I’m not a fan of Billy Ackman for several reasons, but nothing has roused my ire more than than this: because of Ackman, I now have to write about sports, which is something I never talk about unless it’s to make fun of it.
For those of you who don’t follow such things, Ackman bought his way into some sort of big tennis match with a lot of big tennis pros. He sucked and lost, prompting Martina Navratilova to mockingly tweet of him, “Oh to have the confidence . . .” She might have added: “. . . of a very rich white man.”
I can’t understand all the ins and outs of this story, except that his buying his way into this match took away a spot from many other deserving players. Which is ironic for Ackman, an infamous opponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), since this is a much more flagrant version of what he and his cronies are always complaining about with affirmative action and DEI. Except that of course students of color are not buying their way into anything; nor are the spots that used to go to white men being taken by undeserving candidates.
The reason this story interests me is that it brings me back to an old argument in political theory that doesn’t get much attention anymore.
Back in the early 1980s, Michael Walzer wrote a very interesting book called Spheres of Justice. This was the high tide (or maybe ebb tide) of liberal thinking about inequality. Most liberal and, in fact, a lot of leftist thinking about inequality focused on the simple fact of rich and poor, that some have much and many have little, as the wrong or injustice in question. As a solution, they recommended what Walzer called “simple equality.” The rich should have less, and the poor should have more. Or maybe everyone should have the same amount.
Walzer wasn’t against this solution so much as he was against this way of thinking about the problem. He favored what he called “complex equality.” He thought the real problem with rich…
Auteur: Corey Robin
