Between listening to the conversation and reading the array of thoughtful comments from the public, one is able to draw insightful conclusions. It's refreshing that people can retort without anger or resorting to insults or shallow accusations. It allows others to be open-minded to all points of views.
Both of the bloggerheads have skirted the most important issue, how the churches have failed their communities, which started when these organisations became more involved in politics and in social issures than in preaching the Gospel. Glenn Loury touches on it but doesn't take it to its logical conclusion when he evokes the African-American church. This latter was particularly critical in reinforcing social cohesion among blacks prior to the sixties.
As soon as she mentioned that she was a kid in the 1950s, I immediately knew why she had such a rosy picture of it. Growing up middle class in any time period, everything looks safe, wholesome, and uncomplicated. That impression lasts throughout your whole life, even if you are presented with the unseemly reality just outside your periphery later on. I grew up in the nineties. I still feel like it was a great time to be alive, but was it really though?
Culture matters. That much is obvious. But so does wealth. In the examples that Professor Wax gives (leaving bike out, staying married, paying close attention to children etc.) could all be seen as a consequence of having enough wealth to do all those things. How useful would it be to merely demand of lower class people to live such a life? The issues of wealth and culture were not appropriately disentangled in this interview. Moreover, the issue of IQ at the end confused me. Was Professor Wax implying that lower IQ is a cause of being in the lower class? Add to the confusion of IQ (which was very briefly discussed), the earlier confusion of wealth vs culture, and I must conclude that though this interview was stimulating, it left much to be desired. Finally Professor Wax kind of dodged the excellent point that Professor Loury was making with regards to the point that some people may blame liberation of women for the loss of traditional values. Wax merely says it's not "all or nothing", but then uses the example of wealth white Americans to retort. That is not fair. Being wealthy affords certain lifestyles and norms that being poor simply does not. Maybe Feminism disproportionately hurt the lower classes while being innocuous to rich white folks? This point was not explored in depth, which is regrettable since this interview was stimulating.
I think viewing cultural norms or values as a causal agent might be a bad way of viewing the role they play. In my view these norms or values produce an inhibitory effect. inequality and deprivation are not caused by anything. They are the default condition. By adhering to certain principles one diminishes their susceptibility to natural human foibles. Just as our consciousness is not seen as causal to our natural human urges, rather it acts as a filter through which those urges are analyzed and choices are determined, so is the relationship between our norms and values and our choices. Rather than promoting and causing positive outcomes, our values inhibit bad outcomes. There are very few ways to succeed. There are far more ways to fail.
I've got mixed feelings about what Amy Wax is saying. I've been noticing that liberals tend to live more orderly lives than they're willing to recommend or tolerate. On the other hand, it's simply not true that criminality is the only cause of mass incarceration. Disproportionate sentences and irresponsible assignment of guilt are also a serious problem. And she complains bitterly about being held to an arbitrary standard for what she's allowed to say, while being fond of arbitrary standards which apparently didn't affect her much. I'd like to see a society where people did serious thought about what standards actually improve quality of life (like not stealing, being reliable) and what standards actually don't matter.
I think that's exactly what she is arguing for. What standards bring the most people up. She is inarticulate in some ways about arguing for this. Look at low trust cultures where people lie and cheat each other too much. Mexico, Russia, the stans, Brazil. You cannot have a successful society where this happens. Your point to black incarceration rates being higher for same crime is true and younger people will change these laws. We still need to find out what causes disproportionate crime in black community so they can even have a chance to finish high school.
Patrick Diaz What country are you from Patrick? In your last paragraph your stumbled on the main difference between liberal and conservative outlooks on people. Each one taken to an extreme will not work out well unless you believe you can orchestrate a perfect society from the government down. Soviet Union and other North Korea tried/trying this. Everyone always says they can do it better if they were in charge but conservative political philosophers show us a fatal pretense of knowledge and inefficiency from too firm of top down control. People do not have the same incentives to try harder. There is truth in all of your counter claims but we have to give attention to where the most truth is and legislate from there. This is why the American founders decided on strict federalism so States could do what they thought was best and people would vote with their feet and other states would change laws when another one was proven better. Trial and error. We must ask ourselves if schools spending 18 thousand dollars per student (jr high high school) need more money or a new structure, when schools who spend far less so far better. Asians are a group besides Euro Jews who came to American with nothing and no family connections that absolutely dominate white anglos in every area. Why is that? I think it's culture and less anglos "giving" them more opportunities because they have a particular Asian fetish. Look at Japanese American culture (in Japan too) and German culture and you will find many tools that lead to successful countries. The poor in the US are richer than 80% of the world so there's another interesting thing to consider. If you graduate high school, get a job, and have a kid while married you have a 2% chance of being in poverty. There has never been a lower bar in human history to jump over. So there must be a lot of psychological factors at play. As for guns, the highest per capita gun zones have the lowest gun and violent crime. Look at entire state of Idaho and Texas. More guns than Afghanistan and extremely low gun crime. Maybe culture has some to play too.
Patrick Diaz There are always outliers to essentially every human phenomena. In general women possess a biological need to produce children and men want to pass on their genes. Marriage isn't about happiness but continuing on the species and it just happens to be that it usually helps the couple own a home and have a stabilizing constant to navigate life with. This happens to help with happiness but of course some single people are happier than many married people but on average is what's important to focus on
I do think she makes some good points, but I suspect that there may be quite a bit of romantization about the 50's and things like that. It's not unlikely that some data we have about the era is not as reliable, but things like domestic violence and extra-marital affairs being under-reported. But it I don't deny that there may well have been declines in certain habits/virtues. I'd like to see a more serious study about it rather than those personal recollections.
Many of those social things more likely don't have causation in only one direction, but are rather cyclical. _Ethnic discrimination screws peoples chances > people suffer with it from birth, it increases the odds of behaviors that are self-detrimental > this causes people to justify their ethnic discrimination._ You can "start" anywhere; in a way it started with slavery, if we're not going to go as far as Jared Diamond's "guns, germs, and steel," which is unnecessarily too far back. Both the left and the right have one point or the other as the ultimate causation, this picture of a self-reinforcing cycle has both sides being right and wrong. It's necessary to fight real structural discrimination, but also to cultivate "middle class" values, as some have put, regarding what foundations such as that of Geoffrey Canada try to do, "Harlem's children zone". The issue of mass incarceration cannot be ignored, here the right has it the the most wrong. The corrective system is much more penal/punitive than really corrective, rehabilitating. Initiatives such as HCZ won't help much without a reform on the corrective system, having it more or less in "European" standards, such as those of German and Norway. But that begs the question of the problem of transition between what the US and third-world countries have, to a system that comparatively looks like relaxing spas for criminals. I'm myself skeptical that there's a simple solution, that even if one could instantly have German-style prisons to accommodate the whole prison population of highly violent prisoners, they would have the same good results. I think it would require also perhaps a much stronger psychiatric/psychological attention to the worst cases, to those who were the most damaged by the system, or from bad genes and development.
Race and gender have been found to be positively correlated with infidelity, however this is the case more often for African American men engaging in extramarital infidelity. 22% of the African-American respondents stated that they have cheated on their spouses compared to 16% and 13% of white and Hispanic respondents, respectively.
How about "the Gods of the Copybook Headings" by Kipling. I first heard of it from John Derbyshire but it has its own Wiki entry. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_the_Copybook_Headings English school children practiced their handwriting in copybooks where they would write sentences such as this: "Graduate from high school, stay married, don't do drugs,keep your job and you will have a successful life." The school children would write the sentence 25 times on the page of the copybook, eventually it sunk in. The misconception we live with now is if you say it once it is absorbed. That might be true for the intellectual class but what percent are they?..... one out of fifty? For everyone else it has to be repeated, as in church, over and over and over before it is absorbed. Not all of us have IQs of 130 to 140. Alain de Botton has expressed similar sentiments.
It reminds me of some things I've seen recently of how some expressive writing exercises (not merely copies of "affirmations", though) helped to reduce the effects of "stereotype threat" significantly. But the effect is in fact somewhat "instantaneous", even though it probably needs maintenance. blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/11/25/15-minute-writing-exercise-closes-the-gender-gap-in-university-level-physics/ I guess it's just a volitional reinforcement of self-conscientiousness that may mimic what people who are naturally higher in this trait do naturally, without requiring the imposition of a discipline. This whole thing is just the tip of the iceberg, though. The left-right dichotomy of self-determinacy and systemic disadvantages is false. Both things aggravate the situation. While systemic issues are arguably the most important ones, the aspect of self-determinacy can't be neglected either. One can say it's not universally ignored, but rather people are often doing the best they can (working harder than those who are better off, for less), but the truth is that often don't know they could do better. And for some, the focus on the situation is an excuse for lesser efforts.
I really try to give Glenn and John McWhorter a fair hearing, because I am not all in on their liberal black critics, but they have nothing good to say about black people-which reminds me of a comment by the late, great Samuel DeWitt Proctor, “They [Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams] cloud the issues with their scholarly cant; I wonder if they ever look up at their audiences and see who it is applauding.”
She brings up obesity around 44 minutes. People were thin years ago since most people walked and exercised more. Most people also lived in big cities. Their wasn't fast food then. Society was different. She also talks about white upper middle class and how there used to be one way of doing things. The problem is they are the majority so it's easy for them to keep doing what they were already doing. I think she makes good points about how great the 50's were but doesn't want to hear that it wasn't great for everyone.
She talks about executive functioning and how wealthier white people have more self-control. Isn't it possible that people who have little are more excited about having something tangible or want to snatch up opportunities before they go away. If a person who never has candy sees candy they might grab it faster than someone who can get it anytime.
The more well off you are, the easier it will be for you to maintain your self control, or indulge in a more controlled fashion, and even to deal with less controlled indulgences. If you're not a victim of racism, it makes it even easier. Judges give harsher sentences in proportion to the time since their last meal. We're all roughly equally susceptible to "ego depletion", but some are more shielded than others by the environment. And the decisions of some of those even impact dramatically in the lives of others, for bad.
Glenn, 12:45 +/-: "What if I told you that the failure to embrace the virtues you [Amy] extoll is evidence, in a way, of the repression of some people..."John: "Yes Glenn, it is true that the country was founded with a fundamental principled flaw, slavery. Who gets to be the last slaveholder?"TL;DR:Glenn, 20:12, paraphrased: Glenn gives the example of two neighborhoods, one black, one white where there is a "gun culture" in one, but not the other. Carefully, Glenn doesn't mention which one is which. Glenn's point is that historically, there has 'evolved', if that's the term, an advantage to carrying for self preservation in the one neighborhood, which seems to explain how the gun carrying culture continues, but which offers no explanation of how it arose in the first place. The problem that is faced in those neighborhoods now is how to change that gun carrying culture into a non-gun carrying culture. Part of that solution is certainly education, particularly about the pitfalls of a shallow honor culture, which seems to be more the cultural issue at hand in that case. "West Side Story" may be the classic example of an honor culture gone wrong. As we all know, that movie was based on Shakespeare's work; honor cultures are not restricted at all in time or by race. BTW, I'm glad that the issue of inanimate objects, swords in the case of Shakespeare, causing crime wasn't brought up in the dialogue between Glenn and Amy.Then Glenn offers an example of how black women, because they don't mate with white men, are manipulated by black men, and this has led to the single motherhood and other stereotypical statistics of black personal relationships. If black men had more evolutionary competition from white men, things would be different. Glenn, 23:25, paraphrased: It's white men's fault, even in their absence.This simply cannot be the case. Glenn has been thoroughly hypnotized and does not realize it. This is the Ctrl-Left's new Lakoffian perversion: What you don't say speaks more than what you do say. Example: You didn't vote for HRC? Then you're seemingly a nazii.This was a great discussion. Thanks very much for sharing.
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