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Notes -
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:
[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.
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.
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