There is a difference in fairness at an individual level and ‘fairness’ at a group level. It seems to me that the moving goalposts issue was a redefinition of fairness from the individual level to the group level - and in too many cases a redefinition of fairness in terms of outcomes. As an old classic liberal, I strive for fairness at an individual level - and let the chips fall where they will.
Thank you, John. You are highlighting the core tension of the whole cycle. The shift from individual procedural fairness to aggregate group patterns is exactly where the political friction becomes most intense, and classical liberals are right to be wary of pure outcome engineering.
But my argument is that Stage 3 often arises precisely because the individual "chips" didn't fall fairly in the past, and those historical distortions leave a paper trail today. When we look at aggregate data, like a credit model disproportionately rejecting applicants from specific zip codes, we aren't necessarily trying to enforce a rigid group quota. Instead, the group data acts as a diagnostic tool. It alerts us that our supposedly neutral individual rule might actually be laundering past, state-enforced individual injustices, like original, race-based redlining.
Using group patterns to identify systemic flaws doesn't have to mean abandoning individual fairness. It often means expanding our data inputs, like looking at an individual's successful rent history instead of just a traditional credit score, to give that individual a fairer shot.
The goal isn't to guarantee equal outcomes across groups, but to ensure that our individual rules are actually doing what they claim to do in a messy, historical world. If we treat the rules as permanently flawless, we end up defending rigidity instead of fairness.
There are also systematic effects that Julius Wilson talked about. He discussed the loss of cultural capital as the people with the knowledge and understanding of the system leave an impacted area, removing the example and explicit guidance from the younger generation. This is as true in the Inner city that Julius WIlson studied as it is in Appalachia and the rural west, where generations of emmigrants to areas with better opportunity have stripped social capital and capability from the local society - and this has nothing to do with discrimination issues, just the classic U-Haul approach to advancement - frequently aided by a stint in the service. I see it in my son-in-law's extended family in rural Utah and I saw it growing up in NW DC and Western Baltimore.
Populists have the same problem understanding how science works. Science, like the systems described by Tarnell Brown, is designed to be self-correcting. You make an observation or a series of observations from which you derive a hypothesis, then you design experiments or plan additional observations to see whether the outcomes support the hypothesis. You can never say with absolute certainty that a given hypothesis -- or if there's enough evidential support, a theory -- is true as stated. You can't prove it; you can only falsify it. If someone finds evidence that disagrees with it, you may have to start over from scratch, but more often you just need to tweak the theory to incorporate the new data. Populists go nuts over this. You lied to us! You're changing the rules! If it's not entirely correct, then to them it's complete bunk. This is why they're still accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists who tried to help officials formulate rules to keep us safe during the COVID-19 pandemic of chicanery. No matter how many times they're told we were dealing with a new virus about which nothing was known and so we had to base our early advice on educated guesses, then update it if those guesses proved not to be entirely correct, the MAGA crowd cannot wrap their heads around it. That's why these people belong to religions that tell them exactly what to believe and how to live their lives and describe harsh punishments in the afterlife for violating those rules -- or perhaps thinking that way isn't inherent, but the consequence of being raised in such a religion. In either case, they need everything to be absolute, black or white. But reality as experienced isn't absolute; it's nuanced, its "truth" occurring in shades of gray that can shift and change with one's vantage point. So they don't trust science or institutions that create rules intended to make aspects of our society more fair because both modify their output as new information becomes available. I don't know whether it's possible to reason with such people, because it appears their minds are closed to even considering any perspective other than their own.
Thank you, Beverly. You’ve hit on what might be the definitive psychological and epistemic link here. The parallel between scientific falsification and liberal institutional evolution is exact.
Just as Karl Popper argued that science advances not by proving absolute truths but by systematically uncovering errors, a healthy liberal order relies on feedback loops to uncover institutional failures. When we adjust a policy or a credit algorithm because new data reveals an unintended disparate outcome, we aren’t moving the goalposts in a fit of bad faith, we are falsifying a previous social hypothesis and updating the model.
The populist demand for absolute, immutable rules from day one is effectively a rejection of reality's complexity. Whether it is a novel virus or a complex housing market, the pretense of perfect, static knowledge is a mirage. When institutions pretend to have absolute answers, they inevitably become rigid and fragile.
By framing every mid-course correction as a lie or a conspiracy, populists protect their black-and-white worldview at the expense of our collective capacity to learn. A society that outlaws institutional cycling is a society that has lost the ability to self-correct.
Does the author distinguish between justice before the law and justice in private institutions? Our public institutions must regard individuals as equal before the law, but private institutions are a different matter. Private institutions and individuals have the political right to be unfair, because this is part of what free expression and freedom to think requires. The proper response to private injustice is to not deal with such people. (This doesn't mean that they can engage in theft or fraud, of course).
Thank you for this thoughtful pushback. You are pointing to a crucial distinction in classical liberal theory, but my argument is that even if we separate state coercion from private association, both spaces are still bound by the same evolutionary reality: they must learn from new information, or they fail.
First, on market discipline and exit: a private institution’s "right to be unfair" is heavily constrained by its own desire to be accurate and profitable. When a private credit algorithm inadvertently redlines a neighborhood, it isn't just committing a social injustice; it is committing a market error by mispricing risk and leaving money on the table. The "shift" from procedural rules to outcome analysis happens because the private firm itself realizes its data is bad. The market forces a cycle of correction.
Second, the boundary between public and private is rarely a clean firewall in the modern world. Many "private" screening and credit algorithms are deeply intertwined with public utilities, state-backed housing programs, and federally regulated banking systems. When these private systems entrench historical, state-engineered injustices (like original redlining), the social pressure to fix them isn't an arbitrary populist whim. but it is instead a demand that the broader liberal order live up to its promise of fair play.
The core of the essay isn't that the state should regulate every private mistake. It's that a healthy liberal society, whether through market competition, public debate, or shifting corporate practices, leaves the door open for citizens to say, "This system isn't working as intended," and allows the system to adapt. Rigidity, even under the banner of private rights, eventually breeds the very populist resentment that threatens the whole liberal order.
Thanks for the reply. I agree that we have a mixture of state coercion and private association and that there's legitimate pressure to fix the problems that arise from this mixture. The reason is that there's a fundamental difference between state coercion and private association.
Coercion doesn't belong in private, economic associations -- i.e., voluntary trade among people -- it should only be used by the state in retaliation against criminals and fraudsters. Trying to mix trade and coercion is like trying to mix food and poison.
The solution is to restrict government to its proper role of protecting rights instead of intervening the economy. Government should not be in the business or picking winners and losers in the marketplace. Doing so is what breeds resentment and threatens liberal order.
What people need to understand is that "the system working as intended" means freedom -- it means removing coercion from human interactions. This is supposed to be the state's job, but it has strayed well beyond this, such that it is the primary source of coercion in people's lives.
There is a difference in fairness at an individual level and ‘fairness’ at a group level. It seems to me that the moving goalposts issue was a redefinition of fairness from the individual level to the group level - and in too many cases a redefinition of fairness in terms of outcomes. As an old classic liberal, I strive for fairness at an individual level - and let the chips fall where they will.
Thank you, John. You are highlighting the core tension of the whole cycle. The shift from individual procedural fairness to aggregate group patterns is exactly where the political friction becomes most intense, and classical liberals are right to be wary of pure outcome engineering.
But my argument is that Stage 3 often arises precisely because the individual "chips" didn't fall fairly in the past, and those historical distortions leave a paper trail today. When we look at aggregate data, like a credit model disproportionately rejecting applicants from specific zip codes, we aren't necessarily trying to enforce a rigid group quota. Instead, the group data acts as a diagnostic tool. It alerts us that our supposedly neutral individual rule might actually be laundering past, state-enforced individual injustices, like original, race-based redlining.
Using group patterns to identify systemic flaws doesn't have to mean abandoning individual fairness. It often means expanding our data inputs, like looking at an individual's successful rent history instead of just a traditional credit score, to give that individual a fairer shot.
The goal isn't to guarantee equal outcomes across groups, but to ensure that our individual rules are actually doing what they claim to do in a messy, historical world. If we treat the rules as permanently flawless, we end up defending rigidity instead of fairness.
There are also systematic effects that Julius Wilson talked about. He discussed the loss of cultural capital as the people with the knowledge and understanding of the system leave an impacted area, removing the example and explicit guidance from the younger generation. This is as true in the Inner city that Julius WIlson studied as it is in Appalachia and the rural west, where generations of emmigrants to areas with better opportunity have stripped social capital and capability from the local society - and this has nothing to do with discrimination issues, just the classic U-Haul approach to advancement - frequently aided by a stint in the service. I see it in my son-in-law's extended family in rural Utah and I saw it growing up in NW DC and Western Baltimore.
Populists have the same problem understanding how science works. Science, like the systems described by Tarnell Brown, is designed to be self-correcting. You make an observation or a series of observations from which you derive a hypothesis, then you design experiments or plan additional observations to see whether the outcomes support the hypothesis. You can never say with absolute certainty that a given hypothesis -- or if there's enough evidential support, a theory -- is true as stated. You can't prove it; you can only falsify it. If someone finds evidence that disagrees with it, you may have to start over from scratch, but more often you just need to tweak the theory to incorporate the new data. Populists go nuts over this. You lied to us! You're changing the rules! If it's not entirely correct, then to them it's complete bunk. This is why they're still accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists who tried to help officials formulate rules to keep us safe during the COVID-19 pandemic of chicanery. No matter how many times they're told we were dealing with a new virus about which nothing was known and so we had to base our early advice on educated guesses, then update it if those guesses proved not to be entirely correct, the MAGA crowd cannot wrap their heads around it. That's why these people belong to religions that tell them exactly what to believe and how to live their lives and describe harsh punishments in the afterlife for violating those rules -- or perhaps thinking that way isn't inherent, but the consequence of being raised in such a religion. In either case, they need everything to be absolute, black or white. But reality as experienced isn't absolute; it's nuanced, its "truth" occurring in shades of gray that can shift and change with one's vantage point. So they don't trust science or institutions that create rules intended to make aspects of our society more fair because both modify their output as new information becomes available. I don't know whether it's possible to reason with such people, because it appears their minds are closed to even considering any perspective other than their own.
Thank you, Beverly. You’ve hit on what might be the definitive psychological and epistemic link here. The parallel between scientific falsification and liberal institutional evolution is exact.
Just as Karl Popper argued that science advances not by proving absolute truths but by systematically uncovering errors, a healthy liberal order relies on feedback loops to uncover institutional failures. When we adjust a policy or a credit algorithm because new data reveals an unintended disparate outcome, we aren’t moving the goalposts in a fit of bad faith, we are falsifying a previous social hypothesis and updating the model.
The populist demand for absolute, immutable rules from day one is effectively a rejection of reality's complexity. Whether it is a novel virus or a complex housing market, the pretense of perfect, static knowledge is a mirage. When institutions pretend to have absolute answers, they inevitably become rigid and fragile.
By framing every mid-course correction as a lie or a conspiracy, populists protect their black-and-white worldview at the expense of our collective capacity to learn. A society that outlaws institutional cycling is a society that has lost the ability to self-correct.
Does the author distinguish between justice before the law and justice in private institutions? Our public institutions must regard individuals as equal before the law, but private institutions are a different matter. Private institutions and individuals have the political right to be unfair, because this is part of what free expression and freedom to think requires. The proper response to private injustice is to not deal with such people. (This doesn't mean that they can engage in theft or fraud, of course).
Thank you for this thoughtful pushback. You are pointing to a crucial distinction in classical liberal theory, but my argument is that even if we separate state coercion from private association, both spaces are still bound by the same evolutionary reality: they must learn from new information, or they fail.
First, on market discipline and exit: a private institution’s "right to be unfair" is heavily constrained by its own desire to be accurate and profitable. When a private credit algorithm inadvertently redlines a neighborhood, it isn't just committing a social injustice; it is committing a market error by mispricing risk and leaving money on the table. The "shift" from procedural rules to outcome analysis happens because the private firm itself realizes its data is bad. The market forces a cycle of correction.
Second, the boundary between public and private is rarely a clean firewall in the modern world. Many "private" screening and credit algorithms are deeply intertwined with public utilities, state-backed housing programs, and federally regulated banking systems. When these private systems entrench historical, state-engineered injustices (like original redlining), the social pressure to fix them isn't an arbitrary populist whim. but it is instead a demand that the broader liberal order live up to its promise of fair play.
The core of the essay isn't that the state should regulate every private mistake. It's that a healthy liberal society, whether through market competition, public debate, or shifting corporate practices, leaves the door open for citizens to say, "This system isn't working as intended," and allows the system to adapt. Rigidity, even under the banner of private rights, eventually breeds the very populist resentment that threatens the whole liberal order.
Thanks for the reply. I agree that we have a mixture of state coercion and private association and that there's legitimate pressure to fix the problems that arise from this mixture. The reason is that there's a fundamental difference between state coercion and private association.
Coercion doesn't belong in private, economic associations -- i.e., voluntary trade among people -- it should only be used by the state in retaliation against criminals and fraudsters. Trying to mix trade and coercion is like trying to mix food and poison.
The solution is to restrict government to its proper role of protecting rights instead of intervening the economy. Government should not be in the business or picking winners and losers in the marketplace. Doing so is what breeds resentment and threatens liberal order.
What people need to understand is that "the system working as intended" means freedom -- it means removing coercion from human interactions. This is supposed to be the state's job, but it has strayed well beyond this, such that it is the primary source of coercion in people's lives.