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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27878 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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In his latest link roundup, Scott links to (a pre-print?) of a paper claiming to show that "Black families who were enslaved until the Civil War continue to have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than Black families who were free before the Civil War".

Here is Scott's commentary:

New study finds that black people whose ancestors were enslaved on the eve of the Civil War, compared to black people whose ancestors were free at the time, continue to have lower education/wealth/income even today. If true, this provides strong supports the ”cycle of poverty” story of racial inequality, and boosts the argument for reparations. But I’ve also seen studies say the opposite of this. I would be much more willing to accept the new study as an improvement on the old one if not for, well, things like the link above [1] - I have no evidence that anything like that was involved, but at this point it’s hard not to be paranoid. Does anyone know a good third-party commentary on this analysis?

[1] Here Scott talks about "the trend to bar scientists from accessing government datasets if their studies might get politically incorrect conclusions"

I'd be very interested in learning what you make of the study and how you think it links to Scott's conclusions. What evidence would it take to convince you that the "cycle of poverty" hypothesis is true / explains a large portion of the black/everyone else disparity across a number of different life outcomes?

There may be something to it, but "cycle of poverty" is far too general to be an explanation, in the same way that "culture" alone is too general.

What's the exact mechanism? We know that not everyone whose family was poor in 1865 is poor and dysfunctional now. We know that not all black people who were poor in 1865 are poor now. We know that not all black people whose families were enslaved in 1865 are impoverished now.

If someone loses all their money today, are their descendants going to be poor, violent and dysfunctional for hundreds of years? If poverty is the direct cause of all this dysfunction, why doesn't that correlation hold for other groups?

Ultimately, a theory of the dysfunction in the American black community must grapple with these and many more strictures. Genetics too offer a glib but limited explanation. This is why we see the "slave breeding" hypothesis, because black african immigrants do not have most of the dysfunction of black americans. Since the average ADOS is a quarter white, if the explanation were purely genetic, black africans should be doing about 25% worse than ADOS.

Personally, I still favor cultural explanations, though poverty can be a stressor and genetics can move the needle on specific traits.

Since the average ADOS is a quarter white, if the explanation were purely genetic, black africans should be doing about 25% worse than ADOS.

I would assume that the people who were captured and sold as slaves and the people who voluntarily immigrate are somewhat distinct populations.

They would be, but the genetic differences between the two groups would have to dwarf the differences between other races and blacks to explain the reversal. African immigrants often do better on most social metrics than generic whites, so a genetic explanation has to posit that the genetic distance between recent african migration and enslaved groups is greater than the distance between africans and europeans. In a couple hundred years.

Which is to say, this did not happen.

I don't see how it would follow that in order for African immigrants to be more intelligent than Europeans and Europeans to be more intelligent than ADOS that African immigrants should have a greater overall genetic distance to ADOS than Europeans do. Only the intelligence related genes would need to be different. And suppose that the African elites and the unfortunates who were shipped off diverged only centuries before they were enslaved, two distinct populations could have evolved where one is more intelligent and one is less than the median European.

Selection (perhaps on both ends) is easily sufficient to explain this.

Selection effects may be strong for a short time, but regression to the mean makes the effect much weaker over centuries, especially given the admixture from other sources.

There's only one round of regression (first post-selection generation), so the centuries don't make a difference there.

You're ignoring admixture and subsequent regression to different means.

Admixture doesn't cause further regression to a mean unless the admixture was itself selective. If slaves were selected from the worse end of the African bell curve for some characteristic and recent immigrants were selected from the better end, we'd expect these the descendants of slaves, even after regression to the mean, to be worse in that characteristic than the recent immigrants. Admixture with a white population falling between those two groups would move the descendants of slaves closer, but wouldn't eliminate the effect.

What evidence would it take to convince you that the "cycle of poverty" hypothesis is true / explains a large portion of the black/everyone else disparity across a number of different life outcomes?

One, when the hypothesis becomes a hypothesis and not a circular reasoning as it is now. Two, if promoters of cycle of poverty would diversify use cases of similar cycles and not only apply them to specific demographics. There might be many inidividual in smaller vicious cycles who do not reach their potential and considered enemies by promoters of cycles of poverty.

I think the African slave trade largely traded on Africans who lost a political, legal or physical conflict in Africa -- they were (for the most part) prisoners of war, convicts, outcasts and misfits who were captured and sold to slavers by other native Africans. So this isn't terribly different from observing that descendants of convicted felons tend to have worse outcomes, which I also expect to be true. As is often the case in studies of intergenerational disparities, genetic heredity can provide a satisfying explanation, which is upstream both from their current status and their ancestors' enslavement.

It also seems plausible to me that slave breeding that took place in America was dysgenic, which could have long-lasting consequences. I don't know if it was, though. If that is correct, it's quite the political hot potato: the folks looking to avenge past oppression are generally not going to want to accept that genetic inferiority mediates the legacy of the oppression, and the folks looking to blame the underclass for their plight are generally not going to want to accept that their blameworthy tendencies were foisted upon them by the sins of America's forefathers.

Ya, but, hypothetically, wouldn't that selection have only existed among the pool of already available slaves.

So if there was selection it would only be among the pre-selected group (of tribes that got enslaved by other tribes, I guess)?

I don't see how your point disagrees with what the parent comment says. Sure there was selection, but that selection would be among a pre selected group, and said means of selection would have dysgenic effect.

Were African slavers in Africa American forefathers?

No, but the American slavers were, and deserve the lion's share of the credit for American slavery existing as an institution. There's plenty of supply for slavery in the third world; the bottleneck is always the more developed country tolerating it and building infrastructure to support it. In any event, it wasn't the African slavers who would have been responsible for dysgenic slave breeding within America.

A little bit of googling illustrates that the US was a very minor part of the international slave trade (about 2%). The largest destinations of slaves were Brazil (44%), British Caribbean (21%) and Spanish Americas (12%).

https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates

If you're shipping 4M slaves to the Caribbean (British + French), shipping another 470k to the US was a sideshow. I find it implausible that eliminating the US market would meaningfully affect the infra, but eliminating the Caribbean market certainly might.

...How much more developed was America than the "third world" when slavery was established and developed? Compared to, say, the Ottomans? Or if colonial America isn't the correct reference, then Britain, France, etc, for the "developed country"?

Uh, "enough," perhaps? Colonial America was probably somewhere between uncolonized Africa and Continental Europe in terms of industrialization and urban development.

American colonies-interestingly, both in British and French North America, but not south of the rio grande- were noticeably wealthier than the mother country even way back when. This appears to be largely due to how land use regulations were written(to maximize owner-occupied farm productivity while leaving less room for tenant farming and sharecropping, and to give the peasants access to markets) with some selection effects in the mix.

the above was somewhat poorly worded, but if we're dating the introduction of chattel slavery to 1619, wasn't England a relative backwater, and America an extremely-sparsely populated colonial hinterland? Meanwhile the Ottomans were, if I'm not mistaken, a serious empire in their prime, and again if I'm not mistaken had been engaging in chattel slavery for much longer.

Even assuming 1619 as the introduction of chattel slavery(and that’s certainly disputable; chattel slavery didn’t become dominant until later and may not have been distinguished from indentured servitude in 1619), England was a major power and one of the wealthiest societies in the world then, not some kind of backwater.

I admit I'm not terribly clear on what parts of Europe looked like around the 1600's--like, did things still look all, well, medieval-y?

No, they didn't look medievally. Think ruffles, breeches, big floppy hats, rapiers, cannons and star forts. Think The Three Musketeers.

yeah, that was kinda my thinking as well. We think of the Ottomans as sort of backward and undeveloped, but 1600 is well before the industrial revolution; everywhere was "undeveloped" by modern standards. I guess the brits and Americans were put-together enough to set up ocean-going trade networks, but then again their whole society was sorta built around the shores of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the Ottomans were ruling a vast empire and making the last of their repeated efforts to conquer a significant chunk of Europe.

One thing that would help a lot would be any evidence that the "cycle of poverty" can be broken or even altered in some reliable fashion.

Failing that, a detectable racism gradient seems like it should be absolute-minimum table stakes in any reasonable discussion. Supposedly, we detect racism from disparate outcomes. The theory, visible all through this thread, is that some places in America are significantly more racist than others. If racism causes the bad outcomes, and some places are historically less racist than others, shouldn't we see significantly less disparate outcomes in the less racist places, and vice versa?

As far as I can tell, neither of these have ever been demonstrated.

The racism thing itself is difficult. Obviously the south is more “racists”. But I’m not sure how true that is. In the south whites are far more comfortable around blacks and theirs more intermixing. A lot of northern states have far more segregated cities and less daily interaction. The northerners will since the Blackmans praise but they do in my experience seem afraid of them in everyday interactions. The south is more explicitly racists but also seem to have more cultural and daily life connections.

claiming that there are different flavors of racism adds no explanatory power. If the different sorts of racism result in different outcomes, why don't we see different outcomes? If they don't result in different outcomes, and outcomes are the entire sum of the data we have, in what meaningful sense are they different?

Blacks who were freed before the civil war were either freed by their masters or freed themselves via escape.

if freed by their master's this was down to 1 of 2 selection effects. Either they were intelligent and enterprising enough to become skilled and bargain a sum of money they could earn and pay for their freedom, or their master was sentimentally disposed towards them, quite possibly because they were his illegitimate offspring.

Indeed we see an overlap of these selection effects in escaped slaves. Frederick Douglas (an escaped slave) speculated himself that he was the son of his master, and implied this was common knowledge amongst the adult slave of the plantation he grew up on.

.

The hypothesis that absolutely everything is biologically heritable and informed by such biology, and nurture is completely discredited remains very very difficult to challenge.

If conditions were the cause of the discrepancy we'd expect a change as large as literal slavery vs literal freedom to account for the major difference and the gap to close as soon as that difference was gone.

If something like intelligence or heritable traits were to blame, then we'd expect changing the conditions via external forces (the union army) to not really alter the positional gap.

Otherwise we wouldn't expect a mere 10-20 year gap in date of liberation to make that big an impact 7-9 generations later

It seems like the right way to check this would be to find a series of black families that maintain their genealogy back to before the civil war, and see if they’re doing better today depending on the circumstances of their freedom.

I’m rather doubting you can find tons of these people, and even if you could, it sounds like a lot of work to do all that.

Isn't that exactly the study Scott commented on? Those freed before the war (possibly due to factors particular to themselves as GP mentioned) are doing better today than those freed slightly later by external factors (the war).

I meant checking on the family lines of pre-civil war freemen and comparing them to means of obtaining freedom. It’s my understanding that some of these people still constitute distinct groups in EG New Orleans.

They did; there wasn't a difference between "freed before the war" and "slave until general emancipation" in the south. The difference was entirely location-based.

Ah, thank you for clarifying.

By 1800 most of the Northern states had abolished slavery. Higher educational outcomes would track Northern states being wealthier and better by almost all metrics. The causal factor is not slavery but the North being wealthier overall.

There are a number of confounders that may actually prove the opposite. The free spent more time among white people, enslaved spent more time among black people. Free would have been more likely to be intelligent: freed by owner in will because their work was skilled; bought their freedom. The most stupid slaves would be more likely to not be freed by the owner, as whites felt that they could not care for themselves (common belief back then). Freed would usually have been from smaller “operations”, not a large plantation, but perhaps an assistant to a blacksmith who would learn the craft. Freed are more likely to have white admixture from sexual relations.

Scott is losing his magic if he thinks there’s enough logic to consider the conclusions of the paper.

I’ve long been interested to see whether the black slaves who spent more time among white people (enslaved) fare better than the the recent arrivals, but there are so many confounders that it’s impossible to measure.

Scott is losing his magic if he thinks there’s enough logic to consider the conclusions of the paper.

In his defense he wrote "If true, this provides strong supports the ”cycle of poverty” story of racial inequality, and boosts the argument for reparations. "

'Boosting the argument' is not the same as endorsing it. It's like saying, if someone wanted to make a pro-reparations argument, they could try to use this paper as justification.

Also 'provides strong support' is a fairly "strong" statement. I would have expected "provides some support" or "adds some weight to".

I'm personally not very convinced by the 'cycle of poverty' argument, having seen rich families fail, and having come from a fairly poor one myself (and seeing others of my friends improve their lot as well). Culture & genes seem much more significant factors, and I think both are passed down through generations much more effectively and directly than wealth.

The difference in crime rates between the poor Amish (or Vietnamese refugees) and the not-as-poor in Detroit seem to support this.

I think poverty does encourage crime to some degree (less to lose!) as does disparity of wealth, but I think it's a much smaller factor than the idpol folks make it out to be.

Oh, I just remembered another nice counter-example given on the original motte site -- Catholics and Protestants in (Northern?) Ireland. The Catholics were systemically literally discriminated against (couldn't hold certain jobs, etc). Once that legal discrimination was removed, they had essentially equalized in ~2 generations. Sorry for the vague recollection, but I found it a really interesting and relevant data point for all of these "cycle of poverty" and reparation claims.

"Boosting the argument" is a motte-and-bailey claim which can be interpreted as "increases the Bayseian likelihood of it being true" up until someone finds a flaw in it, whereupon the proponent can retreat to "I just meant that someone could use it".

It's always a fantastic gut check to ask, "What would it take to convince me otherwise?" And this mental habit is one reason why I think this group has remained so high quality for so long.

Ideally, we would have IQ scores for every slave/free black in America since before abolition, along with all family trees, so we can observe the prevalence of success markers between the two groups controlled for IQ. My guess is that some blacks who were free before emancipation were free for a reason, and this reason is why the descendants of free blacks are more successful today than their enslaved counterparts. But, if I'm wrong, we would see otherwise identical individuals differ markedly in outcomes solely because of the difference between their ancestors date of emancipation.

I guess this theory really relies on the idea that free people accumulate wealth no matter what, which seems really stupid to be honest. And that wealth is primarily responsible for success because your able to afford better education, nutrition, healthcare, etc. — this doesn't jive with me. Go back far enough, you have to find someone who started with nothing but his body and mind and made something of himself because of who he was. And this is the thing that those advocates of this cycle of poverty idea can't let themselves entertain.

I was going to post my analysis, but this guy already did a much more in-depth analysis than I have the patience for:

https://cremieux.substack.com/p/black-economic-progress-after-slavery

TL;DR: As noted in the abstract of the paper itself, the gap appears to be driven almost entirely by state of residence, with southern but not northern blacks having been exposed to Jim Crow (the main analysis is in 1940, and the extended analysis only goes through 2000). There's also likely some selection bias, with more productive slaves being more likely to be freed.

In short, this provides basically zero evidence for the effects of truly exogenous poverty persisting for more than a generation or two once the impoverishing forces are removed.

As I understand it, the general pattern was for lighter-skinned mulattos to be freed, in a way which swamps any tendency to free more productive slaves.

If you believe in hbd wouldn’t lighter skin mulattos by definition be on average higher productivity?

I've got a little epicycle of a theory that the whites who were messing around that way generally weren't of the highest quality (Thomas Jefferson perhaps excepted).

I wouldn’t necessarily expect that- AFAIK, overseers, skilled plantation workers, and other ‘poor whites’ with access to the slave population were mostly from the ambitious upper working class(which we should expect to be towards the top end in intelligence, if not necessarily geniuses), and the majority of mulattoes born in the antebellum south could trace their ancestry to master in some way(albeit as often through a son as to the master himself).

They would probably on average be higher intelligence, but that doesn’t necessarily equal higher productivity given that slaves were doing manual labor.

Macnamara's Folly showed that higher IQ soldiers were more effective than lower IQ ones, even at manual talks like loading shells in a mortar.

Even manual labour requires people to follow processes, learn from mistakes etc.

Slaves did all sorts of stuff. This guy was a contractor who managed construction crews building giant mansions:

https://www.destrehanplantation.org/history/the-building-of-a-plantation

Ironically his payment included a slave.

boosts the argument for reparations.

Am I missing something? The pre-civil war freed blacks didn't get reparations.

He's trying to imply that slavery had lingering post-slavery effects and blacks in the north did better because they didn't have those effects. So reparations would be needed to address the effects of slavery and make southern blacks on par with the north.

Unless Scott comes up with a study showing that 1) whites in the south didn't also do poorly compared to whites in the north and 2) blacks were treated equally in the north and south post-slavery, I am not convinced by this argument.

But weren't nearly all blacks in the north also former slaves or descendants of slaves? This is plausibly an argument for giving the other subset of blacks longer to catch up but it's not an argument for reparations.

It's not my argument, and it may not be correct. But it's one that Scott might be trying to imply.

  1. The 'if true' is a very big if. The file drawer effect would be VERY strong here.

  2. There's several obvious confounders. One is that the free population may have been different in some way besides either wealth or the state of being free. Another presents itself when we read in the abstract that the difference is driven by location with south being worse; the South was an economic basket case after the Civil War, so the effect (if real) may have been driven by general economic conditions in the South rather than specific oppression of black people.

  1. The authors seem to compare among other things blacks in the north / free blacks in the south with enslaved blacks in the south. Necessarily the first group will have a better outcome over time just like northern had better outcomes compared to the average southern. The authors acknowledge that but treat location as one of the crimes of slavery. But then the right comparison is slaves in the south compared to west Africa if you are trying to isolate the affect of slavery. That is, location itself seems like weak tea.

  2. The data appears pretty messy. I wonder what decisions were made to cut which data in particular ways and what different results would occur if different methods are used.

  3. There seems to be an idea that blacks were equal except for their status as slaves. I highly suspect that is not true. If that is not true, then their results are simply finding the differences between the Du Bois and Douglasses on one hand, and the average share cropper on the other.

I don't know why this would say much of anything about the "cycle of poverty," since there is an entire complex of social and cultural issues connected with slavery that are not associated with mere poverty. Moreover, the paper explicitly claims:

The persistent disparities between the two groups are entirely driven by the fact that families who were enslaved longer were freed further south and, as a consequence, experienced more severe post-slavery oppression under Jim Crow.

Given the mechanism involved, I don't see that there is much that can be inferred about "the cycle of poverty."

Yeah, short of a definition of 'cycle of poverty' broad enough to include "the KKK tries to burn down your parents or grandparent's house in your living memory", this seems like it's missed some possible confounders. And there's something useful for that broad of a definition! But something worth keeping in mind before generalizing.

short of a definition of 'cycle of poverty' broad enough to include "the KKK tries to burn down your parents or grandparent's house in your living memory"

...but not broad enough to also cover "communist revolutionaries force your parents or grandparents to leave your home and community (possibly killing any number of your relatives) so they fetched up, penniless, on a foreign country's shores without language proficiency or contacts, within living memory," or "your parents or grandparents have to sell all your family's possessions (and abandon those they couldn't sell) and emigrate to escape a genocidal regime before they get around to opening the death camps, within living memory"?

If the latter is meant to refer to European Jews, very few Jews in the US are descendants of people who emigrated to the US post-1933. And, if refugees from the former Yugoslavia are representative of those who successfully flee genocidal regimes, then those who escape are the more affluent ones. Those were certainlythe ones whose children I taught in the late 90s.

Finally, your examples are not very relevant. The entire concept of cycles of poverty assumes multigenerational poverty, not one-off catastrophes which plunge previously regular folk into penury.

Finally, as I have mentioned on here before, it is worth thinking about John Ogbu's writing on the difference between immigrant and non-immigrant minorities, in the US and elsewhere.

I was thinking of Cuban boat people, Latin American refugees from any number of crappy revolutions, and SE Asian post-Vietnam migrants for the first, actually. For the second, I was thinking, yes, of the Holocaust, but also of first-wave Armenian immigrants in the 1890s-1920s, Ibo migration to the US after the Biafra conflict, Rwandans fleeing the 1990s conflicts, etc. The communities are smaller, but they're there!

Well, here is what Wikipedia says about Cuban refugees:

After the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959, a Cuban exodus began as the new government allied itself with the Soviet Union and began to introduce communism. The first Cubans to come to America after the revolution were those affiliated with former dictator Fulgencio Batista, next were Cuba's professionals. Most Cuban Americans that arrived in the United States initially came from Cuba's educated upper and middle classes centered in Cuba's capital Havana. This middle class arose in the period after the Platt Amendment when Cuba became one of the most successful countries in Latin America. Between December 1960 and October 1962 more than 14,000 Cuban children arrived alone in the U.S. Their parents were afraid that their children were going to be sent to some Soviet bloc countries to be educated[citation needed] and they decided to send them to the States as soon as possible.[citation needed]

This program was called Operation Peter Pan (Operacion Pedro Pan). When the children arrived in Miami they were met by representatives of Catholic Charities and they were sent to live with relatives if they had any or were sent to foster homes, orphanages or boarding schools until their parents could leave Cuba. From 1965 to 1973, there was another wave of immigration known as the Freedom Flights. In order to provide aid to recently arrived Cuban immigrants, the United States Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966. The Cuban Refugee Program provided more than $1.3 billion of direct financial assistance. They also were eligible for public assistance, Medicare, free English courses, scholarships and low-interest college loans.[citation needed]

Some banks pioneered loans for exiles who did not have collateral or credit but received help in getting a business loan. These loans enabled many Cuban Americans to secure funds and start up their own businesses. With their Cuban-owned businesses and low cost of living, Miami, Florida and Union City, New Jersey (dubbed Havana on the Hudson)[18][19] were the preferred destinations for many immigrants and soon became the main centers for Cuban-American culture. According to author Lisandro Perez, Miami was not particularly attractive to Cubans prior to the 1960s.[20]

Vietnamese refugees were also provided financial and other assistance from the US govt

Those relatively few Jewish refugees who settled in the US after fleeing Germany (page 11 here puts the number of arrivals from 1933-1945 at 168,000) of course were assisted by the millions of Jewish people already living in the US. And note that on page 14 of the link above, only 12% of males in the sample were unskilled workers; 46% were skilled, 26% were semi-professional, and 9% were professional. These are not poor people without marketable skills.

Most importantly, how many of the groups came here and became sharecroppers, as African Americans did after slavery? The closest is probably the Hmong, many of whom settled in the Central Valley, and who are not doing so hot.

And, how many of those groups were effectively deprived of education, as were African Americans after slavery?

Again, comparisons with immigrant groups as a means of assessing the cycles of poverty is problematic because the entire argument is about the effect of multigenerational poverty.

here is what Wikipedia says about Cuban refugees

That's why I was specifying the boat people (definitely not middle class) who kept drifting on over on slapped-together rafts, or getting smuggled through latin america and up through the southern US border, like Yasiel Puig.

how many of the groups came here and became sharecroppers, as African Americans did after slavery?

If they were sharecroppers, they weren't all that different from most Southerners - two-thirds of sharecroppers in the South were White. Moreover, they didn't stay sharecroppers - millions moved north for industrial jobs in the Great Migration of the early 20th century (i.e., the big urban transition in U.S. history). While they were frequently met with opposition, quietly-prosperous black middle classes developed.

This actually mirrors the refugee and immigrant experience to the U.S. - show up in the cities, take a bunch of low-skill industrial and menial jobs (railway porters for blacks, taxi and uber drivers today), and slowly save and skill-up until you're basically level with most everyone else. Only, every time the black middle class started really developing, their neighborhoods got progressively wrecked worse-and-worse by radical "activism."

But, the Cuban boat people (isn't that term usually used to refer to Vietnamese refugees?) did not arrive "without . . . contacts" as you originally posited. That is why I assumed you were not referring to them.

If they were sharecroppers, they weren't all that different from most Southerners

How is that relevant to the discussion of blacks versus immigrants? And, if anything, that reinforces the cycles of poverty argument, given how the descendants of those white sharecroppers have done, and given that appears that social mobility in the South seems to be unusually low for whites.

And, note that, the Great Migration notwithstanding, in 1960 11 million of the 19 million African Americans in the US lived in the South.

quietly-prosperous black middle classes developed . . . every time the black middle class started really developing, their neighborhoods got progressively wrecked worse-and-worse by radical "activism."

This appears to be a claim that blacks have gone backward. But that is [clearly not the case}(https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/06/27/1-demographic-trends-and-economic-well-being/), and see here.

And, I am afraid you need to be more specific about your claim that "their neighborhoods got progressively wrecked worse-and-worse by radical "activism." Are you referring to the demise of black middle class neighborhoods like Central Ave in L.A. and Sugar Hill in Harlem, after housing discrimination disappeared, and black middle class families were not forced to live in certain neighborhoods

First, gaps due to direct exposure to slavery itself dissipated by 1940. In 1870, five years after the end of slavery, the socioeconomic status of recently freed families was far below that of families freed earlier, even for individuals from the same state. By 1940, those large Free Enslaved gaps vanished conditional on the state in which their ancestors lived during slavery.

That's interesting. A lot of the justification I see for affirmative action is that people are still suffering the effects of slavery even though it ended a long time ago. But this says that those gaps were gone within 75 years of the end of slavery. You could argue that continued discrimination affected them after that, but the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1960 which is now 63 years ago, almost as long as it took for the gap between enslaved and free blacks to disappear after the civil war.

What evidence would it take to convince you that the "cycle of poverty" hypothesis is true / explains a large portion of the black/everyone else disparity across a number of different life outcomes?

They'd have to address the other side of the equation - groups of immigrants that came with nothing to their name, but ended up doing ok, or even above average within a generation or two, or lottery winners who reverted back to their old socio-economic class within a generation or less.

In addition to what @RococoBasilica said, as well as the related fact that immigrants might be low-income but might or might not have cultural attributes associated with poverty (because poverty and being low-income are not quite the same thing) --compare Hmong poverty rates with Vietnamese-American poverty rates, for example -- historically immigrants have tended to settle in areas of the country in which poor people in general seem to have had higher level of social mobility. See, again, the Hmong. who tended to disproportionately settle in rural areas like Fresno.

related fact that immigrants might be low-income but might or might not have cultural attributes associated with poverty

immigrants might be low-income but might or might not have genetic traits predisposing them for poverty

In addition to what @RococoBasilica said, as well as the related fact that immigrants might be low-income but might or might not have cultural attributes associated with poverty

What RoccoBasilica said is basically the standard conservative argument on culture, not "the cycle of poverty", which as far as I know it relied more on material conditions.

historically immigrants have tended to settle in areas of the country in which poor people in general seem to have had higher level of social mobility.

So? There's nothing stopping people from moving to these areas?

which as far as I know it relied more on material conditions.

You are mistaken. For one thing, the cycle of poverty argument sees those cultural aspects as rooted in the original poverty (and/or slavery or Jim Crow in the case of African Americans), whereas the conservative argument tends to identify the source as personal failings. Though, really, framing this issue as liberal versus conservative is not particularly fruitful.

So? There's nothing stopping people from moving to these areas?

How is that relevant to the issue? The extent to which so many people want to read everything as a normative argument is quite depressing. I was merely positing location as a confounding factor which might help explain why, as you put it, "groups of immigrants that came with nothing to their name, but ended up doing ok."

You are mistaken. For one thing, the cycle of poverty argument sees those cultural aspects as rooted in the original poverty (and/or slavery or Jim Crow in the case of African Americans), whereas the conservative argument tends to identify the source as personal failings.

This may not be "Catholics worship the Virgin Mary" levels of not understanding your outgroup, but you sure are trying.

Though, really, framing this issue as liberal versus conservative is not particularly fruitful.

Sure, these are just labels. The point was that it's weird to shout "Eureka! It's the culture!" to people who have been saying "it's the culture" for decades.

How is that relevant to the issue? The extent to which so many people want to read everything as a normative argument is quite depressing.

I wasn't reading it as normative. I think it's an inadequate explanation, because if improving your standards was as simple as moving to another city, black people would have done so.

And that's without taking into account various ways of making this whole argument moot, like checking if there were any black people in these socially mobile regions, and if the disparities between them and other groups are much different than in the less mobile regions.

  1. Conservatives are not my outgroup.

  2. I am familiar with conservative arguments about the cultural causes of poverty, and I said that the liberal/conservative framing is not helpful because there is overlap between liberals and conservatives on this issue. Culture is obviously important; at the very least, attitudes toward work an education affect the likelihood of leaving poverty (at least at the individual level, but of course it is possible that that claim doesn't hold up so well at the group level). HOWEVER, My statement was NOT that conservatives do not consider culture to be a cause of poverty, but rather my statement was re views about the SOURCE of that culture. I very explicitly said that.

I think it's an inadequate explanation

I do, too. That is why I said that is merely a possible confounding factor re your causal claim relating to immigrants. I said: "I was merely positing location as a confounding factor which might help explain why, as you put it, 'groups of immigrants that came with nothing to their name, but ended up doing ok.'" A confounding factor is a variable that influences both the dependent variable and independent variable, causing a spurious association.

if improving your standards was as simple as moving to another city, black people would have done so.

Again, I didn't say it was. Besides, 1) they might not know the extent of the effect in general; 2) they certainly can't know the extent of the effect on their descendants specifically (remember, we are discussing multigenerational poverty and the effects of location thereon, not the effect of moving on an adult who decides to move. I.e., inter-generational mobility, not intra-generational mobility); 3) there are real, and obvious, costs to moving, including being uprooted from family and community. Hence, it could be perfectly rational to decline to move, even if your claim re immigrants is completely wrong, and location explains ALL of their relative success (no, I don't think it does. I am making a rhetorical point). Therefore, the fact every black person has not chosen to move doesn’t do much to rescue your argument.

The conservative argument is that those cultural arguments are rooted in poor welfare policies in the 60’s, not personal moral failings.

That is one conservative argument, not the only one. The moral failings argument predates the 1960s, as does, of course, entrenched poverty. That's why I said "tends." And, isn't one of the conservative criticisms of those welfare policies precisely that they undermine the moral traits supposedly needed to emerge from poverty? And then there is the traditional conservative distinction between the "deserving poor" (those who are poor through no fault of their own) and the "undeserving poor" (those who are poor due to character flaws and poor choices)

And unlike almost every other argument, this one is actually backed in observed, durable, large-scale outcomes, if unfortunately negative ones. Blacks used to have much better outcomes in marriage, much lower rates of fatherlessness, etc, all of which strongly correlate with a multitude of positive social and economic outcomes. The collapse of such statistics was predicted in advance of the implementation of key social policies, among them no-fault divorce, and those predictions did in fact come to pass.

And these predictions are strongly memory-holed, too, I’ll point out. Social conservatives have been right about the harmful effects of policies they oppose a lot, and dismissed so often with ‘have you ever been right? Remember what you predicted about no-fault divorce?’, that it’s nearly Cassandra at this point.

Slave states treated (white) people with nothing to their name very differently from those enslaved black people, both before and after slavery ended.

But not as differently as you might expect. Poor whites were treated extremely badly by the powers-that-be in the antebellum south (see, e.g. Keri Leigh Merritt's recent monograph Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South). And after the war, though poor whites were not subject to segregation, the economic and suffrage oppressions popularly associated with Jim Crow (e.g. debt peonage, "sharecropping," lack of access to schools, political disenfranchisement, etc.) were also imposed on disreputable and landless poor whites in large number. For example, 60% of sharecroppers were white, and to my knowledge the crop lien and debt systems imposed on sharecroppers didn't discriminate based on race.

enslaved black people

I wonder why the "people first language" doctrine isn't applied to "slave" and what the resulting newspeak term for it would be.

Using a less strictly literal interpretation of "people first language", what you just quoted is the newspeak term for it: "enslaved people".

But perhaps you knew that and were just clowning.

Did you have something to say that isn't unsolicited complaining about the way other people talk?

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Did you have something to say that isn't unsolicited complaining about the way other people talk?

Apply this admonishment to yourself.

I'll cop to having not much to state beyond my annoyance that he had nothing else to say, sure.

People are allowed to comment on things and make observations that you do not agree with or appreciate. You are not the judge of what is or isn't worth saying. If you think a comment breaks the rules, report it. If you just don't like it, either articulate your objections (respectfully), or refrain from degrading the signal-to-noise ratio yourself.

Sometimes I dislike stuff that may or may not break the rules, and I don't much care for pinging the mods for every post out there. I did not start the rudeness here - and yes, soccer moms who hate 'he started it' are wrong.

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unsolicited

On this forum 99.9% of coCommencmments on this aren't made in response to an explicit request for an opinion. In fact without @arjin_ferman pinging you, you replied to them.

complaining about the way other people talk

I didn't complain, I noted how the present PC guidelines consider "people first language" important, yet their replacement, to which you adhere, for "slave" is "enslaved person" ie "people last".

But even if I did complain, I would be in good company in considering nouns to be important. From the rectification of names in confucianism, to the above linked Stanford University many respectable people institutionism considered how names influence thought and sought to alter them.

So? We're well past the point of the Civil Rights Act, and since then there are non-white minorities who arrived with less than black people had at the time, and who are now doing better than white people on average.

People treat those non-white minorities differently from slaves' descendants too! Second-generations Nigerians are intensely easy to tell apart from people who've lived in Georgia for the past 250 years, and they are treated differently as much as they both arrived in the US very differently.

Well, we went from states treating the differently (which implied laws being on the books) to people treating them differently. And since you brought up Nigerians, who have the same skin color as African Americans, meaning the remaining differences are probably cultural, at this point I have to ask, how is this different than the standard conservative argument about culture?

We needn't be so anal about language to keep writing the longform 'people in X and Y states', I don't think. The people of Alabama and South Carolina treated black people differently from others than they did in 1860, and they do it in 2022 as well. Nigerians are black in the same way that both Indians and Arabs are brown: the difference is really really easy to see. Furthermore, what Africans got to America in the past fifty years aren't close to a random sample; they are extremely disproportionately people who were well off enough to chance migrating to America in the first place.

I wasn't trying to be anal, I think there's a huge difference between people people looking at you with suspicion because of your skin color, and living subject to Jim Crow laws.

Can you make a specific argument on how the mechanics of the cycle of poverty would work here? Racist people from Alabama treat African Americans badly, which explains why they're doing so poorly, but are happy to see Nigerians zoom past them?

Furthermore, what Africans got to America in the past fifty years aren't close to a random sample; they are extremely disproportionately people who were well off enough to chance migrating to America in the first place.

So you are saying there isn't a single non-white group that arrived poor, and who is doing better than whites nowadays? If I find one will you change your mind on the cycle of poverty?

Racist people from Alabama treat African Americans badly, which explains why they're doing so poorly, but are happy to see Nigerians zoom past them?

That's.. Kinda it, yeah. The Nigerians mostly aren't moving to the south, and when they do mostly don't get caught up in the sorts of dynamics southern black people do. Pretty much.

So you are saying there isn't a single non-white group that arrived poor, and who is doing better than whites nowadays? If I find one will you change your mind on the cycle of poverty?

No, and that's so far off the mark from what I wrote that I've no idea how you could read into it that way. What the hell, man? The Africans who migrated to America over the past fifty years, disproportionately, were among the most well-off and affluent people within their own societies. The same did not hold true for the slaves carted off that way. A skilled Nigerian worker migrating for a nation more than eager to receive skilled workers is going to have extremely different outcomes from someone whose ancestors were still slaves in the 1800s and whose (white) neighbours, by and large, wish they were anywhere but near them.

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They'd have to address the other side of the equation - groups of immigrants that came with nothing to their name, but ended up doing ok, or even above average within a generation or two, or lottery winners who reverted back to their old socio-economic class within a generation or less.

The argument would probably be that these new arrivals did not suffer from the destruction of other, perhaps intangible assets: a culture of intact families, agency, responsibility for one's own well-being, lack of generational trauma etc.

But.... then what's the difference between that and the standard conservative argument about culture being the root of the issue? When you called it "the cycle of poverty" I assumed you meant material conditions.

To be honest, I am not quite sure what people mean by "cycle of poverty". I am sure there is a whole host of definitions. From what I gather, it is an umbrella term for various theses stating that unequal conditions that have long been resolved can still have effects for the descendants of the marginalised. It is an argument referring to unequal starting positions due to past injustices, which are often used to justify compensatory preferential treatment for the people ostensibly still affected. One of the most plausible mechanisms for such an effect (to me) is via culture, i.e. poverty->culture of poverty->poverty. This is very likely not an argument a progressive would make.

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