I think you give too short a shrift to the idea that public policy can, at the margin, ameliorate some of the entrenched consequences of our historical legacy of racism (and these entrenched consequences are a big part, though not all, of what is generally meant by systemic racism). A couple of examples:
1. Black kids are AIUI much more likely to grow up in areas of concentrated poverty, and growing up in an area of concentrated poverty is bad for anyone's life outcomes. This disparity is at least partly due to the legacy of racist housing policies which led to residential segregation patterns, and housing policies aiming to break down those segregation patterns and move people to opportunity could ameliorate it.
2. Black kids are also more likely to be victims of lead pollution, and the distribution of lead pollution is due at least in part to environmental racism. So a race-neutral effort to remove environmental lead everywhere, which is likely a good thing for the whole population, would also act to narrow racial gaps.
I share the tendency to attribute most of these differences to cultural causes rather than genetics or systemic racism, but isn't it plausible that the change in incarceration rates for black males over that time span was due to society taking remedial steps to reduce the effects of systemic racism?
In particular, if we take "cultural causes" to act through the habits and indicators that a person learns and exhibits, and "systemic racism" to act through differential expressions of government power, the change in incarceration rates looks like some combination of both. If one follows a link from the Pew article to a Marshall Project essay, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/12/15/a-mass-incarceration-mystery, there are a number of factors contributing to the change. Both crime and arrest rates have dropped since the 1990s; the former is more of a (putative) cultural-cause effect, and the latter a (putative) systemic-racism effect. The War on Drugs shifted focus over this time, from crack to meth and opioids, and criminal justice reform was disproportionately adopted in urban areas. I think this at least weakly or partially supports the systemic-racism position, although one could argue -- even from what the Marshall Project presented -- that the effect is partly a kind of systemic-reverse-racism, treating rural crime more strictly than urban crime.
On the other hand, that we reduced such a disparity by a third with relatively ordinary changes to the polity, strongly undercuts the claim that correcting those problems "requires revolutionary change".
Favoring a cultural explanation should be done, even if the gaps were substantially genetic, which, of course, they are not. The path we are on, and well down, is disastrous. Charles Murray's numbers maybe, are appropriate material for the Inner Party, but it's hard to see how telling the public about them is productive, especially because he is wrong and there are no genetic differences. I am sure I am not alone in observing the increasingly poisoned interpersonal relations which have prevailed in the last year, especially. It's lose-lose for everyone.
The question is, what on earth can be done to improve culture? If you could engineer some 'conspiracy' by media/entertainment/education purveyors to promote virtue and inter-group harmony, you could certainly improve things, but how to do this? How do you get all the parties on board? We know what this looks like, it's called "The 1980s". When we look back the 80s, we see TV and movies which model almost ideal inter-group relations.
I suppose we could write a letter to the NSA and ask them, real nice, to please blackmail the heads of major music and TV production companies to start modeling high contentiousness behavior, and inter-group harmony. This is the best I got.
You are right to favor generic policies to promote behavior that leads to better outcomes."
But what exactly are they?
And are there any possible that haven't been tried?
How about paying kids to go to school, do homework, and avoid causing trouble? $10/day is about $2,000 / year -- with the teacher able to withold money for bad behavior, and they get $0 if they don't show up, even if it's because they're sick.
The success sequence 1) finish HS, 2) FT job, and 3) marriage before children fails to mention #4) do not commit crimes (and get arrested and convicted).
In high crime school districts, those who finish HS should get a diploma plus $10, 000.
In high poverty/ low employment school districts, those under 25 who have full time jobs or are attending college full time (or both part time), should get some $200/month (6k/yr) bonus for keeping a job for a year (OR working every month with any job changes that pay more).
In school districts with low marriage rates, those parents who ARE married should get $1k yr for each year of continuous marriage up to 5 (or 10?).
School district communities are the key communities of America - and big school districts should be reduced to smaller ones so that real issues can be addressed.
I'm sure such "good behavior" bonus payments for more certain success will have more poor folks doing these steps, tho it's unlikely to be enough to eliminate the gaps.
We should be focusing efforts on changes that reduce the gaps.
The USA should also have volunteer National Service that accepts everybody, even low IQ folk, and gives them jobs that allow them to be productive, contributing members of their community -- even if there are many disabled jobs such that the net value of the work (minus mistakes) is less is paid. Any small overpayment is far far less than UBI, and far more supportive of developing work habits to allow escaping poverty.
Society needs to talk a bit more about the lazy, low-IQ, play-all-the-time kids that don't work and become young adults that don't work.
The Robin Hanson UB Dorm living ideas should be tried.
Far more ideas should be tried. Including even a few more trials of UBI - tho so far limited trials have been failures.
I think there is a 4th option - but maybe many would claim it was 'white supremacy'.
1. There were legitimately racial barriers to work and prosperity in the not-so-distant past.
2. Over the intervening years while overt racism has declined, barriers to entry have increased dramatically. Between zoning restrictions, licensure, the defacto requirement that one must get expensive college degrees for any middle class job and the list goes on.
3. While not explicitly racists, these barriers have done a lot to maintain a status quo.
While not all of the story - certainly culture is probably part of it - I think it does a better job explaining while progress is so difficult.
Closing racial gaps is a noble problem and you have set forth a sound path forward. But you and so many others are simply focused on the wrong problem when we consider the success and wellbeing of the future generations of Americans.
I favor Tyler Cowen’s problem of maximizing economic growth as the paramount problem of our time. Other issues that should take precedence over the racial gaps problem include:
1. Elimination of all nuclear weapons
2. Sound immigration policy that accounts for 60% of US population growth
3. Building the world’s greatest education system
4. Eliminating obesity, diabetes, alcoholism, and drug overdoses
5. Curing cancer
6. Eliminating neuro-degenerative deseases
7. Developing sound strategies for climate change.
8. Reducing violent crimes by 50%
9. Eliminate poverty and food insecurity in the US
10. Providing a system of healthcare that makes universal care accessible to all.
I believe the greatest minds on earth could solve these problems in the next generation. Let’s turn our attention and work together on the most important issues first.
Mainly I agree, but "white supremacy" (persistence into the presence of overt racisms in the past) partially overlaps with "cultural differences." And that overlap may justify some (but not just any) non-colorblind policies.
Your approach is wrong, very wrong. First, there are no two persons alike, and if we are going to focus on their life outcomes we should not be surprised they differ. Indeed, if we are going to compare two groups of people we should expect significant differences in their life outcomes regardless of how we define and measure outcomes. It's nonsense to compare two persons without defining what we know today about the many dimensions that define their personality, their behavior, and the outcomes of their actions. And make no mistake we know little about those dimensions. Given what we know today, it's grotesque to compare the life outcomes of two or more people (since you reject standard macroeconomics, you know well how wrong comparisons of aggregates of outcomes are).
Second, if we were going to explain differences between the personalities and behaviors of two adults, we may rely on dimensions that may define three types of sources: biological, cultural, and rational (just read what Hayek wrote in the final chapter of the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty in the late 1970s). Although we have advanced a lot in the past 40 years, we are still far away from knowing enough about those dimensions and sources to compare two people.
Third, we are still struggling to separate clearly biological and cultural sources of human differences. This is due mainly to our struggle to define culture. I suggest you focus on new work on child development to understand what may be relevant dimensions in new adults' cultural legacy and how different they may be. Social scientists may prefer to define culture in turn of the personal and social principles (values, rules) learned during their development, but others may emphasize language or something else (I don't mention emotions because as of today I prefer to look at them as constraints to rationality).
Fourth, rather than relying on available measures of some potential outcomes, you have to start from our profound concerns about the meaning and the extension of life. Our actions have too many consequences, so we should be sure which ones we are concerned about. And remember, the distinction between intentional and unintentional consequences because it's critical to assess rationality.
I think you give too short a shrift to the idea that public policy can, at the margin, ameliorate some of the entrenched consequences of our historical legacy of racism (and these entrenched consequences are a big part, though not all, of what is generally meant by systemic racism). A couple of examples:
1. Black kids are AIUI much more likely to grow up in areas of concentrated poverty, and growing up in an area of concentrated poverty is bad for anyone's life outcomes. This disparity is at least partly due to the legacy of racist housing policies which led to residential segregation patterns, and housing policies aiming to break down those segregation patterns and move people to opportunity could ameliorate it.
2. Black kids are also more likely to be victims of lead pollution, and the distribution of lead pollution is due at least in part to environmental racism. So a race-neutral effort to remove environmental lead everywhere, which is likely a good thing for the whole population, would also act to narrow racial gaps.
I share the tendency to attribute most of these differences to cultural causes rather than genetics or systemic racism, but isn't it plausible that the change in incarceration rates for black males over that time span was due to society taking remedial steps to reduce the effects of systemic racism?
In particular, if we take "cultural causes" to act through the habits and indicators that a person learns and exhibits, and "systemic racism" to act through differential expressions of government power, the change in incarceration rates looks like some combination of both. If one follows a link from the Pew article to a Marshall Project essay, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/12/15/a-mass-incarceration-mystery, there are a number of factors contributing to the change. Both crime and arrest rates have dropped since the 1990s; the former is more of a (putative) cultural-cause effect, and the latter a (putative) systemic-racism effect. The War on Drugs shifted focus over this time, from crack to meth and opioids, and criminal justice reform was disproportionately adopted in urban areas. I think this at least weakly or partially supports the systemic-racism position, although one could argue -- even from what the Marshall Project presented -- that the effect is partly a kind of systemic-reverse-racism, treating rural crime more strictly than urban crime.
On the other hand, that we reduced such a disparity by a third with relatively ordinary changes to the polity, strongly undercuts the claim that correcting those problems "requires revolutionary change".
Favoring a cultural explanation should be done, even if the gaps were substantially genetic, which, of course, they are not. The path we are on, and well down, is disastrous. Charles Murray's numbers maybe, are appropriate material for the Inner Party, but it's hard to see how telling the public about them is productive, especially because he is wrong and there are no genetic differences. I am sure I am not alone in observing the increasingly poisoned interpersonal relations which have prevailed in the last year, especially. It's lose-lose for everyone.
The question is, what on earth can be done to improve culture? If you could engineer some 'conspiracy' by media/entertainment/education purveyors to promote virtue and inter-group harmony, you could certainly improve things, but how to do this? How do you get all the parties on board? We know what this looks like, it's called "The 1980s". When we look back the 80s, we see TV and movies which model almost ideal inter-group relations.
I suppose we could write a letter to the NSA and ask them, real nice, to please blackmail the heads of major music and TV production companies to start modeling high contentiousness behavior, and inter-group harmony. This is the best I got.
You are right to favor generic policies to promote behavior that leads to better outcomes."
But what exactly are they?
And are there any possible that haven't been tried?
How about paying kids to go to school, do homework, and avoid causing trouble? $10/day is about $2,000 / year -- with the teacher able to withold money for bad behavior, and they get $0 if they don't show up, even if it's because they're sick.
The success sequence 1) finish HS, 2) FT job, and 3) marriage before children fails to mention #4) do not commit crimes (and get arrested and convicted).
In high crime school districts, those who finish HS should get a diploma plus $10, 000.
In high poverty/ low employment school districts, those under 25 who have full time jobs or are attending college full time (or both part time), should get some $200/month (6k/yr) bonus for keeping a job for a year (OR working every month with any job changes that pay more).
In school districts with low marriage rates, those parents who ARE married should get $1k yr for each year of continuous marriage up to 5 (or 10?).
School district communities are the key communities of America - and big school districts should be reduced to smaller ones so that real issues can be addressed.
I'm sure such "good behavior" bonus payments for more certain success will have more poor folks doing these steps, tho it's unlikely to be enough to eliminate the gaps.
We should be focusing efforts on changes that reduce the gaps.
The USA should also have volunteer National Service that accepts everybody, even low IQ folk, and gives them jobs that allow them to be productive, contributing members of their community -- even if there are many disabled jobs such that the net value of the work (minus mistakes) is less is paid. Any small overpayment is far far less than UBI, and far more supportive of developing work habits to allow escaping poverty.
Society needs to talk a bit more about the lazy, low-IQ, play-all-the-time kids that don't work and become young adults that don't work.
The Robin Hanson UB Dorm living ideas should be tried.
Far more ideas should be tried. Including even a few more trials of UBI - tho so far limited trials have been failures.
I think there is a 4th option - but maybe many would claim it was 'white supremacy'.
1. There were legitimately racial barriers to work and prosperity in the not-so-distant past.
2. Over the intervening years while overt racism has declined, barriers to entry have increased dramatically. Between zoning restrictions, licensure, the defacto requirement that one must get expensive college degrees for any middle class job and the list goes on.
3. While not explicitly racists, these barriers have done a lot to maintain a status quo.
While not all of the story - certainly culture is probably part of it - I think it does a better job explaining while progress is so difficult.
Closing racial gaps is a noble problem and you have set forth a sound path forward. But you and so many others are simply focused on the wrong problem when we consider the success and wellbeing of the future generations of Americans.
I favor Tyler Cowen’s problem of maximizing economic growth as the paramount problem of our time. Other issues that should take precedence over the racial gaps problem include:
1. Elimination of all nuclear weapons
2. Sound immigration policy that accounts for 60% of US population growth
3. Building the world’s greatest education system
4. Eliminating obesity, diabetes, alcoholism, and drug overdoses
5. Curing cancer
6. Eliminating neuro-degenerative deseases
7. Developing sound strategies for climate change.
8. Reducing violent crimes by 50%
9. Eliminate poverty and food insecurity in the US
10. Providing a system of healthcare that makes universal care accessible to all.
I believe the greatest minds on earth could solve these problems in the next generation. Let’s turn our attention and work together on the most important issues first.
Mainly I agree, but "white supremacy" (persistence into the presence of overt racisms in the past) partially overlaps with "cultural differences." And that overlap may justify some (but not just any) non-colorblind policies.
Your approach is wrong, very wrong. First, there are no two persons alike, and if we are going to focus on their life outcomes we should not be surprised they differ. Indeed, if we are going to compare two groups of people we should expect significant differences in their life outcomes regardless of how we define and measure outcomes. It's nonsense to compare two persons without defining what we know today about the many dimensions that define their personality, their behavior, and the outcomes of their actions. And make no mistake we know little about those dimensions. Given what we know today, it's grotesque to compare the life outcomes of two or more people (since you reject standard macroeconomics, you know well how wrong comparisons of aggregates of outcomes are).
Second, if we were going to explain differences between the personalities and behaviors of two adults, we may rely on dimensions that may define three types of sources: biological, cultural, and rational (just read what Hayek wrote in the final chapter of the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty in the late 1970s). Although we have advanced a lot in the past 40 years, we are still far away from knowing enough about those dimensions and sources to compare two people.
Third, we are still struggling to separate clearly biological and cultural sources of human differences. This is due mainly to our struggle to define culture. I suggest you focus on new work on child development to understand what may be relevant dimensions in new adults' cultural legacy and how different they may be. Social scientists may prefer to define culture in turn of the personal and social principles (values, rules) learned during their development, but others may emphasize language or something else (I don't mention emotions because as of today I prefer to look at them as constraints to rationality).
Fourth, rather than relying on available measures of some potential outcomes, you have to start from our profound concerns about the meaning and the extension of life. Our actions have too many consequences, so we should be sure which ones we are concerned about. And remember, the distinction between intentional and unintentional consequences because it's critical to assess rationality.