My Family’s Money

Recently, I read posts on My Dollar Plan and AllFinancialMatters that got me thinking about the whole issue of fairness and being equitable with one’s children. While I currently have no children, this will be important to me when I have one (or seven) so I will engage in this thought experiment for fun and for the benefit of having thought it through before the fact.

What My Family Taught Me About Equality

My family of origin was one where making things equal was very important to my parents. Each Christmas they would try to get us about the same value in presents. Yet when it came to college, each of us was afforded the financial backing of our father irregardless of the price tag. So my oldest brother, whose schooling was well below $10,000 a year, got the short end of the stick when you consider that the school I attended ran from $20,000-$25,000 a year. Our opportunity was the same, but the money that created that opportunity was different for both of us. When it came to extras (i.e. presents) my parents were equitable, but when it came to opportunity they would not let the cost deter their sons from taking part.

Now this set-up seems relatively fair to my sensibilities. All us kids got what we needed and we were all afforded the same opportunity to succeed. We even got equal amounts of extra stuff if we wanted the extra stuff. My parents seemed to live by this rule: make opportunity available to all and make the extra stuff equal. I wonder how this would hold up in a situation or even a culture where neither money nor opportunity were in ample supply?

Ethiopia and Equality

To continue this thought experiment let us travel to the absolutely beautiful country of Ethiopia. With a GDP per capita that ranks in the bottom 10% of the world, a largely rural society, and an inefficient education system I doubt most families can give equal opportunity to all their children like my parents could. It is especially difficult for women in this culture. Bogaletch Gebre, founder and director of KMG, an NGO in Ethiopia, writes,

“Rural and urban poor women, on the other hand, perceive themselves as different. All their energies go to their families’ survival in harsh and worsening conditions. In the villages and in the city slums, a major part of their time and strength goes toward providing basic amenities of life, like carrying water long distances, gathering firewood, and preparing food. Their aspiration is to have enough rain to bring in a normal harvest so their routine of life is not disrupted and they are not displaced from their homes.”

This not only affects women who run households, but even the young girls of those households. Gebre continues by adding that,

“Although at the policy level Ethiopian education is not discriminatory against women, in some areas a staggering 94 percent of women have no schooling. Nationwide just 46 percent of all girls entering grade one remain till grade four, in some regions just 22 percent.

In 1989, at higher levels of education, women were 14.5 percent of students going for a two-year diploma, 8.2 percent for undergraduate and 6.4 percent for graduate degrees. For most female students, the primary level of education terminates at grade 6.”

This statistic is staggering and a little disturbing. When Gebre boils it down, she calls it an issue of sexism and patriarchy,

“Peasant women of the Third World are forced into asymmetric participation in development, by which they bear the greatest costs but are excluded from the benefits. While large numbers of men as well as women are impoverished by development processes, women tend to lose more. Men and boys are given greater access to education. They are given greater access to training for new kinds of jobs in the developing economy, while women and girls are often deprived of educational opportunity, being expected to stay home to do “women’s work” while their sustenance land base, the principle source of food for themselves and their children, is disappearing as land is taken up for large-scale mechanized farming of export crops.”

While it is true that the patriarchy that excludes women in this system is appalling and should be addressed, I tend to think that the real issue here is more about poverty and access to opportunity than anything else.

Equality Thought Experiment

Let us imagine our family is in a similar situation to one of those living in rural or urban poor areas of Ethiopia. For the sake of the experiment our access to food is dependent on factors outside our control, employment is scarce, and children are plentiful. Our only source of water is located 3 miles away. Education is available, but anything past the elementary level costs money to enroll in and money is scarce, very scarce. You’ve had somebody else do the math for you (since you never had much of an education) and you only have enough money to send one child to school. Your left with a choice:

1. Send the oldest to school, they will be able to make money from their job soonest and help you and their siblings possibly break the cycle of family poverty
2. Send the brightest to school, they stand the best chance of making it
3. Send each child to school for one year, to be fair, but essentially crippling their chance to get a job since they did not complete their schooling
4. Do nothing

Remember the rule that I thought my parents lived by: make opportunity available to all and make the extra stuff equal – well it seems to me like it is totally destroyed by this example. Choice 3 would seem like the logical extension of my parents line of thinking and to me choice 3 just seems plain wrong. This experiment seems to highlight a better rule in situations where we have to decide what do in matters of opportunity: make the choice that will improve the well being of the family. Choice 1 and 2 seem to follow this rule, albeit with different views on other details such as merit.

Family First, Individuals Second

I would say that most of the people I have run into would put their emphasis on individuals when thinking about families. But what I think this exercise has taught me is to think of my family first as a unit, and then as a unit of individuals. When we have a choice to make, choose what will create the best results for the family as a whole while also meeting the needs of as many individuals within that unit as possible. The choices won’t always be popular, and it may hurt like hell to disappoint our children by saying no to something so that we can say yes to something else, but in the end the family will be better off and that is what being a parent should be about.

Equality and fairness is something that we should strive to maintain only as much as it supports and maintains the collective good. Is it best for our children to treat them exactly the same on all counts, even when they are completely different individuals? Does it serve their best interests to spoil them and make them feel like the only rewards worth receiving are of a monetary value? I think that we can do a lot better for our children than teaching them that equity and fairness demand that everyone get the same thing irregardless of their situation. That is just bad thinking and bad practice.