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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?

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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