Owen Jones' latest gripe
about the outrageous injustice of Britain
What Owen Jones has never
been very good at is understanding causality in these kinds of situation.
Rather like how feminist proponents of the spurious gender pay gap don't grasp
that when left to their free choices, there will be unequal outcomes as regards
men and women's average pay because men and women want and prioritise different
things, radical redistributionists rarely seem to grasp that when the results
of societal free choices are measured - even in the most equal countries - the
lowest two quintiles own next to nothing compared to those in the top quintile.
Alas, Owen Jones is not
alone though - errors of causality are highly common. This is because when we
ascribe causes to effects we do so by focusing on what seems to be the most
primary element of causality at the time. So for example, people will assert
that ISIS was caused by (among other things) Blair and Bush's Iraq invasion;
that the financial crash of 2008 was caused by (among other things) bankers'
recklessness; that the Brexit majority vote was caused by (among other things)
a huge anti-immigrant feeling; and that the Trump election was caused by (among
other things) a large anti-establishment feeling.
But consider a heart
attack by way of an analogy. Your obese neighbour Bob is outside washing his
car on a hot July afternoon, when suddenly he keels over and dies of a heart
attack. The most primary element of that event, the one on which the local
newspaper report would probably focus, would be on the fact that Bob was an
obese man over-exerting himself on a boiling hot summer day.
But there are other causes
too, multiple causes. For example, Bob's obesity was in part caused by
genetics, but also by his eating and drinking habits. Bob drank 40 units of
alcohol a week and had a fry-up for breakfast three or four times a week. He
also suffered from depression, which drove his excessive drinking. His
depression was triggered by multiple past legacies, including being treated
badly by his father, and having a mother too scared to protect him.
The upshot of all this is
that causes are numerous and complex, and they depend very much on which link
on the causal chain is being zoomed in on at the time. Moreover, in the case of
Bob's heart attack, all of the causes have some relevance and none of them
contradict the others.
The things that are causing
all this inequality of outcome are very much not instances of unfairness, they
are, by and large, instances of freedom in action, where a society with billions
of individual decisions, in aggregation, naturally leads to expected power laws
and income disparities. It's all very much to be expected, and probably always will be - it's a natural outcome of societies with diversity and a multitude of options.
And lest we forget, a few
other pertinent points, namely:
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