I've often thought that the seemingly intractable problems of the inner city could be broken by instituting boarding schools for the children. And, lo and behold, someone is doing just that in Albany, GA. King Randall has been working on the X School for Boys and I think his approach is very promising. It's just one piece in the puzzle but he's going against the black establishment mentality where you just go along with the system. He's forging a new direction and I hope he's successful.
Lets take a step back. Is parenting the problem for black kids? Would teaching the latest child-rearing techniques make a difference? On the face of it, it looks like it would. The book, Love Money and Parenting, written by Doepke and Zilibotti appears to show that the intensive parenting of the professional managerial class makes a huge difference to how their children do, and the economist, James Heckman has made a career off the apparent ROI of investing in early childhood education for low income kids. But looking from 30K feet only tells you so much. And the same if true of studies that looks at, for instance, the numbers of words that children hear. The thing that all these perspectives share is that there is something about the things that parents do that makes the difference.
But I think we would be better off looking at families from an institutional perspective. Why? Because institutions preserve cultural ways of doing things that go beyond the behavior of individual parents. This isn't just a question of family structure, though certain structures work better than others. It is a question of purpose.
Since the 1970s the family as an institution has gradually ceased to be about socializing the next generation and has become, to the extent that families are intentional, about emotion, and childrearing has become about the development of children's sense of self.
Instead of integrating kids into the world, we validate them and this expectation of being validated has produced at least two generations of people who possess an external locus of control, who despite their interest in self expression and identity, aren't terribly robust because they have come to rely on praise and recognition in an unhealthy way. And because of this, they are worryingly open to authoritarian controls on their behavior and that of others, (speech codes, for instance) as long as they don't feel personally disrespected.
This is what we don't talk about when we talk about the success of kids who have been intensively parented in the style of the professional and managerial elite. They have the material means to offset some of their fragility and the social weight to demand that colleges or other institutions adapt to their weaknesses, but are they alright? Not really. The crisis of children's mental health is testimony to this.
Well maybe, you might argue, but at least they are doing better than black kids. And perhaps they are -- but they are doing better not primarily because of the extra curricular activities or the numbers of words they hear. They are doing better because they are living in stable families --even when they are children of single parents.
Working class white kids are increasingly in the same boat as working class black children, but one interesting pattern I have noticed and that has been documented by PEW and others, is that many white working class families are blended families. Typically a man and a woman cohabit, they have a child and then they go their separate ways. Many of these people will move on from their "starter family" and go on form longterm, stable relationships when they are somewhat older. Life for the children of these starter families is the luck of the draw. If their parent (usually the mother) forms a stable permanent relationship they will usually be okay. But if, lIke JD Vance's mother, they are unable to form a stable relationship they do worse by every measure. This is true of black kids in the same situations
If a family is stable it can be disorganized and chaotic as still, amazingly, the children can still be okay. Contrast Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle with JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both families are poor and culturally Appalachian. Both are madly chaotic. But one family stays together and the other falls apart with JD's mother eventually falling into long series of tenuous partnerships. You might even make the case that the family in the Glass Castle is far poorer than JD's. And yet all the children manage to transcend their difficult upbringing.
The difference is generational. Within JD Van's family you can see that his mother's older siblings do okay but by the time his mother has him and his sister, families are about emotion and the personal fulfillment of adults. Given how long black families have been unstable (mainly because they were in the wrong places at the wrong time -- but that's a whole book) it's not surprising that kids aren't doing well. Put it another way, living in a poor, unstable home where the needs of adults take precedence, there is only so much early childhood education and parent coaching can do.
I am with Woodson on this but I have something to add. We can see that a lot of well intentioned attempts to "fix" black parents don't work and are probably just making things worse. I'm not saying that parents don't even need help, but parenting coaching can be a problem unless it is limited and really is only coaching.
Almost all parents have the capacity to be a good enough for their child, just as all parents need help now and then. But too much contemporary parenting advice isn't really advice. It is expertise masquerading as advice. It is often contradictory and far too general to really be of much use, except perhaps by superficially boosting parents' confidence for a short time. All too often it becomes a substitute for developing the instinct for caring for your child. And when you aren't confident, when your decisions are subject to expert's scrutiny, it undermines your authority with your kids. There really is no substitute for just doing it, but if you are being second guessed all the time, you just make it harder for people who are already having a hard time.
I recently was on a zoom with a woman who runs her own black mom's group in her Pittsburgh community. I was really struck by her tag line. "I know you are already a good momma, we're just here to help each other out". That, I think, is how it should be.
Why not get the government out of the way? Clearly black families did better during the first 50 years than the second 50 years of the 20th century (ref Raj Chetty 2015 MTO paper and many books by Thomas Sowell). Chetty found that that moving families to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were below age 13. If there's systemic racism, it's the policies that keep successive generations of black families stuck in substandard public housing, surrounded by violence, drug peddlers and substandard schools (unions and democrats oppose charter schools which would give black mothers a real choice, ref De Blasio in NYC). IMO, it's unconstitutional as it conflicts with a central tenet of the Bill of Rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness clause)...
I simply don't understand why most welfare systems weren't reformed years ago. At the moment they are a strong disincentive to the first dollar earned. A supplement which phases out at a rate somewhere between 25c and 33c per dollar earned would be a far more humane system which would encourage people to pick-up less reliable work and transition into employment, whilst also helping the perennially low-waged.
My suspicion is that Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is at play. It would mean that much of the bureaucracy which surrounds welfare could be dissolved, and the administrative state wouldn't want that, would they?
and I suspect you are spot on w.r.t. Pournelle's Law -- more current examples are the FBI, FDA and the Dept of Education whose budget & spending increase each year yet our students score in lower quintiles than other OECD countries.
Thank you Mr. Woodson for all you and others in your organization are doing. And also thank you Mr. Loury for all you do to bring these issues to the forefront. I appreciate your (Woodson) “from the inside out” approach with the community for the trust aspect for one but also a permanency aspect as well. While people will leave an area or change availability, I suspect the more the direct community is involved/invested, the more constancy there is of the volunteers. And people need constancy and not people who are there for 6 months (or less) and no more. And, they are there- not 20 minutes (or more) away. It takes life on life, prayer, people being willing to trust and give and receive which is hard when trust has been broken previously. As one who grew up in a divorced family with its own dysfunction, I get it. The Lord God has used many people to help me be in a healthier place. People need to see an extension of Him from others (in the form of grace, mercy, patience, truth, encouragement, etc). And Lord willing, as you help families and individuals, they will be empowered to make healthier choices so harmful cycles are broken. Thank you again! No easy fixes in life. Keep on keeping on!
I worked as a public health visiting nurse for 20 years seeing women on public assistance who delivered a baby. I found that as much as I cared for families, I wasn’t empowering them. If you polled most experienced public health nurses, and they were honest, they would agree. This includes nurses who work with pregnant teens who they case-manage with a goal of getting them to graduate from high school. There are more black public health nurses now, which helps. But ultimately I blame these 30-40 years of failed government programs. My experience moved my political views from flaming white liberal to a conservative. Perhaps if government conservative policies were implemented, that would provide mentors and support, (especially job training for black fathers )along with weaning off these terrible government dependent programs, we could empower people. Greater emphasis on marriage (a mother and father having a family together) and the church is needed.
Great comment. Richard Tremblay has done some incredible work in Canada on chronic physical aggression in children which shows that interventions need to happen as early in pregnancy as possible, at the latest. There are a number of studies available online, but I found this obscure YouTube video particularly helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOAi-yyGSJ4&t=2647s . In general his work shows that chronic physical aggression is epigenetic in nature and caused by a number of risk factors which tend to correlate quite significantly with the economic socio-economic sorting associated with single motherhood. Stress related cytokines seem to play a particularly significant role, but I would read the 2018 paper.
I mention all this because in addition to a massive shift towards vocational training, there needs to be a secondary school program geared towards helping teenagers envisage what type of life they want to lead, and giving them the skinny on what their children are likely to encounter if they pursue certain life paths. The impact on social mobility for boy children alone, should dissuade teenage girls from ever wanting to become single mothers. A lot of our pre-industrial social systems imparted by Christianity might seem quite condemnatory, judgemental and geared to punish, but they probably existed for good reasons- to aid in the social health and well-being of the community.
"I really expected more of a blueprint for rebuilding Black America from a guy who won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and has been doing this work for 40 years. Does he not have some well-developed hypotheses about how to build strong Black families by now? "
I think it's rather simple. Empower African American women and give them complete autonomy over their bodies and reproductive abilities.
That's a great point, but Dr Raj Chetty's research shows that African American women enjoy slightly high rates of social mobility than white women, but the lack of community choice in the dating field leads to a form of cruel intergenerational reset. It takes two income household to build family wealth in the West, because you're basically looking at a 40% drop in non-tax related living costs. Plus, men tend to budget more responsibly when they have a woman in charge.
Where most social reformers go wrong is that they focus on access to opportunity at the top- with many skilled blue collar workers earning more than non-STEM college graduates there is an opportunity for building wealth from the lower middle upwards. Stable family formation only works when young men in a community have the employment opportunities and direction to become responsible earners to which women will be attracted into longer term commitments.
"...Stable family formation only works when young men in a community have the employment opportunities and direction to become responsible earners to which women will be attracted into longer term commitments..."
Exactly backwards. Stable families are formed by a Man and a Woman who make staying together with their children their top priority regardless of their individual histories or cultural disfunctions. Groups that have moved out of poverty had intact families before, not after, opportunities (which they took advantage of) presented themselves
Frankly I was surprised by Clifton Roscoe's letter. He seems to be unaware of all the water that has passed under the bridge regarding attempts to fix inner city black life and the decay of black families. I recently read "Freedom is Not Enough, The Moynihan Report and Americas Struggle over Black Family Life--- from LBJ to Obama", written by James T. Patterson. Someone here suggested it.
Moynihan's report came out around 1965, identifying the sad state of inner city black family life and predicting its' further catastrophic demise in the absence of programs to fix the problem. For the past 55 years bureaucratic elites in government have been unsuccessfully designing and implementing fixes much as suggested by Clifton Roscoe. They have all failed. They will always fail and Bob Woodson understands why and takes an alternative approach. Bob Woodson and the people he attracts to his cause care about the the poor people leading these terrible lives. Government bureaucrats could care less about the people involved. To them it's a job that they get paid to do and another step towards a comfortable civil service retirement.
I support Bob Woodson figuratively and financially. We all should.
I hope more of us want "results" to what Bob states in the context of "shared-intentions" across all "races" in our land with the hard focus on what Martin Luther King dreamed for his children - specifically what some call our "American Creed"...The second paragraph of our Declaration Of Independence. "This", (Creed), is why we do what we do. But for decades now (some for centuries) have lived outside the mental/emotional attachment to this "shared-imperative). When we "dream" of success in this difficult cultural and economic condition, it must all culminate it what we all need to be free and prosperous. Many are trying to decouple all of us from the American market and American Creed. That conflicts with Bob's (and King's) intentions in all this. The following is from the NMAAHC " Whiteness" essay. https://scontent-ort2-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/118701681_1503581099834726_8655698853942456149_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-5&_nc_sid=e3f864&_nc_ohc=bjv51IwHIE4AX90OmNn&_nc_ht=scontent-ort2-2.xx&oh=dbd9c3046c3a7d1f6732d392b49b2de9&oe=6158EC5D. I'm stretching to say that if Dr. Maxwell Maltz' theory of success via our minds is near correct - that the subconscious mind is a servo-mechanism evolved to only to aid our success. Further, Maltz postulates that to do its job (work), the subconscious requires a person to have "a goal" - commensurate with one's self-image, that self-image must be a "positive" one and the "target owner" must be capable of forming "the goal". I'm betting there is quite a difference in imagining what a goal is between the middle class American (of all races) and those with poor or no parenting.
That's a very interesting hypothesis which ties in with some of criticisms we've seen concerning disparate role models by community, but we also need to ask ourselves how much universalism applies. On single motherhood some of Theodore Dalrymple's observations are apt- because despite their circumstances if you ask any single mother what she wants for a daughter, the answer will usually involve her daughter meeting a nice reliable man, settling down and having kids- her life without the deficits.
There is also a form of non-governmental community social safety net which operates in communities with high rates of fathers. Or at least it's what I postulate given that the UK has equalised income disparities for the 18 to 30 age bracket, yet still has significant differences in unemployment rates. Communities with high rates of fathers have all sorts of ways of gainfully employing teenage boys who don't so well at school- and let's face it, those first couple of jobs are just rungs on a ladder getting people where they are supposed to be.
Thanks, Geary. I hesitate to try and depict the economic positions of any groups today although I hope all groups improve at ever increasing rates. I'm stuck in the old fashioned belief that we need to encourage and insist our economy gets back to a stronger national position and per capita wealth is achieved within that dynamic (easier said than done at this point in time). Many fellow citizens claim to need help and many are even reluctant to work for today's wages. I sense the improvement in the plight of Black America who grabs onto the educational and effort ring of our merry-go-round. I remember when Jackie Robinson broke in to baseball. I recall the terrible time he had to experience. I see the adulation from the sea of "white" Tiger Woods received as he approached the 18th green in the 2019 Masters. A long time for such a change of hearts and minds, perhaps but perhaps that is the time it had to take. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/facts-about-the-us-black-population/. I don't say or think these stats indicate "enough", but they are pointing in better directions.
If you wait for the chronically overeducated to study the problem and come up with a plan, all you will get is the continued suffering of those in need currently and a top down implementation so full of unforeseen consequences as to be worse then useless... people aren't rats and low income neighborhoods aren't laboratories where we can sacrifice generations of "mice" looking for answers.
For those of you who don't understand what Bob's group is doing just be thankful for its existence and send in a donation. For anyone confused enough to say they are "disappointed" in Bob... well, I got nothing to cut through that thick-headedness...
Carry on Bob... unlike most in today's world, you are making a difference and not just running your mouth...
Very astute comment, but I would caveat slightly. Data collection from the top can be very useful, provided it's not construed to polish a turd or hide embarrassment under a carpet, but the second step should be to encourage a ground-up entrepreneurial approach problem-solving.
The West spent $2.4 trillion on foreign aid, much of it wasted. A prime example comes from the use of mosquito nets- where the top down approach resulted in people either throwing them away, using them for fishing or even as materials for wedding dresses. What did work was making them a prestige retail item for wealthier people, and giving nurses in clinics a small commission for successfully promoting them to their patients. The market in action.
As your example points out, there is an infinite chasm between lofty universal theory and the combinatorially explosive complexity of human society and individual choices.
I am indeed indebted to the social scientists and thinkers in their ivory towers... and perhaps deal too harshly with their presumably good intentions... but we all know what the "road to hell" is paved with.
These issues are complex and as in all things hubris is the enemy...
Sorry, I should have mentioned that almost all incarceration these days for drugs is drug dealing. Drug possession is mainly a form of government rent-seeking. Hundred of thousands of cases of marijuana possession a year, but only about 600 cases per year of actual prison sentences for marijuana possession as the only charge. Plus, at the state level, drug offences account of about 14 or 15% of the prison population. 50% is violent crime, 20% property crime. Crucially, drug dealing feeds into violent crime, which is one of the reasons why drug dealing was treated so punitively in the past.
The best approach is the Scottish Public Health approach. It uses proactive policing as a vehicle for early intervention and then focuses everything on Youth Reform. There are a number of things that helped it to work- social workers, housing, the provision of youth clubs and diversion- but the key element was getting buy-in from employers in blue collar type work, to offer economic opportunities to demoralised and wayward youth.
But the key is to not back off or defund proactive policing- you simply need to change everything which happens from that initial point of contact with police onwards. The other thing which is worth considering is short sentences for gang grooming (up to 90 days, with contributing to delinquency the standard). Although the Norwegians have been quite cagey about publishing definitive figures, they have at least admitted that their reform model doesn't work anywhere near as well with gang involvement.
In general though you need to reduce sentencing for drug dealing- down to about 18 to 24 months as a disruption strategy (instead of 71 months as an average), with longer sentences for those at risk of escalating to violent behaviour. The reason for this are simple- by handing out harsh sentences for drug dealing in an unregulated market, you are effectively increasing the number of slots or speed of a conveyor belt of corruption. An unregulated market always gets filled.
90 days for gang grooming is apt, because it deprives drug dealers of around $90K of income for utilising kids as runners, spotters or cut-outs.
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.
I’m very concerned for black families. But no matter what, and this is true. The first head on the pike is going to be the faggots. Lil Nas X getting dissed for the poetic license of a metaphor as a threat to the black family is the perfect concrete real word representation of that threat. I read an article the other day about the fourth trans woman of color murdered in my city the other day. Jesus ministered to the prostitutes, and poor, where are these fine Christians for vulnerable communities like the trans sex worker class. They point to a celebrity if they mention it all, and condemn us as a threat because we are an easy target. Everyone laughs at the circus freak. Mark my words, the first head on the pike is the faggots.
Ah well... I'd do better to think, but then if I did I probably wouldn't write anything.
"Going back to M. Woodson. I can't believe that anyone would question that the solutions have to be **developed IN the community and** PROMOTED by the community..."
Also, I've "said" this before and, honestly, I don't know why I bother, but I don't see why ANYBODY wouldn't want to decriminalize marijuana, RELEASE prisoners (a lotta them Black), EXPUNGE the records and get FATHERS back on the streets. Then I recall: I'm nobody, but also in the Zen sense-a the term, too, so there is that. :)
TYTY, as always, M. Loury. It's about noon and I've been up for 10 1/2 hours already, so I don't have the patience I would like. Here's the thing: It's ALL OF IT, it's about mindset. And people changing who they are for the better. Tho this may not SEEM completely logical, the ONLY person who can change someone, is that person THEMSELVES. Technically, it's impossible for one person to change another person. INFLUENCE? Yeah, but usually that never happens either.
All that to say... I think it's a lot easier for the anatomy of a human brain to find out what's wrong with a situation. That's the design of the brain.
What's one whole lot HARDER is to come up with solutions to problems, not in identifying them, right? Besides, my Instincts/Intuitions tell me that 90 - 95+% of the time M. Woodson is gonna be right, and that it's pretty easy to take shots at him from the peanut gallery. Or at anybody.
I read a lot, but sometimes I forget things. But it's been said many times before and will be said again. I think the quote goes something like this, "As long as Black females are giving sex out to Black males who have a lotta sex appeal, instead of Black males who would MAKE GOOD FATHERS..." MIGHT-a been M. Adam B. Coleman in "Black Victim to Black Victor." Mebbe not.
Schooling is the key, after fathers, right? It always HAS been anyway.
"The Education of Eva Moskowitz" is a memoir that tells a lot about Success Academies, or whatever they call themselves. A public charter school. Just finished that lately. They take 15,000 kids outta the poor neighborhoods of NYC, at random, and teach them to excel. Not easy, but their students outperform most-a the white kids, they are THAT good. They've honed the method and put it online someplace. I'm not one-HUNDRED percent behind Moskowitz. She's made a lotta enemies, and likely where there's smoke there's fire. But success? She's been there, done that for a decade? Mebbe?
I'm on Wilfred Reilly's "Taboo." Probably finish tomorrow. If people would just look at what he writes as a GIVEN, as FACT, then I think there'll be plenty of possibilities.
Oh! One more: "The Alternative: Most of What You Believe About Poverty Is Wrong"
by Mauricio L Miller. WHen I read it, reminded me a LOT of M. Woodson's approach. That there was some things to gain from Miller's POV. But You gotta realize he's dealing with a different group of people. The book talks mainly about immigrants coming to the country for the express PURPOSE of bettering themselves. Well-motivated, with better resources. IOW, I dunno his poor and M. Woodson's poor are in the same ballpark. Still, things could be learned. His approach is to get a number of families to join up together in his program. And they work together, as a mini-community, to GET THINGS DONE.
Going back to M. Woodson. I can't believe that anyone would question that the solutions have to be PROMOTED by the community, if their gonna take hold. Telling them, "DO this" and "DO that" just would slow things down, if not completely stop any progress whatsoever.
The Unions also might be a little more amenable with their approach than Success Academy's. They see training and continuous improvement as the solution to underperformance with teachers (fewer firings) and also generally seem to have far lower burn rates on staff. That being said, there are a lot of complaints about workloads for the latter on some of the employment sites.
I follow Miss Snuffy (Katherine Birbalsingh) on Twitter. Recently trainee teachers posed the question 'why does she hate kids so much?' As if being strict and preparing kids to excel in the world were somehow a bad thing, through having demanding standards...
I've often thought that the seemingly intractable problems of the inner city could be broken by instituting boarding schools for the children. And, lo and behold, someone is doing just that in Albany, GA. King Randall has been working on the X School for Boys and I think his approach is very promising. It's just one piece in the puzzle but he's going against the black establishment mentality where you just go along with the system. He's forging a new direction and I hope he's successful.
Lets take a step back. Is parenting the problem for black kids? Would teaching the latest child-rearing techniques make a difference? On the face of it, it looks like it would. The book, Love Money and Parenting, written by Doepke and Zilibotti appears to show that the intensive parenting of the professional managerial class makes a huge difference to how their children do, and the economist, James Heckman has made a career off the apparent ROI of investing in early childhood education for low income kids. But looking from 30K feet only tells you so much. And the same if true of studies that looks at, for instance, the numbers of words that children hear. The thing that all these perspectives share is that there is something about the things that parents do that makes the difference.
But I think we would be better off looking at families from an institutional perspective. Why? Because institutions preserve cultural ways of doing things that go beyond the behavior of individual parents. This isn't just a question of family structure, though certain structures work better than others. It is a question of purpose.
Since the 1970s the family as an institution has gradually ceased to be about socializing the next generation and has become, to the extent that families are intentional, about emotion, and childrearing has become about the development of children's sense of self.
Instead of integrating kids into the world, we validate them and this expectation of being validated has produced at least two generations of people who possess an external locus of control, who despite their interest in self expression and identity, aren't terribly robust because they have come to rely on praise and recognition in an unhealthy way. And because of this, they are worryingly open to authoritarian controls on their behavior and that of others, (speech codes, for instance) as long as they don't feel personally disrespected.
This is what we don't talk about when we talk about the success of kids who have been intensively parented in the style of the professional and managerial elite. They have the material means to offset some of their fragility and the social weight to demand that colleges or other institutions adapt to their weaknesses, but are they alright? Not really. The crisis of children's mental health is testimony to this.
Well maybe, you might argue, but at least they are doing better than black kids. And perhaps they are -- but they are doing better not primarily because of the extra curricular activities or the numbers of words they hear. They are doing better because they are living in stable families --even when they are children of single parents.
Working class white kids are increasingly in the same boat as working class black children, but one interesting pattern I have noticed and that has been documented by PEW and others, is that many white working class families are blended families. Typically a man and a woman cohabit, they have a child and then they go their separate ways. Many of these people will move on from their "starter family" and go on form longterm, stable relationships when they are somewhat older. Life for the children of these starter families is the luck of the draw. If their parent (usually the mother) forms a stable permanent relationship they will usually be okay. But if, lIke JD Vance's mother, they are unable to form a stable relationship they do worse by every measure. This is true of black kids in the same situations
If a family is stable it can be disorganized and chaotic as still, amazingly, the children can still be okay. Contrast Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle with JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both families are poor and culturally Appalachian. Both are madly chaotic. But one family stays together and the other falls apart with JD's mother eventually falling into long series of tenuous partnerships. You might even make the case that the family in the Glass Castle is far poorer than JD's. And yet all the children manage to transcend their difficult upbringing.
The difference is generational. Within JD Van's family you can see that his mother's older siblings do okay but by the time his mother has him and his sister, families are about emotion and the personal fulfillment of adults. Given how long black families have been unstable (mainly because they were in the wrong places at the wrong time -- but that's a whole book) it's not surprising that kids aren't doing well. Put it another way, living in a poor, unstable home where the needs of adults take precedence, there is only so much early childhood education and parent coaching can do.
I am with Woodson on this but I have something to add. We can see that a lot of well intentioned attempts to "fix" black parents don't work and are probably just making things worse. I'm not saying that parents don't even need help, but parenting coaching can be a problem unless it is limited and really is only coaching.
Almost all parents have the capacity to be a good enough for their child, just as all parents need help now and then. But too much contemporary parenting advice isn't really advice. It is expertise masquerading as advice. It is often contradictory and far too general to really be of much use, except perhaps by superficially boosting parents' confidence for a short time. All too often it becomes a substitute for developing the instinct for caring for your child. And when you aren't confident, when your decisions are subject to expert's scrutiny, it undermines your authority with your kids. There really is no substitute for just doing it, but if you are being second guessed all the time, you just make it harder for people who are already having a hard time.
I recently was on a zoom with a woman who runs her own black mom's group in her Pittsburgh community. I was really struck by her tag line. "I know you are already a good momma, we're just here to help each other out". That, I think, is how it should be.
Why not get the government out of the way? Clearly black families did better during the first 50 years than the second 50 years of the 20th century (ref Raj Chetty 2015 MTO paper and many books by Thomas Sowell). Chetty found that that moving families to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were below age 13. If there's systemic racism, it's the policies that keep successive generations of black families stuck in substandard public housing, surrounded by violence, drug peddlers and substandard schools (unions and democrats oppose charter schools which would give black mothers a real choice, ref De Blasio in NYC). IMO, it's unconstitutional as it conflicts with a central tenet of the Bill of Rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness clause)...
I simply don't understand why most welfare systems weren't reformed years ago. At the moment they are a strong disincentive to the first dollar earned. A supplement which phases out at a rate somewhere between 25c and 33c per dollar earned would be a far more humane system which would encourage people to pick-up less reliable work and transition into employment, whilst also helping the perennially low-waged.
My suspicion is that Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is at play. It would mean that much of the bureaucracy which surrounds welfare could be dissolved, and the administrative state wouldn't want that, would they?
and I suspect you are spot on w.r.t. Pournelle's Law -- more current examples are the FBI, FDA and the Dept of Education whose budget & spending increase each year yet our students score in lower quintiles than other OECD countries.
Thank you Mr. Woodson for all you and others in your organization are doing. And also thank you Mr. Loury for all you do to bring these issues to the forefront. I appreciate your (Woodson) “from the inside out” approach with the community for the trust aspect for one but also a permanency aspect as well. While people will leave an area or change availability, I suspect the more the direct community is involved/invested, the more constancy there is of the volunteers. And people need constancy and not people who are there for 6 months (or less) and no more. And, they are there- not 20 minutes (or more) away. It takes life on life, prayer, people being willing to trust and give and receive which is hard when trust has been broken previously. As one who grew up in a divorced family with its own dysfunction, I get it. The Lord God has used many people to help me be in a healthier place. People need to see an extension of Him from others (in the form of grace, mercy, patience, truth, encouragement, etc). And Lord willing, as you help families and individuals, they will be empowered to make healthier choices so harmful cycles are broken. Thank you again! No easy fixes in life. Keep on keeping on!
I worked as a public health visiting nurse for 20 years seeing women on public assistance who delivered a baby. I found that as much as I cared for families, I wasn’t empowering them. If you polled most experienced public health nurses, and they were honest, they would agree. This includes nurses who work with pregnant teens who they case-manage with a goal of getting them to graduate from high school. There are more black public health nurses now, which helps. But ultimately I blame these 30-40 years of failed government programs. My experience moved my political views from flaming white liberal to a conservative. Perhaps if government conservative policies were implemented, that would provide mentors and support, (especially job training for black fathers )along with weaning off these terrible government dependent programs, we could empower people. Greater emphasis on marriage (a mother and father having a family together) and the church is needed.
Great comment. Richard Tremblay has done some incredible work in Canada on chronic physical aggression in children which shows that interventions need to happen as early in pregnancy as possible, at the latest. There are a number of studies available online, but I found this obscure YouTube video particularly helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOAi-yyGSJ4&t=2647s . In general his work shows that chronic physical aggression is epigenetic in nature and caused by a number of risk factors which tend to correlate quite significantly with the economic socio-economic sorting associated with single motherhood. Stress related cytokines seem to play a particularly significant role, but I would read the 2018 paper.
I mention all this because in addition to a massive shift towards vocational training, there needs to be a secondary school program geared towards helping teenagers envisage what type of life they want to lead, and giving them the skinny on what their children are likely to encounter if they pursue certain life paths. The impact on social mobility for boy children alone, should dissuade teenage girls from ever wanting to become single mothers. A lot of our pre-industrial social systems imparted by Christianity might seem quite condemnatory, judgemental and geared to punish, but they probably existed for good reasons- to aid in the social health and well-being of the community.
"I really expected more of a blueprint for rebuilding Black America from a guy who won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and has been doing this work for 40 years. Does he not have some well-developed hypotheses about how to build strong Black families by now? "
I think it's rather simple. Empower African American women and give them complete autonomy over their bodies and reproductive abilities.
That's a great point, but Dr Raj Chetty's research shows that African American women enjoy slightly high rates of social mobility than white women, but the lack of community choice in the dating field leads to a form of cruel intergenerational reset. It takes two income household to build family wealth in the West, because you're basically looking at a 40% drop in non-tax related living costs. Plus, men tend to budget more responsibly when they have a woman in charge.
Where most social reformers go wrong is that they focus on access to opportunity at the top- with many skilled blue collar workers earning more than non-STEM college graduates there is an opportunity for building wealth from the lower middle upwards. Stable family formation only works when young men in a community have the employment opportunities and direction to become responsible earners to which women will be attracted into longer term commitments.
"...Stable family formation only works when young men in a community have the employment opportunities and direction to become responsible earners to which women will be attracted into longer term commitments..."
Exactly backwards. Stable families are formed by a Man and a Woman who make staying together with their children their top priority regardless of their individual histories or cultural disfunctions. Groups that have moved out of poverty had intact families before, not after, opportunities (which they took advantage of) presented themselves
Frankly I was surprised by Clifton Roscoe's letter. He seems to be unaware of all the water that has passed under the bridge regarding attempts to fix inner city black life and the decay of black families. I recently read "Freedom is Not Enough, The Moynihan Report and Americas Struggle over Black Family Life--- from LBJ to Obama", written by James T. Patterson. Someone here suggested it.
Moynihan's report came out around 1965, identifying the sad state of inner city black family life and predicting its' further catastrophic demise in the absence of programs to fix the problem. For the past 55 years bureaucratic elites in government have been unsuccessfully designing and implementing fixes much as suggested by Clifton Roscoe. They have all failed. They will always fail and Bob Woodson understands why and takes an alternative approach. Bob Woodson and the people he attracts to his cause care about the the poor people leading these terrible lives. Government bureaucrats could care less about the people involved. To them it's a job that they get paid to do and another step towards a comfortable civil service retirement.
I support Bob Woodson figuratively and financially. We all should.
I hope more of us want "results" to what Bob states in the context of "shared-intentions" across all "races" in our land with the hard focus on what Martin Luther King dreamed for his children - specifically what some call our "American Creed"...The second paragraph of our Declaration Of Independence. "This", (Creed), is why we do what we do. But for decades now (some for centuries) have lived outside the mental/emotional attachment to this "shared-imperative). When we "dream" of success in this difficult cultural and economic condition, it must all culminate it what we all need to be free and prosperous. Many are trying to decouple all of us from the American market and American Creed. That conflicts with Bob's (and King's) intentions in all this. The following is from the NMAAHC " Whiteness" essay. https://scontent-ort2-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/118701681_1503581099834726_8655698853942456149_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-5&_nc_sid=e3f864&_nc_ohc=bjv51IwHIE4AX90OmNn&_nc_ht=scontent-ort2-2.xx&oh=dbd9c3046c3a7d1f6732d392b49b2de9&oe=6158EC5D. I'm stretching to say that if Dr. Maxwell Maltz' theory of success via our minds is near correct - that the subconscious mind is a servo-mechanism evolved to only to aid our success. Further, Maltz postulates that to do its job (work), the subconscious requires a person to have "a goal" - commensurate with one's self-image, that self-image must be a "positive" one and the "target owner" must be capable of forming "the goal". I'm betting there is quite a difference in imagining what a goal is between the middle class American (of all races) and those with poor or no parenting.
That's a very interesting hypothesis which ties in with some of criticisms we've seen concerning disparate role models by community, but we also need to ask ourselves how much universalism applies. On single motherhood some of Theodore Dalrymple's observations are apt- because despite their circumstances if you ask any single mother what she wants for a daughter, the answer will usually involve her daughter meeting a nice reliable man, settling down and having kids- her life without the deficits.
The other thing to consider is a more general sense of agency and self belief imparted through education. This source from AEI is fairly informative: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/black-men-making-it-in-america-the-engines-of-economic-success-for-black-men-in-america/ . It shows about an 8% increased chance of joining the middle classes if agency is imparted early on.
There is also a form of non-governmental community social safety net which operates in communities with high rates of fathers. Or at least it's what I postulate given that the UK has equalised income disparities for the 18 to 30 age bracket, yet still has significant differences in unemployment rates. Communities with high rates of fathers have all sorts of ways of gainfully employing teenage boys who don't so well at school- and let's face it, those first couple of jobs are just rungs on a ladder getting people where they are supposed to be.
Thanks, Geary. I hesitate to try and depict the economic positions of any groups today although I hope all groups improve at ever increasing rates. I'm stuck in the old fashioned belief that we need to encourage and insist our economy gets back to a stronger national position and per capita wealth is achieved within that dynamic (easier said than done at this point in time). Many fellow citizens claim to need help and many are even reluctant to work for today's wages. I sense the improvement in the plight of Black America who grabs onto the educational and effort ring of our merry-go-round. I remember when Jackie Robinson broke in to baseball. I recall the terrible time he had to experience. I see the adulation from the sea of "white" Tiger Woods received as he approached the 18th green in the 2019 Masters. A long time for such a change of hearts and minds, perhaps but perhaps that is the time it had to take. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/facts-about-the-us-black-population/. I don't say or think these stats indicate "enough", but they are pointing in better directions.
"Amen Bob... Don't let the bastards get you down"
If you wait for the chronically overeducated to study the problem and come up with a plan, all you will get is the continued suffering of those in need currently and a top down implementation so full of unforeseen consequences as to be worse then useless... people aren't rats and low income neighborhoods aren't laboratories where we can sacrifice generations of "mice" looking for answers.
For those of you who don't understand what Bob's group is doing just be thankful for its existence and send in a donation. For anyone confused enough to say they are "disappointed" in Bob... well, I got nothing to cut through that thick-headedness...
Carry on Bob... unlike most in today's world, you are making a difference and not just running your mouth...
You have my respect...
Very astute comment, but I would caveat slightly. Data collection from the top can be very useful, provided it's not construed to polish a turd or hide embarrassment under a carpet, but the second step should be to encourage a ground-up entrepreneurial approach problem-solving.
The West spent $2.4 trillion on foreign aid, much of it wasted. A prime example comes from the use of mosquito nets- where the top down approach resulted in people either throwing them away, using them for fishing or even as materials for wedding dresses. What did work was making them a prestige retail item for wealthier people, and giving nurses in clinics a small commission for successfully promoting them to their patients. The market in action.
As your example points out, there is an infinite chasm between lofty universal theory and the combinatorially explosive complexity of human society and individual choices.
I am indeed indebted to the social scientists and thinkers in their ivory towers... and perhaps deal too harshly with their presumably good intentions... but we all know what the "road to hell" is paved with.
These issues are complex and as in all things hubris is the enemy...
Dr. Loury, wanted to point out these 2 essays regarding the "1619 Project" that are recent and excellent:
Tom Mackaman who recently wrote this stunning essay which is a rebuttal to historian Woody Holton article in the Washington Post:
"Historian Woody Holton launches 1619 Project-inspired attack on the American Revolution"
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/17/holt-s17.html
Also, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz who a few months ago wrote this:
"The 1619 Project and Living in Truth"
https://www.opera-historica.com/pdfs/oph/2021/01/05.pdf
Dr. Loury and Fellow readers, I thought this essay from today by David French may be of interest:
"The Mistakes We Cannot Make Again
As crime rises, so will the temptation to crack down. Yet vengeance is not justice."
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-mistakes-we-cannot-make-again
Sorry, I should have mentioned that almost all incarceration these days for drugs is drug dealing. Drug possession is mainly a form of government rent-seeking. Hundred of thousands of cases of marijuana possession a year, but only about 600 cases per year of actual prison sentences for marijuana possession as the only charge. Plus, at the state level, drug offences account of about 14 or 15% of the prison population. 50% is violent crime, 20% property crime. Crucially, drug dealing feeds into violent crime, which is one of the reasons why drug dealing was treated so punitively in the past.
The best approach is the Scottish Public Health approach. It uses proactive policing as a vehicle for early intervention and then focuses everything on Youth Reform. There are a number of things that helped it to work- social workers, housing, the provision of youth clubs and diversion- but the key element was getting buy-in from employers in blue collar type work, to offer economic opportunities to demoralised and wayward youth.
But the key is to not back off or defund proactive policing- you simply need to change everything which happens from that initial point of contact with police onwards. The other thing which is worth considering is short sentences for gang grooming (up to 90 days, with contributing to delinquency the standard). Although the Norwegians have been quite cagey about publishing definitive figures, they have at least admitted that their reform model doesn't work anywhere near as well with gang involvement.
In general though you need to reduce sentencing for drug dealing- down to about 18 to 24 months as a disruption strategy (instead of 71 months as an average), with longer sentences for those at risk of escalating to violent behaviour. The reason for this are simple- by handing out harsh sentences for drug dealing in an unregulated market, you are effectively increasing the number of slots or speed of a conveyor belt of corruption. An unregulated market always gets filled.
90 days for gang grooming is apt, because it deprives drug dealers of around $90K of income for utilising kids as runners, spotters or cut-outs.
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.
I’m very concerned for black families. But no matter what, and this is true. The first head on the pike is going to be the faggots. Lil Nas X getting dissed for the poetic license of a metaphor as a threat to the black family is the perfect concrete real word representation of that threat. I read an article the other day about the fourth trans woman of color murdered in my city the other day. Jesus ministered to the prostitutes, and poor, where are these fine Christians for vulnerable communities like the trans sex worker class. They point to a celebrity if they mention it all, and condemn us as a threat because we are an easy target. Everyone laughs at the circus freak. Mark my words, the first head on the pike is the faggots.
According to the Institute for Family Studies, only 22% of black kids are raised by both birth parents throughout childhood. It's 58% for white kids. (https://ifstudies.org/blog/1-in-2-a-new-estimate-of-the-share-of-children-being-raised-by-married-parents)
58% is a disaster for society. 22% is beyond words. Nothing can fix the damage done by not being raised by your biological Mom and Dad.
I don't know how our society will address this but if we don't make this the absolute top priority then we're just doing Cargo Cult Sociology.
Ah well... I'd do better to think, but then if I did I probably wouldn't write anything.
"Going back to M. Woodson. I can't believe that anyone would question that the solutions have to be **developed IN the community and** PROMOTED by the community..."
Also, I've "said" this before and, honestly, I don't know why I bother, but I don't see why ANYBODY wouldn't want to decriminalize marijuana, RELEASE prisoners (a lotta them Black), EXPUNGE the records and get FATHERS back on the streets. Then I recall: I'm nobody, but also in the Zen sense-a the term, too, so there is that. :)
TYTY, as always, M. Loury. It's about noon and I've been up for 10 1/2 hours already, so I don't have the patience I would like. Here's the thing: It's ALL OF IT, it's about mindset. And people changing who they are for the better. Tho this may not SEEM completely logical, the ONLY person who can change someone, is that person THEMSELVES. Technically, it's impossible for one person to change another person. INFLUENCE? Yeah, but usually that never happens either.
All that to say... I think it's a lot easier for the anatomy of a human brain to find out what's wrong with a situation. That's the design of the brain.
What's one whole lot HARDER is to come up with solutions to problems, not in identifying them, right? Besides, my Instincts/Intuitions tell me that 90 - 95+% of the time M. Woodson is gonna be right, and that it's pretty easy to take shots at him from the peanut gallery. Or at anybody.
I read a lot, but sometimes I forget things. But it's been said many times before and will be said again. I think the quote goes something like this, "As long as Black females are giving sex out to Black males who have a lotta sex appeal, instead of Black males who would MAKE GOOD FATHERS..." MIGHT-a been M. Adam B. Coleman in "Black Victim to Black Victor." Mebbe not.
Schooling is the key, after fathers, right? It always HAS been anyway.
"The Education of Eva Moskowitz" is a memoir that tells a lot about Success Academies, or whatever they call themselves. A public charter school. Just finished that lately. They take 15,000 kids outta the poor neighborhoods of NYC, at random, and teach them to excel. Not easy, but their students outperform most-a the white kids, they are THAT good. They've honed the method and put it online someplace. I'm not one-HUNDRED percent behind Moskowitz. She's made a lotta enemies, and likely where there's smoke there's fire. But success? She's been there, done that for a decade? Mebbe?
I'm on Wilfred Reilly's "Taboo." Probably finish tomorrow. If people would just look at what he writes as a GIVEN, as FACT, then I think there'll be plenty of possibilities.
Oh! One more: "The Alternative: Most of What You Believe About Poverty Is Wrong"
by Mauricio L Miller. WHen I read it, reminded me a LOT of M. Woodson's approach. That there was some things to gain from Miller's POV. But You gotta realize he's dealing with a different group of people. The book talks mainly about immigrants coming to the country for the express PURPOSE of bettering themselves. Well-motivated, with better resources. IOW, I dunno his poor and M. Woodson's poor are in the same ballpark. Still, things could be learned. His approach is to get a number of families to join up together in his program. And they work together, as a mini-community, to GET THINGS DONE.
Going back to M. Woodson. I can't believe that anyone would question that the solutions have to be PROMOTED by the community, if their gonna take hold. Telling them, "DO this" and "DO that" just would slow things down, if not completely stop any progress whatsoever.
All that to say... IMHO.
If you like Success Academy, you should read this article by Robert Pondiscio: https://www.the74million.org/article/pondiscio-i-just-wrote-a-book-about-success-academy-charter-schools-it-does-not-support-your-preferred-narrative-i-hope-you-hate-it/ . Did you see their recent SAT scores? 1268! There are also a couple of great examples from here in the UK, across the Pond. The Michaela Community School is one. But Brampton Manor Academy is killing it- they recently outpaced Eton in placing kids at Oxbridge.
The Unions also might be a little more amenable with their approach than Success Academy's. They see training and continuous improvement as the solution to underperformance with teachers (fewer firings) and also generally seem to have far lower burn rates on staff. That being said, there are a lot of complaints about workloads for the latter on some of the employment sites.
I follow Miss Snuffy (Katherine Birbalsingh) on Twitter. Recently trainee teachers posed the question 'why does she hate kids so much?' As if being strict and preparing kids to excel in the world were somehow a bad thing, through having demanding standards...
TY M. Geary. I can't recall if I bought Pondiscio's book or put it on the list. But, yah...