What's Changing? - Fairness

Please see below selected recent fairness-related change.

See also:

July 2022

When people talk about life and say, “there’s no such thing as luck,” they might be referring to the fact that, in the long run, people who are prepared, persistent and granted the benefit of the doubt often do well, but what that's missing in that analysis is that life (and culture) is constructed to reward early luck. Such early luck can have a massive impact. Where you’re born, the caste society puts you in, whether or not you were appropriately precocious in various early ranking systems - these all get compounded.

June 2022

December 2021

Fairness - essentially, lack of favouritism - is easier to track when everyone is working in similar circumstances. But the vast majority of knowledge workers, and most employers, now prefer a hybrid approach. Before the pandemic 5% of work in America was done remotely and 27% of employers offered flexible hours; today the numbers are 40% and 88% respectively. The hybrid workplace will be a messy concoction. Left to develop organically, it is more likely to exacerbate existing inequalities than reduce them, warned The Economist.

December 2020

Fairness is a theme that emerged time and again in conversations and essays about the pandemic. The pandemic brought renewed focus on health outcomes across social and racial groups.
Created by the World Health Organisation, the vaccines alliance GAVI, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, the COVAX project was designed to provide global equal access to vaccines as they are developed. Unfortunately, lack of adequate international support crippled its chances of success. Short on funding, COVAX hadn't by the end of 2020 come close to locking up the 2 billion doses it hoped to provide by the end 2021. According to Arnaud Bernaert, who heads global health for the World Economic Forum, about 75 percent of the 12 billion doses expected to be produced globally by the end of 2021 had already been purchased by wealthy countries.

November 2020

G20 leaders called for equal access to the coronavirus vaccine, pledging to “spare no effort” in supplying the drugs, tests and vaccines affordably and fairly. The nations agreed to work to protect and create jobs for all while protecting lives and providing support “with a special focus on the most vulnerable,” according to their final communique.

September 2020

The Economist argued that capitalism must be for the many not the few. In poor countries that means giving more people title over their property, so they can use it as collateral to buy seeds or start a business. Twenty years ago Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist, argued that this could harness informally owned land and other assets worth $13.5tn at contemporary valuations. Since then his ideas have spread. India wants to use drones to survey its villages; Rwanda has mapped all its territory. Even so only 30% of the world’s people have formal titles today.
The World Health Organization announced that 172 countries had signed up to its programme to ensure a COVID-19 vaccine was distributed fairly around the world. The COVAX scheme aimed to procure and deliver around 2 billion doses of a successful vaccine to all participating countries - both rich and poor - by the end of 2021.

December 2019

The issue of fairness has been a recurring one in the global climate debate: one of the key issues is whether developed nations will provide greater financial help to developing nations to encourage sustainable growth. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, current policies and practices don’t seem fair for many emerging nations of the world.

July 2019

Tax avoidance by corporations deprives poorer countries of up to US$100 billion per year - or around 6% of sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP. In Uganda, for example, where the average person lives on $2 per day and fragile tax systems rely heavily on corporate tax, losing that revenue can be crippling, claimed Quartz.
The Financial Times argues that it is unfair for companies to enjoy tax advantages simply because they are transnational. The ability of some of the world’s most profitable companies to escape paying fair levels of tax is fuelling a popular backlash against globalisation and western-style capitalism. Resentment is understandable when digital companies can reduce tax bills to paltry levels by domiciling in jurisdictions such as Ireland or Luxembourg.
In the US, the bipartisan Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act legislation addressed the decades-long wait times for applicants for employment-based visas. Many of the impacted applicants already lived and worked in America as doctors, engineers, and scientists who studied in American universities. Many had faced decades-long wait times for permanent residence.

August 2018

For The School of Life, a truly fair society would be one in which a yearly rise in the degree of emotional privilege in circulation would became a national priority – and where an abundance of love, concern, and connection was adequately studied, encouraged and prized as the true ‘wealth’ it is.
The TSOL adds that many of us feel that our societies are a little - or even plain totally - ‘unfair’. But we have a hard time explaining our sense of injustice to the powers that be in a way that sounds rational and without personal pique or bitterness, and that’s why we need John Rawls (1921-2002), a twentieth-century American philosopher who provides us with a failproof model for identifying what truly might be unfair – and how we might gather support for fixing things.

Pre 2018

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