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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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The central problem with your argument is that you are ignoring the vastly different history of all these groups and the flattening the different circumstances of each by saying they were all discriminated against. Of course, you do address the point that each group are/were disadvantaged to a similar extent, but it isn't really that simple. Of course, Asian and Jewish Americans did/do face significant discrimination. However, for instance, in the case of Asian Americans the circumstances of their arrival have had the effect of counteracting disadvantage based on race faced on an institutional or inter-personal level. Asian Americans are almost all here as or as descendants of economic migrants, which selects for the most educated and grafting. Consider this; in the period immediately following 1965, Asian immigrants (excl. Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) had an average 15.2 years of schooling, which makes plenty of sense - it was not your average Indian or Japanese that immigrated to America in the 1960s and 1970s, or even today, especially in the case of poorer countries. This far exceeded the average native level, which as late of 1980 was only 13.07. This represents an enormous advantage in terms of ensuring the kind of beneficial which, as you, Asian-Americans disproportionately enjoy. So of course Asian immigrants should do better than average.

The circumstances of the arrival of African-Americans are plainly vastly different. Hence why recent Nigerian immigrants and their children actually out-earn the American average. Looking at such a vast disparity between recent black immigrants and the descendants of slaves, what else can explain that gap except the circumstances of the arrival of the slaves and their subsequent treatment, first as slaves and then as free but disadvantaged citizens?

A somewhat similar argument was made by John Ogbu

years ago; he made a distinction between voluntary and involuntary immigrants [edit: he actually referred to minorities, not immigrants], the development of a caste-like status re the latter, and the effects on the culture of each. I don't know, however, how that theory has fared subsequently.

Edit: Ogbu's arguments were not just about the US, he tried to explain why, eg, the Buraku do poorly in school in Japan but do well in the United States, or why Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States but do poorly in Japan.

Regardless, the OP errs in glibly equating the experience of African Americans with that of other groups. It was literally illegal to teach slaves to read, which was never the case for other groups, and Jews of course are famously literate on average. Non AfAm groups tended to immigrate to urban areas, whereas AfAms largely were in rural areas until the 20th C, so AfAm culture presumably has rural influences. Asian Americans largely immigrated in the last 60 years, when discrimination was less and opportunites greater. Etc, etc. None of this demonstrates that OP's conclusion is necessarily wrong, only that his argument rests on a dubious premise.

A somewhat similar argument was made by John Ogbu years ago; he made a distinction between voluntary and involuntary immigrants,

Jew didn't "voluntarily" immigrate from nazi Germany, yet their achievements are greater than many other European ethnic groups that had merely economic reasons to come to the US.

  1. The vast, vast, vast majority of Jews in the United States immigrated long before the Nazis. According to this, the Jewish population of the US was 4.6 to 4.8 million in 1937 (i.e., pre-Kristallnacht), and 4.5 to 5 million in 1950. Moreover, this estimates that total immigration from Germany from 1931 to 1946 was only about 120,000 (50,500 x 16 x 0.15) and from Central and Eastern Europe about half that, while this states that only about 110,000 Jewish refugees were admitted to the US.

  2. I have not read Ogbu in years, so I misspoke. He actually refers to voluntary and involuntary minorities rather than immigrants.

  3. Note also that his work is cross-cultural; he is also interested in why the Buraku do poorly in school in Japan but do well in the United States, or why Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States but do poorly in Japan.

With respect, I think you're misreading me. I am making no argument as to why there are group differences; I am simply pointing out that a frequently-given explanation (prior trauma) is clearly and obviously a non-answer. Clearly, races are distinct in terms of outcome at the group-aggregate level; equally-clearly, we see that outcomes of races do not correlate directly with discrimination.

I do think that we've got a lot to untangle if we did want to claim it's all group-founder effects. If we posit that the primary determinant in group outcomes is subgroup selection and founder effects, we could also look at the outcomes of indentured servants who were shipped across to the burgeoning Americas as well; if selection effects explains all, then we should find a clear delineation in demographic destiny between the children of free colonists and indentured servants (who we would expect to be very close to the descendants of slaves). We could also dig into the histories of Irish immigrants who came over en masse in response to the Famine, as well as digging into those sentenced to transportation to, e.g., Australia.

Of course, the big issue is that if the secret sauce is selection effects and we're just getting the cream of the crop from various nations, then we could look at the pool of people who didn't immigrate from various nations and see if the world really is divided into Economic Go-Getters and Everyone Else. And now that I mention it, wouldn't the descendants of the original American colonists be the ultimate economic migrants? Shouldn't we see parity between their descendants and the others?

Again, I make no claim as to why group outcome difference exists. I just note that it does, that it's durable, and that historic discrimination doesn't account for it. As far as I'm concerned, the reason for different group outcomes is that people are different, and groups contain different people, and because I believe this, I am very skeptical of any "But for Factor X, these groups of people would have identical outcomes."

Equally-clearly, we see that outcomes of races do not correlate directly with discrimination.

This is just a causation/correlation problem. Just because discrimination has a significant negative effect on group outcomes, that does not imply historic discrimination will correlate directly with discrimination. In my view the two central factors determining group outcomes are historic discrimination/disadvantage and selection effects/the circumstances of arrival. These both work against African-Americans significantly, but for Asian-Americans the negative impact of discrimination is counter-acted by selection effects.

if selection effects explains all

I didn't say it explains all, just quite a lot and a very large part of why we see many more recent immigrants groups perform very well.

the reason for different group outcomes is that people are different, and groups contain different people,

Vague waffle. How are the people in these groups different and how is that affecting outcomes?

Again, I bring up what those two factors would imply about the pool of non-immigrants; if we assume that groups are blank slates, then we should see the same demographic outcomes in non-immigrants from Nigeria, and from Israel. Do we? And again, does this assumption encode American original-colonist exceptionalism as an expected outcome, where we should assume that the best outcomes should belong to the stock of those that did the hardest initial work on arrival? Do you think there is any reversion-to-the-mean going on, and at what rate?

And yes, I'm being vague. From my perspective, I'm a guy who can watch the night sky and has an OK memory hearing astrologers confidently announce that a plague is happening because Mercury is in retrograde and that is what causes plagues, and lining up that with the other times I know that Mercury was in retrograde and there was no plague. I am not a doctor or a microbiologist or even an astronomer, but I don't need to be; all I need to do is evaluate "Does condition X, which I hear people claim as the reason for this observable event in the world Y, actually correlate with Y, or do we have cases of X not causing Y and in fact being associated with the opposite of Y?"

My own default position is vague because it's complicated. My thoughts are that sets like black Americans and Jews are a huge, confounded mass of distinct lineages and cultural influences, and that what might be true about subsets of those groups could not be true about the whole. My default position is that while knowing someone's race gives you information about their likely group outcomes, every group contains diligent sinners and callow saints and that looking at the individual in front of you and tracing their specific life outcomes to their specific choices and reactions to the events of their own specific life is the only way to get a non-statistical answer.

And so, if anyone is going to say "But for X, these groups which have wildly divergent group outcomes would have near-identical ones.", then they'd better be able to show the general principle first that groups are not distinct in the absence of X, and second that X moves the needle for a high confidence interval of groups that I can think of in the expected direction."

non-immigrants from Nigeria, and from Israel

By non-immigrants, do you mean Nigerians in Nigeria and Israelis in Israel? If so, then I'm not sure what the thrust of your point is. The different levels of prosperity of different countries are affected by various historical and geographical factors.

And again, does this assumption encode American original-colonist exceptionalism as an expected outcome, where we should assume that the best outcomes should belong to the stock of those that did the hardest initial work on arrival? Do you think there is any reversion-to-the-mean going on, and at what rate?

Again, not quite sure what you're getting at here. With regard to reversion to the mean, yes that definitely is happening to some extent but we should also recognise that these things are often very inter-generationally persistent. Indeed, this is the whole argument for programs to help certain groups with poor outcomes, that it is quite difficult to break the cycle of low education, low earnings and poor childhood circumstances for the next generation etc. without some external help.

My own default position is vague because it's complicated. My thoughts are that sets like black Americans and Jews are a huge, confounded mass of distinct lineages and cultural influences, and that what might be true about subsets of those groups could not be true about the whole. My default position is that while knowing someone's race gives you information about their likely group outcomes, every group contains diligent sinners and callow saints and that looking at the individual in front of you and tracing their specific life outcomes to their specific choices and reactions to the events of their own specific life is the only way to get a non-statistical answer.

If we want to look towards solution to the problems regarding the performance of different groups this appears a deeply unsatisfactory and pointless conclusion. Of course it's complicated, everything about society is complicated, but that does not preclude us from making general statements about the position of certain groups. Obviously the outcomes of each individual will depend on their specific circumstances, but the disparities between groups indicate broader forces are at play.

"But for X, these groups which have wildly divergent group outcomes would have near-identical ones.", then they'd better be able to show the general principle first that groups are not distinct in the absence of X, and second that X moves the needle for a high confidence interval of groups that I can think of in the expected direction."

I think the problem here is that you seem to be confusing 'X moves the needle' with 'groups affected by X must be below average in outcomes'. I think discrimination does and did affect the outcomes of Jewish and Asian-Americans, is just that it's moved the needle from over-achieving somewhat more to overachieving somewhat less.

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