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 gender¹, colour, religion, ethnicity, disability, SOGIESC and so on). Possibly, in this case, we should allow the implication of the diversity of causes to override 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.