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This trend is based in our culture's obsession with equality of outcomes. Rather than telling those who are struggling to change culture or virtue -- we assume

This trend is based in our culture's obsession with equality of outcomes. Rather than telling those who are struggling to change culture or virtue -- we assume the "system" is at fault and force a change there. As the author pointed out, HS graduation rate is the symptom not the cause to be treated. As an example, asians whether immigrant or American-born typically have the best credit, highest graduation rates, pursue higher education, and have the highest paying / stable jobs of any culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... Either you are racist and think "asians are better than everyone else", or you have to concede that culture and virtues are the cause -- since they too are in the same education system. They simply emphasize the right priorities, convey those to children, and teach functional life skills (conscientiousness, hard work, etc).

dforrestwilson 9y ago
Within the context of a stable democracy founded upon a legacy of Judeo-Christian values which encourages individualism, yes this is true. I think that's the winning combination personally.
- jhoechtl 9y ago
  Care to elaborate? I fail to see the context yet your idea sounds interesting.
  - dforrestwilson 9y ago
    Western European culture in particular appears to have encouraged a degree of reward for individualism and self-advancement which Eastern cultures (for whatever reason) have not been able to sustain. Corruption and favoritism are also more commonly accepted, in part I suspect due to the influence of Confucianism and Buddhism. This tends to result in societies with less-democratic structures which ultimately entrench social status. Most of us have probably had a college class or two with foreign students from Asia who somehow passed the very tough English component of the GMAT or other standardized test, yet barely spoke English. I certainly had a few such folks in mine. My intuition would be that test scores matter quite a bit, but honestly achieving them may not matter as much. Social mobility is higher here in the U.S. than most Asian cultures, but we put a greater emphasis on honestly achieving it (or did in the past anyway). Combine that with an Asian cultural emphasis around testing/studying and I think you get an interesting dynamic. Just my perspective.
    - jhoechtl 9y ago
      Thanks for explaining in more detail. Sorry for the downvotes (certainly not mine). While I want and connot comment on corruption etc I certainly wittness the (over-) emphasis on individualism in western cultures as oposed to eastern cultures (or is it just China?). Don't know though wheather this is comming from Judaism/Chrustianity. Might also be a thing
    - dforrestwilson 9y ago
      Sigh, I figured this would get down-voted. Not surprised but kind of disappointed that, after giving my opinion and qualifying it as such, someone still felt it necessary.
pmoriarty 9y ago
"we assume the "system" is at fault" ... which is, of course, inconceivable. "Either you are racist and think "asians are better than everyone else", or you have to concede that culture and virtues are the cause" Or might it be the likelihood that the Asians who are in the US in the first place tend to be a very tiny percentage of relatively fortunate families from their own societies back in Asia, and elites tend to perform better?
- program_whiz 9y ago
  According to NYT, the effect is present even on poor and working-class asian families. They also attribute to culture (but like you point out this isn't true for all minorities, only Asians): https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-advantage.html?mcubz=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-... NYT Quote: "Why should the success of the children of Asian doctors, nurtured by teachers, be reassuring to a black boy in Baltimore who is raised by a struggling single mom, whom society regards as a potential menace? Disadvantage and marginalization are complex, often deeply rooted in social structures and unconscious biases, sometimes compounded by hopelessness and self-destructive behaviors, and because one group can access the American dream does not mean that all groups can."
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    "the effect is present even on poor and working-class asian families" They might be poor in the US, but that doesn't mean they didn't come from relatively privileged families back in their home countries.
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    Nobody cares. Derailing to talk about so-called racial differences only takes away attention from things we can actually change.
austenallred 9y ago
Also based on the reality that we're requiring college degrees for everything, despite the fact that a lot of what's taught in college could easily be taught in a trade school.
analog31 9y ago
As an example, asians whether immigrant or American-born typically have the best credit, highest graduation rates, pursue higher education, and have the highest paying / stable jobs of any culture. It might point to the same conclusion, but I'd need to see a result that is controlled for parental education and wealth, and also be shown that being "asian" in the US equates with a culture. Anecdata: In my locale, the "asian" kids do have a different education system: Most of them live in the neighborhoods, and attend elementary schools, that generally have the highest level of educated and affluent parents. Many of those "asian" kids are adopted.
pm90 9y ago
You make a good point but I think its not accurate to conflate race with culture, although the two do seem intertwined. I tend to believe that, if a white kid (say) was brought up by Asian parents, he/she would probably have the same qualities as an asian kid. So its not racist to say that Asian culture values different things than the mainstream American culture, which is perhaps why Asian Americans tend to be more educated and gainfully employed.
- busemann 9y ago
  Do you think an adopted Black kid would on average develop the same qualities as an Asian kid in an Asian family?
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > its not accurate to conflate race with culture This is true, but there aren't regularly gathered statistics on what culture students are a part of. Race, however, is constantly tracked. There is generally a correlation between race and culture in America, and thus race is being used as a proxy for culture in the example.
- zmoreira 9y ago
  I'm sorry to bring bad news, but you are probably wrong. Kids tend to be like their biological parents. http://quillette.com/2015/12/01/why-parenting-may-not-matter-and-why-most-social-science-research-is-probably-wrong/ http://quillette.com/2015/12/01/why-parenting-may-not-matter...
  - pm90 9y ago
    That is a very revealing article, thanks for sharing! I think one interesting point the article makes is that parenting really doesn't matter much, except when parents do something extreme to affect the behaviors of their children. I wonder if parents' extreme desire for their children's scholastic success could be categorized as such? Anecdotally, growing up in India, I remember being hit by my parents as a younger kid; the physical violence stopped when I became a teenager, but my parents were quick to show their extreme displeasure and worry when I would get low grades in High School. Not to suggest that all Asian/South Asian households are violent towards their children, of course. Although, I do trust research over anecdata, so I will agree with you that it might just be a genetic thing.
mrhektor 9y ago
I recently read Hillbilly Elegy, and one of the key insights I got from there was success seemed to be related to a stable home / family, and in particular a presence of mentors and role models. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the success of Asians (South Asians + East Asians) also stems from the fact that divorce is looked down upon and extraordinary efforts are made to prevent it from happening. Divorcees are often social pariahs in these cultures.
- JPKab 9y ago
  Grew up in Appalachia. I agree with some of the points made by Vance in Hillbilly Elegy. I don't think he has a lot of details right, and he's not from Appalachia himself. However, he's not wrong on cultural dysfunction. I should also point out that Hillbilly Elegy has been embraced by the same political class that rejected the same key points made by Charles Murray here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murray-examines-the-white-working-class-in-coming-apart.html?mcubz=3 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murra... I should also note that Vance's book could only have succeeded as a critique of working-class white culture. Had a black man written a book like this about cultural dysfunction in his own community, he'd be vilified and marginalized as an "Uncle Tom" blaming the victims.
JPKab 9y ago
My two lunch buddies fall into two categories of "Asian-American": One is the more typical example. He's a child of voluntary immigrants, self-selected people from their nation of origin. The other is a child of refugees who fled their homeland. The refugee descendant has a much more typical level of financial dysfunction in his family, but still far better than the "underclass" elements in the US native-born population. As someone who grew up in an Appalachian family that has been in the US for over 300 years, cultural dysfunction plays a HUGE role in academic failure. Let's be honest here: The advent of birth control has now created a situation where people who don't have their shit together are going to reproduce at a higher rate than those that do. My metric for cultural dysfunction is whether a family raising kids "has their shit together" and teaches productive habits to their kids. Foods, music, language are just the visible cultural traits. Much less obvious are the habits of timeliness, respect for authority, willingness to examine one's OWN role in failure before jumping to blame others, etc. The key issue in the US is we don't have a conversation about cultural differences, and instead have a conversation about racial differences, which completely obscures the real issue. 60%+ of black American children are born out of wedlock. This isn't caused by some magic gene. This is a sub-culture within the black American population that has cultural dysfunction that matches that of some of the bad elements at play within my Appalachian relatives. We know that poverty isn't the root cause. Equally poor Latino and white communities have much higher percentages of fathers present in the household. Incarceration rates don't explain the gap either. Culture is almost certainly the answer. I say this as a person who spends a lot of time helping the neighborhood kids who are playing with my son every afternoon. Almost all of them have parents who, contrary to the narrative pushed out, are not working 60 hours a week at 2 jobs. No, they are working 40 hours or less at a crappy job, and then invest their time/resources into blowing off steam at the end of the day. Car hobbies, drinking, NFL games, but helping their kids do their homework? No way. A lot of them don't even bother TELLING their kids to do their homework.
swsieber 9y ago
This is a major point "Outliers" (by Malcom Gladwell). I recently finished listening to the book. He makes a strong case that culture heavily contributes to the success of people. He highlights Asian culture for their hard work ethic (positive) as well as the higher power distance index [1] (negative for things like airplane crashes, specifically because it impedes communication proper communication between pilot, copilots and the tower [2]). Other notable aspects of culture (well, in this case language) is that perfect pitch occurs more often in speakers of tonal languages (think chinese), and speakers of languages with shorter words for numbers can remember lists of numbers easier [3] Now does this mean we don't try to fix other things? No. "Culture" is not a panacea for everything I would think. What do you do with those born into a unfavorable circumstances? But I do agree that more often than not we're trying to fix the wrong thing when fixating on outcomes, instead of tools and opportunities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensions_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensio... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm-gladwells-cockpit-culture-theory-everywhere-after-asiana-crash/313442/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm... [3]

dforrestwilson 9y ago

Within the context of a stable democracy founded upon a legacy of Judeo-Christian values which encourages individualism, yes this is true. I think that's the winning combination personally.

jhoechtl 9y ago
Care to elaborate? I fail to see the context yet your idea sounds interesting.
- dforrestwilson 9y ago
  Western European culture in particular appears to have encouraged a degree of reward for individualism and self-advancement which Eastern cultures (for whatever reason) have not been able to sustain. Corruption and favoritism are also more commonly accepted, in part I suspect due to the influence of Confucianism and Buddhism. This tends to result in societies with less-democratic structures which ultimately entrench social status. Most of us have probably had a college class or two with foreign students from Asia who somehow passed the very tough English component of the GMAT or other standardized test, yet barely spoke English. I certainly had a few such folks in mine. My intuition would be that test scores matter quite a bit, but honestly achieving them may not matter as much. Social mobility is higher here in the U.S. than most Asian cultures, but we put a greater emphasis on honestly achieving it (or did in the past anyway). Combine that with an Asian cultural emphasis around testing/studying and I think you get an interesting dynamic. Just my perspective.
  - jhoechtl 9y ago
    Thanks for explaining in more detail. Sorry for the downvotes (certainly not mine). While I want and connot comment on corruption etc I certainly wittness the (over-) emphasis on individualism in western cultures as oposed to eastern cultures (or is it just China?). Don't know though wheather this is comming from Judaism/Chrustianity. Might also be a thing
  - dforrestwilson 9y ago
    Sigh, I figured this would get down-voted. Not surprised but kind of disappointed that, after giving my opinion and qualifying it as such, someone still felt it necessary.

pmoriarty 9y ago

"we assume the "system" is at fault" ... which is, of course, inconceivable. "Either you are racist and think "asians are better than everyone else", or you have to concede that culture and virtues are the cause" Or might it be the likelihood that the Asians who are in the US in the first place tend to be a very tiny percentage of relatively fortunate families from their own societies back in Asia, and elites tend to perform better?

program_whiz 9y ago
According to NYT, the effect is present even on poor and working-class asian families. They also attribute to culture (but like you point out this isn't true for all minorities, only Asians): https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-advantage.html?mcubz=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-... NYT Quote: "Why should the success of the children of Asian doctors, nurtured by teachers, be reassuring to a black boy in Baltimore who is raised by a struggling single mom, whom society regards as a potential menace? Disadvantage and marginalization are complex, often deeply rooted in social structures and unconscious biases, sometimes compounded by hopelessness and self-destructive behaviors, and because one group can access the American dream does not mean that all groups can."
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  "the effect is present even on poor and working-class asian families" They might be poor in the US, but that doesn't mean they didn't come from relatively privileged families back in their home countries.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Nobody cares. Derailing to talk about so-called racial differences only takes away attention from things we can actually change.

austenallred 9y ago

Also based on the reality that we're requiring college degrees for everything, despite the fact that a lot of what's taught in college could easily be taught in a trade school.

analog31 9y ago

As an example, asians whether immigrant or American-born typically have the best credit, highest graduation rates, pursue higher education, and have the highest paying / stable jobs of any culture. It might point to the same conclusion, but I'd need to see a result that is controlled for parental education and wealth, and also be shown that being "asian" in the US equates with a culture. Anecdata: In my locale, the "asian" kids do have a different education system: Most of them live in the neighborhoods, and attend elementary schools, that generally have the highest level of educated and affluent parents. Many of those "asian" kids are adopted.

pm90 9y ago

You make a good point but I think its not accurate to conflate race with culture, although the two do seem intertwined. I tend to believe that, if a white kid (say) was brought up by Asian parents, he/she would probably have the same qualities as an asian kid. So its not racist to say that Asian culture values different things than the mainstream American culture, which is perhaps why Asian Americans tend to be more educated and gainfully employed.

busemann 9y ago
Do you think an adopted Black kid would on average develop the same qualities as an Asian kid in an Asian family?
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> its not accurate to conflate race with culture This is true, but there aren't regularly gathered statistics on what culture students are a part of. Race, however, is constantly tracked. There is generally a correlation between race and culture in America, and thus race is being used as a proxy for culture in the example.
zmoreira 9y ago
I'm sorry to bring bad news, but you are probably wrong. Kids tend to be like their biological parents. http://quillette.com/2015/12/01/why-parenting-may-not-matter-and-why-most-social-science-research-is-probably-wrong/ http://quillette.com/2015/12/01/why-parenting-may-not-matter...
- pm90 9y ago
  That is a very revealing article, thanks for sharing! I think one interesting point the article makes is that parenting really doesn't matter much, except when parents do something extreme to affect the behaviors of their children. I wonder if parents' extreme desire for their children's scholastic success could be categorized as such? Anecdotally, growing up in India, I remember being hit by my parents as a younger kid; the physical violence stopped when I became a teenager, but my parents were quick to show their extreme displeasure and worry when I would get low grades in High School. Not to suggest that all Asian/South Asian households are violent towards their children, of course. Although, I do trust research over anecdata, so I will agree with you that it might just be a genetic thing.

mrhektor 9y ago

I recently read Hillbilly Elegy, and one of the key insights I got from there was success seemed to be related to a stable home / family, and in particular a presence of mentors and role models. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the success of Asians (South Asians + East Asians) also stems from the fact that divorce is looked down upon and extraordinary efforts are made to prevent it from happening. Divorcees are often social pariahs in these cultures.

JPKab 9y ago
Grew up in Appalachia. I agree with some of the points made by Vance in Hillbilly Elegy. I don't think he has a lot of details right, and he's not from Appalachia himself. However, he's not wrong on cultural dysfunction. I should also point out that Hillbilly Elegy has been embraced by the same political class that rejected the same key points made by Charles Murray here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murray-examines-the-white-working-class-in-coming-apart.html?mcubz=3 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murra... I should also note that Vance's book could only have succeeded as a critique of working-class white culture. Had a black man written a book like this about cultural dysfunction in his own community, he'd be vilified and marginalized as an "Uncle Tom" blaming the victims.

JPKab 9y ago

My two lunch buddies fall into two categories of "Asian-American": One is the more typical example. He's a child of voluntary immigrants, self-selected people from their nation of origin. The other is a child of refugees who fled their homeland. The refugee descendant has a much more typical level of financial dysfunction in his family, but still far better than the "underclass" elements in the US native-born population. As someone who grew up in an Appalachian family that has been in the US for over 300 years, cultural dysfunction plays a HUGE role in academic failure. Let's be honest here: The advent of birth control has now created a situation where people who don't have their shit together are going to reproduce at a higher rate than those that do. My metric for cultural dysfunction is whether a family raising kids "has their shit together" and teaches productive habits to their kids. Foods, music, language are just the visible cultural traits. Much less obvious are the habits of timeliness, respect for authority, willingness to examine one's OWN role in failure before jumping to blame others, etc. The key issue in the US is we don't have a conversation about cultural differences, and instead have a conversation about racial differences, which completely obscures the real issue. 60%+ of black American children are born out of wedlock. This isn't caused by some magic gene. This is a sub-culture within the black American population that has cultural dysfunction that matches that of some of the bad elements at play within my Appalachian relatives. We know that poverty isn't the root cause. Equally poor Latino and white communities have much higher percentages of fathers present in the household. Incarceration rates don't explain the gap either. Culture is almost certainly the answer. I say this as a person who spends a lot of time helping the neighborhood kids who are playing with my son every afternoon. Almost all of them have parents who, contrary to the narrative pushed out, are not working 60 hours a week at 2 jobs. No, they are working 40 hours or less at a crappy job, and then invest their time/resources into blowing off steam at the end of the day. Car hobbies, drinking, NFL games, but helping their kids do their homework? No way. A lot of them don't even bother TELLING their kids to do their homework.

swsieber 9y ago

This is a major point "Outliers" (by Malcom Gladwell). I recently finished listening to the book. He makes a strong case that culture heavily contributes to the success of people. He highlights Asian culture for their hard work ethic (positive) as well as the higher power distance index [1] (negative for things like airplane crashes, specifically because it impedes communication proper communication between pilot, copilots and the tower [2]). Other notable aspects of culture (well, in this case language) is that perfect pitch occurs more often in speakers of tonal languages (think chinese), and speakers of languages with shorter words for numbers can remember lists of numbers easier [3] Now does this mean we don't try to fix other things? No. "Culture" is not a panacea for everything I would think. What do you do with those born into a unfavorable circumstances? But I do agree that more often than not we're trying to fix the wrong thing when fixating on outcomes, instead of tools and opportunities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensions_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensio... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm-gladwells-cockpit-culture-theory-everywhere-after-asiana-crash/313442/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm... [3]