There are a lot of reasons, some deserved and some not, for Americans’ distrust of their institutions. Lately I have been thinking about one of the more counterintuitive ones: Our schools, governments and even employers are trying too hard to make things fair.
In so doing, they are not only setting themselves up for failure — and eventually mistrust — but they are also misunderstanding the galvanizing role that unfairness plays in a competitive economy.
Unfairness can be tempered, but it can never be eliminated. The decision of how much unfairness to tolerate is one for society as a whole to make, and we expect our institutions to enforce it. I fear that, in the last decade or so, those institutions went too far in enforcing fairness, without full buy-in from the public and at the expense of other values.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Nick Cammett/Diamond Images via Getty Images
