Glenn, you briefly mentioned something that has been part of my more serious bug with the whole discourse: that black college graduates have significantly less wealth than white high school graduates. This is something that really bothers me, and is something I believe is very illustrative of a problem with the discourse, because it's always presented as a GOTCHA factoid. Objecting to concerns about a wealth or income gap by noting the education gap, you might be gotcha'd by this factoid.
The problem being that the average black college grad is in their late 20s and the average white high school graduate is in their mid-40s, where lifecycle effects of income absolutely dominate human capital from education. You bring this kind of thing up during the course of your conversation, which is nice to see. A discussion of the ways in which the black and white populations differ in entirely innocent ways (so, not Murrayan population genetics, but instead just demographics like the above: the Baby Boom lasted a bit longer for African Americans than it did for European Americans, so Black America is a bit younger than White America) and the effect these differences may have on aggregate statistical outcomes isn't something that is ever part of the discussion.
The whole discourse relies on these 'gotcha' factoids. Yes, there is often SOME sort of research extant to back the factoid, but the research often seems almost to have been done with the purpose of buttressing the rhetorical factoid, rather than the factoid having fallen out of research being done for any other reason research might be done. The Desmond article you mention is like this: it feels like the whole New History of Capitalism (of which Matthew and Sven are part) project seems to be about substantiating political rhetoric, generating gotcha factoids for activists to use in influencing public opinion.
This is especially obvious when the research is of such thing quality that it's so easily excoriated by other researchers without the same rhetorical mission. Olmsted and Rhode have not been kind to Beckert and Baptiste (another member of the NHC school of thought). Why is it, do you think, that the research of Sven and Matthew gets featured in the New York Times and the rejoinder from other scholars remains obscure? For one, the refutation is technical and doesn't lend itself as well to being transformed into publicly consumable rhetoric. And that may be all it takes: if 'American wealth is built on the back of cotton slavery and whip torture' as a rhetorical factoid can only be refuted through and in-depth look at plant genetics and historical national accounts, the factoid will win in the court of public opinion by default. No one will pay attention to the technical refutation long enough to understand it.
This is an important problem with explanations for social outcomes arising from the cultural hegemony theory: they're Pat, simple, and very easy to understand and get angry about. Alternative explanations are often involved and not so easily packaged for soundbyte consumption. This is a problem when everyone only has so much time to spend on The Issue and otherwise has to grind out the rest of their life.
Glenn, you briefly mentioned something that has been part of my more serious bug with the whole discourse: that black college graduates have significantly less wealth than white high school graduates. This is something that really bothers me, and is something I believe is very illustrative of a problem with the discourse, because it's always presented as a GOTCHA factoid. Objecting to concerns about a wealth or income gap by noting the education gap, you might be gotcha'd by this factoid.
The problem being that the average black college grad is in their late 20s and the average white high school graduate is in their mid-40s, where lifecycle effects of income absolutely dominate human capital from education. You bring this kind of thing up during the course of your conversation, which is nice to see. A discussion of the ways in which the black and white populations differ in entirely innocent ways (so, not Murrayan population genetics, but instead just demographics like the above: the Baby Boom lasted a bit longer for African Americans than it did for European Americans, so Black America is a bit younger than White America) and the effect these differences may have on aggregate statistical outcomes isn't something that is ever part of the discussion.
The whole discourse relies on these 'gotcha' factoids. Yes, there is often SOME sort of research extant to back the factoid, but the research often seems almost to have been done with the purpose of buttressing the rhetorical factoid, rather than the factoid having fallen out of research being done for any other reason research might be done. The Desmond article you mention is like this: it feels like the whole New History of Capitalism (of which Matthew and Sven are part) project seems to be about substantiating political rhetoric, generating gotcha factoids for activists to use in influencing public opinion.
This is especially obvious when the research is of such thing quality that it's so easily excoriated by other researchers without the same rhetorical mission. Olmsted and Rhode have not been kind to Beckert and Baptiste (another member of the NHC school of thought). Why is it, do you think, that the research of Sven and Matthew gets featured in the New York Times and the rejoinder from other scholars remains obscure? For one, the refutation is technical and doesn't lend itself as well to being transformed into publicly consumable rhetoric. And that may be all it takes: if 'American wealth is built on the back of cotton slavery and whip torture' as a rhetorical factoid can only be refuted through and in-depth look at plant genetics and historical national accounts, the factoid will win in the court of public opinion by default. No one will pay attention to the technical refutation long enough to understand it.
This is an important problem with explanations for social outcomes arising from the cultural hegemony theory: they're Pat, simple, and very easy to understand and get angry about. Alternative explanations are often involved and not so easily packaged for soundbyte consumption. This is a problem when everyone only has so much time to spend on The Issue and otherwise has to grind out the rest of their life.