SpeakFreely’s Oscar Gill-Lewis caught up with economist and academic Deirdre Nansen McCloskey about her concept of “equality of permission”—the equal freedom of all to pursue their happiness and values without restrictive and unnecessary legal restrictions. Read part of the conversation below.
Oscar Gill-Lewis: I think many liberal people—particularly liberal in the European sense of the word—would be in favor of equality of opportunity.
Deirdre McCloskey: That’s right—that’s the standard. Let’s put socialism and communism aside for the moment, because it turns out that if you give absolute power to the government it corrupts absolutely, as Acton said a long time ago.
All right, let’s consider a constitutionally constrained little socialism—just a bit—and let’s take the middle way, as people are always saying, between harsh dog-eat-dog capitalism on the one hand and a lovely but unattainable perfect communism on the other. And let’s have not equality of outcome but equality of opportunity. So everyone starts at the same starting line in the race of life. But of course, it’s not attainable. If you’re born in South Sudan instead of France, you’re out of luck. And the only way to achieve equality for some girl born in South Sudan is to immediately move her to France where she has a lot more opportunity. The same is true of the great variety of human gifts. Whether they’re inherited gifts, or come from having a very good family, or are in other ways cultivated… I don’t care if they’re genetic or not… if they’re just there; location, genes, upbringing, whatever, education… allowing people with vastly different abilities to trade with each other is what’s made the modern world. It’s made us all reasonably well-to-do.
And by the way, over the next century, poverty in the world is going to be eliminated by these same mechanisms of allowing people to have a go, allowing them to try out things. Not suppressing things in aid of so-called protection, like Donald Trump wants to introduce. Not central planning, not the state choosing winners, not the Town and Country Planning Act. That’s not what does it. What does it is people moving, inventing, trying out things that enrich us all. That comes from diversity. There was this attack in the United States on diversity, equity, and inclusion. My first name starts with DEI, so I’m quite sensitive on the point. Diversity is a good thing if you allow people to trade. Equity is a good thing if you allow people to achieve it with equal permission. Inclusion, if it means equality of permission… I’m all for it. So, I’m all for “DEI”. I’m not actually in favor of the stupid way it’s imposed, but still, I’m in favour of it.
And it’s the diversity of humans which we can’t compensate for. We can do little things like having public education, maybe. But it doesn’t really equalize people. I don’t know any foreign language except Latin and Greek, which doesn’t allow me to order coffee in Paris. But many people have multiple languages. Well, are we to make them stupid by driving nails into their head until they’re as stupid as I am about practical languages? Equality of opportunity is not what we want. We want equality of permission.
OGL: And it’s a completely different way of looking at the world… as you put it in the book, it’s a cosmopolitan ethic.
DMC: It is very much so.
OGL: We don’t look at someone from South Sudan as someone from South Sudan, but as another human being striving to get wealthy, to trade with us. It’s a win-win.
DMC: It’s profoundly egalitarian and I would say… and I’ve written a whole book claiming this… it’s consistent with Christianity. I’m an Anglican. We call it Episcopalian in the United States, but I’m an Anglican, and have been since 1998. Most liberal Protestants are basically socialists or new liberals and I have written this book that hasn’t been published yet, that says the core of Christian thinking (or for that matter Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, etc), is an equality of souls permitted by free will to choose their way. Not God’s pets, wholly governed by God… we’re not in the Garden of Eden anymore. We’re cast out of the Garden of Eden and we have free will.
And that’s consistent with this essential liberalism. I know that my friends in Protestant and Catholic theology do not agree with this. They hate it, but they’re wrong. And I think that so to speak, God wants us to be essential liberals. Or at least my God does. She, by the way, is a black British working-class single mother lesbian that works in a grocery store in Leeds. That’s my Anglican God. You’ll be surprised. She’s not an old man in a beard.
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