First, I think its better to talk about damage to community fabric rather than culture, because with the latter you lose half your audience. The first obstacle is hypergamy, not culture- the fact women may sleep with a man and have his children, but won't settle with him unless he is productive. So understanding the problem what do we need? The most massive shift in public education since public education began- streaming off the 50% of the American population who don't do well academically towards vocational education at 14 (any later and we won't get the buy-in that we need, because by 16 they will have become too despondent and jaded).
It's a universal policy which would disproportionately help those African American communities which have not yet joined the middle classes- and it's not as though blue collar jobs weren't standing vacant in 2019, with 7 million available and a housing sector which was producing houses at a rate that was far below what was necessary to replace even existing stock. More responsible and employment young men in any job other than low paid service sector work, would automatically lead to a much enhanced rate of stable family formation.
I tackled this very subject in my Substack recently: https://geary.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-america-in-one-easy-step/comments . I also think I've solved the mechanism for closing supposed racial gaps in IQ. It was socio-economics but more about the social side than the economic, with a self-sorting function at the bottom creating an environment with both low parental engagement in the home and low parental engagement in the peer group. I think you will agree with my conclusions about Fig 1 from the Swedish Adoption Study.
I used Dr Raj Chetty's work on social mobility and linked it to a Swedish Sibling Adoption study. Also informative was an old British longitudinal IQ study which compared low father engagement with high father engagement with the old socio-economic grading system- which showed a 2 point increase towards the bottom and 3.5 points further up. The other thing I had in mind was the Chinese British demographic, for whom the bottom quintile of the SES performs within a couple of percentile points of the top quintile in our national GCSE exams at 16- with a huge difference in economics, but almost no difference in fathers in the home, or fathers in the community.
I think the other thing to consider is the extent to which opportunities further up the socio-economic spectrum require a liquid blue collar class in order to come into being. Family doctors, lawyers, accountants and entrepreneurs all need a reasonably paid customer base in order for their opportunities to generate wealth. Most Left-leaning liberals seem to fixate purely on access to existing hierarchies at the top for inclusion, when they should be thinking how can we build these precious opportunities from the base up?
It's also worth looking at the Sewell Report from the UK. There is a huge difference in outcomes between Afro Caribbean British and our more recent African British- the main difference is fathers in the community, with around 37% for the AC British and over 60% for the African British. It also bears out Shelby Steele's position- our white working class, Afro Caribbean British and Bangladeshi British populations were all subject to the same terrible housing and welfare policies. White working class boys attend university at a rate of 9%, for girls it is 14% (although these figures might have improved slightly since the last time I looked at them).
Vocational education was the only thing I could think of, but I am open to new ideas. When we look at the other groups which spent too much time struggling at the bottom, Irish Americans, then it becomes clear that a seat at the table doesn't help and the only thing which finally helped empower their rise was a surplus demand for labour. Failing that. technical specialisation would seem to be the answer. It seems to work for the Germans.
First, I think its better to talk about damage to community fabric rather than culture, because with the latter you lose half your audience. The first obstacle is hypergamy, not culture- the fact women may sleep with a man and have his children, but won't settle with him unless he is productive. So understanding the problem what do we need? The most massive shift in public education since public education began- streaming off the 50% of the American population who don't do well academically towards vocational education at 14 (any later and we won't get the buy-in that we need, because by 16 they will have become too despondent and jaded).
It's a universal policy which would disproportionately help those African American communities which have not yet joined the middle classes- and it's not as though blue collar jobs weren't standing vacant in 2019, with 7 million available and a housing sector which was producing houses at a rate that was far below what was necessary to replace even existing stock. More responsible and employment young men in any job other than low paid service sector work, would automatically lead to a much enhanced rate of stable family formation.
I tackled this very subject in my Substack recently: https://geary.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-america-in-one-easy-step/comments . I also think I've solved the mechanism for closing supposed racial gaps in IQ. It was socio-economics but more about the social side than the economic, with a self-sorting function at the bottom creating an environment with both low parental engagement in the home and low parental engagement in the peer group. I think you will agree with my conclusions about Fig 1 from the Swedish Adoption Study.
I used Dr Raj Chetty's work on social mobility and linked it to a Swedish Sibling Adoption study. Also informative was an old British longitudinal IQ study which compared low father engagement with high father engagement with the old socio-economic grading system- which showed a 2 point increase towards the bottom and 3.5 points further up. The other thing I had in mind was the Chinese British demographic, for whom the bottom quintile of the SES performs within a couple of percentile points of the top quintile in our national GCSE exams at 16- with a huge difference in economics, but almost no difference in fathers in the home, or fathers in the community.
I think the other thing to consider is the extent to which opportunities further up the socio-economic spectrum require a liquid blue collar class in order to come into being. Family doctors, lawyers, accountants and entrepreneurs all need a reasonably paid customer base in order for their opportunities to generate wealth. Most Left-leaning liberals seem to fixate purely on access to existing hierarchies at the top for inclusion, when they should be thinking how can we build these precious opportunities from the base up?
It's also worth looking at the Sewell Report from the UK. There is a huge difference in outcomes between Afro Caribbean British and our more recent African British- the main difference is fathers in the community, with around 37% for the AC British and over 60% for the African British. It also bears out Shelby Steele's position- our white working class, Afro Caribbean British and Bangladeshi British populations were all subject to the same terrible housing and welfare policies. White working class boys attend university at a rate of 9%, for girls it is 14% (although these figures might have improved slightly since the last time I looked at them).
Vocational education was the only thing I could think of, but I am open to new ideas. When we look at the other groups which spent too much time struggling at the bottom, Irish Americans, then it becomes clear that a seat at the table doesn't help and the only thing which finally helped empower their rise was a surplus demand for labour. Failing that. technical specialisation would seem to be the answer. It seems to work for the Germans.