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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27887 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?

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?

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