Measured on an individual level, Republican voters contribute more to GDP than Democratic voters. The paradox where Republican voters are higher income than Democrats but Republican areas tend to be poorer has been analyzed extensively by people like Andrew Gelman and discussed extensively over many years in the media. Hard to believe Wilkinson is unfamiliar with this. Essentially affluent voters in poorer regions vote Republican so overwhelmingly resulting in a Republican majority despite the poorer voters voting Democrat.
Conversely, it may be the case that the voters who solidify the Democrats’ hold in urban areas may are not necessarily the folks generating the GDP there.
The comment then goes on to question the attribution of Trump’s support to racial animus. I know that there are many researchers who claim that racism forms the core of Mr. Trump’s support. I am afraid that I tend to discount their claims as long as they appear to come from someone who is clearly personally hostile to Mr. Trump. Such a claim would sound more credible to me if it were coming from an analyst who is clearly neutral or sympathetic to Mr. Trump.
Going from the banal point that rich people in certain geographic regions don’t like to pay taxes so they are generally associated with an anti-tax party to the generalization that rich people contribute more to GDP is quite a leap indeed.
The analysis assumes a GDP factory. Assuming such a factory existed, you’d need compelling evidence that individual “rich” people are the primary contributors to the factory’s productivity as opposed to agglomeration effects. Furthermore, you’d then need to account for regional variations and appropriate causal factors. Finally you’d need to clarify what exactly one means by rich presumably in terms of income quartiles.
Lately one of the many tropes urban progressive triumphalist have been spouting is that the relatively lower economic productivity of Deplorable country is proof of not just its moral failure but its essential inability to keep up with the modern world. This appeals to many urban professionals who aren’t profoundly political but like to make sure they’re on the winning team.
If those aggregation effects you speak of apply at the individual level, then they certainly apply at the regional level too. I own a software company with offices in several of the “winner” cities but my clients are scattered all over the country, and nearly all are much lower margin/growth than mine. I personally wouldn’t want to own a cement company in Oklahoma, but people there need cement, and without them I wouldn’t have many clients.
I would make a counterpoint – pertaining to those that argue urban progressive areas are producing a disproportional fraction of GDP – that one has to adjust for cost of living, and that regarding someone selling a $10 haircut in a rural or suburban area as half as productive as someone selling the same $20 haircut in Manhattan is misleading, even if it’s what the numbers say. It says some people are willing to pay a large premium just to live in New York, not that people who live there are more productive. Of course, one could argue that the willingness of people to pay the premium to live there reflects that New York, as a city, is more ‘in demand’ and therefore services provided there are automatically more productive, but I don’t think that’s any better than saying that people who earn more income can be automatically assumed to be more productive than people who earn less. In each case, one is assuming a higher price reflects higher demand which means more value being produced. Maybe it does, but one should apply the assumption consistently. So one couldn’t seriously argue, on one hand, that variation in income between individuals (or groups, such as Republicans vs. Democrats) isn’t necessarily related to variation in productivity, while on the other hand insisting that the variation in prices between locations must be attributable to variation in productivity.
These kinda statements are dumb in general and like Romney won 68% of the land of the United States or HRC won 68% of the GDP.
The great reality of 2016 Trump, is he ran as Republican economic centrist but used white identity politics to carry the Primary. Before 2016, no Republican candidate promised to protect Social Security in my lifetime. So his rallies chanted the Wall and then complained forever about NAFTA and that it was the Clinton fault for outsourcing.
Honestly, Trump is not really racist in general and loves nothing more when a minority heaps praises on him. Herman Cain is great American and almost got nominated for the Federal Reserve! However he does tend to over-emphasis minority groups stereotypes too much and rationalize bad white citizen behavior such as the C-ville play acting KKK rallies in front of Robert E Lee statues. (Blacks lazy on welfare, Mexican taking US worker jobs, Jewish people tough negotiators, Arab terrorists.)
And we really differentiate white identity politics versus being racist.
So I don’t believe Ronald Reagan was a racist but I do believe his 1980 ‘Welfare Queens’ was effective white identity politics in the 1980 election.
Trump is fundamentally a reality TV star and pro wrestling heel. He says quasi-racist things knowing that the left will freak out, then his conservatives will freak out about the left’s freakout. He often does this right before a questionable policy is announced, which may be because he’d rather have the press screaming about his tweets than figuring out his tax policies.
But I can’t discount the null hypothesis that he’s usually tweeting provocative crap and usually promoting questionable policies and the timing is uncorrelated.
He says quasi-racist things knowing that the left will freak out, then his conservatives will freak out about the left’s freakout.
I would argue you reversing the order and conservatives were just waiting to elect a Rush Limbaugh politician.
And Trump learned conservatives were drawn to his quasi-racist statements. The first major political statements Trump made was Birtherism and Fox News loved airing his wild theories on Obama’s birth certificate. And conservatives loved it even if most knew Obama was US born citizen. So even if Obama was really a US citizen, conservatives liked the political narrative that Obama was not really a ‘True American’ citizen and did not understand US greatness.
Trump didn’t write the show, he just showed up to Open Mic Night with an act and a plan. He realized early on that the Rust Belt states have enough contested states to control the election, so he played to that audience.
Any good showman plays to the audience’s fantasy. His audience is in worsening economic circumstances, so he builds a fantasy that the good old days are coming back. His “racism” is part of this fantasy – in the fantasy, America is already over racism and anyone who says differently is a whiny moron.
I think the timing seems pretty random. I think you’re right about the effect though. Trump can pretty much rely on the reaction to the reaction to his remarks to salvage or improve his standing on the right, and sometimes in the general public. It’s a general lesson that younger politicians are picking up on I think. In the largely socialist milieu amidst which I have the misfortune of living, people spend far more time talking indignantly about the dumb thing some obscure columnist tweeted in response to the latest dumb thing Ocascio-Cortez tweeted than about the original dumb tweet. Negative partisanship makes gaffes an end in and of themselves rather than a cost of having to talk a lot about sensitive topics.
In terms of Trump over-emphasis on stereotypes, when he complained about the ‘Squad’ on twitter, he taunted “Go Back To Where You Came From” (The Squad is the strong left AOC, Omar, Pressley, Tlaib)
Of course three of the members were born in the United States! And Pressley and AOC, if you consider Puerto Rico US territory, have longer ancestry roots in the United States than Trump, and especially 4 of his kids, himself. This is the definition of white identity politics Trump acts upon. We can roll our eyes on the MSM getting their panties in uproar on these taunts, but it is ugly political attacks.
That said:
1) I believe trump 2016 ran an effective anti-HRC scandal campaign focusing ‘Lock Her Up’ to pull out an electoral college victory.
2) His anti-Caravan and kneeling football players, was not effective in the 2018 Midterms so we will see if it is effective in 2020.
“This is the definition of white identity politics Trump acts upon.”
Nah. In the late 60s and early 70s some of the Trump-voters of the day had bumper stickers reading ‘America–Love it or Leave It’. The people they had in mind then were leftist anti-war protesters — there was no racial component. When a number of celebrities promised to move to abroad if Trump (or before him Bush) won the presidency, some conservatives wanted to know why they weren’t keeping their promise to leave. Again, no racial factor. There’s a long history of a cultural conservatives telling left-wing critics of the U.S. that they’re free to get out. I’ve always thought it was dumb and obnoxious, but not racist.
“America: Love it of Leave It.” I remember such T-shirts advertised in 1970s comic books, along with others that said things such as “I’m with Stupid” or “Stupid’s With Me,” or “Black is Beautiful.”
It’s not a new idea and it can be a strictly ideological argument without racial undertones.
The Black American Conservative radio host Ken Hamblin (aka The Black Avenger) titled his book: _Pick a better country_ [and go there].
= – = – = – =
It would be nice to know how early in the history of the American Republic people were encouraged to leave if they didn’t like it. Probably during the American Revolution when many Tories and British sympathizers promptly moved to British Canada.
By the way, it’s interesting that no one has yet mentioned Albert O. Hirschman’s wise little book _Exit, Voice, and Loyalty_. maybe Prof. Arnold can bring up such analysis in the future.
His mental processes are plain–one knows what he will do,
And can logically predicate his finish by his start
-Kipling
“His form is ungainly–his intellect small”
(So the Bellman would often remark)
“But his courage is perfect! And that, after all
Is the thing that one needs with a Snark.”
–Lewis Carrol
So you only trust a claim that Trump is racist and employs racist tactics from a researcher or analyst who, believing this and having published this view, remains neutral or positive to Trump?
Yeah, right? What a bizarre condition to attach. You only have standing as a credible critic of Trump’s racial views if you share them or are indifferent to them. This is playing tennis without a net.
So this is how to practice “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”? At least we have clarified what that means.
It has echoes of Soviet apologists dismissing claims about the crimes of Stalin. If the people who are saying that Stalin killed millions oppose him, then the claims are just counter-revolutionary propaganda!
A moment’s reflection would show you that the bar *ought* to be that you want to see charges laid against political figures by people who are broadly sympathetic to their claimed ideology (especially to the extent you share it) rather personally loyal to that politician. (So very odd to see a professed libertarian looking for personal loyalty to a politician as a mark of credibility!) Of course, if you set the bar where you have to believe libertarian-minded folks who are frustrated with the wastefulness and overseas military adventures of the Bush/Tea Party-era GOP, that’s hardly going to let you dismiss Wilkinson.
I’m afraid that Tom DeMeo seems to have misread or misremembered the passage to which he’s responding. Dr. Kling was speaking, not of claims that “Trump is racist and employs racist tactics” (as TDM puts it), but of assertions that “racism forms the core of Mr. Trump’s support” (Kling’s own words).
We’re not looking for analysts saying things like “Trump’s a racist, but I like him”; we’re looking for “I like Trump for reasons X, Y, and Z; but I’m afraid that the majority of my fellow Trump-supporters appear to be motivated by racism.”
There’s probably not a person in the world who believes that racists support Trump but that it’s just an unfortunate coincidence that has nothing to do with his appeals to racism. The respectable case is supposed to be that Trump is personally questionable but that his supporters are trying to express some kind of non-racist angst (economic anxiety or frustrated nationalism or whatever).
Personal opposition isn’t necessarily inconsistent with unbiased analysis. Since we’re discussing a question that is very much a matter of interpretation rather than something strictly ‘factual,’ then it absolutely makes sense to be incredulous toward someone’s interpretation if they cannot or will not set aside a strong emotional investment in the question. When assessing whether a person is guilty of some crime, if I know that someone publicly and ardently hates the suspect for some other reason, even if the suspect deserves the hatred, it is entirely appropriate that this hatred would make one skeptical of the person’s interpretation of things. In the case of Wilkinson, if he makes an empirical claim and presents evidence for it, it’s certainly as valid as if anyone else did, but I don’t think he has much credibility in interpretive exercises regarding the Trump administration. He seems sufficiently convinced of the certainty of his interpretation that he wouldn’t give satisfactory consideration to alternatives, and therefore to anyone who doesn’t share both his interpretation and certainty of it, he will seem to be going at it partially blind.
No. Simply that any argument as to whether Trump is driven by racial animus or not should be based on logic and reason. If the argument seems driven by emotion or political preference that isn’t directly related to the issue at hand, then there is reason to be skeptical of the argument.
So who is failing to meet your conditions? Wilkerson or Kling?
“I am unclear what this racial animus argument is”
Coincidentally, at Instapundit today Glenn Reynolds links to blog linking to a Spring 2001 City Journal article by Brian Anderson entitled “Illiberal Liberalism.” The piece opens:
“It’s hard not to notice that political discussion over the last decade has increasingly degenerated into name-calling—and that the insults most often come from the left: “racist,” “homophobe,” “sexist,” “mean-spirited,” “insensitive.” It has become a habit of left-liberal political argument to use such invective to dismiss conservative beliefs as if they don’t deserve an argument and to redefine mainstream conservative arguments as extremism and bigotry.”
Reynolds notes “FDR was retroactively insinuating that Calvin Coolidge was a Nazi in 1944, and Walter Cronkite was doing the same to Barry Goldwater 20 years later. A lie repeated for a three-quarters of a century by the side of the aisle that controls the culture just might gain a bit of traction eventually.”
And urbanists projecting bigotry upon the hinterlands has been a commonplace in what passes for US intellectual discourse for over a century if not longer. Urbanists would have us believe that enlightened cosmopolitanism is the forte of rich white urban dwellers. Nevertheless, one seminal study that has been reproduced with similar findings around the country found that when comparing the price of Long Island housing, location in a majority white elementary school increased the value of a house by $50,000 over the price of an identical house in a non-white majority elementary school. And urbanists who have a child are increasingly quick to flee their urban sanctuaries to the suburbs. Similarly, the highly woke hard left NEA is quick to decry the racism of others while their clique remains around 80% white, 77% female and only 7 percent black and 2 percent Asian. And despite the condescending pieties and billions of dollars purportedly devoted to high-minded egalitarianism, university professors remain disproportionately white. Not that there is anything inherently wrong in demographic variations in occupations, just to note that the obsessions of these Pharisees are telling in and of themselves and rarely reveal any insight or nuance.
In his poem Two Races, Kipling writes of the voluble Celts and the English who “confide their views to none.” Taking cognizance of facts like that if Harvard admissions were based purely on the basis of test scores, the percent of white males admitted would actually increase, is to ask to be labeled “alt-right.” There is no gain to had to engage with the likes of Wilkinson and everything to lose. Being personally guilty of having learned to sit quietly after decades of silently listening to far-left extremist yammering at countless staff meetings in federal bureaucracies, it is perhaps incumbent to recognize and appreciate individuals who are willing to take on the oppressive powers that be. Yet, the reality undoubtedly is the number of “English” among us is multiplying more rapidly than we know.
Harvard admissions were based purely on the basis of test scores, the percent of white males admitted would actually increase
—–
Nah, Chinese would dominate.
Well, I did a bad job of expressing what I was trying to say and now I can’t find where I got the information from. You are right based on actual applicants the percentage of white males admitted would decline very slightly, something like 0.6 percent, if admissions were purely test based. But what I remember reading is that comparing the percentage of white males who are among the very top test scorers, then there percentage of admissions would be larger because in this culture defined by hatred of white males, many top test scorers don’t bother applying. White males outscore white females on tests, mostly due to much better math scores only offset by a very small female advantage in verbal. Yet because of the highly feminized hostile environment of US high schools, women receive grade and AP preferences while the loathed white males are deemed inferior and oppressed at every turn.
D’oh….wrong poem title. Should be The Puzzler, not Two Races. Apologies
I’m guessing the typical progressive would say that’s an impossibly high bar and thus not just unfair but calculated to yield a null result. And if they really don’t like you, they’ll just say, “Exactly the kind of thing a racist would insist on,” or, if being more slimy about it according to the latest meme, prefaced with “I don’t think he’s a racist, but …”
They would claim that this is because most of the racists are always lying, denying the fact about themselves and the members of their groups, and using very thinly-concealed code words and cover stories that the progressives are always smart enough to see through.
So no one is ever going to make the “admission against interest” and say something like: “I have supported Trump since the beginning and will certainly be voting for him again and donating to his reelection campaign. That being said, as a matter of personal integrity, I have to concede that a rigorous and fair investigation into the views of my fellow Trump supporters reveals that a very large portion of them are filled to the brim with bigoted prejudices and irrational animus and barely-contained violent passions regarding anyone not of European descent, and furthermore, that they hold views that would be understood to constitute “white supremacy” or “white nationalism”, not as those terms are used by progressives today, which is totally nuts, but as someone from, say, 1955 would understand them. It’s #Sad! Still, we need the votes of these people, and at the end of the day, these unfortunate matters are still less important than having a Republican President.”
If the progressives made the argument I described above, I think they’d have a point. After all, doesn’t the final line in that faux quote above seem like a real career killer?
Given the two party system we have here, it’s pretty likely that morally horrendous people vote for both parties every election.
However, as Scott Alexander has recently written, there seems to be a pretty poor argument floating around, which goes something like: “There is a morally horrendous person who seems to be an archetype of a whole set of people. His sins must therefore also be attributable to the whole set of people.”
This kind of argument is exactly the kind of thing that buys a civil war, if people are willing to push it that far.
Perhaps someone who was at least once sympathetic or neutral regarding Trump, but may have since soured on him would suffice? That may also be a somewhat high bar, since he started his public life with great controversy.
It’s not really how sympathetic or unsympathetic one is that should matter, but how well one can set aside such sympathies or unsympathies and put on an ‘impartial juror hat’ once in the deliberation room. Maybe that’s what Kling should’ve said.
“not as those terms are used by progressives today, which is totally nuts, but as someone from, say, 1955 would understand them.”
That is the issue. I consider myself a racist because by the definition of today I certainly am, but probably not under the 1955 version. I mean in 1954 we implemented Operation Wetback.
Growing up I was told that racism is an irrational hate of others for their skin color and no other reason. Sometimes it was because you *falsely* believed people of a race has some bad trait (say, more crime), but the False part was key to that claim. If you believe The Bell Curve on racial crime stats, are you now racist? I would say yes under todays definition, if not the one I grew up with.
Would the people of Japan (or any other East Asian country) today be considered racist under the 1955 version? The modern version? Discovering Asian racism was a turning point for me in my conversion to racism. Still, I don’t know if they would fit that example I grew up with, and many were very polite to foreigners.
Maybe the difference is philosophic. People in Japan just weren’t obsessed with universal moral claims in the same way. Japan didn’t need to solve the worlds problems or be all things to all people. Japan had to be a good place for the Japanese, and the other peoples of the world had to figure out their own path on their own. If someones presence wasn’t what Japan wanted, they literally SENT THEM BACK. Some years back they had a program to return ethnically Japanese immigrants from Brazil back to Brazil because hey, it wasn’t working out.
asdf,
>—-“If you believe The Bell Curve on racial crime stats, are you now racist? I would say yes under todays definition, if not the one I grew up with.”
It is not believing crime statistics that makes someone a racist. It is believing that a genetic racial inferiority is the only thing that could explain the statistics.
But what does even that mean? Are you saying that non-racism requires that one believe all average differences between racial groups are ‘socially’ determined?
Or do you recognize a distinction between the following two positions: 1) group X is inherently (either exhaustively or in some ‘essential’ sense) inferior to group Y; and position 2) for some genes there are alleles that correlate with whether one is an X or a Y, and said alleles also correlate with some phenotypes, and said correlation explains some of the observed differences in the group averages.
The latter position is generally accepted as obviously true – and not considered racist – on physical traits and the incidence of genetic mental illnesses. Why not though? Why isn’t it racist to believe that Jews are more likely to get Tay-Sachs disease for genetic reasons? Certainly a group’s predisposition to such a debilitating disease could be construed as evidence of ‘inferiority’ just as a slightly lower mean IQ could, no?
For that matter, is it sexist to believe that men tend to be more violent than women in large part because of innate reasons, like in utero testosterone exposure?
I would say that for a definition of racism to not be hopelessly inconsistent with our moral reasoning applied to almost any other issue than race and intelligence, it has to be something other than merely the belief that a correlation between race and some behavioral trait is in part due to genetic variation. I would define racism In terms of belief in racial superiority/inferiority in some more essentialist sense, and/or antipathy toward people if a particular race; and/or the tendency to discriminate on the basis of race eo ipso, on the premise that race itself isn’t sufficiently predictive to justify such discrimination (a premise some here would doubtless take issue with as well).
I think in the common mind merely believing in a genetic difference is evidence of racism (I was taught this growing up). And to propose such a difference, even with every caveat Charles or anyone else ever attached to it, would be enough to get 99.9% of people fired from their jobs or otherwise socially outcast. When that is the case, the idea that such things can be discussed rationally has no hope.
But let’s leave that aside for now.
What the hell is superiority/inferiority suppose to mean? If someone has ability and behaves in a way we consider “good” is that not superior to someone who lacks ability and behaves in a manner we consider “bad”? Do we not consider a Nobel prize winner in chemistry a superior addition to society then some street corner thug?
When most of the OECD runs a “skills based” immigration system, they are literally awarding superiority points to potential applicants. High enough IQ to get a degree? Superior! Young enough to pay lots of taxes before retiring? Superior! Speak native language of the country? Superior! And if you have more superiority points than the other guy, you get in over him.
If people with Tay Sachs aren’t inferior to those without, why do people tend to abort them when they find out the information? Whole countries are “eliminating” Down’s Syndrome. Their own parents think they are so inferior they shouldn’t be born. We allow mass murder of the inferior provided it’s before some arbitrary cutoff.
I think these notions of superior/inferior have lost all meaning if we can’t admit this.
We might decide, for whatever reason(s), to grant this or that right(s) or try to bestow this or that status to the inferior, but they are inferior. To say otherwise is to twist words.
I think most peoples instinct is to simply not talk about it. Why bring it up if one doesn’t have to. And to extent we organize society so that we don’t have to, that’s fine. Probably a positive good! However, sometimes people (agitators, hustlers) make not talking about it untenable, and then you’ve just got to bite but bullet and tell the truth.
If the response to say not wanting to talk about race is to be told you suffer from “White Fragility” and now need to agree to this list of demands and fork over XYZ, you just can’t stick to the keep your mouth shut strategy anymore.
Mark,
.—“Are you saying that non-racism requires that one believe all average differences between racial groups are ‘socially’ determined?”
No, of course not. That’s not what I said and that’s not what I meant.
Both genetics and social factors determine a very wide, but not unlimited, range of outcomes. Any two people or groups of people will vary in both respects to some extent. Our understanding of how that extremely complex process works is still very poor. Nevertheless, for as long as there have been intelligence tests, there have been people using them to argue with great confidence that the latest large immigrant group is surely a lethal threat to the general intelligence and moral character of the good people who arrived here a bit earlier.
I would say that “non-racism” requires a willingness to consider people as individuals rather than as members of a “race” (whatever that is) when making judgments about their personal worth.
asdf has referred to “brown people” as being “worthless.” I consider THAT to be racist and, if I am understanding him correctly, he does too. He just doesn’t think of it as a bad thing.
Greg G,
I consider “judging people as individuals” to be:
1) Impossible
2) At odds with our societal definition of racism, as well as at odds with many other social ideas we have (nationalism, family, etc)
3) Not much of a change on what I think is the core issue (the question of human worth)
I’ll take these in reverse order. If we judged brown people as individuals, wouldn’t most of them fail the test? Romney famously got in hot water for suggesting that 47% of the country were basically Randian “takers”. Even if we used a much more generous version of this test, what would the taker/maker breakdown of the brown population be? Not very good. Once we decide “worth” is some concrete thing we can measure (pick your metric), it’s inevitable that some people are going to have more of it than others. And some people are going to have so little worth its fair to call their existence a burden on others.
That’s just math. If we extend this concept to the global non-white non-Asian population its not a great picture. On every metric we claim to consider “good” and on every metric we claim to consider “bad” the numbers don’t paint a good picture. If we were actually capable of judging every individual we would still get very bad results.
Your counter when this comes to a head is to say “maybe it’s not true”. But this is 2019. Not 1959. It was believable that it could not be true in 1959. Now the data is in and its pretty damn convincing.
There are other definitions. For instance the Christian one says all people have equal worth due to having a non-material “soul”. If you believe that, then it makes sense to say everyone is “worth” the same. As individuals, races, or whatever else.
I think that is the real emotional drive behind your revulsion, even if you wouldn’t claim to believe in the faith. These sort of supernatural claims are the only ones I consider a legitimate counter on this question of human worth. On the materialist plain what you get is what you get. And we all essentially claim to be materialists in these debates, on account of all the problems with proving statements of faith.
All I can say personally is I like the idea as much as anyone else, and I’d be very happy if it became an animating truth that guided most peoples day to day actions, but it does appear to be a mathematical dead end if you take it 100% seriously. Most people seem to take it “sort of seriously”. Like, “its wrong to abort your kid because they are going to be a bit short, but OK to abort them if they have Down’s syndrome”.
I take it sort of seriously. I do have some sympathy for less “worthy” individuals in my society, and support modest and well constructed private and public support for them, but you can cross the line (like if you decide that equality of worth means we need to invite billions of hostile foreigners into our country).
So what would you do if you took this idea of cosmic equal worth “sort of seriously”. Well, you would be a bit nicer to others then you might otherwise be, but you wouldn’t go crazy. You would not colonize another country to exploit its resources, but you wouldn’t feel a need to donate 50% of your GDP to foreign aid (like some effective altruist might tell you is your moral duty). Etc.
So let’s get to racism. Our definition of racism today is a lot like Hazel Meade below. Its primary legal principle is “disparate impact”. And the understanding behind disparate impact is basically the one Hazel wrote. Courts enforce this principle and its culturally enforced as well. This principle obviously doesn’t treat individuals as individuals. So if you want people judged as individuals, you are essentially a racist by the commonly understood and applied legal or cultural definition of racism.
Lastly, I have no idea how you think “judging as an individual” is going to happen. It doesn’t happen today. How many real “individuals” do you know in your life. Very few. The human mind is capable of keeping a limited number in their mind.
When we apply for a loan, or a school, or a job, or hail a cab, we aren’t being judged as individuals. We are getting pattern matched based on whatever data was economically reasonable to collect in order to statistically predict future behavior. Sometimes that data is very limited (because its not remotely effective to gather more) and sometimes its quite a lot and its still not something that gets you close to something resembling an individual (GAP, SAT)…we are supposed to say this is a gives us an idea of what an individual is like (most of those things are genetic anyway).
It’s a joke to say people should be judged as individuals. We don’t judge anyone as individuals, except a few people very close to us. In most cases our “judgement” is basically limited to “likely to perform function I want out of them well enough”. We don’t even pretend to judge someones soul or “worth” in any greater sense.
So get over it. Sometimes race is going to be the only data point someone has. Or sometimes it’s going to correlate so closely with some other data point they might as well be the same thing.
Redlining wasn’t some racist conspiracy to hold down blacks. Redlining was a bunch of banks realizing that loaning money to most blacks (and most white trash) lost them money. So what are you in favor of. Forced money losing loans to minorities? We had that, it was called George Bush’s ownership society. He thought it you just got these fruit pickers in houses they would vote Republican. It gave us the housing financial crisis.
These concepts are bumper stickers that make you feel good about whatever philosophy of life you think you have. It’s not some kind of actual plan for navigating the real world.
asdf,
>—“Romney famously got in hot water for suggesting that 47% of the country were basically Randian “takers”.
Yes, he did. This is a good example of the problems with this way of thinking even though it was not an example of racism in this case. Romney failed to recognize that almost everyone starts life with a long period as a “taker.” During this period taxpayers spend a lot of money educating them. Then most people enter an extended period when they are “makers” in the prime of their working and taxpaying life. Then they finish with maybe a couple decades as “takers” on Social Security. Judging their worth simple from a snapshot of their tax payments at an arbitrarily chosen time is an absurd standard. People were quite right to object to being shoehorned into that false dichotomy.
>—“Once we decide “worth” is some concrete thing we can measure…”
You are assuming your conclusion. I don’t think that human “worth” is something we have good “concrete” measurements for in a global sense.
I certainly don’t think it is accurately measured in IQ points and transparently displayed by skin tone as you do.
>—“Your counter when this comes to a head is to say “maybe it’s not true”. But this is 2019. Not 1959. It was believable that it could not be true in 1959. Now the data is in and its pretty damn convincing.”
It was only a few centuries ago (the blink of an eye in evolutionary time for anyone serious about genetic explanations) that Northern Europe was a dismal backwater. It’s pale “races” that you now consider among the world’s most superior trailed the darker races of the Middle East and India by almost any “concrete” measure.
And the Flynn Effect shows changes in group IQ far too fast to be genetic. Not that anyone has even offered a scientifically useful measure of “race.”
>—“There are other definitions. For instance the Christian one says all people have equal worth due to having a non-material “soul”. If you believe that, then it makes sense to say everyone is “worth” the same. As individuals, races, or whatever else.”
Hey, you’re the one claiming to be a Christian, not me. I’d love to hear how you square the teachings of Jesus about how you should treat the less fortunate with the ideas you are espousing here.
>—“I think that is the real emotional drive behind your revulsion, even if you wouldn’t claim to believe in the faith. These sort of supernatural claims are the only ones I consider a legitimate counter on this question of human worth. On the materialist plain what you get is what you get.”
On the materialist plane what you get is human history. That is to say, you get a history where defining whole groups of people as “worthless” has preceded all of histories greatest crimes.
Your world view strikes me as more Hobbesian than racist. And strikingly zero sum for a modern economics blog. World population and living standards are at historic highs. Never in world history has the average person been less likely to be the victim of ethnic violence. And yet all you see is threats from darker skinned peoples.
>—“So let’s get to racism. Our definition of racism today is a lot like Hazel Meade below. Its primary legal principle is “disparate impact”.
I’ve already given you my definition and that’s not it.
>—“When we apply for a loan, or a school, or a job, or hail a cab, we aren’t being judged as individuals.”
It is your individual credit score and income and net worth, not those of your racial group that are considered. It should be your individual resume not a composite resume of your racial group that is considered although some racial discrimination exists for sure as you vividly show us with every comment. As for cabs, Uber and Lyft are developing a system where riders (and drivers) are being effectively rated as individuals.
>—“So what are you in favor of. Forced money losing loans to minorities? We had that, it was called George Bush’s ownership society.”
No one forced financial institutions to make more loans than they wanted to to minorities. All the institutions that got in trouble made way more loans to minorities than they were required to . They did it because for many years these were, by far, the most profitable loans. When you get a ticket for going 100 miles an hour on the freeway, it won’t work to blame it on the 40 mph minimum speed. The bet the bankers were making wasn’t that poor credit risks would turn into good credit risks. It was that rising home prices would supply the equity that had previously come from down payments. That business plan actually worked spectacularly well until it blew up because the big financial players kept copying the strategy that had made the most money for the previous 5 or 6 years.
Greg,
1) It’s possible to calculate someones net tax status over a lifetime. When you add it all up, do they pay more than they take or take more then they pay. This is a simple math problem, and not hard to solve.
2) If the concept of “worth” doesn’t have meaning to you, why are you so up in arms over the term “worthless”. Either worth is something concrete we can discuss, or it’s not something we can debate at all.
3) Blah blah regurgitated Flynn garbage. You know your entire way of viewing the world collapses if you accept the facts, so you deny the facts.
4) The world has never been better in the genetically superior countries and because of the economic surplus they created. It is specifically because I view all times and places outside of the modern OECD as horrifying that I don’t want to go back to that (which I believe immigration of brown people could do). You say history is terrible, I say do whatever it takes not to repeat it.
5) Words mean what society say they mean. If a word doesn’t mean what you want, use a different word.
6) The individual credit scores of blacks suck. Saying we should judge them as individuals doesn’t really help them because as individuals they don’t measure up.
Moreover, you don’t seem to understand loan economics. There are two aspects to loan economics.
A) Likelihood to repay
B) Bank’s ability to recoup losses if they don’t pay
Credit score determines the first. For the second the value of the home is what matters, since that is what gets repossessed.
There is a problem though. The second a black person moves into a house, it’s less valuable. In fact the houses next to that house also go down in value, so this can affect other loans besides the one in question.
If a lot of black people move into a neighborhood, value tanks hard. This is due to the fact that blacks are miserable neighbors to have (crime, school disruption, noise, etc).
Redlining was meant to protect the value of the house, because giving loans to the wrong people destroyed the value of the house and those around them, which ultimately made these loans money losers for the bank.
Of course redlining wasn’t just for blacks. In fact a majority of those redlined on an absolute basis were actually white. But like blacks, they were the kind of whites whose mere presence tended to lower the value of everything about them.
7) The people who should have been regulating these institutions let this go on in part because it was achieving a political/social objective they desired. More importantly, this dodges the question as referenced above.
It’s like some GMU post awhile back about “discrimination in the movie theatre” where someone wondered how could you discriminate against someone if you couldn’t see their skin color?! As if blacks don’t have a disruptive way of behaving in the theatre that tips one off.
asdf,
>—“It’s possible to calculate someones net tax status over a lifetime. When you add it all up, do they pay more than they take or take more then they pay. This is a simple math problem, and not hard to solve.”
Just because it’s “possible” doesn’t mean that’s what he actually did. The 47% number came simply from the net payers of income tax (not even all taxes) at a moment in time.
>—“If the concept of “worth” doesn’t have meaning to you, why are you so up in arms over the term “worthless”. Either worth is something concrete we can discuss, or it’s not something we can debate at all.”
I didn’t say or mean that it didn’t have meaning. I said it can’t be measured in concrete terms and isn’t transparently indicated by skin color. Many things have meaning but can’t be measured accurately by concrete metrics.
I am “up in arms” because the term is intentionally inflammatory and hostile to those described as “worthless.”
>—“The world has never been better in the genetically superior countries and because of the economic surplus they created.”
The world changes with astonishing speed. Unlike genetics which changes very slowly. Civilizations rise and fall within the same ethnic groups. Whole populations suddenly make great economic progress or suddenly descend into barbarism for reasons we only dimly understand.
You love to cite the Chinese as having superior intelligence. Only a few decades ago they were among the most economically desperate of all the world’s people and couldn’t even feed themselves. Strange how no one was describing them as racially high IQ at that time isn’t it.
>—“You say history is terrible, I say do whatever it takes not to repeat it.”
You are repeating it. All of history’s greatest crimes were preceded by defining some targeted group as “worthless.”
>—“Words mean what society say they mean. If a word doesn’t mean what you want, use a different word.’
Oh, I agree that word meanings are entirely conventional. Dictionaries do an excellent job of tracking conventional meanings. The first dictionary definition that comes up on a Google search for the definition or “racism” is: “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.”
Nothing in there about “merely believing in genetic difference.”
>—“The second a black person moves into a house, it’s less valuable. In fact the houses next to that house also go down in value, so this can affect other loans besides the one in question.’
A black person did move into the house next door to me and live there for years. I was completely unharmed.
1) And if you ran the math you’d get some result with a high number like that. So I don’t think your response is substantive in any way.
2) Well, I proposed a metric(s) that it meant to me and then I add up the statistics for a race as a whole and the answer comes back in the negative. So those are my terms and the math is easy to prove.
It is intentionally inflammatory and hostile. I’ve been getting inflammatory and hostile shoved down my throat by them my whole life. They have a stated goal to use demographic replacement to dominate me and my loved ones to our detriment. They blame me and the people I love for everything that is wrong with them, in the most inflammatory and hostile way possible. Their policies, actions, and attitudes hurt me and the people I love unjustly.
I’m done taking their crap. We’ve tried being polite to these people for decade. We tried subsidies. We tried AA. We tried political correctness. The message we keep getting shoved in our face over and over is “we see these things as a sign of weakness and we will use them to loot you even more.” If you don’t respond to that in kind you’re a sucker at best and craven at worst.
3) This stuff has been answered, if you gave a shit about the truth you would find the answers.
4) The crime of not wanting to be invaded? The crime of not wanting to be robbed? Get out fool.
5) Again, dodging. This is retard level rebuttal.
6) I’ve lived near black people to. I’ve been friends with some. You know you are dodging the question. All of this is about YOU YOU YOU. What does your stance about race say about YOU. The actual facts of the matter and how they affect people are completely irrelevant to how all debate over everything has to come down to your self image.
asdf,
So then, ask yourself which of these alternative descriptions best describes your last comment:
“Merely believing in a genetic difference.”
or
“Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.”
1) Prejudice is a false believe.
“preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience”
If the statement is true then it’s not prejudice.
Everything I state is actually true, therefore not prejudice.
2) Discrimination is what we do every day.
The bank discriminates against people they think unable to pay back loans. The university against people it thinks won’t graduate and attain a certain socioeconomic status to benefit the university. The national against immigrants it thinks will do more harm than good to society. The individual when deciding who to be friends with, marry, etc.
A world without discrimination is total anarchy and completely non-functioning.
If you mean “to discriminate irrationally and inefficiently in a given context” then I try to avoid that as much as anyone else. This has little impact on the question at hand.
3) I think that ones relations to others has to encapsulate a lot of factors. Blacks/browns have been very antagonistic to whites/asians, and there isn’t any justification for it. At a certain point you have to meet antagonism with antagonism. In game theory you can’t play cooperate all the time, you have to gauge your next move against the strategy of the other player.
Think for a moment about what someone who accepts an affirmative action position says.
“I don’t care if I deserve this, I want it. If someone more deserving loses out, tough for them. I don’t even care that much if I can perform the role given to me that well, only that I get access to the rewards and status that come with it. Merit, justice, and all these other concepts around which we organize society can just take a back seat to what I want. Not only that, I’m not going to show gratitude to you for this gift. I’m going to blame you for my even accepting it, and I won’t give you absolution in return. I will never give you absolution, and this state of affairs will never end. I will use this situation to exploit as much as I can as long as I can while giving nothing in return, sucker.”
If your response to that is to self flagellate some more, you’re beyond saving.
I’ve met plenty of people that want to leave race alone that are decent people, but I’ve met zero anti-racists that are decent people. They crave the power it brings them, or they are such cowards they go along with the zeitgeist to protect themselves. Or they should know better but choose not to either willfully or through a kind of criminal negligence. There is no mercy or other good intentions in what they do, they actively or passively tear down for their own selfish reasons.
4) I think that in the kind of stuff everyone claims to want. Economic productivity, good behavior, etc that in aggregate whites are superior at these things then blacks. This is in line with every data point we can find, and to deny it is to deny facts themselves.
asdf,
I think we understand each other. You are saying that racism is good, being against racism is bad, and that, if someone is brown or black skinned, that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about them and justifies your hostility towards them.
Thank you for your honesty.
Just to be clear Greg, you’re a bad person. I’m being 100% honest about that.
You know that isn’t what I said, but in order to make yourself fell better, at the expense of others, you will lie to yourself and others. That’s what bad people do.
You are no motivated by justice, mercy, or any other positive emotion. You are motivated by your own selfish desires, and you will dispense with the truth to fulfill those desires if you choose to.
You love to cite the Chinese as having superior intelligence. Only a few decades ago they were among the most economically desperate of all the world’s people and couldn’t even feed themselves. Strange how no one was describing them as racially high IQ at that time isn’t it.
As I recall, Richard Hernstein was saying this back in the early 1970s. At that time, he was a psychology professor at Harvard, not yet the co-author of The Bell Curve. I had to read some papers about improving education and there were a number of people saying that, whose names I can no longer remember (Arthur Jensen?).
I have heard similar arguments from a number of conservatives that have made the decision to support Trump instead. At least for now, it has not killed anyone’s career.
Characterizing the size of Trump’s overt racist base is a trap. Trump is racist, but he doesn’t care about it as much as he does himself. There are some racists who support him, and a few other bands of various levels of indifference, but the racism doesn’t explain the majority of his voters.
Trump’s racism is strategic. The core of Trump’s support is resentment and fear of expanding government, not racism. The racism is a tool to steer the opposition, pulling out the outrage and disgust that can then be used to force the resentment he needs to win.
He is attempting to ruin a middle path for Democrats, and force contempt. And now, four freshman congresswomen with fringe views are somehow important to the public debate.
white identity yes. racial animus, no.
There is a coordinated attack on white identity to brand it as racial animus and hate, but the difference is quite obvious.
I’d actually consider Reagan’s welfare queens remark more driven with animus than Trump’s comments. Trump’s arguably most inflammatory comment, “… they’re rapists; and some, I presume are good people” is quite funny to watch even today. And it’s reasonable to believe that comment was designed to drive the anti-white-identity politicos crazy, rather than any genuine malice. Or Trump’s taco bowl tweet “I love hispanics!” was funny and designed to enrage the anti-white-identity politicos.
This myth of “Reagan’s welfare queens remark” is pretty revealing when you remember that Reagan didn’t call her that. It was the Chicago Tribune who called her the welfare queen. And it was 1976, not 1980.
Ronald Reagan: “In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”
Five years later, Reagan is now president, giving an interview on the 19th of February, 1981, and this is the outrageous, utterly reprehensible thing that he says: “We finally turned the task force loose to come back with a plan for reforming welfare. And we had a long fight. We could do the part administratively. We had two fights. We had a fight with our legislature to get some of it, because I had a hostile legislature at the time, and we had a fight with Washington, with the bureaucracy in HEW who had rules and regulations that for example–and this is still true today–that under those rules and regulations no one in the United States knows how many people are on welfare. They only know how many checks they’re sending out, and then we turn up a woman in Chicago that’s getting checks under 127 different names. And just recently in Pasadena, California, living in a lovely big home there, a woman was brought in and charged with collecting $300,000 in a welfare scheme.”
There is no “white identity” that isn’t based in racism. Most whites don’t identify themselves ethnically as “white” – they identify as Irish, or German, or Italian, or British, or some other amalgam. There are no “white-American” ethnic organizations, in the way there are “Irish-American” or “Italian American” clubs. White is a race but not an ethnicity – it’s a box you check on a census form. The only time people come to identify themselves as ethnically “white” is if they are involved in some sort of white supremacist group or otherwise driven by racial animus to define themselves that way in opposition to other races. To extent people care about their european heritage, again, they care about the specific country their immigrant ancestors came from, not their “whiteness”.
You could just as easily say there is no “German” identity. Weren’t they all a bunch of tiny little kingdoms that fought each other for millennia?
Germany itself only came about because two Napoleon’s traipsed armies through there and they managed to put aside their difference in order to form a mutual defense. Bavaria remained so independent of Germany that it has its own independent army that only had to take orders from the national government in wartime, something it didn’t do in 1914 and possibly cost them the war. The Naval Arms race with Britain was in part because the Navy was the only truly federal wing of the German armed forces.
Germans formed a unified identity in part because other powers were pushing them around. Napoleon was fine invading southern independent Catholic German states to launch an invasion of Prussia. If whites form a unified identity because they are under assault it would simply be a manifestation of the reason most people have federated into larger organizations throughout history. It’s not like the Bavarians loved Bismark’s Kulterkumpf against them, it was just better them Napolean.
If anything “People of Color” is far more absurd an association than “white people”. Yet like to wolves dividing a lamb for dinner, Puerto Ricans can team up with Blacks and Dominicans or whoever else to say take slots at Stuyvesant away from Asians and divide them up amongst themselves.
I’m not a big fan of the race/ethnicity distinction. Most ethnicities are what used to be called races — back in the day you referred to the French race or the Irish race. And sure enough, if you look at the genetic clustering of different ethnic groups (Europeans, Asians, or Africans) they all cluster in different places using a F stat:
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/11/human-genetic-variation-fst-and.html
That is an old post and the data just keeps getting better and better showing us the variation between different groups. I personally like Sailer’s definition of a race:
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-race-faq.html
I seriously doubt that’s true anymore, but I’m open-minded about it if you could provide some recent source to support this proposition. I’m guessing to the extent those clubs still exist they are full of senior citizens and evaporating quickly.
Also doesn’t “amalgam” count as identifying as “white” in the sense of mixed European ancestry?
Consider, the 1790 census counted Free Whites (broken down into males over 16, males under 16, and females), all other Free Persons, and Slaves. It’s a common trope that the Irish must not have counted as white, but that’s not true, and they were counted in the free white category as far back as the first census. It’s also worth remembering there were a handful of Irish signers of the Declaration of Independence and who participated in the Constitutional convention, who weren’t writing themselves out of public life.
National origin for Europeans was salient and important for immigrants and those dealing with them when living in un-integrated immigrant communities, but for Europeans those tended to disappear and melt into the generic white population within a generation or so.
Indeed, it’s precisely because national origin tended to not form the most important part of a typical first-generation native-born European-American’s identity that allowed for the easy and quick integration of those immigrant communities, a history which over-optimistic immigration-boosters are always quick to point to in their efforts to try and buttress their argument that “there may be problems, but they are merely temporary and will fade, because, after all, look at the X”.
I’m sorry, but this is just plainly preposterous. Why is “German” or “Irish” or “Italian” the only moral level of ethnic identity? What exactly makes you the arbiter of what level of specificity of one’s ancestry people are supposed to care about? Why shouldn’t people identify as Bavarian-Americans or Sicilian Americans? Or as Benelux-Americans? What is so majestic about the nation-state, that makes it morally acceptable level of identity? This is a case of ethnic essentialism if ever there was one.
Mind you, I think ethnic pride in any form is nonsensical, but it’s laughable to insist that there’s something inherently racist about identifying with a continent, but oh, with a peninsula, that’s fine.
Andrew Gelman: “If poor people were a state, they would be ‘bluer’ even than Massachusetts; if rich people were a state, they would be about as ‘red’ as Alabama, Kansas, the Dakotas, or Texas.”
But he’s talking about voters, not the tiny sliver of the population who are celebrities and politicians. In this bubble you end up believing a very different image of yourself and your party. You fall for this fantasy about the worthlessness and depravity of people outside the bubble.
Hillary Clinton: “You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t want, you know, to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are.”
So it says a lot about how a tiny number of powerful Democrats are so out of touch with the vast majority of their own voters that their delusions are so impenetrable. In their own minds, they’re amazing.
Hillary Clinton: “I win the coast. I win, you know, Illinois and Minnesota, places like that. What the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
But is she herself so optimistic? Is Bette Midler happy, for all her success? Has wealth and fame made any of these celebrities happy? The resentment never seems to fall away, even with all the money in the world, even when you can get whatever you want.
I admit it, I am a racist. I don’t care, I follow the rules, make sure there is no discrimination (except on my blog). I see the races as different in many correlated ways, and my brain takes the short cut unless I am on some duty requiring unbias.
Racism has been at the base of the Republican Party for 5 decades. Trump just brought it out of the closet and put it on his sleeve.
To read people even slightly familiar with trump thinking he is not a racist is beyond scary. He has been racist for at least 6 decades. The nicest thing you can say about his racism is that he comes by it honestly, through his father.
I suppose you’re of the opinion that welfare reform was just an excuse to hurt black people?
The key aspect of the modern understanding of racism is that it is not just a matter of personal animus, but a self-organizing system of racial inequality (structural racism). The segregation of neighborhoods and social exclusion of blacks from white social and economic networks is a key aspect of this. Whites who are personally not racist can quietly persist in favoring whites in economic and social interactions, leading to the very observable and marked separation between white and black communities, not in terms of economic inequality, but in terms of the number of interracial relationships. That social division can’t help but affect economic outcomes. And this isn’t even getting into ways in which government policies have been manipulated to favor whites, for instance in the housing market throughout the 20th century.
In this context “a racist” is not necessarily limited to someone who actively hates people of other races, since racism isn’t a personal belief, but someone who wishes to perpetuate that informal system of social inequality in which their own race is dominant.
That means that, in this understanding of racism, people who argue that America is uniquely white and should remain so, are racist. They want to maintain a system in which “white” culture, “white” aka European heritage remains dominant, they’re advocating a system of racial superiority. In other words, they are advocating white supremacy – they are white supremacists. Being a white supremacist doesn’t mean a person hates black people, it means they want to maintain a system in which “whites” are ethnically and culturally supreme. And that criterion absolutely applies to people who want to keep out Hispanic immigration for the reason = that they don’t want America to become majority non-white, which a LARGE portion of Trump’s base explicitly states.
In order to do that, one would have to structurally favor (for instance) immigration by family members of whites, over that of family members of non-whites. That would be a racist policy. One would have to favor the sort of immigration that white people favor over the sort of immigration that non-whites favor. Which is basically saying the interests of white Americans in maintaining the culture that white people like should be institutionally favored over the interests of non-whites in bringing in more people who are like them. Ultimately, it means that you implicitly regard non-white Americans as lesser Americans – that they are in some way less authentically American and less deserving of having a say in the future shape of American culture as white people. And even if you don’t “hate” them – that still means you are othering them, which, in a way is still racist according to the classic 1955 definition.
“The segregation of neighborhoods and social exclusion of blacks from white social and economic networks is a key aspect of this. Whites who are personally not racist can quietly persist in favoring whites in economic and social interactions, leading to the very observable and marked separation between white and black communities, not in terms of economic inequality, but in terms of the number of interracial relationships. That social division can’t help but affect economic outcomes.”
Why should it effect economic outcomes? Asians tend to self-segregate and yet have excellent economic outcomes — it is almost as if the issue is NOT what whites are doing but what the other racial groups are up to…
Don’t bother Jeff. The whole, long, sad intellectual history of this argument is one of endlessly shifting goalposts, motte-and-bailey word games with definitions, and a filo dough of epicycles stacked layer upon layer to always arrive at the same predetermined assertions. It’s Apologetics, which always ends up ‘proving’ the truth of The Faith, no matter what.
The issue here is a total, indeed strategic, lack of “pre-registered falsifiability”. It’s not worth taking anyone seriously unless unless they are willing to tell you in advance what kind of feasibly obtainable evidence would count as disproving their hypothesis, in this case, that certain important statistical disparities between groups are not mostly the result of past and current discrimination.
Obviously the truth is a mix of nature of nurture, and history is always going to matter somewhat. But the question is whether those disparities are more like ‘innocent’ differences even despite a history of oppressive behaviors, say, the difference in height between those of Dutch and Indonesian ancestry.
Some of those Dutch colonists did some truly awful things to some Indonesians – that’s beyond question – however, that has nothing to do with why the Dutch are much, much taller than the Indonesians today, indeed, one of the largest average height gaps in the world at over 10 inches.
So, with height, someone trying to blame the stature gap on the legacy of Dutch colonialism could pre-register a standard of falsification by saying, “Look, if you took a group of average Indonesians and gave them all the nutrition that we know is essential for people to reach their maximum height potential without hormones, and they still end up a lot shorter than the Dutch, then I’ll concede that the height gap is innocent.”
Which is exactly what they would find today, now that calories and sources of protein are abundant and cheap and affordable by most people in most places. The fact that the messy history had the same group on top of the other turns out to be coincidental in terms of the current gap.
Note that someone with the opposite hypothesis – that the gap is natural and innocent – could agree to the same test to falsify his own thesis. “Yes, if you give them all the nutrition they need and the heights match up, then I’ll agree that prior shortness was actually the result of stunted growth from malnutrition, and since I can’t prove otherwise, I’ll allow that the malnutrition was somehow the fault of the Dutch colonists. This conclusion would be bolstered further if we go digging up old Indonesian skeletons and discover they used to be as tall as the Dutch, before the Dutch arrived.”
And again, that second part could falsify the “oppression-based theory” too. “If we dig up the pre-colonization skeletons and they’re short too, then I’ll concede the gap is natural.”
All of this would go even better if the participants put a lot of skin in the game and bet on the outcomes for big stakes.
But good luck trying to get a progressive to actually lay down a marker like this.
I wonder if Asians and Jews were subject to “red-lining” in housing policy back in the 30s to 50s. Was it in the Underwriting Manual of the FHA that loans to Asians and Jews could not be insured?
It’s like trying to convince a conspiracy theorist that there is no conspiracy. No matter what you demonstrate, that too is part of the conspiracy, obviously.
Before Shelley v Kramer in 1948, Jew-excluding neighborhood covenants existed in many places in the country, and use of more informal methods of discouragement continued for some time longer in some places. Asians were redlined completely out of the country by exclusion acts and the Japanese that were here, even those born here, were rounded up into American concentration camps during WWII.
Somehow, unaccountably I suppose from the perspective of the conspiracy theory, those groups really bounced back and landed on their feet, to put it mildly. Their descendants should have been lagging for 100 years at least.
Which of course is nonsense crazy talk.
So there’s like a linear and deterministic relationship between the oppression level of a group and the socioeconomic status they should have achieved 100 years later.
I mean, we have all of three data points here, we should be able to derive something like a law of physics from that.
If there’s so little data, then why pray tell are you so utterly certain of your model?
@Hazel, what would be enough to convince yo to change your mind on this matter? What evidence would you accept?
Change my mind on what, exactly? Whether society can self-organize in ways that create structural inequalities between different groups? Whether black people are intellectually inferior?
I honestly don’t know what would change my mind, partly because those questions are too complex to boil down to some single piece of evidence, and partly because I haven’t entirely made up my mind in the first place. There are many, many factors potentially at play. Anyone who thinks that they have a definitive answer one way or the other is just not being objective. My perspective is we don’t know, but we sure as heck ought to make sure that the poor economic outcomes of African Americans are not caused by racial prejudice.
“but we sure as heck ought to make sure that the poor economic outcomes of African Americans are not caused by racial prejudice.”
That’s what I’m asking you. What kind of test result, experimental evidence, study, etc. would convince you that the poor economic outcomes were mostly not the result of racial prejudice? That we had “made sure” enough? If you don’t have an answer, then you aren’t being rational, you’re being dogmatic.
You’re being evasive on this point, though that is typical and you have plenty of company, because evasion is exactly what one always gets when trying to get an answer to this important question.
It’s an important question because providing an answer at the start is the only thing that can make any discussion on this topic productive. Instead it’s always Calvinball.
I’ll even provide you with some possibilities. You could say you would need psychometric studies and big average differences in scores on various cognitive tests, especially among people who weren’t exposed to lead (and obviously we have tons of those). You could say you would need to see that differentials in various gaps and disparities didn’t correlate with differences in perceived racial hostility in different parts of the country or in different contexts (actually the correlation is negative).
Usually we require accusers or prosecutors to prove a case against a defendant. If we’re going to shift presumptions and the burden of proof require a defendant to prove his or her innocence, at the very least we are obligated to make it actually possible for an innocent person to prevail, and to tell the accused what they must do. Otherwise it’s clear that we’re just dealing with a Kafka-esque set-up for a pre-determined conclusion.
I said “affect” which can be either positive or negative. The reasons why it negatively affects blacks, and not so much Asians may be complex and of course there are confounding factors like differing levels of racial prejudice and ties to economic support networks back home. Blacks are former slaves who for a long time lived in the same areas as their former masters, and whose ties to Africa were largely severed.
I also suspect that a lot of Asians don’t self-segregate by choice, but due to being excluded from white communities. I.e. maybe people don’t call them “chinks” anymore, but they still get the cold shoulder.
Because when in history have people ever preferred living alongside people with similar culture, language, religious beliefs, cuisine, etc. What a far fetched explanation. It makes much more sense to operate from the premise that all things one doesn’t like about the world are ultimately caused by mean white people.
It’s certainly possible that they do self-segregate by choice, but far from certain. Don’t you wonder all all about that? Why assume that everyone who lives in a racially segregated neighborhood is totally happy with that development and lives there by choice? Maybe it’s just something that happened after the bought the house and they can’t afford to move.
A lot of Asians are fairly recent immigrants (first and second generation), and recent immigrants tend to self-segregate. America used to have lots of urban neighborhoods with names like “little Italy”, “little Odessa”, etc. I know plenty of half-Asians and Asians who’ve married across races – it seems to me like Asian immigrants are integrating about as quickly as Italian and Irish immigrants did.
From what I can tell Asians choose some of the best commuting real estate close to hubs of professional jobs and then bid up the real estate until the older whites sell out and the younger whites can’t afford it. They can do this because of their higher incomes.
It’s why say Ellicot City, MD got way more Asian and less affordable. It already had good schools and was located on major highway hubs to either Baltimore, Columbia, or DC. I would buy a house in Ellicot City tomorrow if the prices were more in line with other areas, and I may still.
Asians could easily move to somewhere else (they have the money to buy anywhere), but they basically bought out the best real estate in the area so why would they want to move.
I wouldn’t call being bought out and priced out of prime real estate “white exclusion”.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Asian-American quotas do exist, but I think its actually far more common in elite progressive circles. I think middle class whites look at Asians as sharing many of their values, they just can’t afford to live in many Asian communities. Though maybe I’m just self projecting my own experience.
Your first sentence sounds to me like social scientific obscurantism. Racism is indeed a personal belief rather than a ‘self-organizing system.’ First of all, what is supposed to be ‘systemic’ here? Words like systemic and structural seem to be added to confer an air of scientificity to vague or unscientific ideas. The way you describe it below, incidentally, is more accurate precisely because it treats racism as a personal belief: e.g. the personal belief that some races are inferior to others. Such beliefs are sometimes idiosyncratic, sometimes inherited from parents, or from one’s cultural milieu, and that, imo, is how racism, in the sense that you’re getting at, would be better described: as a cultural norm, basically a habit. But the ‘system’ boils down to personal beliefs. Neighborhood segregation occurred in the past because enough people personally preferred living among similar people to living among different ones. The system is not more than the sum of its parts. Incidentally, though you attribute segregation solely to white people, social norms today – and especially government policy- seems far more adamant about preserving black enclaves and preventing white ‘intrusion.’ Self-imagined anti-racists support heavily subsidized, tacitly race based subsidies for ‘historic black communities’ in expensive cities to prevent the market from integrating them either by inducing white people to move to Harlem or black people to move out to predominantly white suburbs. This desire to preserve communities is probably to the detriment of the descendants of those who currently make up said communities.
You sort of suggest, though, the possibility that racism may simply be rational self interest; e.g. ‘I don’t actually care about my race, but policies that benefit people who happen to belong to it benefit me, so I’ll support them’ in which case it can become a self-perpetuating convention in the general population.
Interestingly, the former actually be an unconscious case of the latter: the personal belief may be irrational/received wisdom, but its persistence may be due to the convention serving a rational, material purpose for its carriers. Robert Sugden’s writing on human’s spontaneous attribution of ‘prominence’ to places, categories, etc. comes to mind, as a means of imposing asymmetry on a coordination problem type games. IOW, racial group preference may be an ad hoc means of escaping Hobbesian anarchy and fomenting cooperation between individuals within the group to their advantage; from the individuals’ perspective, it doesn’t matter how arbitrary the basis for membership of the group really is, only that there be a cooperative group. Of course eventually everyone joins a group as the system approaches its equilibrium, and the zero sum game between individuals is transformed into a zero sum game between groups.
See, this just tells me that you just don’t “get” how social inequality could exist in a self-organizing or self-reinforcing fashion. Which is odd, because if you understand how the free market creates order spontaneously through distributed individual choices, then you should be capable of understanding how racial inequality could exist similarly.
Neighborhood segregation occurred in the past because enough people personally preferred living among similar people to living among different ones. The system is not more than the sum of its parts.
Actually, no. Read ‘The Color of Law: How the Government Segregated America’, which details how the US government deliberately orchestrated the development of segregated neighborhoods through housing policy, as well as financing home ownership for whites while simultaneously ensuring that blacks could benefit from the same programs. This stuff was still going on in the 1960s.
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america
You seem to assume that blacks “self-segregated” from whites by mutual choice. But in reality, the choice was probably much more one-sided than you seem to be assuming. Whites moved away from blacks. Blacks didn’t move away from whites.
A social justice koan:
If white people want to move away from black neighborhoods, and black people also want to move away from black neighborhoods, is wanting to move away from black neighborhoods racist?
If Jews want to move away from ghettos are ghettos not racist?
Jewish ghettos are an amusing analogy, because modern day black ghettos are precisely the opposite of European Jewish ones: Jews were restricted to the latter by force to keep them in by people who didn’t want them elsewhere. Modern day black ghettos in the US are largely supported by extensive subsidized housing, rent controls, restrictions on development meant to keep housing prices low for current residents, etc. In essence, politicians (sometimes self-serving, but often at the behest of these very residents as short-sighted voters) offer subsidies to persuade residents to stay in their ghettos, largely done in the name of advancing black people’s interests, but ultimately to their detriment.
If more people abandoned their special ‘concern’ for black communities and simply let markets do their work and disintegrate and reconstruct these ghettos, the erstwhile poor black residents and their progeny might have a chance to integrate into more functional communities elsewhere.
@Hazel: If by “ghetto” you mean an area where Jews are legally required to live, then there’s nothing comparable in current black experience. If you mean “Jewish neighborhood”, then a sufficiently large population of Jews can’t move away from the ghetto, because it comes with them wherever they go.
But quite a few Jews choose to live in Israel, which implies that many Jews rather like ghettos under certain circumstances.
But my point was that Hazel and Mark pretty much agree on what’s going on, just not on who’s to blame. Hazel thinks it’s because whites are racist; Mark thinks it’s because blacks are, on average, undesirable neighbors. There’s evidence for racism, but there are also plenty of statistics that show black neighborhoods experiencing much more crime and poverty than white neighborhoods. Both of you are making sense.
Modern day black ghettos are also constructed by white flight and other government policies that intentionally create segregated neighborhoods. Subsidization for low-income housing is indeed one such policy. It’s not created by violence, but the effect is the same. And when black people try to move out of the ghetto areas, white residents flee. The point is, the fact that black people try to escape ghettos doesn’t mean that they weren’t created by racist government policy.
I called it a koan because it’s a question with no reasonable answer. It’s silly to say that ghettos aren’t racist, but it’s also silly to say that whites are racist for wanting the same thing blacks want.
“See, this just tells me that you just don’t “get” how social inequality could exist in a self-organizing or self-reinforcing fashion. Which is odd, because if you understand how the free market creates order spontaneously through distributed individual choices, then you should be capable of understanding how racial inequality could exist similarly.”
Market coordinate the desires of participants. Markets, in other words, reflect the personal desires and beliefs of participants; a market is, by definition, the aggregation of the preferences of its participants, the sum (or product, or some mathematical operation on) of its parts. Your ‘self-organizing system of oppression’ is just a black box I’m supposed to believe in while its mechanism of operation is left a vague mystery.
“How the Government Segregated America’, which details how the US government deliberately orchestrated the development of segregated neighborhoods through housing policy, as well as financing home ownership for whites while simultaneously ensuring that blacks could benefit from the same programs.”
And they did this why? For kicks? No, because someone *believed* in it. Someone wanted it done, be it voters, lenders, borrowers, or politicians and their own ideas. All these structures, they’re just people and relationships between people. What you’re describing seems like the sociological equivalent of a perpetual motion device.
“You seem to assume that blacks “self-segregated” from whites by mutual choice. But in reality, the choice was probably much more one-sided than you seem to be assuming. Whites moved away from blacks. Blacks didn’t move away from whites.”
First of all, the assumption that “white flight” was primarily about race and not economics is almost certainly wrong. Even if it had been poor whites moving into the major urban cities in the 40s-60s, the same pattern would’ve happened as the increasingly wealthy urban descendants of European immigrants wanted better homes, better schools, safer neighborhoods as crime rates were skyrocketing, etc. all of which are perfectly reasonable desires. In fact suburbanization was itself probably a causative factor in the reinforcing black migration into the cities, by increasing the availability of work and making urban housing more affordable.
Regaring modern day self-segregation, blacks don’t necessarily have to move away from whites to self-segregate: anti-gentrification policies or subsidized housing designed to keep poor ‘people of color’ together in the ‘old neighborhoods’ has much the same effect, and I expect most black people who want to keep their neighborhoods black would *prefer* to keep non-black people out to having to move somewhere else. White people who feel the same way likely would share that preference, but it’s far more palatable to use public policy to preserve black communities these days than white ones.
It’s also odd for a libertarian to insinuate that upwardly mobile people have some sort of obligation to stay in poor neighborhoods to be the village that helps raise less mobile people around them. If so, then you should be railing against Wilkinson for praising increasingly well-off, educated rural people from leaving their communities behind to be poorer and worse off. But in any case, of course black people moved away from white people. They moved away from white southerners. You may say, “but that was justified flight; white people leaving major cities was not.” In which case I would defy to look at a graph of crime rate trends in almost any major American city starting in the 1950s and tell me it was not justified for anyone who could afford it to want out. (And this story is more consistent with what we see in modern times, as wealthy whites have been flooding back into cities the last couple decades as crime rates decline and quality of life improves, apparently unphased by all the ethnic minorities).
our ‘self-organizing system of oppression’ is just a black box I’m supposed to believe in while its mechanism of operation is left a vague mystery.
So is capitalism. You sound exactly like a leftist.
Markets, in other words, reflect the personal desires and beliefs of participants; a market is, by definition, the aggregation of the preferences of its participants, the sum (or product, or some mathematical operation on) of its parts.
It’s not “just” an aggregate at all. Markets have feedback mechanisms which alter what is available in the market and channel people’s options into those which are the most efficient to produce. Likewise, a a black person who doesn’t want to live in a ghetto may find that their housing options are constrained by other people’s choices – in the past by official government policy, and more recently by white flight.
And they did this why? For kicks? No, because someone *believed* in it. Someone wanted it done, be it voters, lenders, borrowers, or politicians and their own ideas. All these structures, they’re just people and relationships between people
Yes, and those relationships are ones of superior to inferior. White people have a superior status in our society and black people have an inferior status. White people are the majority and can vote for policies that favor them and subtly push blacks into all-black ghettos with inferior schools and inferior services.
Regaring modern day self-segregation, blacks don’t necessarily have to move away from whites to self-segregate: anti-gentrification policies or subsidized housing designed to keep poor ‘people of color’ together in the ‘old neighborhoods’ has much the same effect, and I expect most black people who want to keep their neighborhoods black would *prefer* to keep non-black people out to having to move somewhere else. White people who feel the same way likely would share that preference, but it’s far more palatable to use public policy to preserve black communities these days than white ones.
Opposition to gentrification is a fairly recent phenomenon, and I doubt it’s a significant factor in promoting housing segregation today. You’re talking about a handful of select “historic” neighborhoods in major cities. This isn’t where the vast majority of black people are living.
But it seems you do see how IF “self-segregation” is not mutual, that might actually be kind of a problem, because you wouldn’t be trying to insist that it’s mutual otherwise.
It’s also odd for a libertarian to insinuate that upwardly mobile people have some sort of obligation to stay in poor neighborhoods to be the village that helps raise less mobile people around them.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m thinking of upwardly mobile blacks who want to move out of ghettos and into middle-class neighborhoods. And then finding that the white people move out of the neighborhood and the property values drop and it winds up being a slum again in 20 years. That sort of thing prevents upwardly mobile blacks from building equity in their homes.
If there’s an obligation somewhere it that white not flee from middle class blacks, and politicians not treat neighborhoods with significant numbers of black people as a good place to stuff low-income housing (or landfills or water treatment plants), so it won’t bother the richer white neighborhoods.
@Hazel: “White people are the majority and can vote for policies that favor them and subtly push blacks into all-black ghettos with inferior schools and inferior services. ”
It’s worth noting that there are jurisdictions where black majorities have elected mostly-black governments, and that services for black people in those jurisdictions are not noticeably better than elsewhere. Baltimore, Detroit, and Washington D.C. are the most notable examples.