7 ms·

Economic Mobility Requires the Nearly Impossible

• norikki 9y ago
  First listed reason for inequality in America according to The Atlantic: Slavery. Good to know what political slant they bring to the table.
  • loeg 9y ago
    Can you explain how Slavery represents a political slant? Are facts political now?
    • AckSyn 9y ago
      Facts that are so old that they have no resemblance of any reasonable basis of someone's current situation should be called out for being political.
      • pikzen 9y ago
        Facts that have affected generations and driven a part of your population to the lowest levels are, indeed, political. Especially if they point out facts you don't like. Aree you going to say the same thing about Jim Crow laws? There has been a systematic will to enslave and degrade black people in America, and this is a continuing effort.
        • AckSyn 9y ago
          > There has been a systematic will to enslave and degrade black people in America, and this is a continuing effort. Are you mad, or are you posting from the wrong century?
          • pikzen 9y ago
            I am posting from the century where, for example, the war on drugs is still a thing, which affects black communities more. I'm posting from the century where an African American will get a harsher sentence than a white person, for the same offence or crime. Reality is tough, huh?
      • cmurf 9y ago
        Because you're not arguing facts, by ignoring them if not flat out suggesting they don't exist in the present time, what you've written is worthy of legitimate ad hominem attack. And that's because the problem is with you, the person. You are a deeply ignorant and foolish person - whether it's malice or not I cannot say. But it is damaging to your personal credibility and is damaging to discourse by speaking mistruth. Jim Crow laws are from 1965, they directly connect to this country's history of slavery. That is not "so old" at all. And variations of Jim Crow laws still persist to this day, hence the Voting Rights Acts. That there are clever derivatives of these practices does not at all mean "they are so old they have no resemblance of". Yes foolish person, they do have resemblance of. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pasadena-texas-voting-rights-act_us_58714e44e4b02b5f85891a0d http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pasadena-texas-voting-ri... For some book ideas so you can work on your ignorance of this present day relevant history: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/chris-hayes-by-the-book.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/chris-hayes-...
  • LyndsySimon 9y ago
    Oh, it gets better: "Temin advocates doing away with the belief that private agencies can act in the interest of all citizens in the way that public entities can, and should"
    • Applejinx 9y ago
      Makes sense to me. Private agencies must act in the interest of themselves in a fiduciary sense, even outside of market forces. Once you involve market forces, and worse, the issuing of stock leading to ownership by a class that demands immediate returns of money for their investment, private agencies are seemingly required to screw over citizens, because that's how you extract money from them in large quantities. Contrasted to that, the bureaucracy of public entities is a much more insignificant problem. Public internet might be sort of 'third world', but right now they are kicking our butts in that, and Comcast might be working hard (meh…) but they are not working for you, they are working to extract capital out of you in the most efficient manner possible. Once you include the caveat of 'all citizens' (even in Podunkville) it's not even an argument anymore. There's an assumption that it's right and proper to hose Podunkville because they're not the big city and shouldn't have nice things if their productivity doesn't warrant it, and this assumption is fair to challenge or even contradict outright. I'm rooting for Podunkville (the big city doesn't need my ideological help) so I'm in favor of public entities. I guess we'll be seeing some experimentation, in that we're likely to see a heavy swing to privatization right now, and most likely a counter-swing in four to eight years. Should be worth keeping track of how it all works. That 'all citizens', though, that's a conditional which is at the heart of the discussion.
      • greggyb 9y ago
        Private != for-profit. Perhaps you realize this, but it does not seem clear in your post.
        • scarface74 9y ago
          The distinction between private for profit and not for profit is a distinction without a difference. It just means that outside shareholders aren't making money, but you'll find that stakeholders in a lot of not for profit companies are just as interested in making money as for profits. The stakeholder are often just the employees.
  • aphextron 9y ago
    How exactly is this a political slant? Slavery is directly responsible for the mass genocide and economic subjugation of African Americans for the past two centuries. Beyond that, it set the stage for the civil war, which crystallized the economic disparity between north and south forever.
  • alexc05 9y ago
    I really think these articles are important to read. I still think about and reference Ta-nehisi Coats' article "the case for reparations" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas... He makes a strong point. Now, I'm a white guy, my father owned a small business after selling his scanning electron microscope company to a bigger player. He paid for my University education outright including rent. I had to work for any spending money I wanted, but I basically had a free ride into my current programming job. A poor black kid living in a high-violent-crime area who is the child of a minimum-wage-working single mother, is not going to have the same chances. If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed. This is (according to this article and others) traceable in a large part back to slavery. But it also comes from gererational poverty. Lack of parental resources leading to malnutrition, which leads to inattention in school, parental long hours at work leads to a lack of attention and corrective feedback. Or the parents are addicted to something and modelling bad behavior to begin with. The child in these cases starts innocent and realistically has an infantessemal chance of success. The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. Free breakfast and lunch for kids, raise minimum wage, etc... The Palmer Luckey's of the world have to catch on to just how fucking privileged they are as middle class white kids. These articles don't deserve to be rejected outright under "bias" they're based on real solid research.
    • teslabox 9y ago
      > The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. It'd be even better to end institutionalized racism, institute a mass pardon program, and pay reparations to the victims of Nixon's stupid escalation of the war on plants: At the time [1994], I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpe... edit: John Taylor Gatto [1] points out in one of his books that black families were pretty stable post-civil-war, until the governments started sending black men to prison for teh ganja. Children do better when they have a father around. [1] https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/ https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/
  • yardie 9y ago
    Indeed. It began with slavery and stayed with us in various forms of oppression up to and including today. But America is great so we're going to take it back to Jim Crow.
  • josho 9y ago
    Your comment is being downvoted because you dismiss the article based on the first sentence and offer no specific criticism. We can do better than that here.
    • r00fus 9y ago
      I'd also say the comment is being downvoted for mentioning rational, on-topic facts as "political slant".
  • cmurf 9y ago
    How is this a political slant? If you want to refine the cause of inequality, that's fair, but on the face of it, calling it political and somehow therefore invalid or a weak argument, is itself weak and invalid. I'd refine it by saying the reason is when exploitation is considered valid and moral, it exists for a purpose. It is OK to select your targets, where you gain and they lose, if they don't stop you. It's finders keepers losers weepers. It's a game of might makes right. You either agree that there are superior people with superior ideas and it's morally OK to exploit others, or you don't. But I consider exploitation the superset cause of inequality. The specific instance of this exploitation in American history has been various kinds of servitude, varying from targeting races (African, Chinese, Irish, Italian). And even today there's exploitation that's class based: trying to make public institutions in a democratic tradition a pay for play, or privatized. Justice, education, privacy - these are products to be paid for, and if you can't pay, you get none or you get lower quality versions.
  • sctb 9y ago
    > Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• rch 9y ago
  > address systemic racism by reviving the spirit of the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s and 1970s I think we're going to need more concrete recommendations than that.
  • Thrillington 9y ago
    We would be better off going back to the antitrust monopoly busting of the initial 1930s new deal anyway.
• maroonblazer 9y ago
  One solution that isn't mentioned is improving our voting process. U.S. ranks something like 30th in voter turnout. Given that you're more likely to vote if you're well-educated/higher income, white and older means many of the disenfranchised referred to in this article aren't represented in govt.
• padobson 9y ago
  This is where I stopped reading: He writes that the upper class of FTE workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some groups and not others, largely along racial lines. The idea that raising the top marginal tax rates 3-5% or raising the minimum wage 4 or 5 bucks will combat inequality is laughable. The cognitive dissonance between the cause of class (and the related race) inequality and the policies suggested to combat it never fail to blow my mind. Slavery was a legal, government subsidized industry. The Jim Crow south that systematically stripped the black community of their property rights was built on a system of state and federal laws. The highly regulated, highly subsidized mortgage loan industry had reams of racially divisive rules that barred the black community from building generational wealth during the most important period of general economic prosperity in perhaps the history of the world following WWII. American governments spent 200 years systematically robbing various ethnic groups of their rights, but bullshit pieces like this blame it on affluent white people that vote for candidates that have ideological problems with the minimum wage. Gimme a break. The cause of economic inequality is several generations of government disrespect of individual property rights and monetary policy that slants competition toward those that can pool assets - banks.
  • dnautics 9y ago
    I think people don't fully appreciate the erosive power of monetary policy.
    • eutectic 9y ago
      What do you mean?
      • throwaway2048 9y ago
        The amount of money being pumped into the economy by the federal reserve has done things like supercharge housing prices, because nobody can find a safe place to dump their new money, it all goes into real estate. This jacks up the price of housing for the middle class and poor to a ridiculous degree, to the point that in many markets over 75% (!) of post tax income is being spent on housing. I suspect this is the real reason we aren't seeing inflation from so much money being poured into the economy, all the money of the "have nots" is being sucked away by insane real estate costs, thus the prices of goods that are traditionally tracked by inflation indicators are unable to rise. This is what is meant by the erosive power of monetary policy, in a very real way it is destroying the wealth of everybody but the 1%, because they cant do anything but pour an increasing large share of their earnings into housing costs (which continue to escalate).
• dnautics 9y ago
  > Many cities, which house a disproportionate portion of the black (and increasingly, Latino) population, lack adequate funding for schools. This is quizzical. Most cities spend more money per pupil than suburbs and rural areas; which suggests that poor education in urban areas is a function of institutional corruption and not lack of funding.
  • jnicholasp 9y ago
    > This is quizzical I think you might mean "This is questionable". Quizzical is an adjective applied to people's expressions or behavior, implying that they are puzzled, confused, or questioning. It is not an appropriate word for suggesting that an argument is dubious. [Assume a standard grammar Nazi mea culpa here, if language corrections are annoying to you.]
    • justifier 9y ago
      i read gp as using quizzical as a verb meaning the sentence induced in thæm 'expressions or behavior, implying that they are puzzled, confused, or questioning.' [Assume a standard grammar allied powers mea culpa here, if language corrections are annoying to you.]
      • jnicholasp 9y ago
        > i > thæm I suspect the so-called Allied powers are trying to instigate a war, but we will not be provoked. > i read gp as using quizzical as a verb That reading of gp's intent, while plausible, still involves an in-apt usage of the word. At best, you might say "This makes me quizzical", but that would still be an awkward way to express your doubts about the validity of the argument.
  • transreal 9y ago
    Where are you getting that data from? From what I have seen, public schools rely a lot on parental donations to go beyond a low base level of education, and city schools on average don't have as much parental involvement compared to good suburban schools, and so have less to spend overall per student.
• zackmorris 9y ago
  I’m pushing 40 and side with the article. It takes about 20 years of paying one’s dues to really understand how broken the entire system is. How much effort year after year it takes to tread water, to climb slower than one is capable of, to get pushed back by debt and doing what others tell us. That’s the part I’d specifically like to do away with - the rat race. I’m older, more broken today, but no more capable than I was when I was 20. I mostly see the wasted time and how others happened to land on the lucky side of things. Now that I have some semblance of stability in my life, I’d prefer to give it all away if it allowed others to self-actualize earlier. I’m wondering if this is something one either groks or doesn’t, and how to communicate with people who only talk but don’t listen.
• pocoloco 9y ago
  The view expressed in the article is not surprising when reading two other articles (see below) that appeared not long ago here in HN, one of which was flagged (I tend to suspect that these theses hit a little too close to home for some and hence the immediate dismissal). [1] America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-is-regressing-into-a-developing-nation-for-most-people https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-is-r... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14158310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14158310 [2] Why Poverty Is Like a Disease http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/why-poverty-is-like-a-disease http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/why-poverty-is-like-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14201822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14201822