Mixed metaphors and false premises

The other day, while conducting my endless search of the Internet, I stumbled across an article on The Blaze’s website that discussed a plan hatched by a group of College
Republicans in California.

Your first reaction to this might be, “Wait, there are Republicans in California?” Surprisingly, the answer is yes. But that’s not the point of this article.

The students’ plan was to go around their campus and ask liberal-minded students if they would be willing to give up a portion of their grade-point averages to students with lower grades. As you might suspect, the answer was almost universally, “No, I worked hard for that GPA.”

This answer delighted the College Republicans because they interpreted it as utter hypocrisy. Liberal, Democratic college students were willing to give away other people’s hard-earned money, but not their own hard-earned grades.

I was taken aback at first, because I, too would not want to share my GPA and did feel a little hypocritical for that stance. Then I began to consider their metaphor more closely.

In a university setting, we all operate under relatively similar guidelines. Sure, it may be easier to get good grades in some departments than others, but we all basically start at the same level.

In the metaphor, this is supposed to be how economic success works. The money you make is resultant of your individual effort and nothing more.

How realistic is that? To me, it’s up there with the Tooth Fairy. Sorry to any of you who still believe in the Tooth Fairy.

In reality, the vast majority of Americans will never even dream of touching an economic 4.0.

Let’s make their metaphor realistic. If we set up a grading system to match our economic situation, there couldn’t be any ‘cap’ on the grading scale because there isn’t a cap on how much one can earn.

For the sake of argument, we’ll make a household income of $250,000 equivalent to our 4.0, partially arbitrarily and partially because it is very close to what the lowest of the top 2 percent of American households earned in 2009.   

Now, let’s look at what I like to call the Super 4.0 Plus Crowd.

If you divide the net worth of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates by their age, you get a crude estimate of how much wealth they would accumulate in a given year. When you apply that yearly total to our economic grade scale, they would be earning roughly a 10,000.0 and a 16,288.0, respectively, on our 4.0 scale.

To be fair, not all of that ‘wealth generation’ would count as income in the technical sense, but the point remains the same. The highest GPA that would be earned by anyone in the bottom 60 percent would be a 1.12.  What’s worse, the vast majority of those in the lower half will never have the opportunity to earn more than what their parents earned.

Poor living conditions, failing schools in poverty-stricken areas and other challenges associated with poverty conspire to keep them well below that level. It’s a cute charade put on by the Californians, but because the metaphor they use is so fundamentally flawed, it adds nothing legitimate to the conversation about social inequality.

We live in a society that believes in meritocracy. But for a meritocracy to work, every individual needs to start at a level playing field. As it stands, that is not how our society functions.

Nonsense like this farce of a comparison cannot possibly make the situation better.

­— jontodd@indiana.edu