So many young people spending hours on their phones and playing video games either don't have the interest or don't seem to realize they already have the skills for some good paying jobs in today's market. A study last year by Raj Chetty at Harvard pointed to your social circles as the most critical factor for economic mobility, as summed up in this Kite & Key video:
Mr. McWhorter: if William Julius Wilson decided on a whim to criticize a significant narrative about linguistics based on reading a few studies — a field which, to my knowledge, he has no true expertise — I would take his critique with a grain of salt. So when you make a claim like you did in 2007 and in 2023 that attempts to critique the voluminous body of Mr. Wilson’s social science work, I have to do the same with you.
Thankfully, Mr. Loury defended the “1/3 of the problem” explanation in 2007. It needed to be said.
In 1976 - 1978, as I left high school, I worked in a factory in Houston, TX. Many undereducated and low skilled African American men & women in their 30’s - 60’s worked in the lowest tiers of the jobs in that factory next to me. I had the rest of my life to chart a better course for myself AND my middle class Latino parents (1st generation Mexican Americans) had set an example for me to follow.
I remember always feeling bad for my fellow workers — many of whom were 2x or 3x my age — who saw that job as their sole means of supporting their families. I knew it was just a short stop along the path to my future life.
When that factory closed a decade later, I have no idea what all of those undereducated and low skilled workers did. But I am sure the closing had a catastrophic impact on their lives.
Mr. McWhorter: have you ever toiled away at a factory filled with such people? Or were you lucky enough to have been sheltered from seeing it first hand? If you HAD seen it, I don’t think you would so casually dismiss the economic impact of such factory closings upon those who weren’t; destined for the Ivy League.
Mr. Wilson’s work helped me better understand the arc of the experience of African Americans stuck in the inner city only to see it change as factory jobs went away. Of course, other factors played into the demise of such areas. But it pains me to see Mr. McWhorter cast it away as if it was an insignificant part of the history of the underclass.
While attending college, many black men I knew were quite happy working at the Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana, California. They were paid very well and could support a family without a college degree. My dad worked at the plant until he went into construction. The closing of the plant did damage many people regardless of their race. However, when white workers catch a cold, black workers catch pneumonia (look at the historical data).
Good-paying jobs help to keep the idle out of trouble. Illiterate Ricky Ross (freeway Ricky), a good tennis player, said to hell with working at McDonald's in Los Angeles for a minimal wage. He hooked up with a Colombian drug trafficker and started making millions selling and trafficking "crack cocaine" across America.
Banks, car dealerships, realtors, etc. also made multiple millions on crack cocaine money.
A reporter for the Mercury News in San Jose exposed a connection between the CIA and South American drug dealers dumping cocaine in the inner cities starting in the early 1980s under President Reagan to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, a right-wing group. I remember Nancy Reagan, saying, "Just say no to drugs. " Lol!
I began my career with the California Department of Corrections via the California Youth Authority in 1981, at which time the prison population was about 27,000 in California. Following the racist 1994 crime bill disproportionately penalizing black drug offenders for possessing crack cocaine plus the implementation of the 3-strikes law, the prison population blew up to about 170,000 when I retired in 2007.
Poor South American increasing participation in the production of cocaine can be attributed to the lack of decent employment opportunities in South America. Latin America has produced several billionaires from the illicit drug trade. America has a strong appetite for drugs.
Prisons take up the slack for the unemployment problems. Corporations are raking in billions of dollars on prison labor. Remember the black codes and convict leasing programs after the end of reconstruction, wherein southern counties and southern private business owners greatly profited off of black slave/cheap labor? The peonage system?
Nonetheless, "The closing of the Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana, California, had a significant impact on the local community and economy. In 1983, when Fontana’s Kaiser Steel collapsed into bankruptcy, it spilled 8,800 high-paid workers into unemployment and left behind a toxic nightmare. The mighty Kaiser steel plant in Fontana, California, modernized just years earlier for $250 million, shut down in 1982-83, laying off 4500 workers.
However, nearly three decades later, the 1,500-acre site is home to NASCAR’s Auto Club Speedway, Kaiser Commerce Center’s 8.5 million square feet of distribution center space, and the West Coast’s only steel fabricator and supplier, California Steel Industries1. Years of soil cleanups that made this redevelopment possible are also finished. On December 22 the California Department of Toxic Substances Control certified the end of soil cleanup efforts that made 1,150 acres safe for a new generation of commercial development1.
The new development is helping grow California’s economy and tax base. The redeveloped Kaiser Steel site is again a major regional employer with 6,700 jobs. Property values at the old Kaiser Steel area have reached nearly $2 billion, four times higher than in 1995. Businesses at the site will pay $13.2 million in property taxes to the San Bernardino County Redevelopment Agency during the fiscal year that ends June 30, 20111. County Redevelopment Director Kathy Thomas says cleaning up toxics transformed Kaiser Steel into a “premier industrial, logistics and entertainment location.” The Auto Club Speedway alone has contributed nearly $2 billion to the regional economy since it opened in 1997, she said, while the average job at California Steel Industries pays $60,000 a year1. The redevelopment area’s new warehousing and distribution jobs also pay well, says regional economist John Husing. “Those are facilities that have above-average pay, comparable to manufacturing, for workers who need blue-collar jobs,” Husing says.
Overall, while the closing of the Kaiser Steel plant had an immediate negative impact on the local community and economy, over time it has been transformed into an economic powerhouse through redevelopment efforts and cleanup of toxic land." ~Bing AI.
What first got my attention on this post was the term "deindustrialization". Of course, there's been no deindustrialization; there is more industry than ever. Where do you think all our stuff comes from, the tooth fairy?
But industry has moved around a lot over the decades, and yes, there has been deindustrialization in a big way in much of America. John summed that up quite well. I know a businessman whose entire business consists of moving entire factories out of the USA and into Mexico. He's been doing it for decades, and he's still moving those factories. Way back in the 1900s both republicans and democrats touted the desirability of NAFTA. One lone voice, Ross Perot, claimed that if NAFTA was enacted, we would hear the giant sucking sound of American jobs going to Mexico. He was right, and we were lied to, again.
But it's not all about blacks, and it's not all about the urban core. I was just thinking earlier today, before I saw this video, that rural blacks are almost completely ignored in the morality play that we call DEI. I grew up in the White suburbs of Boston, but my first real job out of college was teaching science in a rural Ohio school. Yes, there's blacks there. And, even fifty years ago, I saw these small towns struggling to survive as "deindustrialization" passed them by. John, until I saw this video, I didn't know it had a name. So, thanks for that, I guess.
So many young people spending hours on their phones and playing video games either don't have the interest or don't seem to realize they already have the skills for some good paying jobs in today's market. A study last year by Raj Chetty at Harvard pointed to your social circles as the most critical factor for economic mobility, as summed up in this Kite & Key video:
https://www.kiteandkeymedia.com/videos/key-to-economic-progress-escaping-poverty-according-to-social-science/
Mr. McWhorter: if William Julius Wilson decided on a whim to criticize a significant narrative about linguistics based on reading a few studies — a field which, to my knowledge, he has no true expertise — I would take his critique with a grain of salt. So when you make a claim like you did in 2007 and in 2023 that attempts to critique the voluminous body of Mr. Wilson’s social science work, I have to do the same with you.
Thankfully, Mr. Loury defended the “1/3 of the problem” explanation in 2007. It needed to be said.
In 1976 - 1978, as I left high school, I worked in a factory in Houston, TX. Many undereducated and low skilled African American men & women in their 30’s - 60’s worked in the lowest tiers of the jobs in that factory next to me. I had the rest of my life to chart a better course for myself AND my middle class Latino parents (1st generation Mexican Americans) had set an example for me to follow.
I remember always feeling bad for my fellow workers — many of whom were 2x or 3x my age — who saw that job as their sole means of supporting their families. I knew it was just a short stop along the path to my future life.
When that factory closed a decade later, I have no idea what all of those undereducated and low skilled workers did. But I am sure the closing had a catastrophic impact on their lives.
Mr. McWhorter: have you ever toiled away at a factory filled with such people? Or were you lucky enough to have been sheltered from seeing it first hand? If you HAD seen it, I don’t think you would so casually dismiss the economic impact of such factory closings upon those who weren’t; destined for the Ivy League.
Mr. Wilson’s work helped me better understand the arc of the experience of African Americans stuck in the inner city only to see it change as factory jobs went away. Of course, other factors played into the demise of such areas. But it pains me to see Mr. McWhorter cast it away as if it was an insignificant part of the history of the underclass.
While attending college, many black men I knew were quite happy working at the Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana, California. They were paid very well and could support a family without a college degree. My dad worked at the plant until he went into construction. The closing of the plant did damage many people regardless of their race. However, when white workers catch a cold, black workers catch pneumonia (look at the historical data).
Good-paying jobs help to keep the idle out of trouble. Illiterate Ricky Ross (freeway Ricky), a good tennis player, said to hell with working at McDonald's in Los Angeles for a minimal wage. He hooked up with a Colombian drug trafficker and started making millions selling and trafficking "crack cocaine" across America.
Banks, car dealerships, realtors, etc. also made multiple millions on crack cocaine money.
A reporter for the Mercury News in San Jose exposed a connection between the CIA and South American drug dealers dumping cocaine in the inner cities starting in the early 1980s under President Reagan to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, a right-wing group. I remember Nancy Reagan, saying, "Just say no to drugs. " Lol!
I began my career with the California Department of Corrections via the California Youth Authority in 1981, at which time the prison population was about 27,000 in California. Following the racist 1994 crime bill disproportionately penalizing black drug offenders for possessing crack cocaine plus the implementation of the 3-strikes law, the prison population blew up to about 170,000 when I retired in 2007.
Poor South American increasing participation in the production of cocaine can be attributed to the lack of decent employment opportunities in South America. Latin America has produced several billionaires from the illicit drug trade. America has a strong appetite for drugs.
Prisons take up the slack for the unemployment problems. Corporations are raking in billions of dollars on prison labor. Remember the black codes and convict leasing programs after the end of reconstruction, wherein southern counties and southern private business owners greatly profited off of black slave/cheap labor? The peonage system?
Nonetheless, "The closing of the Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana, California, had a significant impact on the local community and economy. In 1983, when Fontana’s Kaiser Steel collapsed into bankruptcy, it spilled 8,800 high-paid workers into unemployment and left behind a toxic nightmare. The mighty Kaiser steel plant in Fontana, California, modernized just years earlier for $250 million, shut down in 1982-83, laying off 4500 workers.
However, nearly three decades later, the 1,500-acre site is home to NASCAR’s Auto Club Speedway, Kaiser Commerce Center’s 8.5 million square feet of distribution center space, and the West Coast’s only steel fabricator and supplier, California Steel Industries1. Years of soil cleanups that made this redevelopment possible are also finished. On December 22 the California Department of Toxic Substances Control certified the end of soil cleanup efforts that made 1,150 acres safe for a new generation of commercial development1.
The new development is helping grow California’s economy and tax base. The redeveloped Kaiser Steel site is again a major regional employer with 6,700 jobs. Property values at the old Kaiser Steel area have reached nearly $2 billion, four times higher than in 1995. Businesses at the site will pay $13.2 million in property taxes to the San Bernardino County Redevelopment Agency during the fiscal year that ends June 30, 20111. County Redevelopment Director Kathy Thomas says cleaning up toxics transformed Kaiser Steel into a “premier industrial, logistics and entertainment location.” The Auto Club Speedway alone has contributed nearly $2 billion to the regional economy since it opened in 1997, she said, while the average job at California Steel Industries pays $60,000 a year1. The redevelopment area’s new warehousing and distribution jobs also pay well, says regional economist John Husing. “Those are facilities that have above-average pay, comparable to manufacturing, for workers who need blue-collar jobs,” Husing says.
Overall, while the closing of the Kaiser Steel plant had an immediate negative impact on the local community and economy, over time it has been transformed into an economic powerhouse through redevelopment efforts and cleanup of toxic land." ~Bing AI.
What first got my attention on this post was the term "deindustrialization". Of course, there's been no deindustrialization; there is more industry than ever. Where do you think all our stuff comes from, the tooth fairy?
But industry has moved around a lot over the decades, and yes, there has been deindustrialization in a big way in much of America. John summed that up quite well. I know a businessman whose entire business consists of moving entire factories out of the USA and into Mexico. He's been doing it for decades, and he's still moving those factories. Way back in the 1900s both republicans and democrats touted the desirability of NAFTA. One lone voice, Ross Perot, claimed that if NAFTA was enacted, we would hear the giant sucking sound of American jobs going to Mexico. He was right, and we were lied to, again.
But it's not all about blacks, and it's not all about the urban core. I was just thinking earlier today, before I saw this video, that rural blacks are almost completely ignored in the morality play that we call DEI. I grew up in the White suburbs of Boston, but my first real job out of college was teaching science in a rural Ohio school. Yes, there's blacks there. And, even fifty years ago, I saw these small towns struggling to survive as "deindustrialization" passed them by. John, until I saw this video, I didn't know it had a name. So, thanks for that, I guess.
If you don't know Iris Dement, you should. Here is her interpretation of deindustrialization, and what it meant to her town: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IUj1mDENg
The disagreement was never as acute as it might have seemed. Fascinating to look back.