Everyone likes fairness. It’s a British value: fair play for everyone. From the childhood “It’s not fair” and into national politics, there is an assumption that things should be fair.
But there is a problem- and the response to the recent budget (and any budget for that matter) shows it up. The problem is that there are multiple different axis for “fairness” and we choose the one that gives us the greatest advantage.
For example, the budget was largely reported in terms of who won or lost in this budget. So people who didn’t get tax cuts (e.g. pensioners) could complain that it was unfair that workers received a tax cut via National insurance. Fairness here is by comparing who wins and loses with a particular change or set of changes.
But while this is how the budget is generally reported, it is not generally the most useful measure of fairness. Because it ignores the question- was the overall distribution of tax and benefits before the change fair. If the previous situation was fair, then changes that make some people winners and others losers are unfair. But what if the previous situation was unfair, and the changes help create a more fair distribution?
But this also is more complicated that it seems. People who argue for more fairness in income, meaning more equality of income, ignore the fact that those with many assets(e.g. owning their own home outright) may have lower costs than those who don’t own assets (e.g. renting a home). If we made it our goal to aim for asset fairness, we would tax low income asset rich pensioners more highly than we do young high earners with large debts and no assets. In practice, we probably care about some combination of both assets and income when we think about fairness.
There is also the question of whether fairness is about equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? Is it a fairer society when someone who chooses to work part time in a low stress job gets the same income as someone working a 60 hour week in stressful job? Or is that unfair?
So fairness has many different dimensions. Here are just a few:
-Distribution of wins and losses of a change
-Overall distribution of benefits and costs
-Income fairness vs Asset fairness
– Outcome fairness vs Opportunity fairness
We human beings tend to be pretty good at finding the axis that helps us benefit. Fairness becomes a tool for our personal gain pretty easily. That doesn’t mean it is useless- justice is important, and things that are truly unfair should be put right. But next time you feel something is unfair, or you hear someone on the news complaining that something is unfair, it is worth pausing and asking whether we have weighed this along enough fairness dimensions. Are we truly concerned for justice, and especially justice for the poor and powerless? Or are we really using fairness as a weapon to get our own way?