5 ms·

I think this under-sells the situation. I grew up in a poor, half-immigrant neighborhood in the 90s in Brooklyn. Despite the limitations you describe some peopl

I think this under-sells the situation. I grew up in a poor, half-immigrant neighborhood in the 90s in Brooklyn. Despite the limitations you describe some people also asked themselves questions like "how do I make sure my kid takes the hardest math class in the school?" and "how do I get my kid to sign up for the magnet school exam" etc. Those things didn't cost more money (nobody had any) but they reflected the focus on getting their kids out of that situation. The kids whose parents thought this way in my hood are mainly in the 1% now. The kids whose parents didn't think this way have a by-and-large the same life their parents did.

tsunamifury 3y ago
What is your point. Also all our statistics counter your point on class mobility
- xyzelement 3y ago
  Is my point that hard to grasp? The person I am replying to is painting the picture of inevitable stuck-ness. But in that example he omits the free thoughts that other poor people have thought that had enabled them to get un-stuck. The stats are really not that relevant IMHO because you don't know which way the people are thinking, that make up those stats. I bet stats show a vast difference in upward mobility between Asian immigrants and others, for example, because Asians think about how to get unstuck...
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    No, your point is perfectly clear. Some people have taken to replying "What is your point" as if it were a Jedi mind trick, as if by saying that they could make everyone else not see your point. Sometimes someone really didn't have a point, or stated it badly enough that it's not very clear. But more often, "What's your point?" is being used as a cheap rhetorical trick, to try to make everyone else not see the point that is being made, because the one who says "What's your point?" very much doesn't want anyone to see the point, or to acknowledge it as an actual point with any validity. Take comfort when you get asked that. You've made a point that they have no real response to, so all they can do is ineffectively try to get everyone else to ignore it. Now in this case, they did go one step further. They said that statistics disprove your anecdata. That's at least a bit of a rebuttal. But they didn't actually cite any statistics, so it's just this unsupported claim.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      Thank you for this supportive post. You're describing a real dynamic but there's a reason I replied to the person's post. If we're just talking debate styles then you're completely right. But this is more than that - this is real "life and death" in a way because how a person thinks about their situation (eg: being stuck in poverty vs looking for long-term ways out) has a huge impact on their outcomes. For some reason, for some people, it's very important to insist that "no, you can't change your own stickiness" - if you are poor, you are poor. If you are fat, you are fat. If women hate you, they will hate you. This reveals something about their own approach in life but worse, I worry that it can influence someone who's on the fence ("should I try to lose weight, should I try to better my economics, etc?") and being barraged with messages of impossibility is poisonous to them.
      - jxramos 3y ago
        Self fulfilling prophecies of being defeated and stuck.
      - Swizec 3y ago
        > being barraged with messages of impossibility is poisonous to them It is not your successful friends staying online all day posting negative messages. That’s the line I tell anyone who needs some unstuckitude and feels it’s impossible. Has worked well for me personally. The people bitching and moaning on Reddit are not the people busting their butts getting unstuck.
        tsunamifury 3y ago
        This is a bit of a feel-good misnomer as well -- as now several of the richest men on the planet are known, active internet trolls.
        xyzelement 3y ago
        Are they the ones saying everything sucks and nothing is possible?
  - nineplay 3y ago
    _Immigrants_ do better because immigrants have self-selected for people with the ability to leave bad situations in pursuit of a better one, and further self-selected for those who have succeeded. Immigrants believe that with sufficient effort you can improve your circumstances, because that is their experience.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      Yes I think that's exactly my point. The immigrants have less resources and are at a disadvantage (eg language) compared to the US born population. But they think and do differently which enables them to achieve escape velocity from poverty. My point is that the same mindset is available to others if they chose to seek it out. Telling yourself how poor and stuck you are precludes that.
      - anigbrowl 3y ago
        Reasonable, but don't fall into the trap of thinking it's that easy. There are a lot of complicating factors, from what assets an immigrant can leverage on arrival (if any) to how socially connected they are, to whether other political and economic actors push back against immigrants (recall that one major political party defines itself by its willingness to do this).
      - TeaDrunk 3y ago
        I disagree with the broad idea that immigrants have less resources compared to the US born population as a category. Immigrants are often more educated than the native US born population, with greater incomes. Nigerian-Americans are some of the highest educated Americans by demographic, and way out-earn their native African-American counterparts. Remember that the immigrants who come to america already have enough resources at minimum to immigrate!
        tetromino_ 3y ago
        > Immigrants are often more educated than the native US born population ... and are usually unable to do anything with that education because most American employers (outside the very unusual field of software engineering) discount or ignore non-American degrees. An immigrant with an engineering or medical degree making a living by driving an Uber in America is a stereotype very much based in reality. I personally know people who fit that stereotype.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    No I was just drawing out what you really were saying 'Asians are better than others." Which is frankly something as a child of an asian immigrant im tired of hearing. Its such a self-congratulatory nonsense.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      FWIW I am not Asian but I admire Asian cultures as being good "operating systems" for growth.
- bilbo0s 3y ago
  I think maybe he's saying that sometimes, one person can slip through if the appropriate conditions are met. Your implication is correct as well. He offers only an anecdote to back up the claim, but no data. Even assuming the anecdote to be true, and s/he has multiple childhood acquaintances from poverty who each now have a 5.8 million dollar or higher net worth [1], it would have little effect at the mean of the population. Personally, I think the explanation is structural, or if you prefer, just math. Just statistical distribution will assure that if you're poor, 99 percent of you won't get into the 1%. You'll never amass the required 5.8 million dollar net worth. In fact, I almost hate to say this, but it should be implied, whether you are poor or middle class, 90% of you will never even get into the 10%. I'm not sure that it's a psychological state of mind, or even a statement on the innate abilities of poor or middle class people? I'm more confident that it's a simple structural barrier. There is not room in the 10% for every law abiding, intelligent, ambitious, hard working individual. Which means many law abiding, intelligent, ambitious, hard working individuals who are poor or middle class, will need to aim lower to increase their chances of success. It sucks, but just in my opinion, that's how things are, I'm not sure there's a way around it? So I think what's happening is more along the lines of people, perhaps even unconsciously, realizing the structural reality, and adjusting their strategies accordingly. That poor or middle class kid says: "You know it's a lot safer if I just become a nurse, teacher, or regular software engineer instead of trying to swing for the fences on a startup since I have no safety net to work with." In fact, in a societal moral hazard kind of way, the more intelligent and rational that poor or middle class kid is, the more likely s/he is to say that. (Or maybe it isn't a societal moral hazard? Since we do need nurses, teachers, fire fighters, and so on. I don't know?) [1] Net Worth of 1%-er: https://money.com/richest-1-percent-america-other-countries/ https://money.com/richest-1-percent-america-other-countries/
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > There is not room in the 10% for every law abiding, intelligent, ambitious, hard working individual. While this is true as a simple matter of distribution, it conflates two very different things. In terms of relative wealth, yes, there's no way everybody can be in the top 10%. But in terms of absolute wealth, there is lots of room to make even the bottom 10% wealthier than they are today. Indeed, the bottom 10% in the US are already wealthier than most humans who ever lived. But they could be much wealthier still, even if their relative wealth stays the same. Focusing kids on "getting out of the bad situation" doesn't have to mean "shoot for being in the top 10%" (and if the GP was implying that it does, I think the GP is wrong on that point). It just has to mean "go out and create wealth instead of staying stuck in this place". And doing that will make those kids better off--not to mention society as a whole--even if their relative wealth never makes it anywhere near the top 10%. To the extent that our society has "structural problems", I think they are about preventing people from creating wealth, by imposing all manner of nanny state micromanagement and by allowing people in power to bully others.
silverquiet 3y ago
You can avoid getting your kids out of that situation by not having any; it seems like an increasingly popular option. DINK or SINK makes it much easier to stay out of poverty.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  For most people throughout history, having family has been the most significant and meaningful thing. DINK/SINK sound "easier" but hardly "more fulfilling" that a life of family and the steady of stream of "oh shit, I waited to have kids and now it's too late and I am depressed" suggests that it's not the ticket to a good life that it might appear at the onset.
  - philosopher1234 3y ago
    What steady stream?
  - silverquiet 3y ago
    Historically speaking you are probably correct, but we live in the present. I've been thinking about this a bit since I recently caught up with a childhood friend. He's a laborer who trims trees for a living and mentioned that he'd been with his girlfriend for a decade and they had never had an accident. Interesting turn of phrase, isn't that? Accident? Yet you know exactly what he means. The research on this suggests that you've got it the other way around actually on who ends up with lower levels of emotional well being. > The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/
  - themaninthedark 3y ago
    If they don't want to have kids and are happy, good for them. If they are unhappy later, I am sorry. Perhaps volunteer to work with youth or adopt. But please don't get an animal, treat it like it is a kid and not properly train it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
stefamo 3y ago
This is very true and I agree with the core points. I also think that there is more to be said for the skills/advantages that aren't easily quantifiable (e.g., habits passed down from parents, mentors, etc) and have a tremendous impact on upward mobility. Those habits are usually reinforced by the culture and if you are unlucky—more unlucky than just being born poor—then that can have an even larger impact on your odds (think of people who are born black, poor, with one parent, and in certain areas in the US). I am not an expert but I do expect the epigenetics field of study to help us build a better understanding of the things touched on in this paper. P.S. you do have a "point". Someone saying that you don't is a cop-out so they don't have to think about how to engage in a conversation, debate, or discourse.
alexilliamson 3y ago
I'm very skeptical of the claim that most of the kids with good parents in your poor neighborhood ended up in the 1%. Even with good parents, kids can grow up to be dumb and poorly socialized. Also, "poor" as you're using it here might be too broad a term. The amount of brain cycles that parents can spare for their kid's academic performance is inversely related to how much time they're worrying about food, whether or not the utilities will be shut off, how to work overtime and keep the kid safe, etc.
bjornsing 3y ago
> The kids whose parents thought this way in my hood are mainly in the 1% now. The kids whose parents didn't think this way have a by-and-large the same life their parents did. Interesting. But it’s worth noting that many different causal mechanisms can explain that data. For example it could be that parents that think that way are pretty smart and good at long-term planning / delayed gratification, and such traits are highly heritable. So kids inherit those traits and do well.
ericmcer 3y ago
Yeah you can't replace having great parents with anything. This is why our current solutions are failing so badly, but telling people they are responsible for their children's outcomes does not get as many votes as telling them that the government is responsible. Just make sure to vote for us and we will fix all your problems!
pessimizer 3y ago
> The kids whose parents thought this way in my hood are mainly in the 1% now. This is comforting fantasy. One of the most dire statistics in the US is that black people consistently place more value on education and getting certifications than white people do, and that it doesn't help them (as a group) in the market at all. A black person with a college degree has about the same likelihood of being hired as a white high school graduate who has spent time in prison. It's also a slander on the poor. You either think that fewer than one percent of the poor place value on education, or you think that class is so hypermobile that far more than one percent of the poor are ending up in the 1%. The idea that all the worthy poor automatically go to heaven is, with the slightest inspection, a statistical impossibility, unless you believe that the poor are almost never worthy. edit: also, where the hell are these worthy poor parents coming from, and how did they manage to stay poor with so much virtue?
- loandbehold 3y ago
  > One of the most dire statistics in the US is that black people consistently place more value on education and getting certifications than white people do, and that it doesn't help them (as a group) in the market at all. A black person with a college degree has about the same likelihood of being hired as a white high school graduate who has spent time in prison. Source? This is hard to believe.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    There's seems to be a study every two months because they're easy to do, and people are hoping the problem will have magically fixed itself. But from a quick google and (https://cepr.net/report/the-continuing-power-of-white-preferences-in-employment/ https://cepr.net/report/the-continuing-power-of-white-prefer...), in 2022 the unemployment for white high school dropouts was 3.4% while the unemployment rate for black people with bachelors' degrees was 3.3%. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/b38Bg/9/#embed https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/b38Bg/9/#embed Another - black people get 50% fewer callbacks in general: https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-americans-hasnt-declined-in-25-years https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-... Here's a random Ipsos poll that finds US attitudes on higher education virtually indistinguishable by race (which understates black educational values based on other studies I recall, but to say that the value put on education was indistinguishable is enough, considering the outcome.) https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/all-americans-see-value-higher-education-race-continues-be-partisan-flashpoint https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/all-americans-see-val... An interesting quote from a guy who ran a study reported on in Fortune: "White participants who opposed affirmative action were more than twice as likely to select an applicant with a white-sounding name compared with applicants perceived as Black – whether or not they had to make the simulated hiring decision in a hurry. "By contrast, giving white participants who favor affirmative action unlimited time to choose a name from the hiring list reduced discrimination against the job candidates with names they perceived as Black-sounding by almost half." What this means is that the 50% fewer callbacks (mentioned above) for black-sounding names became only 25% fewer if you believed in AA, but if you didn't like AA, you would call random white-sounding names twice as often as random black-sounding names. https://fortune.com/2023/09/24/affirmative-action-race-discrimination-hiring-black-sounding-names-study/ https://fortune.com/2023/09/24/affirmative-action-race-discr... So, I wouldn't say this random selection of links proves what I said true, but I'd say that it points pretty heavily in a direction.

tsunamifury 3y ago

What is your point. Also all our statistics counter your point on class mobility

xyzelement 3y ago
Is my point that hard to grasp? The person I am replying to is painting the picture of inevitable stuck-ness. But in that example he omits the free thoughts that other poor people have thought that had enabled them to get un-stuck. The stats are really not that relevant IMHO because you don't know which way the people are thinking, that make up those stats. I bet stats show a vast difference in upward mobility between Asian immigrants and others, for example, because Asians think about how to get unstuck...
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  No, your point is perfectly clear. Some people have taken to replying "What is your point" as if it were a Jedi mind trick, as if by saying that they could make everyone else not see your point. Sometimes someone really didn't have a point, or stated it badly enough that it's not very clear. But more often, "What's your point?" is being used as a cheap rhetorical trick, to try to make everyone else not see the point that is being made, because the one who says "What's your point?" very much doesn't want anyone to see the point, or to acknowledge it as an actual point with any validity. Take comfort when you get asked that. You've made a point that they have no real response to, so all they can do is ineffectively try to get everyone else to ignore it. Now in this case, they did go one step further. They said that statistics disprove your anecdata. That's at least a bit of a rebuttal. But they didn't actually cite any statistics, so it's just this unsupported claim.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    Thank you for this supportive post. You're describing a real dynamic but there's a reason I replied to the person's post. If we're just talking debate styles then you're completely right. But this is more than that - this is real "life and death" in a way because how a person thinks about their situation (eg: being stuck in poverty vs looking for long-term ways out) has a huge impact on their outcomes. For some reason, for some people, it's very important to insist that "no, you can't change your own stickiness" - if you are poor, you are poor. If you are fat, you are fat. If women hate you, they will hate you. This reveals something about their own approach in life but worse, I worry that it can influence someone who's on the fence ("should I try to lose weight, should I try to better my economics, etc?") and being barraged with messages of impossibility is poisonous to them.
    - jxramos 3y ago
      Self fulfilling prophecies of being defeated and stuck.
    - Swizec 3y ago
      > being barraged with messages of impossibility is poisonous to them It is not your successful friends staying online all day posting negative messages. That’s the line I tell anyone who needs some unstuckitude and feels it’s impossible. Has worked well for me personally. The people bitching and moaning on Reddit are not the people busting their butts getting unstuck.
      - tsunamifury 3y ago
        This is a bit of a feel-good misnomer as well -- as now several of the richest men on the planet are known, active internet trolls.
        xyzelement 3y ago
        Are they the ones saying everything sucks and nothing is possible?
- nineplay 3y ago
  _Immigrants_ do better because immigrants have self-selected for people with the ability to leave bad situations in pursuit of a better one, and further self-selected for those who have succeeded. Immigrants believe that with sufficient effort you can improve your circumstances, because that is their experience.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    Yes I think that's exactly my point. The immigrants have less resources and are at a disadvantage (eg language) compared to the US born population. But they think and do differently which enables them to achieve escape velocity from poverty. My point is that the same mindset is available to others if they chose to seek it out. Telling yourself how poor and stuck you are precludes that.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Reasonable, but don't fall into the trap of thinking it's that easy. There are a lot of complicating factors, from what assets an immigrant can leverage on arrival (if any) to how socially connected they are, to whether other political and economic actors push back against immigrants (recall that one major political party defines itself by its willingness to do this).
    - TeaDrunk 3y ago
      I disagree with the broad idea that immigrants have less resources compared to the US born population as a category. Immigrants are often more educated than the native US born population, with greater incomes. Nigerian-Americans are some of the highest educated Americans by demographic, and way out-earn their native African-American counterparts. Remember that the immigrants who come to america already have enough resources at minimum to immigrate!
      - tetromino_ 3y ago
        > Immigrants are often more educated than the native US born population ... and are usually unable to do anything with that education because most American employers (outside the very unusual field of software engineering) discount or ignore non-American degrees. An immigrant with an engineering or medical degree making a living by driving an Uber in America is a stereotype very much based in reality. I personally know people who fit that stereotype.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  No I was just drawing out what you really were saying 'Asians are better than others." Which is frankly something as a child of an asian immigrant im tired of hearing. Its such a self-congratulatory nonsense.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    FWIW I am not Asian but I admire Asian cultures as being good "operating systems" for growth.
bilbo0s 3y ago
I think maybe he's saying that sometimes, one person can slip through if the appropriate conditions are met. Your implication is correct as well. He offers only an anecdote to back up the claim, but no data. Even assuming the anecdote to be true, and s/he has multiple childhood acquaintances from poverty who each now have a 5.8 million dollar or higher net worth [1], it would have little effect at the mean of the population. Personally, I think the explanation is structural, or if you prefer, just math. Just statistical distribution will assure that if you're poor, 99 percent of you won't get into the 1%. You'll never amass the required 5.8 million dollar net worth. In fact, I almost hate to say this, but it should be implied, whether you are poor or middle class, 90% of you will never even get into the 10%. I'm not sure that it's a psychological state of mind, or even a statement on the innate abilities of poor or middle class people? I'm more confident that it's a simple structural barrier. There is not room in the 10% for every law abiding, intelligent, ambitious, hard working individual. Which means many law abiding, intelligent, ambitious, hard working individuals who are poor or middle class, will need to aim lower to increase their chances of success. It sucks, but just in my opinion, that's how things are, I'm not sure there's a way around it? So I think what's happening is more along the lines of people, perhaps even unconsciously, realizing the structural reality, and adjusting their strategies accordingly. That poor or middle class kid says: "You know it's a lot safer if I just become a nurse, teacher, or regular software engineer instead of trying to swing for the fences on a startup since I have no safety net to work with." In fact, in a societal moral hazard kind of way, the more intelligent and rational that poor or middle class kid is, the more likely s/he is to say that. (Or maybe it isn't a societal moral hazard? Since we do need nurses, teachers, fire fighters, and so on. I don't know?) [1] Net Worth of 1%-er: https://money.com/richest-1-percent-america-other-countries/ https://money.com/richest-1-percent-america-other-countries/
- pdonis 3y ago
  > There is not room in the 10% for every law abiding, intelligent, ambitious, hard working individual. While this is true as a simple matter of distribution, it conflates two very different things. In terms of relative wealth, yes, there's no way everybody can be in the top 10%. But in terms of absolute wealth, there is lots of room to make even the bottom 10% wealthier than they are today. Indeed, the bottom 10% in the US are already wealthier than most humans who ever lived. But they could be much wealthier still, even if their relative wealth stays the same. Focusing kids on "getting out of the bad situation" doesn't have to mean "shoot for being in the top 10%" (and if the GP was implying that it does, I think the GP is wrong on that point). It just has to mean "go out and create wealth instead of staying stuck in this place". And doing that will make those kids better off--not to mention society as a whole--even if their relative wealth never makes it anywhere near the top 10%. To the extent that our society has "structural problems", I think they are about preventing people from creating wealth, by imposing all manner of nanny state micromanagement and by allowing people in power to bully others.

silverquiet 3y ago

You can avoid getting your kids out of that situation by not having any; it seems like an increasingly popular option. DINK or SINK makes it much easier to stay out of poverty.

xyzelement 3y ago
For most people throughout history, having family has been the most significant and meaningful thing. DINK/SINK sound "easier" but hardly "more fulfilling" that a life of family and the steady of stream of "oh shit, I waited to have kids and now it's too late and I am depressed" suggests that it's not the ticket to a good life that it might appear at the onset.
- philosopher1234 3y ago
  What steady stream?
- silverquiet 3y ago
  Historically speaking you are probably correct, but we live in the present. I've been thinking about this a bit since I recently caught up with a childhood friend. He's a laborer who trims trees for a living and mentioned that he'd been with his girlfriend for a decade and they had never had an accident. Interesting turn of phrase, isn't that? Accident? Yet you know exactly what he means. The research on this suggests that you've got it the other way around actually on who ends up with lower levels of emotional well being. > The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/
- themaninthedark 3y ago
  If they don't want to have kids and are happy, good for them. If they are unhappy later, I am sorry. Perhaps volunteer to work with youth or adopt. But please don't get an animal, treat it like it is a kid and not properly train it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

stefamo 3y ago

This is very true and I agree with the core points. I also think that there is more to be said for the skills/advantages that aren't easily quantifiable (e.g., habits passed down from parents, mentors, etc) and have a tremendous impact on upward mobility. Those habits are usually reinforced by the culture and if you are unlucky—more unlucky than just being born poor—then that can have an even larger impact on your odds (think of people who are born black, poor, with one parent, and in certain areas in the US). I am not an expert but I do expect the epigenetics field of study to help us build a better understanding of the things touched on in this paper. P.S. you do have a "point". Someone saying that you don't is a cop-out so they don't have to think about how to engage in a conversation, debate, or discourse.

alexilliamson 3y ago

I'm very skeptical of the claim that most of the kids with good parents in your poor neighborhood ended up in the 1%. Even with good parents, kids can grow up to be dumb and poorly socialized. Also, "poor" as you're using it here might be too broad a term. The amount of brain cycles that parents can spare for their kid's academic performance is inversely related to how much time they're worrying about food, whether or not the utilities will be shut off, how to work overtime and keep the kid safe, etc.

bjornsing 3y ago

> The kids whose parents thought this way in my hood are mainly in the 1% now. The kids whose parents didn't think this way have a by-and-large the same life their parents did. Interesting. But it’s worth noting that many different causal mechanisms can explain that data. For example it could be that parents that think that way are pretty smart and good at long-term planning / delayed gratification, and such traits are highly heritable. So kids inherit those traits and do well.

ericmcer 3y ago

Yeah you can't replace having great parents with anything. This is why our current solutions are failing so badly, but telling people they are responsible for their children's outcomes does not get as many votes as telling them that the government is responsible. Just make sure to vote for us and we will fix all your problems!

pessimizer 3y ago

> The kids whose parents thought this way in my hood are mainly in the 1% now. This is comforting fantasy. One of the most dire statistics in the US is that black people consistently place more value on education and getting certifications than white people do, and that it doesn't help them (as a group) in the market at all. A black person with a college degree has about the same likelihood of being hired as a white high school graduate who has spent time in prison. It's also a slander on the poor. You either think that fewer than one percent of the poor place value on education, or you think that class is so hypermobile that far more than one percent of the poor are ending up in the 1%. The idea that all the worthy poor automatically go to heaven is, with the slightest inspection, a statistical impossibility, unless you believe that the poor are almost never worthy. edit: also, where the hell are these worthy poor parents coming from, and how did they manage to stay poor with so much virtue?

loandbehold 3y ago
> One of the most dire statistics in the US is that black people consistently place more value on education and getting certifications than white people do, and that it doesn't help them (as a group) in the market at all. A black person with a college degree has about the same likelihood of being hired as a white high school graduate who has spent time in prison. Source? This is hard to believe.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  There's seems to be a study every two months because they're easy to do, and people are hoping the problem will have magically fixed itself. But from a quick google and (https://cepr.net/report/the-continuing-power-of-white-preferences-in-employment/ https://cepr.net/report/the-continuing-power-of-white-prefer...), in 2022 the unemployment for white high school dropouts was 3.4% while the unemployment rate for black people with bachelors' degrees was 3.3%. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/b38Bg/9/#embed https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/b38Bg/9/#embed Another - black people get 50% fewer callbacks in general: https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-americans-hasnt-declined-in-25-years https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-... Here's a random Ipsos poll that finds US attitudes on higher education virtually indistinguishable by race (which understates black educational values based on other studies I recall, but to say that the value put on education was indistinguishable is enough, considering the outcome.) https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/all-americans-see-value-higher-education-race-continues-be-partisan-flashpoint https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/all-americans-see-val... An interesting quote from a guy who ran a study reported on in Fortune: "White participants who opposed affirmative action were more than twice as likely to select an applicant with a white-sounding name compared with applicants perceived as Black – whether or not they had to make the simulated hiring decision in a hurry. "By contrast, giving white participants who favor affirmative action unlimited time to choose a name from the hiring list reduced discrimination against the job candidates with names they perceived as Black-sounding by almost half." What this means is that the 50% fewer callbacks (mentioned above) for black-sounding names became only 25% fewer if you believed in AA, but if you didn't like AA, you would call random white-sounding names twice as often as random black-sounding names. https://fortune.com/2023/09/24/affirmative-action-race-discrimination-hiring-black-sounding-names-study/ https://fortune.com/2023/09/24/affirmative-action-race-discr... So, I wouldn't say this random selection of links proves what I said true, but I'd say that it points pretty heavily in a direction.