What is strikingly different in 1950 is that blacks overtake whites in their level of urbanization. After 1950, blacks become more urbanized than whites, and they continue to urbanize. Whites de-urbanized after 1970. Blacks moved to the cities after World War II, en masse. And it is after this move that severe family-formation problems began to emerge. The data suggest that the clues to recent family-formation problems among blacks are to be found in the circumstances of black urbanization after 1950.
Pointer from John Alcorn. The data in the paper show that before 1950, marriage rates of black women were even higher than those of white women.
prostitutes (or just sluts) and cheap restaurants reduce the incentives for men to marry
Restaurants are cheaper in the countryside. however, “better restaurants” is probably sufficient for your argument. I’m not familiar with the other market you mention.
Rather, I’d suggest, it was the ability to escape one’s reputation in the urban world that led to the decline of the family. It is much easier to move into a new town now than 150 years ago.
Arnold, if you haven’t read Wilkerson’s _The Warmth of Other Suns_, you should read it (and specifically its description of the urban conditions faced by those who made the Great Migration) before speculating more on this.
Wealth matters.
Small town Blacks are more likely to marry than urban Blacks, wrote Ivory Toldson in the NYT in 2011: “nothing to do with race, and everything to do with educational and income disparities between races. Black people also have higher population concentrations in urban centers, which have a lifestyle and cost of living that appear less conducive to marriage and family.”
And noting the difference between income and wealth, piece at Pew observes
“Since the 1960s, household-income growth for African-Americans has outpaced that of whites. Median adjusted household income for blacks is now 59.2% that of whites, up slightly from 55.3% in 1967 (though in dollar terms the gap has widened).
But those gains haven’t led to any narrowing of the wealth gap between the races. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, the median net worth for black households in 2011 ($6,446) was lower than it was in 1984 ($7,150), while white households’ net worth was almost 11% higher. “
(Black incomes are up, but wealth isn’t
by Drew Silver, August 2013).
And more recently:
“Households headed by whites have considerably higher median net worth – a measure of the value of what a household owns minus what it owes – than those headed by blacks. In 2013, the net worth of white households was $144,200, roughly 13 times that of black households, according to Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
The wealth gap between black and white households has widened since 1983, when the median wealth of white households ($98,700) was eight times that of the wealth of black households ($12,200). The gap narrowed in the 1990s and early 2000s but increased in the years following the Great Recession.
While median net worth tends to increase as levels of educational attainment rise, the white-black gap in wealth persists even controlling for educational differences. For example, the median net worth of black households headed by someone with at least a bachelor’s degree was $26,300 in 2013, while for households headed by white college degree holders that net worth was $301,300 – 11 times that of blacks.”
(Pew, June 27, 2016)
Perhaps relatedly, John Wake ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwake/2020/09/19/the-paradox-of-the-black-home-ownership-rate/?sh=516a8b6b29b9 ) observes
“ the Paradox of the Black Home Ownership Rate – in the 30 years from 1940 to 1970 when housing discrimination against Blacks was legal and horrific, the U.S. Black home ownership rate nearly doubled going from 23% to 42%, but 50 years after the 1968 Fair Housing Act became law, the U.S. Black home ownership rate was essentially the same as in 1968. It was 41% in 2018.”
And
“today, the Black home ownership rate in the South is higher than in the North. The Black home ownership rate in Massachusetts is 35% but in Georgia it’s 47%. The Black home ownership rate in New York state is 31% but in Mississippi it’s 54%.”
Predatory lending by the credentials industry is a major contributor:
“African Americans with four-year college degrees have a lower homeownership rate than white Americans without a high school diploma,” said Choi, citing data from the 2017 American Community Survey.
Although homeownership rates increase as educational attainment increases for both black and white Americans, white high school dropouts have a homeownership rate of 60.5 percent, compared with 56.4 percent for black college graduates.
Student loan debt was mentioned as a potentially significant contributor to the growing gap between black and white homeownership. Of all racial groups, African Americans have more student loan debt, and African Americans with a college degree are five times more likely to default (PDF) on their student debt than white Americans.”
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/these-five-facts-reveal-current-crisis-black-homeownership
Nevertheless the establishment continues to scapegoat working class whites for all the country’s racial ills.
“The data suggest that the clues to recent family-formation problems among blacks are to be found in the circumstances of black urbanization after 1950.”
Why not just “urbanization”? From the “Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies American Jewish Population Project”, “The vast majority of Jews (97%) live in urban metro areas surrounding cities.” Something similar could be said for most Asian groups.
And these people were not always urbanized. In the Jewish case, in the late 19th Century in Eastern Europe, there was a quiterapid urbanization as semi-emancipated Jews moved from rural shtetls into the cities.
Japan and Korea have been ultra-urban for generations, and also saw a rapid surge in urbanization following WWII and the Korean War respectively. No “black family” or “Moynihan’s Scissors” problems to speak of.
According to the link…
White % Urban is 70.2% and Black % urban is 86.1%. Not a big difference.
In addition black rural is worse than white urban, by a lot.
The relevant issue is how much of social tension is due to relative levels of middle class behavior and attainment within or without black groups. Things like urbanization, income, family formation cleary produce a big effect when looking at different black families. But relative to other groups — like whites and asians — income and urbanization don’t explain as much about between race differences.
So again, we are asking whether the problem was bad but got worse due to post war policies and economic changes or whether even in an ideal paternalistic libertarian world, the differences between blacks and whites today would be big enough that unrest and pressure for “woke” solutions have emerged. Notice that the left has given up on focusing on opportunity improvements and increasingly legitimized simply calling for equalitarianism of outcomes rather than traditional egalitarianism.
If we can’t get to a point where society or its leaders are willing to accept the notion that there is a set of fair conditions that might still produce large discrepancies between blacks and whites which are acceptable, then we can see the endpoint. Some form of regulatory communism or civil war is inevitable. If equal results when they cannot arrive without natural processes are insisted upon, the road to serfdom is clear. The road to apocalypse is also more probable.
There was a brief period in American history between say 1924 and 1964 when it seemed like we could integrate African Americans. In part because the value of a rather ordinary individual with US citizenship willing to do routine physical movements over and over while showing up sober was enough to attain middle class respectability, and even blacks could do that. And the Great Migration probably cut into UAW bargaining power by like 1% a year or something, which mattered a lot to some people at the time.
This raises a very tough question.
What does industrialization, urbanization and capitalism mean for the survival of extended families, and then even primary families?
Obviously, as a practical matter, to survive in urbanized, industrialized capitalism, extended families are scattered hither and yon. Sometimes this has a lot to do with the economies of scale in farming.
If you visit rural Thailand or Malaysia, you still see extended families in operation, in existence as economic and social units, but under duress as family members migrate to urban centers.
I am a free-market sort of guy, but let me tell you the truth: free markets dissolve families.
Do free markets dissolve families or do modern high productivity organizations–or even modern prosperity in general–dissolve families?
High productivity organizations came first to capitalist countries. But any socialist country that wants to have a high standard of living may well find the same thing happening.
So, something went completely awry for this author (I’m thinking an extreme case of TDS), but he likely found the answer to your question in this short, but eloquent book.
“Why are the blessings of American life so unevenly distributed? Because of complexity, I will argue. It is my contention that, although things were very different in the relatively recent past, today the primary determinant of socioeconomic status is the ability to handle the mental demands of a complex social environment.”
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Capitalism-Economic-Smarter-Unequal-ebook/dp/B00CMU8G48
There is a reason Facebook pays to freeze its employees eggs. Because it increases the odds they will never have kids.
In a rat race for zero sum positional goods, having fewer kids is always the cheat code to win. Unless you heavily incentivize child bearing in a number of ways, high productivity modern economies all trend toward Singapore style 1.0 TFR IQ shredders.
I believe a huge brain drain effect of Affirmative Action is under discussed. Many Slovaks are not happy that many medical students who graduate in Slovakia, then go to practice in much richer Austria, Germany, or the UK; or somewhat richer Czechia. A brain drain out of of Slovakia.
Like many have noted a brain drain out of Africa into America. Which reduces the avg IQ/ skilled level of the place being drained.
It happens inside US black majority “ghettos” as well. The “top” blacks, those most responsible & capable, are encouraged to leave for some integrated college, and work for some integrated company at integrated approx equal wages to whites. And live in as a minority in an integrated middle or upper class house, in an integrated school district.
Such US blacks leave the majority Black areas – leaving fewer good role models to be physically present there. It’s often, usually, better for the individual Blacks to move up & out. But it’s certainly worse for those that are left behind.
Some 70% of Black kids are not being raised by married parents? I’d bet, without having the data, that over 80%, likely over 85%, of Black kids in Black majority school districts are being raised by their married parents. Most of the 30% of Black kids who do have married parents, are living in integrated areas, going to integrated schools, and NOT providing good role models to the less advantaged Black kids of unmarried mothers.
I also claim that school districts are the right admin area to be focusing attention on, and there should be a lot more help for those who live in districts with the most kids whose parents are not married – and such places are mostly Black (the districts with the lowest rate of married parents).
likely over 85%, of Black kids in Black majority school districts are being raised by their unmarried parents.
What you’re describing is just Fishtown and Belmont, but hyped up because of the bunching of blacks at the low end.
I guess the claim in The Bell Curve is that while we can’t expect Fishtown people to attain higher income in the market economy, it doesn’t seem theoretically impossible for them to marry and stay married, which would probably do 90% of the work of “a decent life for decent people”. Yet nobody can crack that nut, though Murray thinks shaming poor men more might do it.
I think the main issue is that getting the bottom 1/2 to 1/3 of society (larger for blacks) to behave as middle class bourgeois is just really hard to do and the only way a society is going to make that investment is if the payoff is huge enough to justify it. Various circumstances have made it uneconomical to make that investment (for society and the individuals involved) and so other then measures whose real purpose is to provide make work jobs in the name of addressing the problem we don’t do much.
“I also claim that school districts are the right admin area to be focusing attention on”
Poor school districts get a lot of assistance but its pretty much all money down the drain. Might as well burn stacks of cash Joker style.
The main issue is that The Great Migration concentrated blacks on valuable northern city real estate where they trashed things, and thus black dysfunction became a perennial issue to be addressed so that northern whites living in those areas could function. If they had remained in the south, or if the black ghetto was merely a bit less violent, we would care about as much as we care about central Appalachia, not at all.
“nobody can crack that nut, though Murray thinks shaming poor men more might do it.”
Who has actually tried using carrots for the men & women who are the decision makers? Orban in Hungary is increasing support for marriage and having kids while being married. Some kind of targeted “anniversary award” might help, and should be tried. Other states and cities should try different things, different awards/ rewards for those doing well among many who make poor choices.
Shame ain’t gonna do it. Involuntary castration after fathering 10 (or X) unsupported babies is a political non-starter. Republicans need to give up on the “stick”.
Carrots only.
“Free market” rewards are not enough.
Totally undiscussed in the paper is the idea that SEX, and having sex, is far more important to the status of black men than to the status of white men. (my “true” speculation)
Good note on how Becker was wrong:
Quite contrary to the prediction of marriage market theorists such as Becker (that when there is a shortage of men relative to women, all men will marry),12
economic uncertainty and a surplus of black women available for marriage means that black men increasingly will not marry or will delay marriage as they hedge their bets in response to uncertain economic prospects and the certainty that there will be a spouse available should they decide to marry.
Ricketts is big on “economic uncertainty”, but doesn’t define or measure it, and he might be wrong about it being worse in the city than in the country, tho my intuition is that there is a much higher variance at an avg level quite higher.
Men want lots of partners, and lots of sex.
Women want love, commitment, and help raising kids.
This is true for blacks and whites, college grads & non-college workers too.
Men give love to get sex; women give sex to get love & help. Usually the net help received by the women includes lots of help the women give back to the men – often women giving more help than they get.
With welfare, lots more women feel: I can handle the kids, even without a job – but I can’t handle an adult dependent, or one that’s abusive.
But sex with sexy guys can still give lots of orgasms. Talking about “family formation” without talking about sex seems a bit like talking about home construction without reference to mortgages.
I think in the present state of Constitutional Law, what Orban is doing might well be unconstitutional here. Though supposedly we now have a “conservative” Supreme Court, so who knows?
(There’s an old legal saying, which Chief Justice Roberts seems to illustrate, “Liberal courts make new precedents, and conservative courts conserve those precedents.)
Tom G,
Within the Overton Window, anything you could do will just increase TFR from like 1.6 to 1.8 or something like that. Any people would fight you all the way.
Outside the Overton Window…maybe, but that’s basically a coup.
The utter lack of marriage-able men in black neighborhoods has several causes:
1. the War on Drugs
2. the whole ‘gangsta’ and pimp culture
3. blacks who ridicule academic achievement as ‘acting white.’
The situation is more wretched than many of us can imagine. George Floyd had five children (he did try to give them some support). Jacob Blake had six children (and was constantly on the prowl for young women.) Breanna Taylor was the devoted girlfriend of a full time drug dealer.
1. the War on Drugs
Drugs seem an excuse, not a cause. If you look at criminal proceedings, they read a lot like “this dude dissed me so I shot him.” If it wasn’t drugs, it would be dice of hoes (and it often is).
3. blacks who ridicule academic achievement as ‘acting white.’
Blacks lack the IQ to succeed as middle class bourgeois. They try to emphasize those traits they excel it, unfortunately they are not traits that most people appreciate.
“George Floyd had five children…Jacob Blake had six children.”
It some point we will need to accept that the children of the dysgenic need to die before adulthood.
When I cited the ‘War on Drugs’ as a cause of social decay, what I meant was that this war has created a very large group of men with prison histories. In so many cases, they never get a good job again.
The War on Drugs was supposed to make the streets safer for law-abiding families and businesses. It sounds gruesome to say this, but if drug crimes had led to capital punishment that might have been true. Instead we have a revolving-door prison system that does keep the money flowing to the jail-industrial complex but leaves communities worse off.
I’m not convinced the war on drugs is the primary reason for high incarceration rates. It just doesn’t seem borne out in the data.
>—“It (sic) some point we will need to accept that the children of the dysgenic need to die before adulthood.”
Now there’s an idea we haven’t seen since Germany in the 1940’s. Sadly, all ideas eventually come back no matter how pernicious.
How do you propose to satisfy the need for the deaths of other people’s children asdf? I hear poison gas has been found to be cost effective and efficient.
asdf is just being a good social planner, who follows “the public good” to its logical conclusion. He’s talking about people who will probably create net negative externalities. It’s the job of government to deal with externalities.
Yes, Roger I realize that you intended to satirize the idea that we need government planning to solve social problems.
That was not asdf’s intention. He has been seriously advocating for the return of authoritarian government eugenics for a long time. For some reason his notion that “the children of the dysgenic need to die” didn’t seem that amusing to me. I guess I don’t have much of a sense of humor today.
Yeah, though what I was satirizing was more the idea that governments should be unlimited when it comes to solving social problems, because after all, they’re the good guys, motivated by the public interest rather than private greed (and maybe guided by experts who use impressive sounding words like externalities).
The problem is that asdf is right in thinking that some people make the world better and some people make the world worse. And thus if one is concerned about the future, there should be more of the first and fewer of the second. Right now, there is pretty much a taboo to even think about that.
How to accomplish such a result, and whether it is even possible, is a different question.
Roger,
So their honestly isn’t a dysgenic fertility problem in the first world. Lower classes clock in at barely over replacement, at least in the American context.
There is a problem with high third world fertility + immigration, though that is mainly an immigration issue.
The real problem is that the eugenic classes aren’t breeding enough. I think this is partly social/cultural and partly economic. On the economic side there is a shortage of certain key goods like real estate in safe areas with good school districts. On the cultural side there is a huge fertility gap between conservative/religious and leftist/secular in the high IQ set. Leftism is literal generational death. Without immigration leftism would die out in a generation or two, but sadly they are importing children to make up for the ones they didn’t have.
There are well known methods to solve the problem of the eugenic classes wanting 2.5 kids and ending up with 1.5 or less kids. Many of them are outside the Overton Window, but aren’t that shocking really and don’t involve gas chambers.
>—“some people make the world better and some people make the world worse”
Yup. And the ones who think good public policy involves deliberately trying to maximize the deaths of children in the lower classes head the list of those who make it worse. You’re damn right there is a taboo about trying to maximize the deaths of poor children just because you have judged them “dysgenic.” Sometimes there is a good reason for taboos.
>—“The real problem is that the eugenic classes aren’t breeding enough.”
And when it comes to government subsidizing that, suddenly you discover government really could and should do social engineering.
>—“There is a problem with high third world fertility + immigration, though that is mainly an immigration issue.”
I’m not an open borders guy but it’s worth remembering that every major immigrant group in our history has been seen by nativists an existential threat due to their purported low intelligence and lower morals and their destiny to outbreed the superior races. Same as it ever was.
“And when it comes to government subsidizing that, suddenly you discover government really could and should do social engineering.”
It’s not a matter of subsidy. Progressive taxation at all levels ends up being something like 50% of the UMC income. In addition, government failure to provide basic safety and education (it taxes people but provides a poor service) is a huge implied tax as well, often filtered through real estate prices.
All the government needs to to do stop penalizing the eugenic classes to subsidize the dysgenic classes. You will note that this is mentioned in “The Bell Curve” that the current status quo is anything but policy neutral on the matter.
“but it’s worth remembering that every major immigrant group”
Charles Murray addressed this head on and noted that there actually wasn’t good IQ data to prove that a lot of 19th century/early 20th century European immigration was low IQ. Why not go read his work on this. And many people noted the proficiency of Asians at the time.
Look, you know the truth of this. Process is and act on it.
Without public assistance surviving fertility will fall on its own. We literally have to not do a thing.
>—“Charles Murray addressed this head on and noted that there actually wasn’t good IQ data to prove that a lot of 19th century/early 20th century European immigration was low IQ. Why not go read his work on this. ”
Yes and that didn’t prevent nativists from believing it anyway. I have read most of Charles Murray’s books including The Bell Curve and his most recent book, Human Diversity. I have a lot of respect for him.
You are using his work to draw the exact opposite conclusions from the ones he does on these issues. He supports a universal basic income. He insists that “Nothing we learn will justify rank ordering human groups from superior to inferior…Nothing we learn will lend itself to genetic determinism.” “I reject claims that differences among groups have any relevance to human worth or dignity.” He certainly does not think that “the children of the dysgenic need to die.” He would be disgusted by the idea.
Why don’t YOU go and read his work on this and consider the fact that he is a much better judge of what his own work means than you are?
I haven’t read either Murray book but this discussion makes me think of Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Vice in Human Evolution. Wrangham contrasts humans, who will wait patiently and then sit in a plane for hours with a hundred or more conspecifics, with chimps who would start fighting as soon as a sufficient number were put together in a limited space. How did we get from there to here?
His answer is “self-domestication”. In a pre-human band, the most cantankerous, least helpful person would go out with a hunting party and not come back and nobody would ask any questions. The less polite word for this is eugenics.