional problems though. What if someone identifies as 60% white 30%black and 10% Inuit?)
Anyway we end up with one variable, race, ten possible assignments to this variable and 100 integer bins or, V1 = race and b1=100
What else?
Well gender is one. Easy, right? We have 50% male and 50% female and only two bins necessary. Hold your horses! We also have those who are gay and self-identify as separate groups seeking equitable representation. We also have trans, bi, queer, LGBQ and various other combinations of the letters of the alphabet. To keep things simple let’s assume this is symmetric with respect to real gender, i.e., sex, and that the population distribution can be expressed with even numbers. In this case we only need 50 bins
So, V2=gender and b2=50
We have now dealt with racism and sexism so we are now a super woke university with equitable representation of each new class in each department. Yay! Hurrah! That is, as long as the number of new students is an integer multiple of 50x100 = 5000 students. I think the problem becomes apparent now…….
But we are not finished. What about impairment? Common, this is serious! The vision, mobility, hearing, speech, even learning impaired deserve equitable representation in our learning institutions. (A few years back we could have added mental diseases such as gender dysphoria but now that has simply changed category). Also, there are degrees of impairment, e.g, nearsighted, farsighted, astigmatic, color blind, functionally blind, nearly full blind, completely blind, that really should be considered. Let’s just assume again that all these categories can be represented with their actual distribution in the general population rounded to the nearest integer value, so 100bins.
So V3=impairment and b3=100
What about age? Sure most new students will be between 18–20years old but there are some gifted students, some late starters and hey even some people returning to college after retirement. Let’s group some of these age groups together so we end up with a manageable number of bins, e.g., 20.
V4 = age and b4=20
Finished right?
Sorry we also need to consider left-handed, right-handed, (b=5), religious beliefs (b=100), political beliefs (b=20), height (b=5), weight (b=6), hair color and type (b=10) and we’ll stop there but the list goes on and on.
So, to have equity, a class of 50 students needs to have:
100 x 50 x 100 x 20 x 5 x 100 x 20 x 5 x 6 x 10 = 3 10¹³ bins
οr 30 trillion bins to achieve equitable representation of all possible combinations of groups.
Consider now the poor Department admissions officer.
What is he(she whatever) to do? They have only 50 positions but need to satisfy 30 trillion possible group identification combinations. The admissions officer fears for his life. Who knows how many different groups might accuse him of discrimination. “The Black, gay female, functionally blind, hearing impaired, over 50, vertically challenged, obese, green haired, libertarian, East Dutch Episcopalians are under-represented”.
What the admissions officer needs is some type of cross-group objective metric, something to evaluate the potential to do well in studies, something like a an SAT score or some other measure of capability.
We have that and it is called IQ.
Note: up to now I’ve assumed that we have independent univariate distributions. It could very well be that the distributions are actually bivariate or multivariate. In this case the number of bins necessary is astronomically larger! Up to10¹⁰ times larger if we have a full multivariable distribution.
Conclusion: yes equity, and equal representation of all groups is not just insane it is insanity on a whole different and unique level. It deserves a special name for the degree of insanity maybe simply “woke” will do. But then again, I have used math and we are being told that “math is racist”……