Both from Quillette, which is what you should be reading instead of political posts on Twitter or Facebook. Both from the same authors, Vincent Harinam and Rob Henderson
First, they write
In general, the percentage of white liberals who perceived discrimination against blacks to be a “very serious problem” increased from 25 percent in 2010 to 58 percent in 2016, with 70 percent believing the criminal justice system was biased against blacks. Compare this to the 75 percent of minorities that reported rarely or never experiencing discrimination in their day-to-day lives.
Second, they write
In the case of white privilege, there are a number of variables which, when taken together, better explain differences in group outcomes. Here, we share four potential factors: geographic determinism, personal responsibility, family structure, and culture.
Read the whole essays, particularly the second.
“graduate from high school, work full-time, and not have children outside of marriage. ”
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I mostly read the essays and this popped out. Sort of the definition of middle class, the minimum needed. I have heard this quoted before, a simple message for the poor.
Yes indeed, the statistics on this are quite staggering, near enough perfect (98-99%) way to get out of poverty. These are not difficult things to do, in terms of complexity or unavailability to some, they just require determination. I have repeated this statistic to others and they are without exception mind blown.
& just want to concur with Arnold & say if you read nothing else today, read the second essay.
In regards to the Success Sequences you reference, here is a recent debate at Cato.
https://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/may-2018/there-sequence-success
I agree with you that this is both excellent advice to the young, and a reminder to all of us of who the long-term poor really are and how much of poverty comes from adverse life choices or paths.
Although I generally agree with these essayists’ conclusions, I am troubled by their repetition of weak evidence. For example, Thomas Sowell is a pretty good economist, but when he wrote about the lazy whites of the American South, which Harinam and Harrison rephrased thus:
Sowell breezed past fairly-obvious economic explanations for Southern white farm practices— and I don’t mean “slavery.”
Compared to New England, the South had much more readily-exploited agricultural land. We are nowadays used to comparing farm sizes with huge flat midwestern farms in mind, but before the Civil War plenty of farmers struggled with small, chill, rugged, stony New England plots— to them rooting out trees was worth the trouble, while in the South plowing around tree stumps was often more economical— stumps removed themselves more quickly by rotting in the warm climate, and one could compensate for somewhat obstructed fields by simply plowing more land.
The economic, rather than psychological, butter and cheese explanation is even simpler: mechanical refrigeration was not available in the Antebellum period. New England’s climate is much more suitable for butter- and cheese-industry (in fact, New England used to harvest and ship ice all over the world to cool customers’ stored food). I haven’t looked for any serious studies of this, but there is no prima-facie reason to suppose that the value of cheese in the South would have exceeded the cost (direct and/or opportunity) of producing it, say by expending much labor on digging deep tunnels in which to store butter and mature hard cheese
Seriously, Southern farmers may just have balked at the opportunity cost of devoting labor and capital to the production of fancy foodstuffs instead of cash crops like tobacco or cotton plus enough staples like grains and beans and so-forth (including the meat of those “under-milked” cattle) to nourish the labor force adequately.
I could go on; Harinam and Harrison really should be more careful with this stuff. It is no excuse for dubious examples that you attribute them to a respected economist who happens to be black.
I think your point about mechanical refrigeration is even more interesting when taking into account the often forgotten technical innovation of Frederic Tudor and the 19th century Frozen Water Trade centered around Concord, Massachusetts (i.e. Walden Pond). Natural ice during this period helped spur innovations in refrigerated rail cars, breweries, and Chicago meat packing. I suspect it also impacted dairy/cheese as you say and the growth of bottled Coca-Cola. Atlanta and bottled Coca-Cola is an interesting case that may falsify some of your assumptions; the availability of natural ice based refrigeration, captured in the terms “ice box” and “ice house”, was global in the 19th century, however, rail access or other technical factors may have been critical in the evolution of the dairy/cheese industry.
I agree that cultural work ethic is an unlikely critical factor.
Sowell tends to provide a lot of examples in rapid succession–some might be more persuasive than others.
I think there may be quite a bit to the “cultural work ethic” but it has to be developed in a more sophisticated manner. Before we know it we can be discussing high-falutin psychological variables such as “fatalism” or “effort pessimism” vs. “internal locus of control” or “grit.”
And measuring those things is non-trivial. We don’t have “grit-ometers.”
I think we are discussing empirical questions that cannot be settled one way or another based on comments after a blog post.
It would be useful to look for “natural experiments.” Off-hand I am reminded of the anecdote of Malaysia being a place where the best rubber-tappers were penniless immigrants from India or China, rather than local Malay inhabitants.
New technology brings new opportunities. Also, “Chance favors the prepared mind” as Pasteur said.
In discussing the “lazy Southerners in the USA” there is also the issue of hookworm and other parasitical diseases.
_Ecology of a Cracker Childhood_ is an entertaining read about growing up in the “piney woods” of the South.
Offhand I’m also reminded of the book _Albion’s Seed_. It sounds like the Scots-Irish “borderers” who lived in certain areas of the South were really the sort of people you would want living on a military frontier to keep the enemy at bay, not necessarily the people to develop your agriculture.
It does feel like the wokest white liberals are ones they live in neighborhoods with limited minorities especially African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. I would 97% of life minorities don’t have barriers and these barriers are diminishing long term. (Most barriers are law enforcement treatment and there is still some older people that mistrust minorities.) Long term most people are growing up in diversity neighborhoods and this will diminish.
Note-the authors carefully avoid any mention of average group differences in cognitive capacity. They have their heads in the sand.
The authors indirectly address it in the first essay with the “Alt-Righters and White Liberals” section which concludes “Both are sorely mistaken.”
Observational studies are hard.
While I don’t disagree with the gist of the conclusions (particularly about in tact families affecting outcomes), the essays present empirical work with either poor reasoning or known problems.
Here’s an example from part 2:
“The researchers, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, found that to avoid poverty individuals must do three things in order: graduate from high school, work full-time, and not have children outside of marriage. This has come to be known as ‘the success sequence’…
According to Haskins and Sawhill, individuals in families that adhered to the success sequence had a 98 percent chance of escaping poverty. By contrast, 76 percent of those that did not adhere to any of these norms were poor.”
There are two problems with this logic. First, they are conditioning on the outcome when they include “work full-time” in the criteria. Of course those who work full-time aren’t as poor as those who don’t; they have full time jobs. Second, graduating high school reveals information about a person’s cognitive abilities and work ethic. That may seem like a relatively low bar for many of us, but that’s the point: of course those who don’t graduate from high school have poor outcomes: they weren’t able to graduate from high school. The only thing they could’ve reasonably conditioned on of those was having children outside of marriage (and they do report statistics for individual conditions in the original success sequence essay). But even then, it probably reflects, to some degree, traits of self-control, willingness for delayed gratification, etc, that are also related to income. Plus marriage allows for splitting housing costs, etc, that are helpful in escaping poverty. There may be cases where simply sticking it out for the credential would make a difference, but others in which not graduating high school reveals information about the person.
In part 1, the author discusses recent research on bias in police shootings, which used violent crime conviction rates as a proxy for police encounters. However, there was no need for this proxy as statistics are kept about police encounters directly:
https://replicationindex.com/2019/10/20/hidden-evidence-in-racial-bias-research-by-cesario-and-johnson/
Also in part 1, the author cites work by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, which is also known to have problems (although these problems don’t necessarily refute the main point on Quillette): https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/11/06/correcting-rising-morbidity-and-mortality-in-midlife-among-white-non-hispanic-americans-in-the-21st-century-to-account-for-bias-in/
The lesson as always: observational studies are hard, and most single studies have incorrect conclusions (at least in magnitude, if not direction).
It seems that the sequences are using a simple framing to address two very different audiences.
For the young, the advice is clear; try to finish high school and avoid having kids before getting married. Not bad advice.
For the rest of us, and that includes voters, counselors and social safety net bureaucrats, the framing is even more useful. Poverty in the US is primarily a factor of people with low intelligence, low self control, poor early life choices, or sheer laziness. Knowing this should help us to address solutions, including avoiding solutions which make it easier to avoid working or having a baby without getting married.
Crime rates actually probably are an important factor that merely counting encounters will miss: police are almost certainly far more likely to shoot a murder suspect than someone with a warrant for fleeing a traffic violation. I think the Harvard study (I forget who it was by) used a more refined approach to encounter characteristics and didn’t find a bias in homicides.
Another interesting phenomenon is that it has been found that black officers are more likely than white ones to shoot block civilians. The common explanation I see for this is ‘internalized racism’ but it seems to me a more plausible explanation is that black offices disproportionately work in areas with higher crime rates and higher % of black people, and i’d predict that encounters with police are more likely to be fatal the higher the violent crime rate is. I’d be interested to see how much the % of encounters that are fatal – within racial categories – is a function of local violent crime rates. Police presence in major cities nowadays is algorithmically allocated according to precinct crime statistics. The composition of encounters will this likely vary with precinct crime rate.
In an earlier comment at this blog, I pointed out the difference between what I called “Wishful-Thinking Conservatism” and “Null Hypothesis Conservativism”. Say WTC vs NHC. Pretty Conceits vs. Ugly Truths.
The second article is straight-up WTC, and embarrassingly incompatible with NHC.
WTC has it’s own ‘normative sociology’ in terms of the cultural-values-based narrative of the primary causative mechanisms responsible for disparate outcomes, and which is almost as dogmatic, willfully blind, and delusionally optimistic as that of the progressives.
Now, to be fair, there’s certainly an important role for nurture to augment nature, and paying some exaggerating lip service to the effects of Horatio Alger bootstrapping moxie and bourgeois virtues has some real and significant benefits, especially when the progressives are constantly trying to denigrate and discount those ideas.
Still, reality imposes its limits, the tides will defy King Canute, and the typical failure mode of WTC is reverse-causation, e.g., “Middle class people have mortgages, so, if you give poor people mortgages too, they’ll become middle class! Maybe even vote Republican!”
Well, you might remember, it didn’t work out. At all. As if King Canute lacked his pious humility and instead had set up royal camps on the beaches near Mont St. Michel, only to watch the bivouac tents all get flooded and swept away.
The things that are correlated with better outcomes do not cause those outcomes, they are the kinds of downstream behaviors that people born with more success-producing upstream ingredients tend to do, and have an innately easier time doing.
Chetty’s Geographic Determinism is perhaps the greatest intellectual sham of the decade. Steve Sailer was able to definitively demonstrate the ridiculousness of Chetty’s analysis using concise, common-sense examples of more plausible alternative explanations, but, alas, is nearly alone is his willingness to actually scrutinize instead of just join the crowd and applaud the unquestionable, infallible genius.
“Personal Responsibility” = “Success Sequence” = A. “Graduate High School” (Be born sufficiently smart and conscientious to do so), B. “Work Full Time” (Be born conscientious enough to do so, in the face of eroded social norms, welfare, and high effective marginal tax rates), and C. “Don’t have kids outside marriage” (same as above).
On the one hand, given that people respond to incentives and nurture and social judgments play an important role, one doesn’t one to give too much ground to the fatalist notion that there’s little a person can choose to do to make better decisions or improve his own situation. Whatever the truth of it, as a public message it would be demoralizing for a marginal individual who would make better decisions and have better outcomes, if socially encouraged to do so, because he perceived that everyone else believed that his success and failure was a matter of individualized credit or blame.
On the other hand, while it’s usually not really productive to get into thorny philosophical issues like free will, responsibility, and culpability, the obvious reality is certain people have a substantially harder or easier time making the right, outcome-optimal decisions, and that this difference is both innate and inheritable to an important degree.
Again, “Middle class people do this, so if we have the poor mimic that lifestyle, they’d become middle class too!”
One irony is that the progressives way have a quicker way to rectify their ideology than the WTCs, because they can always say that genetic factors leading to differences in intelligence, conscientiousness, human capital, and labor marketability are just another “accident of birth” and “unearned privileges and burdens”, thus fundamentally undeserved, unfair, and unjust. Thus, in the progressive view of things, the state is morally justified – even compelled – to, at the very least, play Robin Hood to remind the winners of the role of fortune and luck and to be humble and generous, and to compensate the losers who fall behind through “no fault of their own”. Eventually they would probably get around to the Brave New World idea of redistributing genetic potential, and we can use CRISPR to spell-check out all the rare variant allele mutations, and turn every baby into the super-version of that baby.
NHCs might disagree with the interventions, and might prefer use of traditional social technologies proven effective by past experience, but probably would not disagree with the underlying empirical argument. WTC, however, has no good way to stop ignoring ugly truths and incorporate those insights without imploding in on itself.
+1
I think there is a natural experiment on the culture end.
1) Amongst immigrants with lower IQ, there is a difference between first and second generation immigrants. Earnings are lower the whites in both cases (IQ), but social statistics (out of wedlock birth, crime, etc) all deteriorate.
2) The one large immigrant group I can think of where they are already bad in the first generation are Puerto Ricans, which just happens to be a quasi-state with access to USA welfare back home.
3) Native whites with low IQ experienced similar degeneration in escalating manner since the 1960s cultural revolutions (Coming Apart).
So perhaps we can conclude that there is something about USA culture (and perhaps western culture more generally) that absolutely shreds the ability of low IQ people t0 follow the “Success Sequence”. At least since the 1960s.
When an individual can’t follow the Success Sequence, that is a personal failure. When say 70% of people below a certain IQ threshold can’t, something is going wrong with your society that most individuals in that demographic aren’t going to overcome.
This gives meat to both nature and nurture arguments. On the one hand this cultural breakdown mainly seems to hit the low IQ (nature), but it also seems to be unique to post 1960s western culture (nurture).
The question is “what do you do about it”. Is there a way to get the low IQ to behave better (in the modern world with modern technology and incentives)? What are the incentives to actually do those things? Is it likely?
The only examples I can think of in modern society where the lower orders are still behaving is in Asia. But they have very small low IQ demographics, radically different culture, different politics, etc. It’s not clear that we could ape their example (including any of it being politically or socially feasible).
The problem is “Robin Hood” is where do you draw the line. If it makes sense to do X% redistribution, why not X+1%? If it makes sense to give welfare to fellow countrymen, why not foreigners? If we won’t give it to foreigners, what about if they immigrate here?
There is no limiting principle to “you were just lucky to have good genetics”. At best you get a broad appeal to pragmatism, but that is thin gruel and has provided zero real resistance to an ever escalating ratchet of “fairness” demands. There is no particular reason to believe, once you have established the moral principle that “you didn’t build that, you didn’t earn your genes” that you can create a soft landing. Was there not a pretty big IQ difference between “workers” and “bourgeois” in the 20th century that explained much of the wealth gap? Did the communists limit their aims based on practicality? I seem to remember them overturning the NEP and butchering those kulaks in the name of fairness.
Genetic engineering would help a lot of this, but who knows when or if it becomes practical. It’s a big bet that it will bail us out of not solving these issues.
Something I posted elsewhere:
The difference between a lottery winner and a genetic lottery winner is that one has a pile of cash, while the other has a pile of potential. The cash very well could be redistributed. The potential can’t.
Furthermore, the potential only has value if it’s *realized*. Untapped potential is like unrefined oil. You can’t put it in an engine. Turning potential into something valuable and transferable requires the voluntary effort of the individual. They have to show up in the morning. They have to stay up studying, thinking, doing. They even have to put up with all the annoyances that inevitably come packaged with accomplishing things.
And so we have dilemmas. The first is pragmatic. If we take away all incentive for those with potential to realize their potential, we don’t end up with anything worth redistributing. So it makes sense that let the keep a sizable chunk of their pie, if only to not kill the golden goose.
The second is moral. Those with high potential aren’t slaves. They don’t exist solely to generate surplus to be consumed by those that can contribute nothing in return. I see no indisputable moral claim such people can make on such people. One could make appeals based on any number of religious of philosophical traditions, but really it’s up to these people whether they want to part with the fruits of their efforts.
Furthermore, when you back that claim with government force rather then private charity, it feels a lot more like looting. In that sense things aren’t that different from when the Mongol’s would take what they wanted because they could. There might be practical reasons to negotiate such a deal (people paid off the barbarians from time to time), but there are limits to pragmatism and we have left the moral plain at that point.
asdf,
You “left the moral plain” a long time ago. As illustrated when you wrote this:
>—-“Here is the reality. People are self interested, form groups to advance their self interest, and they don’t give a shit about universalistic morals (and only talk about them as a way of gaining power).”
There is certainly a great deal of cultural dynamics that one would think lends itself to natural experiments, however, the complexity of the system results in very few clean cases for comparison.
In terms of health outcomes, there is no shortage of people who believe that some aspect of modern society/technology is destroying our health. The elephant in the room for these Cassandra’s is that the average lifespans keep increasing (a notable recent exception being the middle-class deaths of despair).
From my perspective, your emphasis on IQ and culture are similar. There is no doubt that low IQ and diligence/character/grit have a significant impact on socio-economic outcomes, however, the elephant in your room is that the U.S. has historically had the greatest natural variation in these measures compared to most/all other modern nation-states and has long been the benchmark for many/most socio-economic markers.
My primary impression after reading both was that the arguments all depended upon an assumption that white privilege had to stand as a fully encompassing explanation for racial difference, instead of being just a more current take on expressing how racial bias works.
It’s a bad assumption, of course.
We covered some of this more than a year ago right here–during the summer of 2018. The old post and comments are still worth reading.
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/thinking-about-privilege/
“In general, a child will see the best outcomes in childhood and adulthood if raised by married parents. ”
Christian morality is the socially optimal lifestyle choice. Most successful Democrats live their own lives around monogamy, or the less optimal serial monogamy (don’t know of studies showing how much). Yet the promiscuous sex culture promoted is anti-Christian morality, and results in too many kids raised without their fathers being married to their mothers.
The single biggest privilege is being an American. Since this privilege is mostly seen by living in America, many of its benefits can be gained even by illegals who get to the US.
Those complaining about privilege but not leaving are being hypocrites, but nothing new.