Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

The problem is using outcomes to describe equality. This in and of itself is controversial and not agreed upon (IMO).

I suggest that most humans would agree striving for equal opportunity is a universal goal (although hard to measure and perhaps impossible to fully achieve)

I suggest that many humans see equalized outcomes as more a dystopian nightmare. In todays world it seems equal opportunity, equity.. and equalized outcomes often conflated with one another.

You can’t simply declare a zero-sum situation to not be, and then expect your study participants to believe you.

That’s what this study did:

> In studies 1 to 5, participants read various equality-enhancing policies that would provide additional resources (e.g., salary and jobs) to a disadvantaged group (e.g., Latino Americans, people with a disability, women, and ex-felons) without changing the resources provided to the advantaged ingroup (e.g., white Americans, people without a disability, men, and non-felons).

Where, exactly, does the money to pay for their additional salary and jobs come from?

> Racial inequality costs the U.S. economy an estimated $16 trillion in lost gross domestic product (GDP)

The entirety of US GDP is about $21 trillion. Based on that, this just looks implausible.

> "According to a recent report, in 2018, White homebuyers received roughly $386.4 billion in mortgage loans from banks, while Latino homebuyers only received around $12.6 billion in mortgage loans overall"

So in the "descriptions of the disparity" given to the participants, they don't even bother to normalize by population.

> "Several banks propose increasing the total amount of mortgage loans to Latino homebuyers by $7.3 billion and not changing the total amount of mortgage loan funding to White homebuyers"

They use this as both an example of an "equality-enhancing policy", which doesn't "harm advantaged groups". But they are misrepresenting this as a Pareto improvement. Changing the amount of loans offered obviously effects the price of homes. Inflation be damned.

This explains the refusal to set aside some Ivy League admissions for non-Jewish whites - Asian and Jewish students misperceive that they would be harmed, and so they prevent it. For reference, the non-international student body of the Ivy League, circa 2019 (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30338742):

                          Ivy League   US      ratio  mean SAT*
  Jewish                  17.2%         2.4%   7.16    n/a
  Asian                   19.6%         5.3%   3.71   1216
  White (incl. Jewish)    50.3%        61.5%   0.82   1148
  Hispanic                11.4%        17.6%   0.65   1043
  Black                    7.8%        12.7%   0.61    966
  White (non-Jewish)      33.1%        59.1%   0.56  ~1141

On the other hand, the study defined "advantaged group" very differently. I wonder if this would affect their results? They should do a follow-up study and compare.

*Source: https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra... - estimate for non-Jewish white SAT calculated by assuming the Jewish score is a generous 200 points higher, and adjusting that they are only ~4% of all white students. I.e. the true value is likely closer to 1148.

While Asian students benefit greatly from their 173- and 250-point leads over Hispanic and Black students, non-Jewish whites are, bizarrely, not helped at all by 98- and 175-point leads over those groups.

Or people are used to being lied to about "equality" initiatives and their effects. There's a finite number of spots at any given university, company, etc. Favoring one demographic inherently means disfavoring another, no matter what lying advocates claim to the contrary.

Ok this one is long and has many many dimensions to try to understand the veracity of (without assuming you know what its referring to).

The conclusion though is something I’ve noticed as well and matches the title. This is exacerbated by the very people arguing for equality, they lose support of would-be supporters in the majority groups by misdefining privilege. Causing resentment by would-be supporters who feel their valid struggles are neglected and invalidated.

Pretty weak, tendentious study mainly designed to flatter the experimenter's priors.

Doesn't compare "advantaged" group (here assumed to simply be "white (non-Hispanic)") to any others.

Claims to find "misperceptions" when a reasonable-person real-world interpretation of any of the questions, even if they are designed to exclude any loss to the respondents' category, will necessarily apply assumptions about resource-limitations.

For example, one example given in the text is a proposed policy, “Several banks propose increasing the total amount of mortgage loans to Latino homebuyers by $7.3 billion and not changing the total amount of mortgage loan funding to White homebuyers”.

People who live in the real world know such a policy might not "increase equality".

Sometimes, generous loans offered due to trendy policies – like in the leadup to the 2008 crisis – trap the borrowers with unsustainable debts. Other times, they meet the ostensible targets – "more to Latinos" – without actually reaching the disadvantaged. (Only Latinos who are already well-off can work the system.)

Many people of all 'advantagedness' categories will reject the idea of targeting loans by ethnicity, preferring as a matter of morality that such decisions should be ethnicity-blind. They might even choose to suffer tangible resource losses for themselves & their 'ingroup', to punish attempts to set up a resource-allocation on unfair precepts, as in 'ultimatum game' experiments.

And, no matter how carefully the question-conditions are wordsmithed to suggest a 'free lunch' for the preferred-category at no cost to the respondents – "not changing the total amount of mortgage loan funding to White homebuyers" – in the real world an extra $7.3B has to come from somewhere. Reserving it for a specific ethnicity means it's taken from everyone else – not just from the study's 'advantaged' but every other (possibly-even-more-needy) program/group.

(Other conditions only described in the supplementary materials are even worse in imagining free-money for pay-raises, and free-jobs that don't displace anyone else, as if magically from-the-sky.)

The experimenters' childlike wishing-away of tradeoffs thus makes their desired result fall automatically out of the interaction between their fanciful scenarios & respondents' real-world familiarity with how such proposed policies truly work.

Doesn’t it though, necessarily?

If you have three people, one who has almost everything, one who has almost nothing and another who has nothing. How can you make things more equal without harming the relative standing of the person who has almost everything?

It could be positive sum in the long run but if you consider life to be a series of snapshots I’m not convinced that equalizing measures don’t hurt those who are, fairly or unfairly, advantaged at least momentarily.

Equality will always be prevented as long as we're allowed to exercise free will. A wise man said, "Differences in habits and attitudes are differences in human capital, ...and such differences create differences in economic outcomes."

Besides, the 2nd sentence of the Abstract shows they begin by labelling the perceptions of others as inaccurate. This corrupts the rest for me:

>Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, instead of between groups, do advantaged group members accurately perceive it as unharmful.

400 years ago:

"Equality is prevented by the misperception that sharing land with the Jamestown colony will harm the Algonquin tribes"

I shake my head whenever I see supposed scientists assert that everybody's incentives are aligned, defying both common sense and all of human history. The reality is competition and contention are readily observed in every domain of human life.

To me, articles like this are obvious political agitation.

In the end we live in mostly free countries.

Women are not clamoring to be brick layers. And men are not clamoring to be kindergarten teachers.

And as long as we remain free - meaning, the ability to choose what we want to do, biology will remain the foremost driver of choice of occupations.

People keep trying to suppress biology with various social constructs, and cry when we fail.

This is no doubt compounded by the very justified anger of disadvantaged groups. It means women, people of color et al often make enemies unnecessarily from people who might well be inclined to be their allies.

And the beat goes on. Same as it ever was.

> advantaged group members misperceive equality as necessarily harming their access to resources and inequality as necessarily benefitting them

I don't think that's misperception. I think the article (and likely cited studies) lead with their dogma and try to "prove" it. Having privilege is beneficial. Isn't that an obvious tautology?

"For each inequality, participants first read a description of the disparity between an advantaged and disadvantaged group (e.g., “According to a recent report, in 2018, White homebuyers received roughly $386.4 billion in mortgage loans from banks, while Latino homebuyers only received around $12.6 billion in mortgage loans overall”). In the equality-enhancing policy condition, participants read proposals to increase resource access for the disadvantaged group and not change resource access for the advantaged group (e.g., “Several banks propose increasing the total amount of mortgage loans to Latino homebuyers by $7.3 billion and not changing the total amount of mortgage loan funding to White homebuyers”). The policy would thereby increase proportional equality in access to a given resource between the two groups. In the inequality-enhancing policy condition, participants read proposals to decrease resource access for the disadvantaged group and not change resource access for the advantaged group (e.g., “Several banks propose decreasing the total amount of mortgage loans to Latino homebuyers by $7.3 billion and not changing the total amount of mortgage loan funding to White homebuyers”). "

. . .

"As predicted, participants misperceived equality-enhancing policies as more harmful to their advantaged ingroup’s resource access than policies that maintained the status quo [b = 0.75, SE = 0.087, t(590.68) = 8.62, P < 0.001, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.58, 0.93]] or worsened inequality"

But do the participants really "misperceive" the hypothetical policies as "more harmful" if one doesn't agree with the study's framing, and conclude that increasing lending to a purported subset of the population results in higher housing costs for all due to market forces?

Eqaulity of outcome is a stupid target. Different people have different productivity. There are people who don't want to work at all. There are people who want to work 15 hours a day. There are people who produce 10x of work in the same time span. There are people with rare and hard to learn skills. I will never be convinced that a neurosurgeon should be paid the same as a janitor high school dropout. While both cleaning and neurosurgery are important jobs, they are not of the same value to the society.

Related, I've seen a lot of commentary on Roe that takes the form "men should stop telling women what to do with their bodies." On it's face, sure, but men support choice almost as much as women, and while abolishing abortion hurts women much more it doesn't help men one bit, and even hurts men who are also very much a part of the hard parts of family planning.

It's the same fallacy in the opposite direction: the idea that because something hurts one group it must help another group, when really pro-lifers just hurt everyone, even themselves.

I don't really know what this stance does to an ideology... it feels like it's unnecessarily constructing enemies, or misplacing anger in ways that dilute the meaning of that anger. I know in most ways these expressions are just ways to release anger, maybe the form doesn't matter that much, but...

There are certainly those who promote equality by knocking people down rather than raising people up at least in their choice of language. It's ingrained in the entire idea of "privilege". A privilege is you get but don't intrinsically deserve. Fair treatment under the law isn't a privilege, it's something everyone deserves.

"In studies 1 to 5, participants read various equality-enhancing policies that would provide additional resources (e.g., salary and jobs) to a disadvantaged group (e.g., Latino Americans, people with a disability, women, and ex-felons) without changing the resources provided to the advantaged ingroup (e.g., white Americans, people without a disability, men, and non-felons)."

That sounds a little too magical.

I understand policies might have that overall effect, at least in aggregate, but I doubt there would be widespread agreement on the "everybody wins" outcome.

Depends on what type of equality you are referring to. I see equality as everyone have equal chances of succeeding...equal opportunity and not necessarily equal outcome. If you push equality as equal outcome...then yes the person who is "advantaged" because they did better (maybe worked harder or had a better idea) will feel like it harms them to force equal outcomes.

When you look at the recent nomination of Ketanji Brown did it harm the 97% of federal judge candidates who were excluded from the process because the intended outcome was to have a black woman on the SCOTUS?

Why is this study applied only to identity groups? It would have been more interesting to see the results in terms of the genuinely disadvantaged in society: those with low income and no wealth. Those are the people who really need help.

This may very well be true, but only as a post-hoc explanation.

Reactionary politics (all politics, really) have their home at a subconscious level. Politics are ways of feeling and acting. It's an error to think that if the other side had more "common sense", they'd see the light. Even animals have politics. Only the most _surface-level_ politics can be affected through logical explanations.

I can't imagine anyone disagreeing with 'equality-enhancing policies' which leads me to believe the entire article has confused equality with equity, an entirely different (and incompatible) concept.

There are a whole bunch of bad assumptions here just in the first few paragraphs. Those include the idea that group are homogeneous (every white person is advantaged, every woman is disadvantaged) and that it is even possible to improve one person's position without worsening someone else's.

It's actually so poor I am having trouble assuming good faith on the authors parts.

Who gets to pick the groupings?

Who gets to define disadvantage?

I would think that whoever imposes those choices on others runs afoul of his own ideology.

(If there's a flaw in my thinking I'd be grateful for correction.)

It is an interesting article but it completely glosses over the fact that not everything is non-zero sum and that differential costs can and do exist. The basis of this is entity-hood, and it applies not only to groups but also to individuals, corporations, etc. In fact, it applies to plants and animals also.

As this is all evolved, it's nearly impossible to separate the inclination from its effects. When humans have equal access to physical resources, they seek status and status as resources because it is a way of assuring physical and other resources in an uncertain environment.

All entities that persist have some process which enables that persistence: self and group interest are long-term evolved responses. We can see them as problematic, but it's actually very important that they exist. Since entities can defect in a game-theoretic sense, existence is not assured. It's nice when you are Ukraine, for instance, to be able to have the urge to promote unequal access to arms (a resource) or international attention to ensure your survival. Without this urge, there is trouble.

Carrying this back to something more local, in a family, attention-envy can happen among siblings because parental attention is not infinite. The non-zero sum model ignores these realities.

> A longitudinal survey of the 2020 U.S. voters reveals that harm perceptions predict voting against actual equality-enhancing policies, more so than voters’ political and egalitarian beliefs

The Biden administration has repeatedly enacted policies that send white people to the back of the line in receiving government benefits. The Biden USDA adopted a loan forgiveness program which whites were ineligible for: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/24/doj-appeal-minority.... The Biden SBA also adopted a small business loan program that excluded whites: https://www.law360.com/articles/1389372/6th-circ-blocks-sba-.... Left-leaning jurisdictions like Vermont, moreover, have adopted policies such as prioritizing vaccines for non-whites: https://khn.org/news/article/vermont-gives-blacks-and-other-....

How can it be a "misperception" if white people conclude that policies that deprioritize them for access to limited government programs will cause them harm?

The study also makes a critical assumption that supposed "equality-enhancing policies" will actually produce "non–zero-sum increases in resource equality." Some may think that small business loans from which whites are excluded will generate benefits that make everyone, including the excluded white small business owners, better off. Maybe even better off than if those white small business owners had been allowed to participate in those government programs in the first instance. But that's an assumption--the authors are assuming that the intended effect of these government programs will be the actual effect. There doesn't seem to be any scientific basis for calling that a "misperception."

> “Misperception that it harms advantaged groups”

They literally put it in the title. The scientists have this prejudice that some groups are advantaged, and that if they complain it’s caused by a misperception.

What people complain about is unfairness. Promoting an entire group based on skin or ethnicity is racism. One can’t assume that groups must be equal in the way they work.

There are only two ways we can solve racism:

- Give people equal opportunity and accept that groups will have different averages, on average,

- Pile up on whites, they’re basically only 10% of humanity so they will end up representing a smaller voting group in the long term, especially if they’re divided pro/against, so we can be unfair to them and punish the ones who complain.

The following line from the abstract:

> Misperceptions persist even after an intervention to improve decision-making.

echoes a finding from the CIA handbook Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, which for some reason lives rent-free in my head:

> Initial exposure to blurred or ambiguous stimuli interferes with accurate perception even after more and better information becomes available.

> advantaged group members misperceive equality as necessarily harming their access to resources

Equality may not harm advantaged groups materially (more likely equality brings material benefits), but the sense of your group's place at the top of a social hierarchy being challenged is surely psychologically distressing.

> A longitudinal survey of the 2020 U.S. voters reveals that harm perceptions predict voting against actual equality-enhancing policies, more so than voters’ political and egalitarian beliefs.

Doublespeak. These policies are equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity, so those voters are siding with their egalitarian beliefs, not against. Waaaaay down in "Materials and Methods", here's the first study:

> In the equality-enhancing policy condition, participants read about policies that proposed to increase the disadvantaged group’s resource access and not change the advantaged group’s resource access, which would therefore reduce the disparity:

> “Several banks propose increasing the total amount of mortgage loans to Latino homebuyers by $7.3 billion and not changing the total amount of mortgage loan funding to White homebuyers. Ultimately, these banks predict that this proposal will narrow the gap in mortgage loans between Latino and White homebuyers over the next year.”

> In the status quo condition, participants read that no policy was proposed to address the disparity:

> “However, several banks propose not changing mortgage loan funding over the next year.”

> In the inequality-enhancing condition, participants read about policies that proposed to decrease the disadvantaged group’s resource access and not change the advantaged group’s resource access, which would therefore worsen the disparity:

> “Several banks propose decreasing the total amount of mortgage loans to Latino homebuyers by $7.3 billion and not changing the total amount of mortgage loan funding to White homebuyers. Ultimately, these banks predict that this proposal will widen the gap in mortgage loans between Latino and White homebuyers over the next year.”

> Participants indicated how each policy proposal would affect the advantaged ingroup’s resource access [“How do you think the proposed changes will affect [advantaged groups’] chances of [receiving resources]?”; 7-point Likert-scale with meaningful anchors: −3 (greatly harm), 0 (no effect), and +3 (greatly improve)].

On top of the opportunity/outcome distinction, there's a something the voters might be thinking of that they didn't account for (this is huge and I went looking for these questions, so it could easily be in there somewhere, but the word "confound" doesn't appear on the page): Where does the extra money for the loans come from? Banks can't create it out of thin air, it has to come from somewhere, so the "and not changing the total amount of mortgage loan funding to White homebuyers" can easily be read as a lie, making the premise of this section ("and not change the advantaged group’s resource access") incorrect.

Let’s say that everyone in the country rolls 11 dice, and whoever rolls all sixes becomes dictator for life. That would be fair, wouldn’t it? In the sense that everyone has an equal chance, it is fair. In fact it’s precisely, purely fair. Everyone in the country had exactly the same chance. You don’t get much more fair than that!

However, you are still left with a nation ruled by a dictator.. Let that cook in your head for a minute.

I’ll solve the riddle for you: Fairness has never been the issue here. Power imbalance is. We’re asking the wrong question. The correct question is, how can we make it so nobody has unwarranted power over anyone else? That’s true equality.

"Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, instead of between groups, do advantaged group members accurately perceive it as unharmful."

This is why it's critical that policies for education, city planning, economic planning etc. all maintain and encourage interaction between classes. If the advantaged are never made aware of the struggle of others, the result is runaway social stratification.

Also, these studies are entirely within the US context and so correlate along common historical and geographical lines. Conclusions can't be applied broadly to other societies.

Accumulation of capital is prevented by the misperception that equality is desirable in and of itself.

Is it better that we allow the capital in society to be commanded by elected bureaucrats or by people who acquired it in a competitive process, even if that means that they will have more pieces of paper (called shares) with their name on it? Is the billionaire who only spends $100k on himself every year to be viewed the same as the billionaire who throws a party every weekend with bikini models on his mega-yacht?

It is not a misperception. It's a high probability that influencing one thing influences the other. Equality of oportunity is what we should be looking for.

The problem with grouping people into advantaged and disadvantaged groups along lines of race and ethnicity is that you will end up grouping some people that are actually from a poor background into the "advantaged" group and vice versa. No matter how you put it, that just doesn't seem fair and I find it appalling that this somehow became acceptable in modern day America.

It depends on the means to achieve equality, right? And you also have to account for the possibility that a given idea to improve equality actually reduces it.

But sure, if you observe equality in a well-functioning system after the fact, I could certainly believe that everyone is better off.

> Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

But what the article calls "equality" is discriminating against men, whites, asians and other groups. It's pretty obvious this discrimination harms those groups.

I have an opinion, that sort of conflicts with having an opinion itself - but hear me out. I have growing opinion that Americans (US) more often than not feel a compulsion to have an opinion. A family-member states an opinion or event, we read something in the news, etc. and, without being even _decently_ educated in the subject, choosing to hold an opinion and (pseudo) defend it. I'm outing my former self here.

How much easier is life if we choose a select group of topics to be informed on and debate those. Letting the other shit go, saying to ourselves "I'm not knowledgeable enough here to have an meaningful opinion. And therefore, I will stfu." That takes a lot of where with all and, aside from myself, I have not heard a single person say words along these lines.

This articles seems to equating societal advantages to game theoretic advantages-- they have severe differences. Human systems don't always benefit from, "equality" and, "democratization" despite those terms being very, "friendly" in terms to the contemporary culture. It's good to democratize workspaces but by comparison it's illiberal to democratize someone's girlfriend. Inviting the public to do grown up science is an interesting idea but in terms of lofty ideals but without a workable, "human model" you get, "drown the public in dopamenic engagements and then use data-collection to develop statistical models as a socioeconomic model" to progress science and technology and I think we can mostly agree that this is not a good thing. This same reasoning has applications in other, "human" domains-- sex cultures benefit from secrecy and exclusivity, artists often benefit from the creative process not being, "democratic" and it seems that it would be unwise to let untrained people manage the greater macroeconomy through voting or popular consensus. Financial, social, and creative elites get this. That's why institutional and social gatekeeping exists.

Real equality and Liberalism go along with Universal Education; Franklin and Rousseau (and others) seem to typify a progressive society as a being a kind of social arrangement where nobody is deliberately or arbitrarily held back from the process of becoming self-determining through education and for the most part, "democracy" has been considered a, "vulgar" form a government since antiquity even amongst the Founding Fathers and Enlightenment thinkers. Consider a modern society where the media system has been hijacked to, "manufacturer consent" for abolishing democratic institutions, libraries, and schools through popular consent and social degradation. It's worth noting that CPAC's having a conference in Budapest two weeks.

The only silver bullet for human systems is education. Equality and democracy without universal education is worse than the forms of government it/they historically displace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism#Lippmann-Dewey

If you're privileged and carrying the feeling that you need to be the provider in your family group, that facet of your life experience would be improved by greater equity in our society. The patriarchy harms everyone, including those that it privileges.

it harms only the poorest, because above all equality means societal stability

This is sophistry for social justice ideology masquarading as science:

>>Racial inequality costs the U.S. economy an estimated $16 trillion in lost gross domestic product (GDP) (4), failing to hire job seekers with a criminal history results in an annual loss of $78 billion in U.S. GDP (5), and the persistent gender pay gap restrains the global economy by about $160 trillion (6).

The idea that these inequalities can be addressed, in an economically net-gainful way, by government mandates or simple changes in hiring preferences, is based on the fanciful premise that such inequality is economically irrational and due to discrimination, as opposed to disparites in skills or work hours that justify pay and representation inequality. This premise - that inequality between various demographics in employment is significantly or largely due to discrimination and thus economically irrational - is not only not established, it is heavily counter-indicated against by the evidence.

Policies that reduce inequality in pay or representation, without addressing inequality in skills present or value contributed that are behind the pay or representation inequality, will harm the economy, by mismatching compensation/representation and value provided, and thus causing capital to be allocated in a suboptimal way for the purposes of maximizing total productivity.

People really struggle with how the logical or works here's a sentence:

I get money or you get money

Most people read that as:

Either I get money and you get nothing, or you get money in I get nothing... which is wrong. That's why equality is so hard. People read or as xor.