There are few words in the English language that are abused so much as “discrimination”, resulting in a division of uses into the proper sense (roughly, the recognition that two things/persons/situations/whatnot differ sufficiently that they should be treated differently, e.g. when an employer decides to hire a stronger applicant but not a weaker) and several variations of an improper. The improper, in turn, has at least two notable variations, namely, (a) the use to imply specifically an unwarranted discrimination among humans (e.g. by sex and/or race in a situation where neither is relevant; the origin is likely an unacceptable and distorting abbreviation of a phrase like “[sexual/racial/whatnot] discrimination”) (b) some weird abstract mistreatment, often manifesting in formulations like “He discriminated me!!!”, which are nonsensical from a grammatical point of view and often leave unclear what type of mistreatment would have taken place. (To make matters worse, such abuse is spreading to other languages.)
To expand on language, it is possible to e.g. “discriminate by sex” but it is not, in the sense typically intended, possible to “discriminate women”. Whether the latter phrase makes sense at all can be disputed, but, if it is allowed, the meaning might be something like “discerning who is or is not a woman” or imply a discrimination among women based on some other criterion than sex (e.g. beauty in a beauty contest). In both cases, better formulations can be found (as with the “discriminat[ion/e] among women” used in the preceding sentence).
On this page, I will, over time, deal with some issues relating to discrimination and the distortions of the concept.
An earlier Wordpress discussion ([1]) already covers much related grounds. These contents might or might not be integrated here at a later time. (Other Wordpress texts of relevance include [2] and [3]. Generally, many texts both on Wordpress and on my website proper, where the current page is published, have a direct or indirect connection to discrimination and “discrimination”.)
For all the shouting about “discrimination this” and “discrimination that” for the right grievance group, there are similar cases that go unheard for lack of a grievance group—and that can prove illustrative of the many pitfalls that surround such shouts.
Consider the situation of the unmarried vs. the married and of the childless vs. those with children in Germany, which can have a “discriminatory” effect of thousands or even tens of thousands of Euro/year to the disadvantage of the respective former group (I have seen alone the tax-paid costs, cf. below, for one school year for one student given as around 10k):
For instance, the unmarried pay higher taxes for not being married and miss out on deductions for the children on taxes. For instance, they pay more in health-insurance fees despite being a lesser burden on the insurance system.
With some over-simplification:
Married couples can have their taxes counted jointly or individually. With an appropriate choice, they are never worse of than they would be as individuals and potentially much better off, especially, when there is a large difference in earnings between the two spouses.
What would the Left do if this applied to e.g. women or Blacks, instead of the unmarried? Raise a political storm. What does it do, with the victims as they are? Nothing. (With similar remarks applying to further points below, without further mention.)
For instance, the school system is financed over taxes that everyone pays (indeed, again, the unmarried and childless pay more), but only those with children have a benefit from this financing. Likewise, there is governmental child support on the tax-payers’ dime.
For instance, there are fees and whatnots that are per household as opposed to per person, e.g. for mandatory (and unethical and severely outdated) TV-license fees.
For instance, there are aspects of German society that seem to base on the idea of a two-adult household, of which one, the real or metaphorical housewife, is “supposed” to be present in the home per default or have the ability to be so at short notice and with no regard for e.g. work. Notably, there can be several notifications per year, often with just a few days forewarning, that some inspection or other is taking place and that residents must be present to let the inspector in—in the middle of the working day. (Potential examples include, varying from locality and apartment to locality and apartment, checks of mandatory smoke alarms, exhaust readings for gas heaters, readings of gas meters, readings of water meters, readings of electricity meters, and readings of on-radiator meters that estimate how much heat has gone through the radiator during the past year.)
Other cases of a less systematic nature exist, however. For instance, when I moved to Wuppertal, I was handed several sheets of coupons with various discounts for museums, events, and whatnots. While most of these were uninteresting to begin with, those that were interesting had one thing in common—they were all some variation on the “admittance for two; payment for one” theme. (Below, I will go with “two-for-one”, while noting that there were no offers like “get two books; pay for one”, which would have been interesting to me.) But what good is this for someone who has just moved to town and who happens to have moved alone because he is neither married/co-habiting nor has children?
Is this practice actually “discriminatory”, be it in a real or distorted sense?
Unlikely: Chances are that it is a mixture, in some proportions, of an attempt to increase profits and stupidity/short-sightedness. In this, it well illustrates the difference between what deliberately targets some group and what merely has unfortunate consequences for that group—something very important to keep in mind when accusations of “discrimination” are raised. (Indeed, chances are that some of the other cases above each has some reason or excuse that might make it seem plausible or fair. However, some, notably related to taxes, are deliberately and explicitly geared at favoring the married/those with children at the cost of the unmarried/childless, in order to motivate the people to other decisions than in a fair system.)
Looking at profits: Any discount, all other factors equal, reduces the profits per visit/purchase/whatnot and this must be offset by something else for the discount to make sense, e.g. in that a visit, even with a lesser profit, takes place that would not have taken place without the discount, that a positive experience during a discounted visit can give the customer incentives to come back again at the full price, or that just being present in one of these sheets (in the specific example at hand) could have some effect of calling attention to the existence of the discounting entity and of increasing the chance of a visit (with or without a discount).
Having a two-for-one angle might have the benefit of increasing custom through having two visitors, while having two visitors moving as a couple might not be much more “expensive” than having a single visitor. (The main “expense” to a museum might be space taken up by visitors, attention of guards necessary to check that the visitors are not up to anything harmful, and similar. While a visiting couple will be more “expensive” than an individual visitor, it will be less so than two individual visitors.) To boot, there might well be secondary profits that are not covered by the discount, e.g., for a museum, purchases in an over-priced museum shop or café. For some customers, such secondary profits can even exceed the nominal primary profits considerably.
Looking at stupidity/short-sightedness: There is a fair chance that the businesses at hand have simply not considered factors like the unmarried, have simply looked at what “everyone else” was doing and copied that without great thought, or similar. A potential, more subtle, point might be that they have failed to consider that the newcomers could have a different nature than the “old” residents, e.g. in that it is less likely for unmarried newcomers to have boy-/girl-friends (or, for that matter, serious platonic friends) in town, and that a two-for-one deal might be considerably less attractive to them until such a point that they have “taken root”. (By which time the coupon might be expired/lost/forgotten, or other complications might have taken place, say, that the business has closed or an event has already come and gone.)
To such examples other complications can be added that sometimes might be too unavoidable for even the Left to protest in a modified-to-deal-with-Blacks scenario (e.g. that smaller apartments tend to be more expensive than larger ones), sometimes could be argued in different ways (see below), or otherwise disadvantage those who live alone, are unmarried (even when co-habiting), or do not have children.
An interesting example of “could be argued” is the consumption-independent fees for various utilities: Overall fees (in Germany) usually have two components, one for merely being “connected” over some time interval and one that varies linearly with consumption. The latter is fair with regard to number of occupants; the other could be seen as fair or unfair depending on perspective. (The best solution from a fairness perspective, but not necessarily from a transparency, bureaucracy, and/or practicality perspective, might be to have three fee components, based respectively on “being connected”, the number of residents, and the actual consumption.) In Germany, I would argue for unfair for the simple reason that the consumption-independent fees usually seem to be disproportionately large; however, this might not so much be an unfairness directed against singles as one directed against those with a low consumption, in that going without some utilities is hard and that those with low consumption can then be price-gouged for artificial profits far beyond what would be reasonable at their level of consumption. (Unlike most accusations of price-gouging, this one is justified through the abuse of a need in a monopolistic or oligopolistic situation.) Those who live alone are more affected by this than large families, certainly, but it is not living alone as such that matters.