What Does German Beer Have to Do with Fairness?
Submitted by CARPE DIEM
All the leading brands of beer in the United States were created by people of German ancestry and so is the leading beer in China, not to mention breweries created by Germans in Australia, Argentina and elsewhere. Germans were producing beer in the days of the Roman Empire.
This does not mean that beer brewing skill is genetic but it also does not mean that this skill– or any other skill– is randomly distributed among peoples, so that a failure to have equal “representation” of groups in a given institution can be presumed to be due to discrimination by that institution.
Fairness as equal treatment does not produce fairness as equal outcomes. The confusion between the two meanings of the same word has created enormous mischief, much of it at the expense of lagging groups, who have been distracted from the things that would enable them to catch up. And whole societies have been kept in a turmoil pursuing a will o’ the wisp in the name of “fairness.”
