The article is a book teaser for The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by Peter Temin at MIT. The central point, he argues, is that the top 20% professional-and-up top crust of American society has enacted structural gatekeeping processes like many years of education, and low minimum wages to systematically repress groups by race.
From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis, where a simple economic one would do: close the door on others after they're already in the castle. You can see this play out everywhere, from how 'disruption' pivots to regulatory capture, from how homeowners fiercely guard their property values, and society self-sorts into cohorts of similar income and circumstance.
We've seen in recent years with working-class people's backlash against neoliberal ideas of governance and trade, in Europe and the US, that the economics notion that growth creates wealth at all levels, and wealth isn't a zero-sum game, is a perception not widely shared among everyday people. The fact is, most people perceive wealth solely in relative terms: are they better off than their neighbors, or people with similar life circumstances? Or are they plagued by the same anxiety and insecurity as people they always thought of as poorer than them?
Race plays into this, sure, but more in terms of shared history or the lack thereof, and of being a convenient visually-obvious indicator for a dimension of difference. The people fighting for the scraps below try to band together along dimensions they find relatable -- similar upbringing, comparable treatment by the same sorts of people, similar biases, similar goals and struggles, and race often correlates with enough difference in these life circumstances to interfere with relatability. Conversely, outside of the upper crust of society, different groups all quest for the same opportunities, where victory of one group is quite often to the economic detriment of another. Simply, every group is trying to keep another out. Those whose families have recently ascended to economic security have a vested interest in keeping large waves of additional risers out, while those competing for opportunities to be upwardly mobile are fighting over limited capacity in education, employment, and housing.
While it is the norm (certainly taught as the norm) to profit by coming together in a transaction where both parties leave with more value it is also possible to profit by taking value. This can be done through outright robbery but it can also be done in more subtle (and legal) ways by making a transaction look more voluntary than it is. When one party is negotiating from a position of strength (employers) and the other party is negotiating with their life and physical well being on the line (employees, especially those on the lower end of the pay scale) then the first party can take more value and profit from the transaction than if they were both negotiating for a net gain in value.
So, somewhere along the way, largely by historical accident and inertia, we've decided as a society that it is ok to keep a huge portion of the population on the edge of desperation and that if they fall it is their own concern. Any moves to change this is seen as an attack on business owners and their profits. This is short-sighted since if people are motivated rather than forced to produce value there will be more people contributing to the improvement of the castle and fewer looking at the walls with jealousy and chip away at it whenever they get the opportunity.
If there are people that would behead other people out of resentment for their success, the last thing I want to do is appease them with basic income paid out of my taxes.
The kind of attitude that rationalizes violence with generalizations based on a single variable like wealth should be penalized, not rewarded with money.
Besides the principle of the matter, which is very important to me, I think acquiescing to predatory and bigoted attitudes, like those held by advocates of class warfare, will result in a more dangerous society in the future.
It is actually less risky in the long run to confront and push back against those types of attitudes wherever they arise, than to give into its demands, in my opinion.
Well, I disagree, and I don't think it is about demands, but basic needs. In particular, I find the notion that the core problem is "resentment of success" to be very naive, especially when projected at such a large segment of society.
It's perfectly predictable what courses of action a desperate person will start to contemplate. It's equally predictable what is bound to happen when desperation becomes systemic.
I find the philosophical discussion about what is owed, deserved, right, wrong, moral and immoral disinteresting in this context. "What works", is more interesting.
History suggests that violence and suppression ("pushing back"), works temporarily, with the predictable result that the targets now have even less to lose, and become even more desperate. Which of course, if you're naive, suggests that even more suppression is needed. And so on. At some point, it explodes in the end, one way or another.
Personally, I suspect that guillotine insurance is cheaper for everyone.
When given resources, people who have nothing go and spend those on necessities–basic consumption, precisely the stuff that stimulates the economy. They're not going to send the resources to an off-shore account. This benefits society at large. Markets live and die by their ability to sustain healthy, large scale exchange of goods and services. I.e., don't you worry that you might be doing someone a service, that money will make it back to your pocket, and—most likely—then some.
So maybe there's a way to make more money for everyone, alleviate suffering, and decrease the need for suppressive force all at once.
The downside being, maybe, that we have to give up some ideology to pursue what's effective.
Which is not to say that basic income is guaranteed to work. We don't know yet, because it hasn't been tried at scale.
>>It's perfectly predictable what courses of action a desperate person will start to contemplate. It's equally predictable what is bound to happen when desperation becomes systemic.
Absolute poverty levels are at their lowest level in history. Any revolution based on class will be fuelled by resentment, not real need.
Mass guillotining would also not be a phenomenon ever borne out of necessity, given it would only be possible after the revolutionaries have obtained power and total control over the population targeted for mass executions. It is borne out of spite, and if it's targeted at the rich categorically, from envy.
>>History suggests that violence and suppression ("pushing back"), works temporarily, with the predictable result that the targets now have even less to lose, and become even more desperate.
It's not about suppressing some irrepressible force. It's about shaping human behaviour away from the arrogance of assuming one has a right to take by force another party's assets.
I believe people can react differently to relative poverty depending on which behavior is tolerated in society. If you continually tell them they're victims of those who are succeeding, and validate the message by instating forcible income programs that institutionalize receipt of unearned income, they will see demands for politically coordinated violence and forcible wealth transferral as both a viable and a morally justified position.
>>When given resources, people who have nothing go and spend those on necessities–basic consumption, precisely the stuff that stimulates the economy
Spending at Walmart is not good for the economy in any general sense. Between investing $1 billion in R&D for a tech company, and being forced to hand over a billion to give to people who could be earning that money doing one of the many jobs for which companies are unable to find willing workers, it's clear which one would actually enhance future productivity more.
>>They're not going to send the resources to an off-shore account.
Money held in an offshore account isn't locked up in a vault. It is invested in real economies, to enhance productivity and abundance.
Investment by people who are proven to be good investors, is excellent for the economy.
>>Which is not to say that basic income is guaranteed to work. We don't know yet, because it hasn't been tried at scale.
We have tried forcible income redistribution, at ever greater intensities, over the last half century, and there is every indication that it's not working.
Economic growth has slowed, wage growth has slowed, the labor participation rate has decreased, and the rate of incarceration, drug abuse, and single parenthood has increased.
Depends on your perspective. There are worse things than death. And equalizing misery is almost romantic.
And compared to other revolutions, the French Revolution was not that bloody. It was just the localized executions that made for all the blood running in the streets for weeks.
No, while it was a revolts against the revolutionaey regime, it was not one to restore the pre-revolutionary regime or the classes who lost power in the revolution, it was a popular peasant uprising sgainst conscription by the revolutionary regime.
OTOH, even if it were a counter-revolution, why would it be excluded: would you really make the argument that a revolution isn't particularly bloody, if you have ignore the cost in lives of putting down attempts to restore the old order? That's part of the cost of achieved a revolution.
The counter-revolution was more to restore church power than the monarchy (that's how the peasants were enlisted, anyway), but that's not a relevant detail. Re why exclude: You were trying to prove that initial revolutions, contra the present upper classes kill mostly poor people. Might be true but can't be shown by citing counter-revolutions. Sure, similarly, White Russian soldiers killed a lot of poor peasants - but then, why wouldn't they?
> You were trying to prove that initial revolutions, contra the present upper classes kill mostly poor people.
Well, it wasn't me, and the claim didn't mention “initial”, it was: “most people who get hurt in a blood-thirsty revolution are generally not the rich and powerful.” I think it's fair to characterize people killed in resistance by the old order before the institutionalization of the revolution to be hurt in the revolution.
It's not just the executions for the French Revolution. You have to add all the wars that followed during 20 years, including the wars fought by Napoleon. So we're talking a few hundred thousand deaths still.
>>When one party is negotiating from a position of strength (employers) and the other party is negotiating with their life and physical well being on the line (employees, especially those on the lower end of the pay scale) then the first party can take more value and profit from the transaction than if they were both negotiating for a net gain in value.
I don't see how that could possibly be true. An employee has plenty of time to peruse offers in the marketplace before accepting one of them, and even more time after accepting one of them.
Job market analysis is an extremely efficient task with modern job listing sites. A person can quickly assess the lay of the land as far as prevailing wages and required qualifications, and applying for the jobs is as easy as sending off an email with minor customization of the cover letter.
The idea that a person would take a job that pays less than what they can fetch on the marketplace because they are poor by developed world standards seems like the kind of overly cynical and unsubstantiated conspiracy theory thinking that motivates so many ill-conceived mandates like minimum wage.
>An employee has plenty of time to peruse offers in the marketplace before accepting one of them, and even more time after accepting one of them.
You seem to be extrapolating middle-class experience and choices to the working poor and below.
The idea that the marketplace is immune to distortions caused by a well-founded fear of pain or existential threat seems like an pollyanna view and the type of thinking that leads to ill-conceived policy like removing worker protections because the market can do no wrong.
People can and do get stuck in a treading-water situation where they simply try to feed themselves and their family and keep them housed and clothed at a minimum standard while working so much that finding another job or spending time improving their value to the marketplace is an unreachable dream.
That's not to say I completely disagree with you. There are plenty of open questions. If basic survival and physical security was guaranteed for a population how many would take that minimum guarantee and just spend all of their free time on activities that benefit only themselves (making them the worst possible drain on society)? How many would find a suitable job or other activity that creates significant value for others but that doesn't make up for the resources spent on their minimum guarantees (making them a smaller drain on society)? How many would take the opportunity to improve their lot through more aggressive negotiations in the sale of their time and labor or through improving their value generation capacity through education or by taking bigger market risks to the point of contributing more than the societal investment? And, finally, how would each of these groups contribute to the whole in aggregate? Would it be a net gain? I think that is an open question and one that a lot of current ideology makes it very difficult to get real answers.
> So, somewhere along the way, largely by historical accident and inertia, we've decided as a society that it is ok to keep a huge portion of the population on the edge of desperation and that if they fall it is their own concern.
This has how the vast majority of humanity has always lived.
Who's "we" and what can "we" do about it? If you're suggesting taking more money from people who earned it to give it to people that didn't, I think you'll find that "we" doesn't include a lot of people.
Nah, no single decision was made about keeping a huge portion of the population on the edge of desperation. And companies are not generally to blame for people's desperation, unless they somehow cheat or commit fraud (usually in collusion with the state). Furthermore, always assuming that the employer is always in the position of strength is wrong. Even though Chinese factory workers are paid very little by Western standards, they are seeing their wages rise, which is exactly because they are increasingly able to negotiate from a position of strength.
Lastly, a transaction is either voluntary or it is not. There are no degrees of 'voluntary' if you use the word in the conventional sense.
> Lastly, a transaction is either voluntary or it is not. There are no degrees of 'voluntary' if you use the word in the conventional sense.
So if I point a gun at your head and threaten to shoot you if you don't hand over your wallet, you would say that you voluntarily handed over your wallet because that was a fair price for keeping your head intact?
Most people mean something different when they use the word "voluntary".
In the conventional sense of the word, no, that transaction is clearly not voluntary. And I don't think your example is making the point that you're trying to use it to make.
OK, so here's a second example: suppose I somehow arrange to have control over all of the available food and tell you that in order to access it you have to hand over your wallet. Is your choice to hand over your wallet so you can eat now voluntary or not?
OK, so if you give me your wallet because I threaten to kill you with a gun (quickly, painlessly) that's not voluntary, but if you give me your wallet because I threaten to kill you by starving you to death (slowly, painfully) that is voluntary? That makes no sense to me.
If I don’t give you my wallet, I face starvation. I could choose to steal from you but that would be immoral.
I personally don’t have any control over any food. If I go the supermarket, they threaten to starve me if I don’t hand over my money. I believe it is a voluntary choice for me to pay up not to starve.
But supermarkets are competitive. The scenario I'm putting forward is one where I have a monopoly and use that leverage to charge you 100% of your income for just enough food to survive.
>Lastly, a transaction is either voluntary or it is not. There are no degrees of 'voluntary' if you use the word in the conventional sense.
If I rescue you from a burning building contingent upon you signing over 90% of your wealth and future earnings first did we engage in a voluntary transaction?
I think you choose to use a redefined "voluntary" to refer to things that are clearly not (a ploy frequently used by certain corporate funded 'libertarian' think tanks). By doing this, a source of relatively unchecked power and profit is protected.
""The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever."
> I think you choose to use a redefined "voluntary" to refer to things that are clearly not (a ploy frequently used by certain corporate funded 'libertarian' think tanks). By doing this, a source of relatively unchecked power and profit is protected.
I was saying that you cannot talk about degrees of voluntary. If there are degrees of voluntary, then you end up in a situation where you can argue that any choice is both voluntary and involuntary. Stick a gun in my back and force me to choose to give up my wallet or my life. Is this a voluntary transaction, since, in the end, I make the choice? I would say it is absolutely involuntary.
Of course, stating that there are degrees of “voluntary” is a typical ploy by socialists to justify having the state loot their citizens.
I liked the part where you dodged the hypothetical question about your house being on fire and then declared the idea of there being shades of gray a socialist plot.
I see your point and agree with you to an extent but there are certainly degrees of voluntary.
A transaction at gunpoint is clearly not voluntary.
But what if I take you out partying, get you loaded up on tequila shots? Can you still make a voluntary transaction?
What if I know that you are cheating on your wife and hint that I won't say anything to her if you sold me your car for $100? In some sense of the word - this would be a voluntary transaction. At the same time, there's not much of a choice to be made.
Last theoretical scenario - I'm a steel tycoon and a multi-billionaire and I decide to buy up all the freight companies and airlines. You can ship whatever products you want on via my transport companies - except steel. You can only ship steel you've purchased from one of my companies. Is your decision to buy my steel voluntary?
A contract made under economic duress is voidable in many cases in the US, and for good reason. Voluntary isn't always as clear-cut as it seems.
There are degrees, I think. Consider the choice between:
- Working a job that requires intense physical labor for $30/hr. and benefits, cons include significant physical impairment starting in your late forties and high risk of serious injury
- Working a job that is largely sedentary for $20/hr. and benefits, cons include serious health risks
- Work a third shift part-time job for $40/hr and no benefits, cons include inconsistent weekly hours, practically no career advancement, and considerable disadvantage to your retirement (no 401k matching), huge risk if anyone in your family needs medical care (definitely put off having kids)
- Go (back, sometimes) to school, cons include significant debt and opportunity costs, coupled with the risk of no career options (went into welding, factory closed, etc.)
Many people in America have no real "good" options, so while yeah, their choices are always kind of "voluntary", there's almost always a big asterisk next to it.
>Lastly, a transaction is either voluntary or it is not. There are no degrees of 'voluntary' if you use the word in the conventional sense.
If that were true there would be no such thing as coercion. There would be 'forced to do it' or 'not forced to do it' not more subtle levels where varying levels of unpleasant pressure is brought to bear.
But a simple exonomic thesis doesn’t fully explain the data, right?
> In the group that has been here longer, white Americans dominate both the FTE sector and the low-wage sector, while African Americans are located almost entirely in the low-wage sector
Simple economics doesn’t explain why white immigrant groups (Irish, Italian) that came here more recently at the bottom of the economic rung have overtaken African Americans, who have been here much longer.
Well, Irish or Italian weren’t brought into slavery, and locked up for >100 years.
If it was white people making it difficult for other races to get in, Asian and Indian people would have difficulty getting into higher classes as well.
Also, if I’m not mistaken, African Americans are 10% of US population. Since there were only 2-3 generations since the Civil Movement, even with 10% of each generation moving one class higher, the expected number of African Americans would be ~3% in middle class and close to zero in the upper class.
So saying that there are very few African Americans in middle class is not a sign of racism. Irish and Italian had 20 generations of a head start.
You should check out the one-drop rule. It is uniquely American, and it uniquely targeted African Americans for generations. It means even the smallest amount of African blood in your lineage made you fully Negro, and subject to all the class, legal and racial demotion that entailed.
Most African American families have been in the United States before it was the United States. Slave importation was made illegal in 1808, before the largest waves of Irish and English. Most white families trace their lineage to immigrants of the mid-1800's, where most black families trace their families well before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
But no other ethic group experienced resistance by natives to integrate throughout reconstruction, and then the regression that began with Jim Crow laws at the end of reconstruction and culminated in the Civil Rights movements of the 1950's. Not merely a remembrance of history, but a glorified nostalgic reverence for the Confederacy, starting in the early 1900's, is uniquely directed at African Americans.
He is making a statement akin to a growth process: wealth and social position accumulate over time and need many generations to come to fruition in that argument.
I think the Asian example vs A-A in the US is a counterexample to this argument.
Only if you ignore the social components. Immigrant groups tend to create support structures that aid newer immigrants from the same group. This is most powerful for groups who don't speak the native language but still impact social norms and networking.
The first wave of Asian immigrants significantly predated the civil rights movement.
Like racism? The point is that, contrary to OP's conjecture, you can't explain this situation without accounting for racism.
@kolinko's unstated premise is that there was racism, which explains why African Americans are behind despite being here so much longer than Irish or Italian Americans, but that there no longer is racism, as of the last 2-3 generations.
> Immigrant groups tend to create support structures that aid newer immigrants from the same group.
That's a very important point I hadn't considered. Success is almost always predicated on strong community and family support, something which slavery was explicitly designed to suppress.
You should probably look into the legacies of Jim Crow laws, redlining policies, sundown towns, and the history of rural property seizures, if you want to find the answer.
People forget that every time black people in America started amassing any considerable collective wealth, there were plenty of discriminatory laws and violent movements ready and willing to take it away from them.
>>Law enforcement officials used airplanes to drop firebombs on buildings, homes, and fleeing families, stating they were protecting against a "Negro uprising."
Holy shit. Now there's something they don't teach you in school.
> the Oklahoma state government with the assistance of Tulsa's white residents massacred hundreds of black residents and razed the neighborhood within hours
Words are insufficient. I also didn't learn about this in my history classes.
> From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis
In the United States, race is inextricably bound up in economic outcomes. To pretend that race is separable from a person's experience here is intellectually negligent, and any theories that do not include race as a major factor should be looked at with more scrutiny, not less.
>In the United States, race is inextricably bound up in economic outcomes. To pretend that race is separable from a person's experience here is intellectually negligent
Race is inextricably bound up in economic outcomes, but the author appears to be more than just acknowledging it - Peter Temin, the cisgendered white male boomer, is using it as a scapegoat for other, larger structural causes of poverty - namely the power and wealth of the 1%.
The "top 20%" (e.g. programmers like us) also appears to be another scapegoat stand in.
Asserting that programmers were the ones actively keeping the minimum wage down "just because we're white", using a thin veneer of academic legitimacy, is way worse than just intellectual negligence: it's class war.
I upvoted this comment, which is exactly correct. HN will, as a group, attempt to remove race from any analysis, when in fact racial bias is present basically everywhere we have enough data to look.
Racial bias can be present everywhere without race needing to be a part of every theory or else face the accusation of intellectual negligence.
It's not a persons race that's discriminating... Persons discriminate. Adding a factor for race in an economists model explains nothing. Proper theory needs to explain the motivations behind discrimination. That actual means (IMHO) theories without 'race' (but with broad socio-economic explanations) to explain racial discrimination and segregated outcomes.
>From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis, where a simple economic one would do: close the door on others after they're already in the castle.
As you yourself admit, race is a very convenient way to help close the door.
Was somebody going yeah, this'll keep those nasty other races down? Was it just an attempt to pull the ladder up behind them by the existing hairdressing firms? Was there some regulator somewhere who was honestly convinced by someone that hair chemicals are so dangerous that they require 1500 hours of training as to how to handle properly? Was it something else?
If you don't identify the problem correctly, you don't stand a chance of solving it. The zeal to attribute everything that can possibly be attributed to racism to racism ironically hurts the very people it's trying to help by ensuring the problems facing them do not get correctly addressed, when it isn't always racism.
Maybe it was this time. I dunno. Maybe there really were some legislators or regulators in Michigan who where just champing at the bit to find a way to keep down those nasty people, and ha ha, here's my chance to strike, no hairdressing for you unless you pay the rent! Ha ha ha!
But I suspect that sounds pretty silly to most of you reading this. I mean, even the most stereotypical racist I can come up with in my head isn't standing there ranting about how terrible it is that "those people" have hairdressers who didn't have to take the full 1500 hours of hairdressing training like good, decent people. It was probably something else.
You don't have to be thinking "these policies will keep black people down" to enact policies have the exact same effect. And it doesn't make you, in legal and moral terms, any less culpable for causing those effects, even if they're systemic and emergent.
But if you want to fix the problem, running around looking for the non-existent racists is going to be less effective than finding the real root problem and addressing that. Meanwhile, if you're too busy running around and yelling at everybody that they're racists, which is one of the most vicious slurs in the modern world, you're not only not spending that effort finding the problem, you're actively impeding it.
Is it racist to suggest that being called a racist is worse than living under the effects of racism? Probably, yeah. Are you a racist? I don't know; I'd assume not. But I think you're right: calling people racist isn't super useful. Given that this isn't the Jim Crow era, racism works differently. Instead of people being actively, loudly and vociferously racist, we just tend to not notice all the many ways that whiteness helps us out, and then plead innocence when asked why we're not doing more.
I mean, think about NIMBYism (or any of the examples above where access to some economic benefit are restricted). White folks have most of the assets; NIMBYism means the world's most vibrant cities become more and more off-limits to non-white folks, who then become even less likely to hold and grow any real assets. I'd call that racist, but again, it doesn't really matter if the people who benefit from racism are Racists with a capital R. They may not hold racist beliefs, and yet they can still benefit from and promote racist systems. We're all complicit in these systems, because they persist today. Denying that, I think, is a way to keep racism working.
How do you fix the real root problem without naming racism and the people who benefit from it as in some way complicit in racism? I don't know. "Racist" is a high bar, and it lets us ignore that so many of us are responsible for the persistence of racism.
The problem with your logic is that if applied consistently, it turns motivations and root causes into a non-actionable mush. If it disproportionally affects women, it must be misogynist, and we mustn't ignore that. If it disproportionally affects people from Kentucky, it must be Kentuckiest, and we mustn't ignore that. If it disproportionally affects people with red hair, that's hairist, and we mustn't ignore that. If it disproportionally affects rural peoples, that must be ruralist, and we can't ignore that.
The problem is, in the real world, everything correlates with everything. Why are there potholes in the road? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else). Why is there acid rain? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else). Why is there a plastic patch in the ocean? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else). Why are governments everywhere going dangerously into debt, running the risk of defaults? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else).
You need no more stretching for any of those examples than the gymnastics you exhibited in your post.
If everything is caused by the same cause, nothing is really caused by that cause. It has no information content. You can't fix anything if you assign everything the same list of root causes without distinction.
In trying to do a favor to the victims of racism, you are working very, very hard to ensure that only ineffective methods of solving their problems are deployed. Is that really helpful?
Fortunately, we are armed with radical social justice tools like "empiricism," and are capable of noticing that some outcomes really do look like racism in action. Maybe you don't understand the meaning of the word? "This happened on our planet" is not indicative of racism; "this happened in a racist society, as a result of policies that began with both racist intentions and which enacted racist outcomes" is.
Try not to conflate the words "disproportionately affects" and "systemic discrimination." There are some things that disproportionately affect women, like "being able to become pregnant." That's a mere fact; frustratingly, it turns out to also be a thing that marks someone for systemic discrimination. "Being able to become pregnant" is, on its own, just a boring old fact, and we mustn't do anything about women being able to become pregnant at rates far higher than men. On the other hand, we ought to do something about ongoing misogyny, in all its modern and subtle forms.
And yeah, if rural folks are disproportionately affected by a set of beliefs or policies that mark them for lesser treatment and poorer outcomes merely for their being rural dwellers, then we can't ignore that. Do you not understand that there's a difference between people being different, and people being marked for worse treatment because of their difference?
I think all I'm asking is that, yes, you do fight against the root cause: the act of marking others for lesser treatment because of their group. If you deny that such a difference is salient to someone's treatment, you have freed yourself from noticing or helping their plight.
>empiricism
>I think all I'm asking is that, yes, you do fight against the root cause
When your body of data is so large, it is easy to mistake cherry picking and associated fallacies for empiricism.
>if rural folks are disproportionately affected by a set of beliefs...we can't ignore that
We can if these policies create more good than harm. Furthermore, even in this example, whether the issue is classism or collateral effects, although people would be quick to scream racism if we replaced "rural" with black, without sufficient evidence of racist intent.
The biggest problem I see with a mindset like this is that the conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome leads to policies which forgo merit to correct imagined racism. And we end up with less competent firefighters, law officers, doctors, lawyers, etc; and by lowering standards to attempt to force equity, all of society is worse off.
>Given that this isn't the Jim Crow era, racism works differently. Instead of people being actively, loudly and vociferously racist, we just tend to not notice all the many ways that whiteness helps us out, and then plead innocence when asked why we're not doing more.
There's also the fact that many people are indeed, openly or covertly, racist.
Just because it's not mentioned in "polite company", and surely not in the kind of circle most Bay area programmers frequent, doesn't mean they don't exist.
And this includes government officials, judges, bankers, and so on...
There are real racists in America. There are also systems that are in effect racist. But there are also real differences between whites and blacks and other races, and there are real differences between their cultures. A difference in outcomes is insufficient to tell whether the cause is racism. It's quite tricky to prove how much of any difference is due to external racism.
> There are real racists in America. There are also systems that are in effect racist. But there are also real differences between whites and blacks and other races, and there are real differences between their cultures.
The former pair are contributing causes to the latter pair (and especially the last.)
> But if you want to fix the problem, running around looking for the non-existent racists is going to be less effective than finding the real root problem and addressing that.
On the contrary, if you want to fix the problem, actively ignoring the real and existing racism that caused and is contributing to maintaining the problem is going to be a lot less effective than acknowledging and addressing it and it's mechanisms and effects.
My best interpretation of your message is that you think I'm trying to defend someone (probably "racists") by assuming some beneficial intention in the regulation I cited. I have no idea what innocent intention you think I had in mind, though. Certainly none of the ones I mentioned seem like a good idea to me.
You're absolutely right. Intent is in no way, shape, or manner magical. In a very real sense, it doesn't matter why a policy with racist outcomes exists. It needs to not exist. It was at no point OK.
I believe jerf's point is that motivations do matter, at least a bit, in understanding how a state of affairs came to be. If it's racism, then we might be able to dismantle it and let it be. If it's about keeping out competition, then taking away barriers is very likely to provoke a backlash as the people whose incomes drop look for a way to avoid that.
Again, you're 100% correct. Intent is not magical. It's just that motivations matter at least a little bit for predicting human behavior.
When resumes with more black sounding names get 33% fewer callbacks than resumes with white souding names, is that somehow not racism? Does it require some moustache-twirling man in black muttering to himself about other races? How do you think racism happens?
The parent post was saying that race doesn't need to be the end, because there is simpler explanations for why people want to pull up the ladder behind them. But using race to close the doors is making it the means, not the end. I think the overall point being made is that these days race is neither purposefully included in either the means or the ends, but due to historical factors accidentally included. Pulling up the ladder for everyone poorer than you will have a disparate impact by race if poverty isn't equal between races, and due to historical reasons it isn't. But that doesn't mean that anything about race fuels the choice of action.
The core problem is attributing bad behavior that is caused by something other than racism (such as classism, greed, or just trying to win a non-infinite sum game) can create problems by hampering discussions of the actual root issues.
Of course, we shouldn't completely dismiss it as a reason for some people to do what they do. But there has to be a middle ground between saying it is the primary factor and it is never a factor.
> The central point, he argues, is that the top 20% professional-and-up top crust of American society has enacted structural gatekeeping processes like many years of education...
I don't think that the top 20% put in education requirements as a way to systemically repress the less-well-off. Instead, look at the jobs that get you a top-20% income. How many of them can be done with little education? Sure, in software engineering you can be self-taught (though I'm not sure how true that is for someone just starting out). I don't want a self-taught doctor operating on me, though, or a self-taught pilot flying me, or a self-taught chemical engineer running the chemical plant a mile from my house.
Those jobs have education requirements for a reason. It's not "I got mine, and now I want to make sure you don't get yours." It's "If you mess up, there can be real-world consequences, and you don't know enough to not mess up without a thorough education in the area, no matter how much you think you know after you've taught yourself."
So the net result looks similar, but there are legitimate reasons rather than bad motives behind the education requirements.
Yeah, this is to some extent a matter of how you define "self taught". I believe that learning to write code does require reading and analytical skills at a level typically found in a college graduate. If you've had many years of formal education developing these skills, but didn't take courses that involved formal coding... I'd say it's stretching things to act like you're entirely self taught.
Suppose you go to college and double major in philosophy and pure mathematics, but never write a line of code. Then you get a job and start reading and coding extensively on your own, until you get good at it.
To me, it blurs the line somewhat to call a person like that "self taught". There's a lot of ambiguity, and I'm not entirely sure what the term means, at that point. I mean, everyone has to learn something they weren't taught in school on the job.
Well, you can (to some degree) be self-taught and still get a high-paying job. Whether that leads to issues in the code was not a question that I was trying to address.
enacted structural gatekeeping processes like many years of education, and low minimum wages to systematically repress groups
See, that's just silly. There was no meeting of "the 20%" where we all talked about it and had a vote and decided to go ahead with our Evil Plan(tm). Or if there was, I was busy that day.
I think your tone is inappropriate given the seriousness of the matter at hand. Please try to be more charitable in trying to understand why someone might have claimed something like that.
> Race plays into this, sure, but more in terms of shared history or the lack thereof, and of being a convenient visually-obvious indicator for a dimension of difference.
As a Cis White Male, you don’t understand what race means to other people, but don’t worry, others will be sure to treat it as a racial issue even if you refuse to.
I call this the Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Tom Jones effect. In the 1910s Britain was a viciously divided society - with poverty gaps greater than the US sees now. The Great Depression was somewhat levelling but children born in the East End of London, Glasgow's Gorbals, or the rural poverty of Welsh valleys had desperately worse outcomes than those in the middle classes. (Can you guess where each of the celebrities was born and raised ? :-)
Then came a war that threatened to
cut off our food supplies (Nazi UBoats sank horrifying tonnage of shipping), and to combat it a simple solution was found cutting through generations of political baggage - rationing. Every citizen got given a minimum set of healthy food (like two eggs a week, a pound of meat etc etc).
For some this was government over-reach - for others it was the first time in their lives they had eaten properly. After the war, a Labour government introduced a welfare state that prescribed a minimum amount of food, education, healthcare in an on going fashion.
And what did we get 20 years later? We got tall strong good looking actors and singers who came to dominate their niches and did so without the rickkets, malnourishment and disadvantages that had been their older brothers lot. We got similar results in medicine, science and business, with each area finding their own James Bond, drawn from a much wider pool of talent.
In short we fed our underclass and turbo charged our growth in the post war period.
In my view there is a bottle labelled "nitro" attached to the American Economy that has yet to be turned on. The knob does have razor blades attached to cut whichever politician tries to turn it, but folks, it will be worth it, 20'years from now
Am I interpreting your story too literally? Do you mean that our economy will improve if we give people more food? Obesity is now a problem that affects all socioeconomic strata in the USA. See [1] and [2].
We introduced a welfare state that for all its many failings, gave those at the bottom of society a floor below which they could not fall below, and that was a floor that gave sufficient supprt to grow and flourish.
And with that flourishing came new talent, talent that had been previously held back by circumstance, and that talent helped drag the bankrupt UK out of its own collapse and bankruptcy (post WWII)
The UK (and Europe) no longer have that vast inequality and underclass, but like its shale oil reserves, the US has cunningly kept tens of millions of poor and downtrodden citizens in misery, just so you can turn on the gas and surprise the Chinese economy with one last blast ;-)
When it comes to the traditional problems of poverty such as malnourishment, freezing in the winter, lack of cloths or shoes, and so on, many countries have done quite well. Even fairly poor countries have had success there.
The complaints coming out of the US are more about inequality than poverty, although people confuse the two issues (sometimes intentionally).
> The complaints coming out of the US are more about inequality than poverty, although people confuse the two issues (sometimes intentionally).
They aren't distinct; poverty is always in relation to a set of standards, and there are very good reasons to looking to the contemporary context for the most applicable standards.
If you set an income standard, sure, it's relative, but you aren't "relatively" starving, or "relatively" infected with parasites because you have no shoes. Those are real problems that have nothing to do with how society choses to view innequality.
well, in the UK a hundred years ago our cities hid poverty of the kind that is rare in modern world (war zones and the like). Rowntrees reports were transformative in understanding of same - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty,_A_Study_of_Town_Lif...
Also it's worth noting that modern notions of poverty are relative - with the "poverty line" often being drawn as some % of median income.
Of course this is discussing inequality of wealth - which is what we usually mean, and is the pillar around which the other inequalities get talked about (unequal opportunity due to race, religion, education gender etc)
rereading that it could be taken the wrong way. My apologies if any offence caused.
a fuller description is that having Sean Connery as your milkman is quite a story, and leads almost irresistibly to the land of milkman jokes.
The one I remember is in "Ernie, fastest milkman in the west" (a Bennie Hill song #) - where the female character asks for enough milk to bathe in - and the milkman says "do you want it pasteurise? Pasteurise is best" and She replies "I would be happy if it got up to me chest"
Yeah it's Seaside Postcard innuendo - but seemed in keeping.
like I said, i apologise for any offence caused to you or your grandma.
(#) Look the 70s was definitely a weird time - Bennie Hill and Black and White minstrels would never get prime time TV today. but they are a part of my childhood and whatever tracks they left in my brain I need to expose to the light occasionally...
There's a similar joke around the brand of peanuts called "Rising Sun". I'm familiar with seaside postcard innuendo having grown up in a seaside town.
Yeah no offence taken. Connery was just a kid when he was delivering milk. He later worked as a lifeguard at one of the swimming pools in town, where I believe he was spotted by a talent scout. But he was also active in amateur theater at the time, so ymmv on that story.
Interesting, I must say this makes some sense. On the otherhand I'm quite seriously opposed to wealth redistribution of any kind. While this isn't a major communist situation, it is as you said a welfare state.
Historically capitalism is cyclic. Inequality grows over time until people are fed up and the system breaks, and then repeat and things are good for awhile. Perhaps one solution would be purposefully resetting the cycle from time to time. An occasional slight redistribution which gives the necessary boost to those in poverty to have some kind of fighting chance.
Its probably a bad idea as most socialistic ones are but eh it sounds interesting, who knows.
In a conversation pointing to actual benefits from a socialistic system, your response is to say they are all bad and you oppose them anyway? How is that not just a dogmatic response, instead of a viewpoint backed up by reason?
(anecdotal data point) I grew up in a very poor family. (Like electricity-or-food, owned no car my entire childhood poor) Always had a love for technology, however, and bought my first used computer (old 286) at 18. (1995) Bought my first Windows machine 2 years later. Was always learning and writing code - school machines, graphing calculator, my computer etc. In 1998 got first "tech job" doing phone support for ISP/computer store in little rural town in Oklahoma. Starting doing web sites for them, then learned server-side (ColdFusion), and by early 2000 was doing contract work in Houston at typical rates. Definitely broke out of poverty, and along the way, made some very dumb mistakes (as well as significant medical costs). Still not in poverty.
Counterpoints: my aunt's family was middle class and all educators, so I had a great example within arm's reach. I'm also a white male, so don't have some of the social issues that would hindered me otherwise.
People who leave high school at 9th grade statistically don't have very good prospects. My last year of school was the 9th grade. I got my GED at 20 (like I walked in off the street and took the tests with no prep or anything), went to college and earned a bachelors in computer science fairly easily.
There's always going to be outliers to any case. People who pull off crazy things that only 1 out of 10, 1 out of 100, maybe 1 out of 1,000 could possible do if things went just so for them.
Also good for you to recognize some of your advantages and maybe learning better habits from successful people. Not everyone is able to break the cycle and circumstances they're born into. And in either of our cases it's probably wise to be mindful how one event, major enough, could leave us in ruins.
When I was in high school some circumstances led to a recommendation that I could drop out and start making money. I never for a nanosecond considered that as an option. Obviously that's not a perspective shared by all, and even those who wouldn't choose that may be facing a different reality than I did.
Personally what I find the most frustrating is finally escaping poverty and getting pushed firmly against an artificial, middle-class, ceiling where it isn't possible to become more financially free because of constant inflation and the choice I made to contribute to society by having a family. Meanwhile productivity and profitability continue to increase
Sorry but I have to pick a bone with you about one of your contentions: having children is a choice. Are you contributing to society? At a basic level of course if no one had children we'd cease to exist but at the same time it's also arguable that there are simply too many of us on the planet to support, which shifts having children into a more selfish choice.
On a more personal level, I suspect you chose to had kids because you wanted kids. This is fine. But you're not doing this for the good of society.
Lastly, in the developed world we WAY overspend on child-rearing. Like... it's ridiculous. It may well be that in the US each child will cost nigh on $1m to raise. That's... ludicrous. But it also comes about from making a bunch of unessential choices (eg private school). Again, if that's what you want to do, fine. But it's another choice.
> there are simply too many of us on the planet to support
No, we could easily support 10 times this many people. The problem is that people are "selfish" and will starve, steal, and kill others for power or property. Starvation isn't because of the lack of food or resources - its the governments, rebels, gangs, and guerrilla fighters.
One "hidden" cost of people over replacement numbers is "footprint". The more people the more we encroach upon wilderness. As people gain purchasing power, the more they plug-in to consumerism. It all adds-up to a leger human foot print on the planet.
What happens to an economy when there's negative population growth? It shrinks unless you dramatically change the economics to permit shrinking while also not making everyone poor or otherwise destabilizing society. Thus far our societies have been predicated on positive population growth, and if that can't happen by birth rates then it must happen with immigration.
About the closest approximation to a shrinking population society, is Japan. They have negative native growth and also don't bring in immigrants. And as a result they have widespread consolidation, aging, and ghost towns. And also the really unanswered questions about how to deal with an aging population with so few youth to care for the old, and where the money comes from to maintain standard of living. The main way they've done this is technological advances as an offset. OK, so is there a limit to such advances as compensatory elements of a shrinking society? Uncertain, but there probably is, and then what happens?
There's way more known what happens with societies that have strong population growth than what happens to shrinking ones that also survive. Typically the shrinking societies end up in the realm of anthropology and archaeology.
There are lots of ways, but the simplest is to take 10% of your income and invest it in an S&P 500 index fund. Also take maximum advantage of any 401k plan your employer offers.
Oh, great so someone just needs to save $18k per year plus an extra ten percent of their income. That will be easy to accomplish for a typical person making the median wage of approximately $30k per year.
That's the median household income which often includes multiple workers and non-wage income. Median wage is about 30k according to the Social Security Administration[1] and they should know since they are supposed to get the wages for every single worker in the country reported to them.
Can a person earning 30k save 20%? I think its possible, and that would almost guarantee a safe retirement. Thats not even counting social security, which is very significant at that wage level.
Pretty much this. I can't afford to commit that level of income to investments, and even if I could, the impact on my financial standing would not be significant (probably? I have no idea what kind of % return you get on an index fund)
Rule of thumb is often an average 10% growth for index fund return (e.g. S&P 500) - this would be over many decades. If you can't put in 10%, at least put in up to what an employer matches - unless you are very low income, it's worth it and once it's sequestered from your day to day budget you won't feel the difference of 1-5%.
It'll make you a millionaire easy. But really, this is just a basic strategy, sort of like the "Dealer's Strategy" in blackjack. As you become a more sophisticated investor, you can invest in things that pay off better.
To become a more sophisticated investor, you'll need to start reading books (uh-oh!) on investing, accounting, and business.
Fully agree with this. I got rid of any major debt almost a decade ago and it's the only way I keep myself afloat. No car loans, not furniture or electronics that I can't pay cash for, and I keep a credit card only for functional aspects (online purchases, credit rating etc)
It turns out that your local thrift store is a great place for both of those cheap. I bought a very nice sound system for about $40 including speakers, one that a couple decades ago would have cost a couple grand. You can get real nice flat panel TVs from the pawn shop for next to nothing, too, as well as computer equipment.
Invested wealth grows faster than inflation, almost always. Wealthy people are disproportionately protected from the effects of inflation because they can invest more. Poorer people spend their income.
Warren Buffet literally describes inflation as a tax - I agree with that. Taxes are [should be] a way of redistributing wealth more fairly.
Responding to your later edit: yes, wealthy people have more opportunities that come from wealth, and therefore can expect their wealth to collect more wealth disproportionately quickly. Inflation does work to correct this.
Indeed, inflation is a way of transferring wealth away from the wealthy, and helping debtors (people with student loans, auto loans, mortgages, credit card debt, etc.) and the poor (people without money saved). It also correlates with reduced unemployment.
A legal change to make minimum wage track inflation and dramatically increase (double?) the currently unlivable federal minimum wage would also be helpful though, as would restoring workers' rights (especially collective bargaining rights) which have been gradually but systematically eroded for the past 40 years.
Not even remotely true. Getting a post-secondary education, learning to be financially responsible, and not fucking up in any major ways (debt, crime etc) are what helped me escape poverty. Also the support of government programs that helped to fill in gaps when I was struggling
Without more people society has no future, eventually everyone will die. So you need to make a decision: will my kids be a net negative or a net positive to future society?
In this case with what little I know about seymour333's situation (one HN comment) I would call it a net positive because these kids grew up in an environment where they or their parents experienced upward social mobility. Perhaps mom and dad can't break the middle class ceiling, but since the kids know escaping poverty is a thing that gives them incentive to elevate past middle class.
Those institutions need kids to continue, but they don't treat them well enough for me to want to give them grist for their mill. Raising kids is a biological imperative and a dumb move otherwise.
But seriously though are you convinced that no worthwhile values exist outside of nationalism and religion? You seem to be interested in this topic so it strikes me as a bit willfully disingenuous for you to not see the low hanging fruit in all of your statements. Like, you clearly have your opinion and you're entitled to it obviously but have you tried at all to find counterarguments? Peterson's ideas have been pretty thoroughly analyzed and debunked outside of his echo chamber, they're just a straightforward google search away. If you really believe his writing you owe it to yourself to challenge his ideas.
I'd love a link to someone "debunking" Peterson, as he is just another scale on the ouroboros that is philosophical critique of the human experience.
I'm quite interested in the topic, but I am loathe to engage in the meta-representation of the topic; I wish to discuss messages not messengers. Though there is maple in my blood I am not who you seek to disparage.
I believe the most effective social organization strategies evolved are religion and nationalism, with religion being the simplest and nationalism being the strongest. I do not believe in an evolutionary stairway to enlightenment, rather a shifting physical world that creates arbitrary "final exams" for species that wish to continue proliferation. Ideas evolve like biological life forms, and meta-analysis is not a determining factor in the survival of ideas without the addition of death squads and concentration camps.
With this as a point of departure, there is no precedent for social organization that can claim consistent superiority over any other. Each has a matched set of strengths and weaknesses that exhibit or recess depending on the situation under review.
I firmly believe that the core criteria for a "working idea" is that it propagates generationally, through actors either cognizant or ignorant of it. Past that, all observable attributes are valued based on a particular situation, not a connected series of events (rather, a dialectic).
"Temin argues that, following decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or less a two-class system: One small, predominantly white upper class that wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political influence"
Temin avoids mentioning Asians, who have a higher average income than whites, despite many being relative newcomers to the country. That would undermine the narrative of a static class structure.
However when you factor in their level of education, they're still making less than their white (male) peers.
>One small, predominantly white upper class that wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political influence"
predominantly...
Stop to consider the number of Asians in the U.S., now take the number of Asians that have a higher than average income than Whites. Now take the number of Whites who earn the same average income or greater than our Asian subgroup. You're not convinced that the group of relatively above average income earners is going to be predominantly white?
You can look at the demographics in anything that you think qualifies people as upper class. Government, at the state or national level? Upper management at Fortune 500 companies? I mean pick anything and if you find any results that don't reflect predominantly white, and almost certainly predominantly white male I'll be shocked and pleasantly surprised that we've made that much progress.
Your point only undermines Temin's narrative if you blithely ignore all the other information.
To be fair, Temin wrote "...predominantly white...", so I would have assumed that meant mostly white, with everyone else in smaller numbers. The fact that asians, or blacks, or native americans or what have you are also included in the top class, does not mean that we don't have a two class system.
From where I sit out here in fly over country, (Madison, WI), it definitely does feel like a 2 class system. I think that's what a lot of people, (in Wisconsin anyway), are reacting to when they vote Trump for instance.
> Temin avoids mentioning Asians, who have a higher average income than whites
Asians have higher average income than whites, but they are not wealthy in general. Income != wealth. Also, asians are the least likely to be promoted or advance in their careers.
Also, multigeneration asians like the chinese and japanese had their wealth stolen many times in the US. During the pogroms against the chinese in the 1800s, their gold mines, stores, homes, etc were all stolen from them. The japanese americans had their property stolen by the US government.
> That would undermine the narrative of a static class structure.
It doesn't. Your argument just shows that some asians went into higher paying industries ( primarily tech ). But asians are highly underrepresented in management, C-Suite, boards, etc of the tech industry.
In other words asians are primarily confined in the lower levels of the tech industry. Just because the tech industry pays their lower level staff better than other industries doesn't change anything.
Asian americans in the US are proof of "static class structure" as they are primarily stuck in their "class structure".
Things obviously have improved for all minorities in the US. Asians aren't being lynched and robbed by the government/people like in the 1800s and asians are allowed to immigrate to the US, unlike for most of the 1900s, but asians are still a minority and they are obstacles for asians.
> Temin avoids mentioning Asians, who have a higher average income than whites, despite many being relative newcomers to the country. That would undermine the narrative of a static class structure.
The fact that educated, middle-class Asian immigrants become educated, middle-class Asian-Americans does not undermine the narrative of a static class structure at all.
> “In the group that has been here longer, white Americans dominate both the FTE sector and the low-wage sector, while African Americans are located almost entirely in the low-wage sector,” he writes. “In the group of recent immigrants, Asians predominantly entered the FTE sector, while Latino immigrants joined African Americans in the low-wage sector.”
When you look more closely at Asian income, you can say the grouping does access an opportunity for higher education more frequently than other groups, but they do not necessarily receive the same relative value of their investments there.
"When one compares the annual personal income of Asian Americans and whites of the same gender and educational level, Asian Americans do not always come out on top. The figure below shows these comparisons for workers with a high school diploma and with a bachelor’s degree. In 2010, among workers with a high school diploma, white men earned about $11,000 more than white women and Asian American men and women."
Also unaddressed is the wide variation of Asian subgroups and how much access to wealth some have access to before & after their immigration.
> The MIT economist Peter Temin argues that economic inequality results in two distinct classes. And only one of them has any power.
Nobody studies history anymore. This has always been the case, and the ratio of haves to have-nots has only improved with time, as has the quality of life of the have-nots. That ratio may have been a little better in the golden years after WW2 in the USA, but it's still way better now than it ever was before WW2.
Modernity truly is the tide that lifted all boats.
>upper class of FTE workers ... has strategically pushed for policies ...to bolster the economic success of some groups and not others, largely along racial lines
> His final recommendation is to address systemic racism
Not a good start from Temin. Its not like the entire upper class is outwardly racist like the first quote implies. If you want to reduce racial/class divides, maybe making the upper class appear to be a purposefully racist enemy isn't the best way to go.
The author never mentions this. The wording (purposefully or not) makes it seem like the upper 20% is purposefully racist and knowingly holding down the lower class.
I don't think there is a mass conspiracy going on. I do think there are disvirtuous circles going on. Ex one school is located in a bad area over time gets less funding, becomes less attractive, fewer people with means want to send their children there, school gets less funding etc.
It's not just rich people who oppose poor people. It's also poor people. Think of the guy who is scraping to get ahead and sees someone he knows totally taking advantage of the system and not working, or is involved in criminal activity. This was a good article on it:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
Where I grew up in Baltimore the problem wasn't the funding of the schools. Indeed, when I was in school Baltimore City spent just a bit less per pupil than Montgomery county which was one of the 10 wealthiest counties in the nation. However the money was spent very differently. So while I would agree that there are real systemic problems I don't think there is any amount of money that could be thrown at Baltimore City that would really change the outcomes in a meaningful way. And that is what makes me the most sad about it.
That's because the wealth and education level of one's parents is much more highly correlated to the wealth and education level of a child than any other factor. People who are poor and uneducated tend to raise children who end up poor an uneducated, regardless of race. Studies have shown that growing up in poverty produces measurable changes in the brains of infants.
It may be en vogue to focus on race and identity has the major problems in our society, but all the data points to poverty and being the unifying cause - not race.
If you read the paper you'll find that the conclusion posted here is absolute nonsense. Kids in poverty had average numbers 0.4-0.5 standard deviations below the mean. The authors didn't make any attempt to disprove the simple and obvious biological explanation: poor parents often had genes making them dumber, more impulsive low-grey-matter-havers that they passed on to their kids.
I'll bet you Syrian refugee kids don't exhibit anywhere near such a large gray matter problem.
how can you spend money so differently in one district to another ? Teacher salaries, buildings, books seem to be the likely highest costs wherever you are.
Spending per pupil alone doesn't tell the whole story.
In the US, it's common for school districts in high poverty areas to end up providing services that in other countries would be provided via state welfare or privately.
So free school lunches and breakfasts, physical and occupational therapy, counseling and nursing for students, transportation for handicapped, social workers etc all get wrapped up in a district budget, with the largest chunk of spending going towards the highest need students. Add up the higher rates of childhood poverty and special needs in urban areas and the per pupil spending becomes a poor measure of what is actually spent on education for the average student.
I'll note that in my state, the balakanized school district situation in many metros leaves suburban districts too small to provide these services themselves, and they'll often send their highest need students into the bigger urban district.
School personnel end up acting as ad hoc social workers for children who show up unwilling or unable to focus on academic study. If one student comes to school worrying about what college they'll be able to get into, and another comes to school worrying if the family's going to be evicted from their apartment, then the same money/attention isn't likley to produce the same academic outcomes.
I don't know if that is what sseveran alludes to -- Baltimore seems to be famously corrupt also -- but it's a significant problem. It's one of the reasons that some teachers are willing to take a pay cut to work at a private school that's selective about students. Teaching students who are attentive and ready to learn can be pleasurable. Trying to teach students who are resentful, distracted, and unprepared -- that's less attractive. Or at least it takes a rarer personality type to find it rewarding.
You might not call it a conspiracy, but in any event there are consequences to "strategically pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and business-friendly deregulation" that need to be acknowledged and reversed.
> I do think there are disvirtuous circles going on. Ex one school is located in a bad area over time gets less funding, becomes less attractive, fewer people with means want to send their children there, school gets less funding etc.
Reinforced by the virtuous cycle going on in parallel: school is in rich area, therefore has more funding/resources, school becomes more attractive, property values get higher, fewer people without means can move in...
Only that's not actually what happens on the ground. The "bad" schools typically had more money per student (and were larger, so more money in total) than the "good" schools where I grew up.
The sole and only difference that mattered was the raw material (students) that attended. Heck, I attended a private inner city high school for a year - those demographics were identical to the public school next door, but since the private school could filter for the best students they did far more with far less.
School funding is rarely the problem. You could increase funding 3x and still not put a dent in the problem until we decide as a society that school's are not social welfare centers. Exceedingly few children can be "saved" from a horrible environment outside of school.
Edit: I do actually agree with the virtuous cycle premise - I just don't think it's directly related to finances. I am quite convinced after 20 years of studying the debate that school funding is almost entirely divorced from school performance. I've had a unique enough education background to know small pockets of poor folks who value education exist - and they get just as good if not better outcomes than the rich suburban "college prep" schools for about a quarter of the cost if they are large enough to fund a private school, or even less if it's simply a high-functioning homeschool group. Parents are pretty much the only thing that matters in this debate, the rest is line noise at best.
A mass conspiracy is a kind of a disingenuous characterization of classist/racist oppression. The Ku Klux Klan is, by definition, involved in racist conspiracy - they are famous for meeting together to plan and execute racist acts of violence/oppression. People who work at Microsoft are obviously not involved in planning violent attacks against poor/brown people, but are often still involved in a much more complex and convoluted racist/classist conspiracy.
When large companies, e.g. Wal-Mart, donate to political causes, they often contribute to ones that will help their bottom line. No matter how benevolent Google and Apple might seem, they and some of their employees and executives DO provide money to political campaigns that do some of the following:
1. Prioritize issues irrelevant to limiting race/class oppression to the top of their talking points. For instance, Hillary Clinton is memorable to voters not because she provided a good solution to widening income inequality, but because she held feel-good positions about immigration and LGBT issues. That's not to insinuate economic/racial issues are the ONLY thing worth caring about, but that they should be a top concern for those who want to eliminate racism and classism from our society. The effect is that by voting for such candidates (who often quietly fall more towards the center, economically), you perpetuate inaction on income inequality.
2. Directly support racist/classist legislation. Giving money to (or voting for) a campaign that opposes a drastically higher Federal minimum wage law directly supports income inequality. Giving money to a campaign that will not support deindustrialization of prisons, drastic improvements in education in low-income areas, or healthcare for all directly supports income inequality and institutional racism. Giving money to a presidential candidate who insinuates that minorities and immigrants are criminals, similarly, directly supports institutional racism.
Now, even if you are one of the "good" ones who only votes for Bernie Sanders, etc. you may still be the beneficiary of racist/classist laws that your company seeks to uphold, implicating you in this conspiracy. For instance, Amazon's political funding that opposes higher Federal Minimum Wage means that they have more money to pay Data Scientists and Marketers and Front-End Designers, hence their ability to hire you. And if you're a good employee, your work will enrich both you and your employer, and some of this cash will flow back into the cycle of supporting racist and classist legislation.
So we (assuming readers of HN are largely well paid FTE employees) are left in a situation where it's REALLY hard to escape our connections to this conspiracy. We can choose to work at places that aren't Amazon or Google (often for less money than they'd give us), we can try extra hard to make our individual efforts efficacious, we can vote with our dollars, we can support other non-political causes to lessen racist/classist oppression, etc.
TLDR; this is what people mean when they say "all White people are racist" - not that you're personally going out there each day and doing all that you can to make black people's lives suck, or purposely waking up and thinking "how can I take more money from the disadvantaged today?". But rather that you benefit implicitly from systemic racism and classism and don't do a whole heck of a lot to fix it. My involvement (and some of your involvement) in perpetuating racism and classism is much higher than I'd like to admit and it's really hard to fully disentangle myself from the privileges that my race, class, upbringing, and place of residence have afforded me so far in life.
Ok the linked article seems to be a short synopsis of a book, one which I did not read nor have intention to.
But dear Lord the article was so full of government fluff, obvious and trite blather of what has been tried and failed, over, and over, and over again.
It is nothing but why we need government to fix the very problems it created, and makes even worse with its choking regulations, legislation, and self-serving laws.
My very own grandfather broke into the roofing business around age 11, growing up in abject poverty. He didn't much care for sitting in a school house. He made a good living eventually, becoming one of the largest employers in town, a respected local businessman who would hire anyone willing to work, and give them a fair shot.
Today, though, his life would be completely unable to be lived, legally, anyway. Between the government's silly attempts at paperwork for immigration tracking, taxes, labor laws, minimum wage laws, the list goes on and on and on, it would be impossible. The barriers to entry for the poor but motivated ensure nothing more than the permanent existence of the poor.
The article is frankly disgusting in its puerile and obviously wrong insistence that what we need is more of the above.
It blows my mind that "low minimum wage" is listed as a reason why minorities don't earn more money. It is well known that increases in minimum wage result in higher unemployment. It is very basic supply/demand. In fact minimum wage laws were originally implemented in the south specifically to price minorities out of the market. [0]
It seems utterly nonsensical now to act as if they are some great boon to minorities and will help them rise out of their current collective predicament. The best thing for people with low skills is to allow them to enter the market to gain skills. Pricing them out of the market and legitimate employment pushes them to black markets as there is no legal way to participate in gainful employment. Which will thereby increase incarceration rates and contributes to the problem of fatherless homes, something we all know is a very undesirable outcome.
The hardest part is changing people's patterns when they get money (I have this same issue to a lesser degree than my friends that had poorer childhood experiences).
That spend it before you lose it thing is really difficult to overcome.
This is pretty true. I'm always watching my sister-in-law, who can barely make ends meet, buy stupid shit. Big TV, new furniture that she can barely get credit approval for, clothes that have brands and logos on them that are twice as expensive as plain clothes that are usually better quality.
A lot of it looks like compensation for being on the poverty line. Like her self-esteem can't take the hit of buying the sensible items that she needs so she can get ahead. Doesn't realize she's getting in her own way.
I think culturally we're taught to have nice things and that becomes the goal instead of acting sensibly and doing the right things. Would probably need a couple of generations of kids who value a healthy savings account and an on-track budget more than whatever shiny things they encounter in the media they consume. That's a tall order
IME growing up on the poverty line and now working as a dev and living comfortably, I get serious guilt trips whenever I spend money I don't need to spend.
Having the valuable experience of earning a salary of 15K after graduating from college I very quickly learned to translate any expense into number of hours worked.
It’s easy to bust on people for buying TVs and cellphones but that’s not what is keeping them poor. The enormous cost of education, health care, housing, transportation; long term unemployment or underemployment, disability. This is what is keeping people down and why class mobility is so tough.
But she has a big screen TV so she’s irresponsible?
Well, yeah of course all of those things are important factors in what keeps people down. And all of those issues need to be addressed, and the solutions to those issues would probably help her situation immeasurably (aside from health care, we don't have to deal with that).
She is irresponsible though, and short of becoming deeply invested in discovering solutions to all the problems you stated, the best chance she has of helping herself is to become better at managing her own life.
I'm not trying to bust on anyone for buying a TV, I've been there. It's kind of a two sided problem. The really big side with all those societal and government issues, and the other side with the things that people can actually control
I don't see the word 'IQ' mentioned anywhere in that article. And yet, it's the single biggest determinant of lifetime success. Unfortunately, it's also highly heritable, so environmental interventions have a fairly marginal effect on it.
Unfortunately, it's also highly heritable, so environmental interventions have a fairly marginal effect on it.
(a) The Flynn Effect demonstrates that IQ is quite responsive to environment.
(b) The heritability of a trait is not a measure of the degree to which that trait is genetically determined: Highly heritable traits can be environmently malleable. (The heritability of height is 0.8, but nutrition, childhood sickness, etc. have a huge effect on height.) Conversely, traits with low heritability can be strongly determined, genetically. ("Number of eyes" is a trait with low heritability, for example.)
(c) The measured heritability of IQ isn't especially high. It's usually found to be in the vicinity of 0.3.
From the article:
> The first are skilled, tech-savvy workers and managers with college degrees and high salaries who are concentrated heavily in fields such as finance, technology, and electronics—hence his labeling it the “FTE sector.”
Am I the only one who's wondering why "electronics" is its own category, instead of being lumped under "technology"?
> That’s a 16-year (or longer) plan that, as Temin compellingly observes, can be easily upended.
I personally think the entire college level education system needs a do-over. Stop requiring people to get expensive degrees, when a decently accredited micro degree system would work. Who gives a fuck if you're more well rounded coming out of college when you're in massive student loan debt. You just created a giant glass ceiling that keeps the poor who are trying to break through even poorer. A handful of Ivy League Universities should be for the elites and the rest of us should have the option to bypass this system altogether. I'm one of these FTE's, and I look back at my college degree as 30% worth the time, and 70% a waste of time, and all of that time cost me a lot.
I'm sure white people do control a lot of jobs or whatever, but I'm still always confused about people talking about white males in tech or techbros etc. when probably 50-75% of my coworkers (F50 tech company) were Asian (note that whites make up 75% of the population and Asians 5% by the 2010-2015 census data i found on wikipedia)
my experiences must be atypical, because at my recent 3 jobs spanning about 11 years, there has been a vast majority of Asian (Indian, Japanese, Chinese, et ) members on our engineering teams.
There's a definite "corporate culture" bias there in your F50 tech company skewing the other direction. How many of that 50-75% are H1b? If not H1b, how "yes man" is your corporate culture? I've worked in large & small orgs on the West coast over the past 20 years, and I tend to notice that people willing to work in large organizations are culturally or personally conditioned to put up with large org B.S. I've seen a significant tendency of Asian workers to take orders and not ask questions, do not try anything outside of what is expected and perscribed. Large orgs thrive on that crap, small to medium orgs it's a sign of something wrong with you if you're not trying to work outside of your box.
Can confirm, my F50 large organization is conformist to a fault. We're super white though, but that reflects the surrounding city (for not-great reasons).
I'm guessing that's anecdotal given the very large range (25% spread) you cite. As a F50 company you might have actual "diversity data" at hand. It'd be interesting to see your actual data.
For example, Intel is #47 and in mid-2017 they were only 801 employees away from full representation.
From their report:
> Full representation means that Intel will be at market availability or higher by 2020 for every employee job category that we track; both technical and non-technical, for women, African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.
At the same time, they state that white males and Asians comprise >90% of mid to senior technical roles.
So I take these two facts together to mean that the number of under-represented folks on the market is quite small. Of course you're at 50-75% Asian employee population, because that's representative of the pool you're drawing from.
I figured the stats would be a bit different since the "IT office" I worked at was majority Asian while some other parts of the business and thus overall numbers might be quite a bit different
The first sentence already contains a lie.
"A lot of factors have contributed to American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the power of lobbying, globalization, and so on."
Slavery ended more than 150 years ago. To claim that it is a contributing factor to current economic inequality is absurd. Racism and discrimination, sure. But not slavery.
>Slavery ended more than 150 years ago. To claim that it is a contributing factor to current economic inequality is absurd. Racism and discrimination, sure. But not slavery.
The history of slavery directly fed into racism and discrimination post-abolition into ways that minorities without a past as slaves haven't had to experience.
Not only that, but these persons didn't even have a state culture of their own (being owned things and not people, and being forcibly abducted from their own cultures). They had to inhabit a dominant culture created by the norms of others (their owners) and run by them. Their culture was half-adopted from their masters, staff they managed to save from their old countries, and whatever they improvised (under the stern eyes of the whites) here.
Besides, 150 years is nothing in historical terms as it relates to the continued impact of something on a population, doubly so for something as impactful as being see (and having to live as) "an inferior class of persons owned by other people".
For example the US was founded by religious zealots, and even today, 300+ years later and tons of immigrants from others countries having been added, it very much shows, and is very much a dominant part of the cultural landscape.
Slaves had their labour stolen from for hundreds of years and were given no land or other economic basis for them to thrive with. In a competitive landscape, without any capital there is no way to rise.
This is also ignoring the fact that slavery does still exist in the prison system. Prisoners are paid almost nothing for their labour, and are charged astronomical prices for essentials such as toothpaste or deodorant.
Slavery did not go quietly. Alternate structures were constructed to continue exploiting the former slaves. Jim Crow was dismantled within living memory, and even that did not stop all of it.
This sounds like racism and discrimination (which I mentioned as separate issues). And they are indeed separate. A country need not have had slavery as an institution to have racism and discrimination.
EDIT - I would also like to point out that a fundamental point of this article was that the economist discovered it was basically more fair and easier to escape poverty prior to 1970.
The United States is kind of special in that we enshrined slavery in our founding document in 1787 and this insinuated itself into the fabric of society in a multitude of ways. Apartheid era South Africa may be the only equivalent for the past 150 years.
You could say that slavery itself was just an aspect of racism and discrimination, as it was practiced in the US. You can’t really separate these issues.
How was it possible, then, for millions of immigrants to come to this country with absolutely nothing and in many cases escape poverty, or at least set up their children for decent, middle class lives? They had no multigenerational wealth to speak of. Also, studies show that 70% of multigenerational wealth is gone by the second generation and 90% is gone by the third generation. There has been at least 7 generations since the ending of slavery.
EDIT - I would also like to point out that a fundamental point of this article was that the economist discovered it was basically more fair and easier to escape poverty prior to 1970.
Saying "Slavery was ended 150 years ago" is a Mission Accomplished kind of statement. It ignores the actual results on the ground because you had one top level legislative win.
The quote specifically mentions American inequality. There are no legal slaves in America currently. The closest thing is sex trafficking, and that is very clearly not what the author was referring to.
EDIT - I would also like to point out that a fundamental point of this article was that the economist discovered it was basically more fair and easier to escape poverty prior to 1970.
Would you mind elaborating a bit? What am I not understanding? The way I see it is that tens of millions of immigrants came to this nation since slavery has ended, most with little or nothing and were able to make lives for themselves and in many cases set up their descendants for middle class (or better) lifestyles. I see no reason this wouldn't apply to freed slaves and their offspring. To be clear, the issue being raised is slavery, not racism or discrimination, which I specified as separate in my original post. I would be very curious as to how slavery specifically is still affecting modern economic inequality when not lumping it in with the separate issues of racism and discrimination.
EDIT - I would also like to point out that a fundamental point of this article was that the economist discovered it was basically more fair and easier to escape poverty prior to 1970.
Sure, slavery was outlawed 150 years ago, after several centuries of practicing it, but after it ended, there was a separate regime of laws and extralegal terror that made it hard for former slaves to build wealth. There's a direct line to today, where most middle class families got a big chunk of their wealth from home ownership, which was explicitly racially segregated (not just the housing itself, but the loans). Now, is this technically "slavery"? No, but it comes from that past. Of course, millions of immigrants and descendants of former slaves have achieved economic "success", but it seems pretty clear to me that the shadow of slavery still shapes our economy in important ways. You may disagree, but calling it a "lie" seems a bit much.
>Slavery ended more than 150 years ago. To claim that it is a contributing factor to current economic inequality is absurd. Racism and discrimination, sure. But not slavery.
Take a look at the black-white wealth gap. To root that gap in an explanation other than the legacy of prejudice and slavery is going to require some tenuous logic.
Patterns created due to slavery are still being felt today, and were felt even more sharply by the older generations that are still around. To claim that it's not a contributing factor to current economic inequality is absurd.
As Ben Shapiro likes to say, to move out of poverty you have to do 3 things.
1. graduate high school.
2. get a job.
3. don't have kinds until you are married.
If you do those 3 things you will not stay in poverty 99.8% of the time.
Well, that's nonsense. I meet all 3 criteria, and in spectacular fashion. Yet I've been in and out of comfort and poverty for much of my adult life. And the reason happens to be exactly stated in the article title. You can't make any mistakes or suffer any bad luck or ill health. Really poor people start with nothing, and have nothing to fall back on.
It isn't a guarantee that you'll never be in poverty, it is basically a guarantee that you will not be in chronic poverty. Poverty isn't exactly "easy" to escape from, but the steps to get out, or at least give your kids a leg up over yourself, are pretty well known.
One of the worst things wealthy people tend to do, is trivialize the reasons behind poverty. Why don't you "just get a job/save/fix your car/get health insurance" etc
Doing those 3 things is not enough. Even an unusually long stretch of very good luck can get wiped out by one unexpected event.
From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis, where a simple economic one would do: close the door on others after they're already in the castle. You can see this play out everywhere, from how 'disruption' pivots to regulatory capture, from how homeowners fiercely guard their property values, and society self-sorts into cohorts of similar income and circumstance.
We've seen in recent years with working-class people's backlash against neoliberal ideas of governance and trade, in Europe and the US, that the economics notion that growth creates wealth at all levels, and wealth isn't a zero-sum game, is a perception not widely shared among everyday people. The fact is, most people perceive wealth solely in relative terms: are they better off than their neighbors, or people with similar life circumstances? Or are they plagued by the same anxiety and insecurity as people they always thought of as poorer than them?
Race plays into this, sure, but more in terms of shared history or the lack thereof, and of being a convenient visually-obvious indicator for a dimension of difference. The people fighting for the scraps below try to band together along dimensions they find relatable -- similar upbringing, comparable treatment by the same sorts of people, similar biases, similar goals and struggles, and race often correlates with enough difference in these life circumstances to interfere with relatability. Conversely, outside of the upper crust of society, different groups all quest for the same opportunities, where victory of one group is quite often to the economic detriment of another. Simply, every group is trying to keep another out. Those whose families have recently ascended to economic security have a vested interest in keeping large waves of additional risers out, while those competing for opportunities to be upwardly mobile are fighting over limited capacity in education, employment, and housing.