This post is about how to think about fixing historical wrongs, like reparations for past injustices.

Imagine playing soccer on a tilted field. Amazingly, I found an image of such a thing online, but it shows a field tilted sideways. I mean tilted so one team has to run uphill on offense. Almost surely one team will have an advantage, though my soccer-playing friends can’t tell which.

[Edit: I since thought of a simpler, clearer way to advantage a team: make the goal one team have to defend six inches wider or taller. I already wrote this post and found the picture below, so I won’t edit it completely, but just imagine instead of a tilted field, a field with one goal larger than the other. I think the rest makes more sense with that way of disadvantaging one team.]

Imagine all the players on both teams are equally skilled and they don’t change sides at halftime. Then one team will tend to win more.

What could you do to fix the lopsided score? In principle, you could award extra goals to the disadvantaged team, but would it feel right just to give goals?

Even if you gave them goals to make up for the difference, as they kept playing, you’d have to keep giving them goals.

You could shuffle players around between teams so the disadvantage was distributed without bias to original team, but it wouldn’t change that one team would keep winning despite not being better.

Isn’t it obvious you have to level the field to remove the disadvantage?

A concrete example

For a concrete (literally) example, I like to think of the Cross Bronx Expressway. The Bronx was once mostly working-class neighborhoods. Then the Cross Bronx Expressway was constructed right through many such neighborhoods.

People don’t like living with expressways next door and they do like living in greener areas with easy commutes into the city, so people who could afford it moved outside the city. The Bronx ended up with poorer people stuck with highways in their neighborhoods with all the air, noise, and other pollution that came with them.

If you wanted to fix the disadvantage the extra-goal way, you could give people in the Bronx cash to make up for their worse lives. Even if you found an amount everyone agreed on, it wouldn’t fix that after you made them whole, their lives continue disadvantaged. You’d have to keep giving them cash forever.

You could say you could give them future amounts, but since it’s unpredictable, I don’t see how payments for future problems could work. You just have to keep giving them cash forever. I expect people would start objecting.

If you wanted to fix the disadvantage the shuffle-players-around way, you could move some people from the Bronx to the suburbs and some suburbans to the Bronx, but that violates many senses of property. It would upend communities that formed.

Isn’t it obvious you have to level the field to remove the disadvantage? As long as the Cross Bronx Expressway exists, it creates disadvantage. You could suggest that housing prices will adjust to reflect the desirability. I should clarify two things I’m convolving and will have to resolve in a future post (sorry, I sometimes use my blog to develop ideas. It’s not a peer-reviewed journal).

Regarding past disadvantages, housing prices adjusting today doesn’t help people whose homes lost value, who became sick from pollution, and so on. If they and their descendants keep living there, giving them cash all the time doesn’t work. If a bias in skin color existed when the Cross Bronx was constructed, it would exacerbate that bias. Shuffling the disadvantaged skin colors out and advantaged ones in would make the harms less biased, but wouldn’t stop the harms.

As long as the highway wrecks neighborhoods and health, we’re playing soccer on a tilted field.

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