The Problem with Fairness

The concept of fairness is a major problem for humans.  It causes massive amounts of inefficiency, it is economically harmful, it causes a great deal of unnecessary poverty, and it is inherently hypocritical.

Fairness causes a great deal of problems for queuing theory.  Queuing, in the simplest terms, is a group of things lining up for something.  In some places, a line of people waiting for some kind of service (a line at the bus stop or a checkout line at the store, for example).  In computer science, a queue is a container that stores things and gives them to the program on a first-come-first-served basis.  A major pet project in queuing theory is how to best arrange lines of people waiting for a service, when there are multiple providers of that service operating at the same time.  Bank tellers and grocery store checkouts are a perfect example of this.  The question is, what is the most efficient queue for this kind of situation?  It turns out the answer is the kind of queue found in grocery stores.  Each service provider (cashier, in this case) has a queue.  When a person comes to checkout, that person goes to the shortest queue (that being the one with the least amount of work, so one person with 100 items adds more length than several people with only a few items each).  This queuing strategy minimizes the amount of time spent in the queue, and it is currently considered the most efficient kind of queue, however it is not perfect.  The problem is that it is not fair.  With this queuing strategy, people are not always served in the order they arrived.  Maybe one cashier has an item that is not scanning correctly, so the next customer has to wait an extra 30 seconds.  While he is waiting, the guy that got there after him, who is in a different queue, gets served first.  Yes, it seems trivial, because it is trivial.  It also really bothers people.  It bothers people so much, in fact, that they will spend several minutes trying to figure out which line is likely to get them to the cashier first.  Some people are so bothered by this that they will pick a line and then peak around to see if another line is going faster, sometimes switching lines several times before they end up checking out.  People would prefer a single serial (just one line) queue over a parallel (multiple lines) queue, even though the second one will almost always save everyone time, because the serial queue is never unfair.

Fairness is economically harmful for several reasons.  The first one is that people tend to define it in whatever way is most beneficial to themselves.  It is economically harmful, because it encourages people to thing about things like ownership emotionally instead of logically.

The most shallow definition is contractual fairness.  This is the idea that anything you can get someone to agree to is fair.  The claim that something is only worth what people will pay for it is an example of contractual fairness.  A more nefarious example is the extension that something is always worth the most people will pay for it.  Contractual fairness would assert that if I was the only person in a desert with access to a well, and you had exactly $100, it would be fair for me to charge you your entire $100 for a pint of water.  It does not take into account need or ability to afford.  In a work environment, contractual fairness asserts that any wage you pay me is fair, regardless of my productivity, because I agreed to that wage.  It does not care whether I had other options, and it does not care if I only took the job because the only other option was starving,  Contractual fairness even allows for slavery and coercion, because even if someone is threatening your life, you have the choice to give it up instead of agreeing to the contract.

Implied fairness, also defined as natural fairness, is fairness as we observe it in nature.  "The early bird gets the worm," because it has already eaten it by the time the other birds have arrived.  This is where "first come, first served" comes from.  "Possession is nine tenths of the law," because it is hard to prove ownership, but it is easy to see who currently possesses something.  The person who makes something implicitly owns it, for the same reason.  When your parents die, you get what they owned, because you know more about what and where it is than anyone else.  Unfortunately, the strong also rule over the weak.  It is better to let the weak die, because they are a liability to everyone else.  It is better to kill your enemies, because it makes you and your offspring a larger relative portion of the gene pool.  Implied fairness is actually worse than contractual fairness, because it is based on nature, and nature does not actually care about fairness at all.

Moral fairness is about what people "deserve."  It asserts that people who work hard deserve more rewards than people who do not.  People deserve to use the "fruits of their labor" however they see fit.  If you take something I own, it still belongs to me.  "All men are created equal."  I should inherit what my parents own when they die, because I am their offspring.  At the same time though, people who don't work should be allowed to starve and die.  If someone is in poverty, it must be their own fault.  Everyone who commits a crime, whether that crime actually harms anyone or not, should be locked away in jail.  The problem with moral fairness is that it is completely objective.  It does not distinguish between a lazy person and a crippled person.  Both don't work much, and thus both deserve poverty.  Someone who steals because they are starving to death is no better than a rich person who embezzles.  Moral fairness uses social conventions to define an objective law of fairness, but it takes no effort to account for the many special circumstances.

Civilized fairness arrives from deep contemplation and critical thought.  It is not based on personal feelings or emotions.  This kind of fairness asserts that everyone should be given an equal chance (instead of asserting that everyone is given an equal chance, like moral fairness does).  It cares very deeply about situation.  Disability is not the same a laziness.  Contracts are not inherently fair, and agreeing to a contract under duress (including the duress of threat of starvation) does not count as voluntary.  Charging the most people are willing to pay is not inherently fair, and sometimes things are worth more than the highest bidder is offering.  Acquisition does not inherently grant full rights of ownership, and owning something does not necessarily give exclusive rights of possession.  The creation of a thing does not inherently grant the creator possession or control of it.  Death is never a fitting punishment for laziness, and laziness is not always even the fault of the person who is lazy.  Unlike the other three definitions, civilized fairness also considers more than just the individual.  If first-come-first-served does not minimize average wait time, then another strategy is more fair, because it wastes less time total.  Civilized fairness allows the late guy to get to the front of the line in an airport, so he won't miss his flight, even if it is his own fault that he is late, because it is better to minimize the number of people who miss flights than it is to save 30 people waiting to go through security one minute just because they got there first.  Civilized fairness says it is better to have a simpler welfare system, despite the fact that it is more easily abused, because the cost of abuse is less than the cost of the extra administration required to maintain a complex welfare system.  It also says that income should be reasonably well distributed, because that will ultimately enrich everyone (including the rich) and improve the economy, while contractual and moral fairness will ultimately harm the economy by starving the majority of resources.  Civilized fairness takes a level of thinking that is beyond what most people are willing to do.  It tends to have a higher up front cost, and it sometimes uses unintuitive strategies, but ultimately it pays of with enormous interest.

In the end, all four types of fairness have their place.  Implied fairness is intuitive, because we see it constantly in nature.  Contractual fairness is important to the proper function of economy and government.  Moral fairness is important for keeping people motivated and useful.  Without civilized fairness though, we are little more than animals who have managed to make hive-like social constructs, without hive-like anti-individualism.  Civilized fairness tempers selfishness with the need to get along.  It can allow us to thrive as a group, without sacrificing our individuality.  It allows for the beneficial parts of the other types of fairness, without the parts that are ultimately harmful.  Civilized fairness is a higher way of thinking and living, and without it, I don't think any large civilization can last long term, without eventually collapsing.