We seem to be reminded on a regular basis that there are some individuals in our world who are largely immune from a sense of shame – indeed, any sense of embarrassment. Such people must be deeply painful to spend any time with, because this immunity must be a sign that they lack empathy and any ability to see themselves through others’ eyes. 

Yet while occasional senses of shame and embarrassment are intensely human, and surely a positive, an ongoing and unshakeable feeling of shame can only be negative. This is termed ‘trait shame’ in a brief and thoughtful paper on Psyche from US clinical psychologists Michaela Swee and Susan Murray. Typically arising from bad experiences in formative years, sufferers feel that they do not deserve good things, that they are ‘bad’ or ‘broken’. Swee and Murray distinguish this from feelings of guilt because it is to do with the individual’s whole sense of themselves, not simply their feelings with regard to a specific act or behaviour.

The clinicians argue that the appropriate response to such shame is not to suppress it nor to avoid the feelings that arouse it, but to recognise and acknowledge it, and to be self-compassionate. In effect, they argue that we should learn to be fair to ourselves, acknowledge the feelings, recognise their underlying origins, and yet be honest about how unfair to ourselves that ongoing sense of shame is. 

After all, such fairness should surely typify our response to those who are less fortunate than ourselves and who face negative life events. Very often, individuals’ decision-making is constrained by their circumstances and allows them to achieve only limited amounts or obliges them to take risks that may not come good. David Kinney, now an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Washington University in St Louis, has long studied causation and the limits to our understanding of it given real-world complexities. In another article for Psyche, Kinney considers these issues through the case of Kenny Chow, a New York immigrant from Myanmar, who in 2011 when made redundant after 20 years working for a jewellery firm chose to buy a taxi medallion for $750,000. Though for a short while this seemed like a good decision, the advent of ride-hailing apps Uber and Lyft completely changed the economics of the taxi business. Chow started to struggle to make the repayments on his loan and eventually took his own life in 2018.

Kinney tries to make the mathematical case that we should be understanding in such situations. He argues that the complexity of decision-making ensures that it will be unknowable for most individuals to predict likely future scenarios and so assess whether they are making wise decisions. Having advised clients on scenario analysis when thinking about climate risk for investment portfolios, I well know that the best way of thinking about the process is not as an attempt to predict the future but rather to seek to gain insights into the range of possible outcomes so as to try to build resilience to the worst ones. As Kinney says, wisdom might lead to individuals not putting all their eggs in a single basket, limiting individual exposures as investment institutions and the wealthy certainly do – but such a mindset assumes that all have resources sufficient to spread their risks effectively. The ability to spread risks is itself a privilege not available to all. Kinney’s is a logical case, but it lacks the compassion that Swee and Murray might argue for, and that the cruelty of the Chow case probably invites.

Even setting aside compassion, in spite of the logic of Kinney’s case, many of us tend to assume that poor life choices lead individuals into these situations. Significant numbers of people – especially in the US – believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and poverty arises from a lack of effort. As we’ve seen previously, people in the US are particularly optimistic about the chances of people from the bottom quintile of wealth rising out of that during their lives. While those from other countries are more realistic (even pessimistic), the chances of rising from poverty are in most countries depressingly small – even though we love to hear those rare rags-to-riches tales. 

Ironically, it is the central importance of fairness to who we are as humans that can lead us to lack compassion, to fail to be fair to ourselves and others. Just as the centrality of fairness to our human world-view leads us to believe in meritocracy in a largely misplaced way, so our view that the world is just means that we are prone to find post-hoc justifications for unfairness having happened to others. Psychologist Melvin Lerner called this the just-world hypothesis and found it makes people enter into intellectual contortions to make injustice make sense – to the extent of asserting that randomly chosen individuals from their own groups actually in some way deserved the mistreatment they received at the hands of experimenters. This sense was strongest for those that were unable to influence the mistreatment, suggesting that disempowerment plays a role in being willing to convince ourselves that iniquitous outcomes are in some way fair. That’s dangerous given how many people increasingly feel disempowered.

As law professor Tess Wilkinson-Ryan explains in her fascinating book Fool Proof, “There are enormous psychological consequences to believing that the world is unfair – it feels really destabilizing and depressing – and people will adapt their other beliefs to fit a story about a just universe. The feeling of living in a rigged or random system can feel terrifying and unsettling in a way that is worse than losing and feeling like you deserved to lose.” Lerner’s evidence is even stronger than Wilkinson-Ryan expresses it – the adaptions of beliefs are awakened not by the world as a whole proving unfair, but just that our world contains specific unfairnesses that we often cannot influence.

Unlike Stanley Kowalski (in Streetcar Named Desire), we don’t make our own luck. We are framed in the world around us, and not all options are available to all of us. Swee and Murray argue that we need to work to awaken our compassionate selves, so as to be more fair to ourselves. I’d argue we need to awaken our compassionate selves to be more fair to others too – and not be so fooled by our firm desires for a fair world that we think that all current outcomes must be the consequence of fairness.

See also: Fairness – the human lens for addressing our current challenges
Meritocracy’s unfair

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

How to cope with shame, Michaela Swee, Susan Murray. Psyche, 2023

The mathematical case against blaming people for their misfortune, David Kinney. Psyche, 2021

Just World Research and the Attribution Process: Looking Back and Ahead, Melvin Lerner, Dale Miller. Psychological Bulletin 85, No 5 (1978)

Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes our Selves and the Social Order – and what we can do about it, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan. Harper Collins, 2023

I write this as I return from my first trip to Australia for a decade. I am reminded that it’s a warm place – not just in terms of climate but also in the matiness of the culture. Fairness plays a key role in this, formally and informally.

There is indeed a remarkable amiability to the culture of Australia. A nation built on immigration, lived in sunshine under large skies, perhaps encourages an openness and friendliness, a willingness to talk to all as equals. That immigrant mindset is aided by the belief – only in recent years eroding – that they took over a tabula rasa (I strongly recommend the remarkable Dark Emu as the firmest of rebuttals to that view).

Aussies have a word for this: mateship. Less gendered than it sounds, the concept of mateship nonetheless has its origins in the experience of predominantly male soldiers in the First World War. It asserts a camaraderie and shared experience, and importantly an equality of status. Everyone in Australia can be addressed as a ‘mate’; in a sense, everyone is a mate. Historian of the term Nick Dyrenforth calls mateship Australia’s ‘secular religion’.

Former Prime Minister John Howard famously tried to co-opt the term directly into the nation’s Constitution as part of a referendum in 1999 (some posit that, a royalist, he raised the issue to reduce the referendum’s focus on republicanism). Words developed by poet Les Murray alongside Howard were proposed as a new preamble: 

“Australians are free to be proud of their country and heritage, free to realise themselves as individuals, and free to pursue their hopes and ideals. We value excellence as well as fairness, independence as dearly as mateship.”

The preamble didn’t make it through the referendum, and mateship in particular remains a divisive concept for many. But fairness seems less divisive, not least in the form of another core Australian value: the ‘fair go’. Indeed, one prominent academic article goes so far as to equate ‘Australianness’ with fairness, emphasising the ways in which it is inclusive and promotes a vigorous and cosmopolitan egalitarianism.

So core is fairness and the ‘fair go’ concept to the nation that it is formally noted among the Australian Values set out by the government, which every visa-seeker must acknowledge. The discussion by the Department of Home Affairs on these Values starts: “Australian values based on freedom, respect, fairness and equality of opportunity are central to our community remaining a secure, prosperous and peaceful place to live.” According to its articulation, the ‘fair go’ for all embraces:

• mutual respect
• tolerance
• compassion for those in need
• equality of opportunity for all

Such thinking goes a long way back in Australian history. A brisk and energetic monograph, The First Dismissal, discusses the actions of early New South Wales governor Lachlan Macquarie, who held the role from 1810 to 1821. Macquarie had an active programme of freeing convicts who were skilled artisans from what would otherwise be burdens as drudges. He did this initially through tickets-of-leave (essentially, parole), and then if they proved themselves, conditional – and in some cases and after a further period of time, absolute – pardons. A number of these skilled artisans were then put to work on the creation of the colony’s first lasting civic infrastructure; the earliest buildings that survive in Sydney date from this era.

Author Luke Slattery focuses on the role of Francis Greenway, an architect who had been transported for forgery but on whose arrival was almost immediately freed by Macquarie. Greenway designed and oversaw the building of several key buildings, including Hyde Park Barracks and St James’s church (originally designed as a courthouse), which stand opposite each other across what is now Macquarie Street. Greenway also created the obelisk from which road distances in the colony were to be measured, still standing in Macquarie Place. Another such example was stonemason Richard Byrne, pardoned in 1812, the stone footings of whose house can be seen at The Rocks following excavation in the 1990s.

Macquarie went further and welcomed former convicts – known as emancipists – into his home, encouraging his military officers to do the same (they largely ignored him). He also founded and funded schools, in itself a revolutionary step for those days. He clearly was trying to create a society where people were to be treated equally, could rise on merit, perhaps even one where all could be seen as mates.

Slattery’s book reflects anger at the way Macquarie and his programme were treated both by the local elite population – those who had chosen to emigrate rather than being transported as punishment, and whose status consciousness is shown by their being known as ‘exclusives’ – and by the reactionary English government of the time. In the end, the governor was ignominiously removed from office and replaced by Sir Thomas Brisbane, who proved less interested in rehabilitation of convicts, and indeed in civic architecture.

There may not be much evidence that Macquarie did in fact invent the ‘fair go’ as such – recent research by academics from Griffith University shows that the term wasn’t much talked about pre-1900, certainly beyond sporting arenas, and doesn’t appear at all in Australian newspapers prior to 1860 – but his intent in freeing the more skilled of the convict arrivals certainly does seem a step towards fairness, a recognition that one error should not mean an individual is marked for life. The contrast with the heavily stratified society sought by his opponents, in which convicts could never lose their status as wrongdoers, emphasises his ideas as ones of fairness of opportunity, as well as a literal building of society.

It is not without irony that Macquarie’s name is nowadays most often attached to a bank variously referred to as the millionaires’ factory and the vampire kangaroo. Macquarie investments have on occasions seemed to work well for its staff and rather less well for the customers of the utilities and infrastructure in question. No doubt its proponents would argue the intensity of its focus on meritocracy, allowing all staff a fair go at riches. But none would argue that the bank’s approach has led to greater equality overall.

I reference in my forthcoming book recent research that heightened income inequality in Australia – not all of which can be laid at the door of Macquarie Bank – is closely associated with dissatisfaction with democracy. As the researchers say, these perceptions may be particularly debilitating in a country where a ‘fair go’ is central to the national psyche. Others have highlighted how current inequalities are undermining belief in the ‘fair go’ and in society more broadly.

Such is the extent of our current inequalities that we risk hollowing out our societies and reintroducing social and economic stratifications reminiscent of the colonial era. That isn’t fair, it isn’t democratic, and it runs counter to the egalitarian concepts of mateship and the fair go. It’s especially painful to see these concepts eroded in countries and cultures where fairness is so central.

Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture, Bruce Pascoe. Scribe, 2018

Mateship: secular Australia’s religion and how John Howard hijacked it, Nick Dyrenfurth. Australian Fabians, September 2015

“Friendship, but Bloke-ier”: Can Mateship Be Reimagined as an Inclusive Civic Ideal in Australia?, Na’ama Carlin, Benjamin Jones, Amanda Laugesen. Journal of Australian Studies, Vol 46 Iss 2, 2022

Australianness as fairness: Implications for cosmopolitan encounters, Stefanie Plage, Indigo Willing, Zlatko Skrbis, Ian Woodward. Journal of Sociology, 53(2), 2017

Australian values, Australian Government Department of Home Affairs

The First Dismissal, Luke Slattery. Penguin, 2014

The Big Dig Australia

What did a ‘fair go’ originally mean to Australians?, Cosmo Howard. Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol 58, No 2, 2023

Income inequality and democratic resilience – Impacts and policy choices, Nicholas Biddle, Matthew Gray. Australian Resilient Democracy Research and Data Network Discussion Paper 1, Australian National University 2024

Inequality and the ‘fair go’ in Australia, John van Kooy. Scanlon Foundation Research Institute Social Cohesion Insights Series, 2023

Having sent my draft book to my publisher – more news on that when I have it – I can re-devote my fairness writing energies to this blog. One side-effect of the book-writing process, and particularly of the editing process, is that I’ve much material that didn’t make it into the manuscript, at least not in full. This then is likely to be the first of a few (or more!) blogs that are based on materials from the cutting room floor.

Many take it as a given that treating employees well encourages them to deliver more, not least because workers value dignity. There’s been a formal economic theory to that effect since at least 1990, in the form of the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis put forward by an illustrious pair, future Nobel prize winner George Akerlof and future Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. This says that workers treated fairly, and specifically paid fairly, put in greater effort; those treated unfairly don’t bother so much.

Sometimes particularly strong evidence is provided that backs the hypothesis, showing greater productivity of workers who are inspired by being treated fairly. In at least one case, that evidence shows the productivity effect not in terms of fairness facilitating the creation of higher numbers of goods, but in the way that unfair treatment led to the creation of products that were in fact lethal for customers.

That case dates back to the era in which the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis was developed: the Bridgestone/Firestone defective tyre issue of the 1990s, and the subsequent product recalls. Some 271 deaths and more than 500 injuries in the US alone have been attributed to the defective tyres. In the end, Bridgestone/Firestone’s costs of the scandal were over $800 million, and those for the other company implicated, Ford, more than $500 million. The detail of the research into the case – particularly a study with the surprising name for an academic paper of Strikes, Scabs, and Tread Separations – is such that it not only succeeds in identifying the implicated plant, but also with some precision the times when most defective tyres were produced. This precision allows us to attribute clearly the defects to failures of fairness in how workers were treated. 

Japanese tyre manufacturer Bridgestone had bought US rival Firestone in 1988. Increasingly, it put pressure on Firestone’s loss-making operations. As pressure increased to reduce those losses, the focus came onto staff costs, perhaps inevitably giving rise to industrial unrest. There were three main facilities in North America; the one where the greatest industrial dispute arose was Decatur in Illinois. The Wilson, North Carolina plant wasn’t unionised and saw no strike, while the strike in Joliette, Quebec was brief and no replacement workers were hired there (not least because that’s illegal in Canada). At Decatur, tensions were much greater and longer-lived. 

The key trigger to industrial unrest was the process of negotiating a new contract from 1994. The company was seeking to change from 8-hour to 12-hour shift patterns, and wanted to cut pay for newly hired workers by 30%. The prior contract expired in April 1994 and workers continued without a contract for three months before going on strike in July 1994. The company hired replacements, and refused to consider rehiring the strikers. A final contract, under which former strikers were in the end rehired, was agreed only in December 1996. 

The issues with the tyres in question were associated with their role on the first Ford Explorer SUVs. In moves that to modern ears have echoes of Boeing’s failed decision-making in the development of the 737 Max, Ford didn’t design the Explorer from scratch but put a new body on an existing pickup chassis. However, the new body was heavier and so the Explorer had a higher centre of gravity and was more prone to roll in an accident. Avoiding a redesign, Ford chose to shorten the suspension and lowered the recommended tyre pressure. Such lower tyre pressure can increase the operating temperature of the tyres, making any faults more likely to cause blowouts or other less catastrophic forms of tyre failure. 

No one fault in the tyres has been identified that made them particularly prone to failure, so there was probably a range of possible defects. While the tyres in question were manufactured at all of the three North American facilities, the evidence is that the bulk of the tyres that failed came from Decatur. 

In particular, the Strikes, Scabs, and Tread Separations study of the timing and sourcing of the failed tires shows a clear linkage between the labour dispute – and particularly the most contentious moments in the dispute, those that will have generated the greatness sense of unfairness for the workforce – and the production of the substandard tires. Workers that feel themselves to be being treated unfairly are likely to take less care over their work. In some cases, the treatment is seen as so unfair and the lack of care is so significant that there are major quality problems. The study concludes simply that: “the strike and associated labor strife in Decatur was a major contributing factor to the production of defective tires”.

In more detail, it says: “Four years after production, tires that were made in Decatur during the labor dispute were at least 15 times more likely to have resulted in a claim than were tires manufactured in other plants.” As the chart from the research shows, in internal engineering testing to destruction, the top quartile Decatur tires from the relevant period performed at the same level as bottom quartile tires from the other factories.

The evidence doesn’t suggest that the replacement workers were more prone to error (as some commentators alleged), but rather that periods when union members operated alongside replacement workers before the final contract was agreed were more likely to see defective tires produced. Similarly, defective tires were produced in much higher quantities in the months leading up to the old contract coming to an end, when the company was pressurising workers for concessions. These were the moments of greatest industrial tension, the greatest sense of failures of fairness.

Simply, it was the poor industrial relations, the unfairness in the dealings between company and its workforce, that seems to have made production catastrophically less reliable. It turns out that the Fair Wage-Effort hypothesis came to pass in a very direct way in terms of quality and safety outcomes for customers. A Fair Treatment-Production Quality hypothesis perhaps.

See also: Workers value dignity
People matter, but not like that
An inequality in dignity, or the dignity deficit

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour

The Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis and Unemployment, George Akerlof and Janet Yellen, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 105, No. 2 (1990)

Strikes, Scabs, and Tread Separations: Labor Strife and the Production of Defective Bridgestone/Firestone Tires, Alan Krueger, Alexandre Mas, Journal of Political Economy, Vol 112, No 2 (2004)