equity

My professors in journalism school taught me to avoid passive voice as often as possible. They taught me that passive voice gets in the way of giving readers a clear view of who did what. Passive voice may be innocuously overlooked in many instances (for example, in this sentence, I didn’t tell you who was doing the overlooking), but more often using it risks confusion and obscurity — and these aren’t exactly journalistic values.

In two stunning interactive visualizations, individuals are able to examine workplace diversity state by state - controlling for factors such as race, sex, and occupation. One visualization ranks states according to representation, with red and green bars showing what percent under and overrepresented certain populations are in relationship to their presence in the labor force. The other visualization allows users to compare states - giving a clear breakdown of representation at  each occupation level.

“Here at NASA, we all pee the same color,” says Harrison.

But this scene never happened. Harrison never took a crowbar to a “Colored Ladies Room” sign. He never solved Johnson’s dilemma of having limited accessibility to a legal bathroom. Harrison’s action is a fabrication framed as history, one that could easily be recognized as an insidious white savior narrative created and advanced by the white people who made the film.

DESPITE APPEARANCES, economics is in essence a very personal and fundamentally moral discipline. It is nothing short of the web of our material relationships with one another and with the natural environment. Economic relationships have personalities and personal histories. Inescapably, these relationships physically manifest our social and spiritual values.

Our language expresses this duality. “Values” are both moral principles and economic measures. “Equity” is defined both as a financial interest in property and as fairness or justice. The root of “property” is also the root of “propriety.” But perception and practice often reflect a division between them.

It’s a good sign we’ve entered the election silly season when pundits are arguing against “fairness.” What’s next, apple pie? (Motherhood, of course, is already a battleground of the “mommy wars”—Lord help us!)

The Democrats are trying to take the pro-fairness side of the debate, in particular around the issue of tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. The so-called Buffett Rule—named after billionaire Warren Buffet, who pointed out the injustice of his paying a lower tax rate than his secretary—became a key talking point the week before April 15.

Here’s how President Obama put it: “Right now, the share of our national income flowing to the top 1 percent has climbed to levels we haven’t seen since the 1920s. And yet those same people are also paying taxes at one of the lowest rates in 50 years. That’s not fair.” (The Occupy movement arguably deserves most of the credit for that framing of the issue.)

The president’s political opponents were quick to dismiss the focus on tax fairness as campaign rhetoric aimed more at the fall elections than any meaningful policy goals. It’s a safe assumption that pretty much anything between now and November has that partisan goal in mind, and—perhaps not surprising—fairness polls well.

But the critics didn’t stop there. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, for instance, called the Buffett Rule “nothing but a form of redistributionism,” and said that focus on the tax fairness issue “is an exercise in misdirection.” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that having the rich pay a higher tax rate “won’t take a single person off the unemployment line.” (It also won’t end the war in Afghanistan, he didn’t add.) Others brought out the tired accusation of “class warfare.”