Jon Reisman

Jeopardy Answer: Policy goal that is loudly proclaimed and pursued across nearly every sector of American society but is rarely (if ever) defined or assessed. 

Jeopardy Question: What is Equity?

Jeopardy  examples: The University of Maine System and Maine’s Climate Action Plan, and that is just for starters. There is no definition, and in my opinion, it is not an accident or oversight but a deliberate decision to obfuscate, hide, and protect the use of racial preferences and government-sanctioned racial discrimination under the cover of affirmative action, anti-racism, and so-called disparate impact analysis. The problem is that the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in the Fair Admissions case that such racial preferences and discrimination are unconstitutional. 

The entire fascist DEI façade is being challenged. One interesting observation — the University of Maine has dropped “Equity” and rebranded DEI as just diversity and inclusion, although there is still plenty of “equity” on the web page — but not a definition of equity. That is true for the University of Maine, the University of Maine at Machias, and apparently the entire University of Maine System. https://umaine.edu/diversity-and-inclusion/ 

I have sent Freedom of Access Act (FOAA) “right to know” (as in spill it Mac) requests to a number of Maine public entities for their definition of equity and have either received no response or the Jeopardy answer above. It should be noted that the Maine Climate Council did not have a definition of the equity they were loudly pursuing, but they did have assessment metrics (courtesy of the University of Maine’s Mitchell Center for Sustainability) if no definition of what they were assessing.

The final submitted version of the updated climate action plan backed off the previous equity rhetoric a bit but not their policy intentions and goals, which in my view will avert no climate change at all but will make energy more expensive, the grid less reliable, enrich wind and solar crony capitalists, and beggar the rest of us. I’d prefer we kept the church of apocalyptic climate change separate from the State of Maine, but there are a lot of true believers (in climate change if not the Constitution) amongst us, especially in the First Congressional District/Northern Massachusetts. Deemphasizing equity devalued the complaints the Second Congressional District could make over the disparate impact land acquisition/carbon sequestration/electric vehicle policies have on rural Maine.

Back in the mid-to-late Pleistocene/20th century, “equity” meant “fairness,” a subjective assessment of the distribution of the benefits and burdens of any policy, as opposed to efficiency, which is a more clearly defined and assessable concept of outputs to inputs. Efficiency and equity are both policy goals, but efficiency is much easier to quantify and assess. Inefficiency is relatively easy to identify, agree upon, and assess; Inequity, on the other hand, is inherently subjective and subject to different interpretations. While modern equity advocates have been unwilling or reluctant to openly define equity, they have occasionally been clear as to what equity is not — equality, that pesky concept in the Declaration of Independence and the 14th Amendment guarantee of Equal Protection.

I think the actual operative definition of equity is “equal results,” but the equity-istas cannot go with that because it is openly unconstitutional. Therefore, they are stuck with pursuing a policy goal they cannot openly define, much less assess.

House GOP leader Faulkingham is the lead sponsor of An Act to Define and Assess Equity, which would require state agencies and public K-12 and higher ed to define and assess equity if they pursue equity in any policy area. There will be a national push to pull back the curtain and abolish the DEI grift. Here in blue/purple Maine, honesty and transparency would be a good start.

Jon Reisman is an economist and policy analyst who retired from the University of Maine at Machias after 38 years. He resides on Cathance Lake in Cooper, where he is a Selectman and a Statler and Waldorf intern. Mr. Reisman’s views are his own, and he welcomes comments as letters to the editor here or to him directly via email at [email protected].