This blog originally appeared on Development Pathways (with apologies to George Orwell, Animal Farm [1945])
I recently came across a heading “Iniquities and Social Protection”. It made me realise (yet again!) what an impossible language English is to master as a second tongue (and even as a mother tongue).
“Iniquity” is definitely the wrong
term to use here: it means “sin” or “wickedness” or “gross immorality”
(depending on which dictionary you choose), as in the phrase “Washington DC is currently
a den of iniquity”. It is not really appropriate to talk about “iniquities” and
“social protection” in the same breath (except arguably if you are referring to
workfare programmes or social registries!). Rather, what was meant in this
heading was probably “inequities”, which comes from exactly the same roots as
“iniquities” (Latin “in-” meaning “not” and “aequus”, meaning
“equal or just”). Yet “inequity” does not mean “sin”; it means “unfairness or
injustice in access to resources”, which is probably closer to what was
intended here.
Or should it
have been “inequalities and social protection”? This juxtaposition is in common
(and increasing) use in social protection discourse, especially with the
growing focus on leaving no-one behind. “Inequality”, like “inequity”, denotes an
uneven distribution of resources, but the implication is more of quantitative
disparities between groups and individuals (for example in terms of income,
wealth, assets or other measures of well-being), rather than qualitative
disparities, for example in access to justice, resources or opportunities. Although it is less common to
talk about inequities in the context of social protection than about
inequalities, it is perhaps nonetheless more apposite, because it implies that
unfairness in the distribution of resources is not just an objective fact, but
that it is the result of poor governance, corruption or cultural
exclusion, all of which well-designed transformative social protection can help
to tackle. Social protection should always aim to overcome inequity, as well as
to reduce inequality, in just the same way that, as a parent, you should strive
to treat your children equitably, even as you recognise that it is impossible
to treat them equally.
The next
issue is whether it makes sense to talk about “inequalities” (and “inequities”)
in the plural, as seems to be increasingly the practice. Linguistically, it is probably
wrong, because “inequity” and “inequality” are both absolute states: they exist
or they do not exist, so you cannot have more than one of them. Think for
example of “prosperity”: you would not talk about multiple “prosperities”, just
because there might be more than one manifestation of being prosperous.
I suspect
that the desire to make the terms plural has the same origin as the focus on
multi-dimensional poverty, which reinforces the important argument that poverty
is about more than monetary poverty: it is a concept that should also consider overlapping
deprivations in health, education and living standards. Similarly with inequities
and inequalities, perhaps the intention of making them plural is to draw
attention to the reality that there exist many causes and forms of “inequity”
and “inequality” (based not only on income, but also, for example, on gender[1],
colour, religion, ethnicity, disability, SOGIESC and so on). Possibly, in this
case, we should allow the implication of the diversity of causes to over-ride
the grammatical questionability of using a plural form.
These arbitrary
reflections invited further meanderings on the vagaries of the lexical semantics
of equality in the English language. Why do we have “unequal” (as in “an unequal
share of the cake” or “unequal to the task”) in place of the (now obsolete)
“inequal”? Yet why do we then say “inequality” but never “unequality”? Why is
“equity” the opposite of “inequity” but “iquity” is not the opposite of
“iniquity”? [“Iquity would actually be a good word for “virtue” – as in “the
seven heavenly iquities”!] Why does “inequity” take the suffix “-able” when it becomes
the adjective “inequitable”, whereas “iniquity” takes the suffix “-ous” to
become “iniquitous”? Where does “inegalitarian”, from the same Latin roots, and
again meaning “characterised by inequality”, fit in? Why do we have
“egalitarian” but not “egality” (or “inegality”), like the French do in Liberté,
Egalité, Fraternité? What about “equable” and “inequable”, whose meaning
also centres on “equal and even distribution” (or the lack of it)? And how is
it possible, in financial circles, that “equity” has been transformed to mean
“the outstanding value of an owned asset”; and that “equities” are “tradeable shares
issued by a company to represent ownership”, when both are in fact the manifestations
of massive inequity?
These musings
lead me to close with two further suggestions. The first is around collective
nouns that might be used for the opposing factions of the social protection
debate. In the same way that we talk about a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese,
a prickle of hedgehogs, a cackle of witches, a recession of economists, a strip of
ecdysiasts (look it up!) and a wunch of bankers, so social protection
needs its own appropriate collective nouns. I would humbly suggest “an equality
of universalists”, “an inequity of poverty-targeters” and “an iniquity of Proxy
Means Tests”.
Secondly, I
would like to propose a social protection tongue twister linked to gender and inequality:
“In general, unequal generation of equity and equities engenders genuine inter-generational
inequity and iniquitous gender inequality”, which, like all the best tongue
twisters, has the benefit of also being true.
Equably
yours,
Nicholas
I would
like to dedicate this piece to the memory of an old friend and colleague,
Philip White, who died on 7 March. Definitely a member of the equality of
universalists, Philip was among the most erudite and enlightened thinkers in
social protection.
[1] Gender is another interesting term,
not just because of the important distinction between sex and gender, but also
because multiple other words with the same root as gender (Latin “genus”,
meaning “birth, offspring or creation”) have evolved to have very different
meanings today: genre, generation, generous, genuine, general, degenerative, engender,
etc.
