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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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indeed asian crime rates are lower than other ethnicities countrywide

Yes, but Asians are also richer than other ethnicities nationwide. What's interesting about New York City is that for some reason they have the highest poverty rate, and still commit the least crime.

Why Asians have such high poverty rates in New York City is an interesting question. I virtually never see this discussed except as a throwaway line in articles promoting the "Model Minority Myth" myth. I suspect that it has something to do with NYC being a destination for Asian immigrants with limited English and technical skills, and possibly some confounding by age (which would be relevant to the crime issue as well), but I'm not sure.

I suspect a lot of it is due to NYC Asians running small businesses and engaging in a lot of tax evasion, which makes them look artificially poorer than they actually are. No good evidence, though, just suspicion.

Now that you mention it, I'm having trouble finding it now, but I remember reading about some Chinese neighborhood in the US or Canada that ostensibly had a very high poverty rate, but was full of million-dollar houses, the explanation being that there was a ton of tax evasion going on.

Isn’t the pattern for Asian immigrants to be poor the first generation but have sky-high upward mobility thereafter? If NYC’s Asian population is more heavily 1st gen, or NYC has lower upward mobility, that could also be a factor.

I definitely agree with the tax evasion thing but think it’s probably not the explanatory factor.

Depending how the stats are reported, there's also a significant number of Asian college students at NYU/Columbia/Fordham/CUNY/Etc who have very low incomes, even if they are factually rich growing up and once they get a job they're in poverty statistically when they're in school. Idk if that matters in a city that size, but it's there.

Good point, but as you observe, I don’t think it matters in city of that scale. Even if there were 10 schools with 10 000 poor Asians in each, that would still only add up to less than 10% of NYC Asians.

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