Metaphor makes the world go round. Some metaphors make it go round faster than others. All have their inherent limits. The worst kinds manage to combine half-bakery and high virality. One such example, it seems to me, is the currently highly fashionable unfair-race metaphor.

The basis of this metaphor is that it’s not fair that some people are given a head start in life. In an equal world, the race metaphor tells us, everyone should start at the same point on the same starting line. More recently, some have tried to take the half-bakery a step further by suggesting that the aim should be for all of the competitors to reach the finish line at the same time. This scenario is supposed to represent the idea of ‘equity’. Taken at the metaphorical level, the equitable-finish idea sounds pretty good to many people. And, to those that recognise the deeper fallacy it contains (I might want to win an Olympic sprint gold medal, but that doesn’t mean I should be given an infinite amount of resources to achieve the goal – probably an IronMan exoskeleton and copious amounts of pain killing drugs in my case), they are likely to agree with the slightly more practical goal of having everyone start from the same point on the track. ‘All men created equal’ and other self-evident truths.

But even that image only works up to a certain point. Equality is good, but too much of it definitely isn’t. Or rather equality measures are good, but having too many of them is bad. Equality, like everything else in life, is subject to Goldilocks Law, and the presence of a Goldilocks Curve. Something like this:

This picture perhaps begins to highlight some of the limits of the unfair race metaphor. I’ll come back to them shortly. In the meantime, there’s a bigger flaw with the metaphor. One that relates to the meaning of the finish-line at the end of the race. In the metaphor, as in actual running races, it is clear the first to reach the finish line is the ‘winner’. And, therefore, those that start the race several hundred metres ahead of others are somehow unfairly advantaged.

The finish-line makes sense in the context of a race. But to what extent is life a race? What exactly is the finish-line supposed to represent in the real world beyond the metaphor? Is life a race to have the most money? Or everlasting life? Or good health? Or a high quality of life? A beach house in Malibu? High functioning offspring? What? Until we can answer that question, it’s not really possible to conclude that the person starting the race ahead of others is at an advantage or not. I suspect many people look at the race metaphor and the unfairness of those given a head-start and assume that the race has something to do with material wealth. Many of us live in a capitalism-based economy, and so money is often seen as the goal. The one with the most toys wins, and all that. But is that what life is really about? I can easily imagine that someone with nothing looks at someone who apparently has multiple silver-spoons sticking out of their mouth with some kind of envy. But at the same time, I can also imagine the same person waking up in their 200-room mansion one day having fought to get to the front of the race and realising they now hate their life. Having enough money is good. Having too much rather less so. In other words, the amount of money we end up with is also subject to Goldilocks Law.

So, the unequal-race metaphor fails at this level. The one with the most toys is not the actual winner. But, let’s assume for a moment that it is. The reason being that apart from the finish-line flaw, there’s an even bigger problem with the metaphor.

Let’s think about the runner with the unfair advantage, the person that starts half a mile ahead of everyone else. For them, life is easy. They don’t have to try. They’ve been educated at Eton and then walked into a cushy job in the City, they have attractive members of the opposite sex throwing themselves at them, they get to drive the best cars, sail the biggest yacht and fly the most expensive executive jet. Well done. One might say that their biggest problem is making sure they don’t lose all the wealth and privilege they had handed to them. That probably doesn’t sound like such a big problem to have given the alternatives. But all the evidence tells us that this ‘don’t-screw-up’ mindset pretty well guarantees they will screw-up. We see exactly the same thing inside the enterprises and institutions of the world. As soon as the leadership team start focusing on not being the ones to sink the ship, they make it much more likely they will indeed sink the ship. Protecting what we have puts us in defensive mode. Which is mainly significant because it is the polar opposite of the type of thinking required for innovation.

Innovation, when it comes, almost invariably originates with the person that has nothing to lose. The cash-poor start-up that has to bootstrap anything and everything to make ends meet while they try and work out how to encourage reluctant customers or investors to part with their money. This lack of money is the thing that drives creativity, persistence and the grit required to succeed. The lone entrepreneur doesn’t get angry with the big incumbent companies with their bigger bank balances, they use them as fuel to find better ways of getting things done. These are the people that actually make the world go round. The people that create new value. The people that see the enormous problems present in the world and set about fixing them.

These are the people that, back to the unequal-race metaphor, look at the runners starting half a mile ahead of them, and use the unfairness as a resource. The motivation to find better ways of running the race. Building a jet pack. Maglev running shoes. Anything that allows them to beat those that ‘cheated’ and now spend their time looking backwards rather than forwards. None of this stuff is easy. But then its not supposed to be. Il faut souffrir. Whining about it doesn’t help. Turning the anger and frustration at the unfairness into fuel absolutely does.

Forget equity. Equity leads to communism, and we know that doesn’t work.

Forget equality. Equality leads to lowest common denominator solutions and then communism.

The world needs innovation, and unfairness (aka ‘frustration’) is the mother of innovation. Yes, unfairness is also bound by Goldilocks Law. Meaning there are limits to how unfair things get before those left behind give up rather than fight. But yes, too, we know that giving the disadvantaged free hand-outs and mollycoddling them with blankets and platitudes doesn’t help either. All these things do is make the whole of society weaker. We call that the Law Of Unintended Consequences, and we see it happening everywhere. Well-intentioned governments that end up delivering the precise opposite of what they set out to deliver. Take away unfairness, in other words, and we take away progress.