Couldn't money correlate to something else that leads to a stable life? How do poor black immigrants relate to this? How does the fact that 70% of kids in failing communities are born to single parents factor in? Do absent fathers affect boys? How do we explain the relative success of some minorities? Why did family structure in poor minority communities change so drastically in the 60s and 70s? Much, much more to this than money.
There is and there isn’t much more to this. Money is a bit of a nebulous term. It’s obviously a cocktail of things. Some of them cultural. But even cultural differences will often times come because of money.
Single parent households does seem directly to be a money issue. Absent fathers feels like a money issue too.
If you want to get more broad it’s an economics issue. White people were in a better position to take advantage of a relatively deregulated market first. Then soccer moms and progressives in their pearl clutching zeal for safety put in a bunch of very expensive regulations into a ton of businesses that then made getting into those industries unnecessarily expensive to ANY poor person.
People in business should be terrified of poor people out competing them. But so long as the people who get their first are for some reason allowed to build invisible walls around their industry it makes it hard to transfer generational wealth.
I will say I agree that there are some uncomfortable cultural norms we need to talk about frankly and correct. Sure. Misogyny in a certain community being a big one.
This is a very good piece and I mostly agree, but Jeff says that racial disparity is mostly down to money. What about the studies that show that Black children have worse academic outcomes than white children *when controlling for income *?
Yes, that is extremely awkward; no, I don’t know why that disparity exists and I don’t want to get into any race essentialist garbage here. If this is true, then it calls for discussion of what to do to help Black children succeed if the problem isn’t just “duh, they’re poor, so of course they’re doing less well.”
I mean. It could be that in this moment of time adjusting for income is a pretty tricky statistical triple somersault.
My take? I think there is a cultural issue at play whereby black children are raised in an unfortunate culture of incuriosity. John mcwhorter has talked about it.
Minority children are often raised in poorer neighborhoods, inside major cities. Since education is funded by local taxes and public education is unescapable unless you are rich enough to send the kids to privates, it is the least suprising thing ever that educational outcomes are worse for minorities. Less well funded schools, in crime filled areas administered by large sclerotic bureaucracies with no competition for entrenched union dominated educational institutions are not going to do well compared to any other school district that lacks any of those adjectives. Race need not enter into it except to explain how those minority families find themselves living in the worst places , and even if you let race enter into it, the prima facia reason will always be "thats the neighborhood they could afford", and you have money working itself back in as the primary factor again.
I'm still waiting for my reparations because my families Spanish land grant
was stolen by the State of Texas via the United States via white American settlers via Mexican revolutionaries via the Cherokee but I'm not sure who to call first.....
"To a liberal white person, having a frank discussion of race is viscerally indistinguishable from being attacked by a bear."
If that was true, Saira Rao would be a nobody. They are the ones refusing to shut up about it when everyone else is pretty much ready to let the discussion move on to something else.
"The argument made by Coates (and many others — I’m just using him as a highly-visible example) is that past racism has caused present-day disparities in wealth and opportunities among racial groups."
I could have sworn that this was not his argument. I thought he made a point of framing it as compensation owed for harm done, almost like tort law, instead of starting from the assumption that disparities are inherently wrong.
But I haven't read it in years and might accidentally be making up my own argument and pretending it's Coates. If I feel less lazy soon, I'll look it up.
“ One of the reasons I don’t find Charles Murray’s arguments persuasive is because I think he waves away the effects of history far too casually. Slavery and other forms of racism were such seismic events that I think it would be extraordinary if we weren’t still feeling their effects.”
What do you make of the massive overrepresentation of Jews in intellectual and financial pursuits despite tons of discrimination and the Holocaust? Doesn’t this give credence to the hereditarian hypothesis?
I won't be satisfied with any "hereditarian hypothesis" related to intelligence until some outline of pathways of cause and effect can be drawn between specific points of genomic inheritance/epigenetic effects (we've hardly begun to measure those) and the activation of specific mental faculties and traits. Without that, all you have are various correlative measures using very general criteria (i.e., correlating "measured IQ" with income earnings in adulthood, etc.) Cheap shorthand.
I also think the old-line status quo view that intellectual achievement emerges from some monolithic substrate- i.e., "Spearman's g", or "general intelligence"- has already been discredited by research findings related to ASD, ADD, etc. The educational psychology testing industry just doesn't want to admit it yet, because the credibility of the entire field is in doubt if it's acknowledged that Raven's Progressive Matrices and the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale measure two very different types of what's supposed to be the same General Intelligence potential.
I don't doubt that a large number of specific mental aptitudes are related to biology, but between genomic inheritance, epigenetics, and developmental windows, that's a tricky thing to trace precisely. Some people have a mental aptitude for connecting human faces with their proper names, even with people they've met only once, years before--I'd venture that involves a combination of genetic advantage, epigenetics, and the strengthening of neural connections built and maintained by exercise. How much of what where when, no one can say. The possession of that aptitude involves skill sets associated with high intelligence- but that doesn't mean that those of us who lack the ability (raises hand) are necessarily "less intelligent." Then there are the even more dramatic demonstrations of activated mental ability, like the uncanny mathematical facility found in so-called "idiot savants." No scientific study has traced the specific biological factors responsible for that, either.
I hope you're getting the idea, which is that We Don't Know. Mental ability isn't demonstrated with direct linear measures, the way sprinting prowess is. There's no tape to be broken to prove to the world that they're in the presence of the Smartest Person Alive. And while biological research has proven the connection between a high density of fast-twitch muscle fibers and the ability to excel at sprints and hurdles, it's still possible to possess a lot of those muscle fibers and not be able to run all that fast, because other factors can interfere with the aptitude, and exercise is imperative for optimal performance. Even in that case, It Isn't That Simple.
Since these discussions so often turn toward revolving around anecdotal bullshit ("number of Nobel Prize Winners in Science who are of [ ] ethnicity", and similar listicles, flatteries, calumnies, balderdash, hokum, etc.), I might as well add an anecdotal example that recently stuck in my mind. It's about a Jewish immigrant who worked shoveling pig fat in the Chicago stockyards so that he could afford to expose his young son to the opportunity to develop a love of music, and later to pay for his musical education. The name of the child was Benny Goodman, who later became a jazz clarinet player and bandleader of some renown. (At least for a while, anyway. If music radio and arts education was worth a damn in the present day in this country, more young Americans might be familiar with his name, and those of his bandmates- like Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, Charlie Christian. And, even more importantly--crucially--with the high level intricacy of the American music the were playing. And Benny Goodman had a feel for Mozart, too.)
Now, what is that about? Maybe we should be paying more attention to the "immigrantarian" hypothesis- whatever it is makes that tick. And tick so particularly well in the United States of America, as a matter of historical record. Whatever that intersection of opportunity and prosocial values represents. Even for nonimmigrants like myself. No hard fast rules, hmm?
Benny Goodman was Jewish, as it happens, and I am not. I'm a garden variety whitey who grew up thinking--somewhat to the dismay of my parents--that the clarinet was a corny instrument for old people, until I wised up a couple of decades back and realized that Benny Goodman's groups play some of the finest music ever recorded. I don't know how exactly how to explain that expansion of my ears and mind, either, except that I don't think that the answer is to be found in a "hereditarian hypothesis."
One thing I think of with systemic racism and building intergenerational wealth: At least until World War II, wasn't almost everyone dirt poor? That's what I think.
Couldn't money correlate to something else that leads to a stable life? How do poor black immigrants relate to this? How does the fact that 70% of kids in failing communities are born to single parents factor in? Do absent fathers affect boys? How do we explain the relative success of some minorities? Why did family structure in poor minority communities change so drastically in the 60s and 70s? Much, much more to this than money.
There is and there isn’t much more to this. Money is a bit of a nebulous term. It’s obviously a cocktail of things. Some of them cultural. But even cultural differences will often times come because of money.
Single parent households does seem directly to be a money issue. Absent fathers feels like a money issue too.
If you want to get more broad it’s an economics issue. White people were in a better position to take advantage of a relatively deregulated market first. Then soccer moms and progressives in their pearl clutching zeal for safety put in a bunch of very expensive regulations into a ton of businesses that then made getting into those industries unnecessarily expensive to ANY poor person.
People in business should be terrified of poor people out competing them. But so long as the people who get their first are for some reason allowed to build invisible walls around their industry it makes it hard to transfer generational wealth.
I will say I agree that there are some uncomfortable cultural norms we need to talk about frankly and correct. Sure. Misogyny in a certain community being a big one.
There’s a lot to this. Sure.
Ummm…
This is a very good piece and I mostly agree, but Jeff says that racial disparity is mostly down to money. What about the studies that show that Black children have worse academic outcomes than white children *when controlling for income *?
Yes, that is extremely awkward; no, I don’t know why that disparity exists and I don’t want to get into any race essentialist garbage here. If this is true, then it calls for discussion of what to do to help Black children succeed if the problem isn’t just “duh, they’re poor, so of course they’re doing less well.”
I mean. It could be that in this moment of time adjusting for income is a pretty tricky statistical triple somersault.
My take? I think there is a cultural issue at play whereby black children are raised in an unfortunate culture of incuriosity. John mcwhorter has talked about it.
Minority children are often raised in poorer neighborhoods, inside major cities. Since education is funded by local taxes and public education is unescapable unless you are rich enough to send the kids to privates, it is the least suprising thing ever that educational outcomes are worse for minorities. Less well funded schools, in crime filled areas administered by large sclerotic bureaucracies with no competition for entrenched union dominated educational institutions are not going to do well compared to any other school district that lacks any of those adjectives. Race need not enter into it except to explain how those minority families find themselves living in the worst places , and even if you let race enter into it, the prima facia reason will always be "thats the neighborhood they could afford", and you have money working itself back in as the primary factor again.
The most important color in America is Green.
Pls add date of original publication on these reposts. I think that info is important.
I'm still waiting for my reparations because my families Spanish land grant
was stolen by the State of Texas via the United States via white American settlers via Mexican revolutionaries via the Cherokee but I'm not sure who to call first.....
Is this one of the blog posts from fall 21
I didn't read because it was proximate to numerous soccer articles like Chernobyl is proximate to radiation?
Oh, and thanks for pulling it out and putting it into a safe zone.....
"To a liberal white person, having a frank discussion of race is viscerally indistinguishable from being attacked by a bear."
If that was true, Saira Rao would be a nobody. They are the ones refusing to shut up about it when everyone else is pretty much ready to let the discussion move on to something else.
"The argument made by Coates (and many others — I’m just using him as a highly-visible example) is that past racism has caused present-day disparities in wealth and opportunities among racial groups."
I could have sworn that this was not his argument. I thought he made a point of framing it as compensation owed for harm done, almost like tort law, instead of starting from the assumption that disparities are inherently wrong.
But I haven't read it in years and might accidentally be making up my own argument and pretending it's Coates. If I feel less lazy soon, I'll look it up.
You would rather be a straight white guy than a straight white gal when facing a criminal charge?
“ One of the reasons I don’t find Charles Murray’s arguments persuasive is because I think he waves away the effects of history far too casually. Slavery and other forms of racism were such seismic events that I think it would be extraordinary if we weren’t still feeling their effects.”
What do you make of the massive overrepresentation of Jews in intellectual and financial pursuits despite tons of discrimination and the Holocaust? Doesn’t this give credence to the hereditarian hypothesis?
I won't be satisfied with any "hereditarian hypothesis" related to intelligence until some outline of pathways of cause and effect can be drawn between specific points of genomic inheritance/epigenetic effects (we've hardly begun to measure those) and the activation of specific mental faculties and traits. Without that, all you have are various correlative measures using very general criteria (i.e., correlating "measured IQ" with income earnings in adulthood, etc.) Cheap shorthand.
I also think the old-line status quo view that intellectual achievement emerges from some monolithic substrate- i.e., "Spearman's g", or "general intelligence"- has already been discredited by research findings related to ASD, ADD, etc. The educational psychology testing industry just doesn't want to admit it yet, because the credibility of the entire field is in doubt if it's acknowledged that Raven's Progressive Matrices and the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale measure two very different types of what's supposed to be the same General Intelligence potential.
I don't doubt that a large number of specific mental aptitudes are related to biology, but between genomic inheritance, epigenetics, and developmental windows, that's a tricky thing to trace precisely. Some people have a mental aptitude for connecting human faces with their proper names, even with people they've met only once, years before--I'd venture that involves a combination of genetic advantage, epigenetics, and the strengthening of neural connections built and maintained by exercise. How much of what where when, no one can say. The possession of that aptitude involves skill sets associated with high intelligence- but that doesn't mean that those of us who lack the ability (raises hand) are necessarily "less intelligent." Then there are the even more dramatic demonstrations of activated mental ability, like the uncanny mathematical facility found in so-called "idiot savants." No scientific study has traced the specific biological factors responsible for that, either.
I hope you're getting the idea, which is that We Don't Know. Mental ability isn't demonstrated with direct linear measures, the way sprinting prowess is. There's no tape to be broken to prove to the world that they're in the presence of the Smartest Person Alive. And while biological research has proven the connection between a high density of fast-twitch muscle fibers and the ability to excel at sprints and hurdles, it's still possible to possess a lot of those muscle fibers and not be able to run all that fast, because other factors can interfere with the aptitude, and exercise is imperative for optimal performance. Even in that case, It Isn't That Simple.
Since these discussions so often turn toward revolving around anecdotal bullshit ("number of Nobel Prize Winners in Science who are of [ ] ethnicity", and similar listicles, flatteries, calumnies, balderdash, hokum, etc.), I might as well add an anecdotal example that recently stuck in my mind. It's about a Jewish immigrant who worked shoveling pig fat in the Chicago stockyards so that he could afford to expose his young son to the opportunity to develop a love of music, and later to pay for his musical education. The name of the child was Benny Goodman, who later became a jazz clarinet player and bandleader of some renown. (At least for a while, anyway. If music radio and arts education was worth a damn in the present day in this country, more young Americans might be familiar with his name, and those of his bandmates- like Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, Charlie Christian. And, even more importantly--crucially--with the high level intricacy of the American music the were playing. And Benny Goodman had a feel for Mozart, too.)
Now, what is that about? Maybe we should be paying more attention to the "immigrantarian" hypothesis- whatever it is makes that tick. And tick so particularly well in the United States of America, as a matter of historical record. Whatever that intersection of opportunity and prosocial values represents. Even for nonimmigrants like myself. No hard fast rules, hmm?
Benny Goodman was Jewish, as it happens, and I am not. I'm a garden variety whitey who grew up thinking--somewhat to the dismay of my parents--that the clarinet was a corny instrument for old people, until I wised up a couple of decades back and realized that Benny Goodman's groups play some of the finest music ever recorded. I don't know how exactly how to explain that expansion of my ears and mind, either, except that I don't think that the answer is to be found in a "hereditarian hypothesis."
One thing I think of with systemic racism and building intergenerational wealth: At least until World War II, wasn't almost everyone dirt poor? That's what I think.