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A highly one-sided presentation. Let me point out some issues: it makes major hay of Moving to Opportunity, but MTO is a notorious failure - it increased crime

by aab0 10y ago

A highly one-sided presentation. Let me point out some issues: it makes major hay of Moving to Opportunity, but MTO is a notorious failure - it increased crime rates in targeted areas, and showed no improvements on anything until the cited Chetty paper managed to torture out of the data, just recently, improvements in only 1 subgroup on only a handful of metrics (which, aside from Vox misstating the Chetty results by implying it was all MTO participants, rather than one post hoc subgroup, contradicts the later experiment: the claimed effects do not remotely overlap); non-randomized moves are heavily confounded by upward mobility and human capital; many other studies like Swedish lottery studies and the land lottery natural experiment show that exogenous shocks of wealth do not produce meaningful improvements in things like health anywhere remotely close to the observed correlations of wealth/health; genetically informed family designs which account for heritability by looking at siblings differentially exposed or by looking at relatives tend to find that most 'poor neighborhood' effects are driven by genetic confounds; specific versions of the 'poor neighborhood' hypothesis tend to go down in flames when rigorously tested (most recently, the claim that schizophrenia is caused by bad neighborhoods, which everyone was sure about; polygenic scores for schizophrenia show that it is the other way around - schizophrenics and those vulnerable to schizophrenia drift to poor neighborhoods); in genetics studies, the correlation between wealthy parents and one's own SES turns out to be entirely genetically mediated; the parent/child IQ thing is differential regression to the mean; and so on. Many of the claims made in OP are naively causal and are guaranteed to be overestimated based simply on not including genetic relatedness. These are just the recent contrary studies I happen to remember offhand. When you look at especially the recent genetic studies using polygenic scores from the GWASes to test environmental claims (eg Mendelian randomization), it's becoming increasingly clear: the slate is not blank and the sociology emperor has no clothes. I don't even know... what can be done about sociology? It is 2016 and every time I see a newspaper article or editorial invoking sociological results, it's totally wrong, and the sociologists quoted seem 100% committed to ignoring all the contrary evidence that not all differences are 100% due to environments. I mean... can you imagine seeing Vox cite a recent paper like "The Genetics of Success: How Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated With Educational Attainment Relate to Life-Course Development" http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/05/26/0956797616643070.abstract http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/05/26/095679761664... or a newspaper article on it (which didn't quote some scientists arguing that genetics research should be defunded or that the research is irrelevant)? That would be nice - society needs to come to grips with the confirmation of behavioral genetics. But it doesn't seem like it will happen anytime soon. It's all terribly frustrating. Anyway, I didn't mean to rant or try to write an in depth carefully cited rebuttal, but I just wanted to say: it is not as simple as 'poor people are poor and unhealthy because of racism and poverty', and there is lots of high-quality evidence of this which tends to go undiscussed in liberal media outlets, so pieces like this are closer to advocacy than research popularization.

beatpanda 10y ago
> society needs to come to grips with the confirmation of behavioral genetics. In your opinion, what would that look like in the ideal case?
alanwatts 10y ago
"Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low. Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. (Listen to him) That is what was known as the Populist Movement. (Speak, sir) The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses (Yes, sir) and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses (Yeah) into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South. To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. (Right) I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, (Yes) thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. (Yes, sir) And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century. If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir)." Dr. King, Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March, 25 March 1965 http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_address_at_the_conclusion_of_selma_march.1.html http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...

by aab0 10y ago

beatpanda 10y ago

> society needs to come to grips with the confirmation of behavioral genetics. In your opinion, what would that look like in the ideal case?

alanwatts 10y ago

"Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low. Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. (Listen to him) That is what was known as the Populist Movement. (Speak, sir) The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses (Yes, sir) and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses (Yeah) into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South. To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. (Right) I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, (Yes) thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. (Yes, sir) And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century. If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir)." Dr. King, Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March, 25 March 1965 http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_address_at_the_conclusion_of_selma_march.1.html http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...