The Cambridge Dictionary defines “equity” as the “value of a company, divided into many equal parts owned by the shareholders, or one of the equal parts into which the value of a company is divided.”

But why do companies and shareholders have the authority to own equity at all? There is also – earlier on – the equity one has in one’s democracy, or the share one has in their political system that makes one relatively self-determining or free, as opposed to being determined by others.

Generally, citizens receive their shares at birth, which vest when one becomes emancipated, and can vote. 

 

And because persons are generally considered politically equal, a rule that means each person gets one vote, one’s share of their democracy, first and foremost depends on the number of other individuals in it. That is why many thinkers have been concerned with the way growth dilutes the average person’s share, a fact hidden by formulas like representative ratios that are not based on empowering those subject to the law by treating them as equally empowered, relative to a neutral standard.

But growth does not really account for other key factors that account for the equity, or level of influence, one has over one’s political system. What if that system has created macro changes in the environment so that persons are influenced, say by heat waves, against their will? What if one has a share, but because of structural racism and birth-based economic inequality, it really is not an equal share?

Equity matters because it gives us some control over the systems in which we live, and that equity depends on the number of people with whom we share those systems, the disparities in the resources each of us may have, and things like the way we impact the physical environment around us.

If one does not have equity in the political system, it’s hard to understand how they are free, or relatively self-determining. And there are hard parameters for what the amount of equity each of us deserves.

Establishing a preemptive standard for self-determination, and political obligation 

One way to consider birth/political equity, or what might also be called relative self-determination and autonomy, is to contrast it with the concept of population in the field of policy, a concept used by some to disenfranchise many.

Partha Dasgupta is a brilliant theorist who has assessed optimal world population ranges. But, how do these persons actually relate to one another? What is the quality of those relations? How do we decide? 

Fair Start’s main value-add to the world is to say that we should only bring kids into certain birth and development conditions, and that if we did that, the future would be better. And when we say “should,” we are the only organization in the world that has shown the “should” overrides all else because who we should be comes before what we do.

Our first hurdle in ensuring that “should” is to overcome the idea that having kids is just about the freedom of the parents. It’s also about the freedom of the child and the community they form. And that second freedom is unique because all authority to govern and to own wealth derives from the inclusion of those subject to the governance or wealth as free and equal persons, with one person/one vote or equal self-determination. But by 1968, governments had taken equity out of reproductive rights systems, so that inclusion never occurred. Instead, economic growth became the standard. 

Freedom was taken out of context, and the creation of power relations was privatized using an illegal – exclusive from self-determining political processes – standard. Challenging that standard can be controversial. In fact, one former ally organization removed content referring to this approach over traditional considerations of population, through the lens of reproductive autonomy, around the time of their receiving a significant grant. 

One way to tell this story involves abortion. The illegal standard, even by the most liberal assessments, treats terminating a pregnancy as autonomy for the woman, even if she dies months later in a climate crisis heat wave, because she could not afford air conditioning, could not influence her political system to save herself, and did not have levels of trust to access her neighbor’s air conditioning, and was positioned that way because under fake “efficiency” standards she was treated as an economic input, etc. She was never free because she was never empowered, and in that situation, there is little reason to follow the rules.

So just as Dasgupta has theorized optimal numbers, we can assess optimal qualitative relations, which we would practically create (whatever we do for equity after the fact) by ensuring no child is born beneath a particular line (or threshold: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational/ ). That line, in many ways, represents the border of human freedom, and we could implement it in current policy measures by preempting baby bonds and similar legislation, using AI to set the line around a host of parameters that try to zero out harm, including the harm of taking the value of autonomy out of one’s political equity. 

Here are many useful measures to inform how we draw the line:

• Welfare, or https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention4
• Economic equity, or https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20151206
• Political equity/democracy, which for now we can just say is not a larger congress but higher investments in kids to drag down the ratio: https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/data-download/nations-population-growing-congress-standing-still-rcna103142. And a good goal would be for any nation to be able to engage in a functional constitutional convention at will with political equity measures like these https://academic.oup.com/ooec/article/3/Supplement_1/i262/7708076 and https://politicalinequality.org/2022/09/30/political-equality-as-measured-by-varieties-of-democracy-v-dem/ and https://dobetter.esade.edu/en/political-equality-democracy and https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/political-equality
• Nature, which for now we can characterize as restorative climate or rewilding:  https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2442.html and https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/elrna51&div=8&id=&page= and the animal rights (relations with individuals in the nonhuman world) side of that: https://www.zerotothree.org/resource/how-to-help-your-child-develop-empathy/
• Successful parenting: And we can use child abuse/neglect and parental regret metrics for that: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37796606/ and https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/child-maltreatment
• True Efficiency: https://event.newschool.edu/babybondsandbeyond
• Trust: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5250644/ (though this measure (must be altered to account for empathy measures, and reasons not to trust those who reject fundamental fairness.)

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation