Interesting! I think it is a mistake to commingle the pursuit of knowledge with the pursuit of economic success, as higher knowledge, e.g. the theoretical sciences, tends to require less than relative economic status. Moreover, there is a sort of existential resilience to own next-to-nothing but books from a library (whose illegal seizure would not be your cost to pay). Being outwardly rich can invite all sorts of trouble, a kind of short-term impulse that would not behave as one so rationally desires.
For this reason, social capital is most important, I believe, to motivating income and vocational equity. That is to say vocational education ought to be of some equal quality such that any entrant can come away with a comfortable income so long as they have shown up with adequate health. This begs the question of health; a healthcare system that prioritizes the production of wisdom or moral skill seems to be the post-Holocaust norm of desire. I argue as much at my blog, Earcake Kitchen, and am attempting to build such medical knowledge through my medical research company named Principia Medicala.
Interesting discussion. I agree with what many have said so far. Hillbilly Elegy made me realize something I’d secretly known a long time: Social capital is all about class, not race. Like some of the first commenters said: There are plenty of poor whites in this country. They have just as much to fear in terms of police violence, poverty, domestic violence, drugs, lack of the ability to transcend their social rank, etc. Ultimately I think it’s all about culture. Yes, culture is definitely influenced by class. But it’s also clear that certain families succeed more than others, regardless of race etc. That’s because different families have different values and teach their kids uniquely. It’s nature and nurture. The ones who succeed are often the kids who are taught to work hard and believe in themselves. But of course being born into the middle class regardless of race puts you at an advantage. Loury is right, I think: it’s probably crucial, if you come from poverty, to do everything in your power to get ‘out there’ into the wider world. Environment can capture people, which is why one must push against it. Of course it’s not always easy to transcend environment. This is where we circle back to family values and culture. If you’ve got five kids and a single mother barely scraping by, and the father is nowhere to be found: What do we think is going to happen? In low-income urban black communities, for example, we know marriage rates and out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed over the past five or six decades. I’m sure poor whites in rural America are similar. Then you get into the welfare system. It’s a vicious cycle. Thomas Sowell’s book ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals’ is helpful here.
It seems to me, Glenn, you're searching for an 'a priori' theory of marriage compatibility that aligns with our scientific understandings. This wonder has occurred to me before, and thinking on it I believe we ought to study how individuals like John Van Neumann came about through mutually consenting marriages.
The experiments have been run that people hiring will mentally downgrade black-sounding names, yet also show that these effects are quite shallow, and if something else in common shows up (played soccer, went to Texas A&M) the effect is overwhelmed easily. I have two sons adopted from Romania who came late enough that they both have accents. One was cheerful, charming, and established a network of teammates, coworkers, school club members, youth group friends very quickly. When his employer went bankrupt, an old friend invited him to Nome, assuring him he would find a job easily. He is still there, happy and well-employed. The other did not make friends as easily except eventually some drinking buddies. Though he has always been a crazy hard worker, he had a harder time and still does. He eventually found a niche. Is this fair? Of course not. The younger son is as worthy, and probably as good an employee on balance as the older one. But his diminished network diminished his possible outcomes.
BTW, it's not just IQ that's heritable. The younger's ability to work hard and the older's easy personality are probably heritable as well. But they have to be planted in at least half-decent soil.
TY for this outstanding interview, Professor Loury.
"But if you segregated the population and you looked at different patterns of social interaction within subgroups of the population..."
I'm *so* glad You did this research, M Loury. And You explain it so well.
"That’s a simplified version of the theory. But one of the implications of this idea is that self-segregation is a recipe for disaster for poor communities, and for anyone seeking to transcend their origins."
I think this may relate to something You said a bit ago about how Black culture was important to You. My question is this: Can one *have* a strictly "Black culture" unless there's self-segregation by skin color?
I'm reminded of a profile I think I might-a seen over at FBT. Anyway, it was about a young Black woman who was very successful. I think mebbe with podcasting or YouTube or in some other entrepreneurial way. And one thing she regretted a little bit was that she had "lost some of her Blackness." I wish she'd explained the whys and hows of this happening. It was just the one comment.
I got a little sense of this conflict from Wesley Yang's "The Soul of Yellow Folks" as he is first generation Asian-American. I think this is a problem of *all* minorities, regardless of skin-color. How much to assimilate? How much to keep separate culture? Should one be upset if Your culture is assimilated into the majority's culture?
Cultural assimilation is at least a lot easier to do than marital assimilation. I suspect it can work much more quickly toward equality if people didn't resist it so much. You know who never worries about whether they're 'X enough'? White people. We don't worry that we're becoming 'too black', or 'too Asian' or whatever. I think 'culture' is one thing (esp for immigrants, preserving some of the way of the old country) but sometimes that 'culture' is based on something we'd like to eliminate (racism, the legacy of slavery) and that causes people to identify with abuse and failure, as opposed to, say, assimilating certain practices that clearly make others more successful (studying more, valuing education, taking more responsibility for one's personal outcomes, etc.)
One of the stupider ideas to come out of the left is the 'cultural appropriation' BS, which I think is only applicable in some areas, like where a dominant group makes money off something some other group developed that wasn't taken seriously until white people did it, or religious appropriation if one is misusing or misrepresenting the religion or its articles. Otherwise, it's a lot of silly-ass "You can't play with my toys for racist/bigoted reasons".
Cultural Appropriation>? WTF? "Reason" is The Enlightenment,. Rational discourse ? Yeah, that be The Enlightenment. Science? Of course, dat be The Enlightenment, too.
“You can't do what you just got through proposing, force people to marry. That's tyrannical. That's so illiberal as to be beyond belief, even beyond the Chinese Communist Party, I should hope. “
Also, quite... biblical. Arguably for most of recorded human history and among known cultures coerced and forced marriages have been the norm. While I do agree it is indeed oppressive, it isnt wild from an anthropological perspective. It isn’t “beyond belief”. Perhaps it should be. But it has been a common belief.
Heck, why not build on what Plato contemplated and raise children communally and let the State transfer children around where “equity” can prevail?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion for all social rearing units! Abolish unequal social capital! Love is privilege!
And of course there ain’t nothing more conservative than good ol’ traditional forced marriages. What’s good for the marauding bandits of Moses should be good for Americans today.
This is something modern liberals and conservatives could embrace together!
I lived in a rural Appalachian community for the first 15 years of my life; my father left my mother before I was born, and my mother worked at Mcdonalds. We had no social connections, and no rolodex. I did very poorly in school, up until about 7th grade, mostly because I never did my homework.
In the summer of that year, I met a physician in my community who, for whatever reason, saw something in me that I don't think I ever saw in myself, and perhaps still don't, and that meeting changed the outcome of my life.
So based on my own experience I do believe that people are generally a product of their environment, but I don't believe government is the solution to this negative externality.
And I'd want to give another example of why I think poor people remain poor: my mother was an avid reader. She knew everything about pharmacuetical products. She loved pharmacy. She had stacks of books on Pharmacy. My mother's dream was to start her own pharmacy, but the regulation wouldn't allow it.
1. The pharmacy needs to be a certain number of meters, which makes rent more expensive, and almost impossible for the average person.
2. If you are not a pharmacist, you have to hire one, because only a certified pharmacist can dispence products.
3. Now the second requirement is understandable, and I think we can all agree on this piece of legislation, but the crazy thing is that my mother could have easily passed any examination at the college level that pertains to that industry. This is a woman who could have taken the test, passed the test, gotten certified, then started her own business. That business would have certainly lifted my family out of poverty.
In the old days, if one wanted to become an attorney all they had to do was pass the bar exam. Now, one has to take on 200K in debt. It took me about ten years to pay that down. And quite frankly, I felt it was uncessary. Everything I learned about the law, I learned from the book.
So anyways, I would want to argue that these are the types of entry barriers that also play a role in keeping poor people poor.
Those that blame racism for the social ills that plague inner city minorities should see what happens in rural Appalachia, which is predominately White.
That’s a great point. In this economy you can’t move yourself into a profession based on your own knowledge and passion pursuit, like your mother for pharmacy. These days one can acquire extensive knowledge being self taught, but that’s not enough because they need you to attend years or over a decade of schooling plus heavy debt in order to serve a high order profession.
Much of schooling today is a racket. It functions primarily for the financial benefit of employees of schools and only secondarily for the benefit of students or the larger society. A recent and clear demonstration was by the way so many k-12 schools responded to covid.
Law school is particularly bad, both functioning to financially benefit the school employees and artificially inflating the costs of acquiring legal aid.
Am working on a study of the differences between Latino (brown) and Black economic trajectories. The lumping in of these two disparate groups under the term “BIPOC” is one of the great abuses of the English language and logic itself. It’s clear by all the metrics including overall wealth, income, home ownership and entrepreneurship that Latino immigrants and 1st generation sons and daughters are making significant economic strides mirroring those made by past 19th and early 20th c immigrants such as Italians. Immigrant and conservative Latino values focused on family and faith are powerful drivers including for next Gen Latinos. Perhaps Latino social capital around family values, entrepreneurship and sacrifice are playing a role? Continuing my research and analysis of all that is unique about the POC of BIPOC -
Interesting! I think it is a mistake to commingle the pursuit of knowledge with the pursuit of economic success, as higher knowledge, e.g. the theoretical sciences, tends to require less than relative economic status. Moreover, there is a sort of existential resilience to own next-to-nothing but books from a library (whose illegal seizure would not be your cost to pay). Being outwardly rich can invite all sorts of trouble, a kind of short-term impulse that would not behave as one so rationally desires.
For this reason, social capital is most important, I believe, to motivating income and vocational equity. That is to say vocational education ought to be of some equal quality such that any entrant can come away with a comfortable income so long as they have shown up with adequate health. This begs the question of health; a healthcare system that prioritizes the production of wisdom or moral skill seems to be the post-Holocaust norm of desire. I argue as much at my blog, Earcake Kitchen, and am attempting to build such medical knowledge through my medical research company named Principia Medicala.
Look, this is a sorry state of affairs. I want to comment about this corrupt news story--> The allegation that a black member of the Duke Volleyball Team was criticized by racist whites while playing against BYU. See https://nypost.com/2022/09/15/byu-newspaper-scoops-left-wing-media-in-duke-volleyball-racial-slur-saga/
Enough of the BS. No more lies.
Interesting discussion. I agree with what many have said so far. Hillbilly Elegy made me realize something I’d secretly known a long time: Social capital is all about class, not race. Like some of the first commenters said: There are plenty of poor whites in this country. They have just as much to fear in terms of police violence, poverty, domestic violence, drugs, lack of the ability to transcend their social rank, etc. Ultimately I think it’s all about culture. Yes, culture is definitely influenced by class. But it’s also clear that certain families succeed more than others, regardless of race etc. That’s because different families have different values and teach their kids uniquely. It’s nature and nurture. The ones who succeed are often the kids who are taught to work hard and believe in themselves. But of course being born into the middle class regardless of race puts you at an advantage. Loury is right, I think: it’s probably crucial, if you come from poverty, to do everything in your power to get ‘out there’ into the wider world. Environment can capture people, which is why one must push against it. Of course it’s not always easy to transcend environment. This is where we circle back to family values and culture. If you’ve got five kids and a single mother barely scraping by, and the father is nowhere to be found: What do we think is going to happen? In low-income urban black communities, for example, we know marriage rates and out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed over the past five or six decades. I’m sure poor whites in rural America are similar. Then you get into the welfare system. It’s a vicious cycle. Thomas Sowell’s book ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals’ is helpful here.
It seems to me, Glenn, you're searching for an 'a priori' theory of marriage compatibility that aligns with our scientific understandings. This wonder has occurred to me before, and thinking on it I believe we ought to study how individuals like John Van Neumann came about through mutually consenting marriages.
Q: What is your working definition of "social isolation"?
Your introduction is a very concise description.
The experiments have been run that people hiring will mentally downgrade black-sounding names, yet also show that these effects are quite shallow, and if something else in common shows up (played soccer, went to Texas A&M) the effect is overwhelmed easily. I have two sons adopted from Romania who came late enough that they both have accents. One was cheerful, charming, and established a network of teammates, coworkers, school club members, youth group friends very quickly. When his employer went bankrupt, an old friend invited him to Nome, assuring him he would find a job easily. He is still there, happy and well-employed. The other did not make friends as easily except eventually some drinking buddies. Though he has always been a crazy hard worker, he had a harder time and still does. He eventually found a niche. Is this fair? Of course not. The younger son is as worthy, and probably as good an employee on balance as the older one. But his diminished network diminished his possible outcomes.
BTW, it's not just IQ that's heritable. The younger's ability to work hard and the older's easy personality are probably heritable as well. But they have to be planted in at least half-decent soil.
TY for this outstanding interview, Professor Loury.
"But if you segregated the population and you looked at different patterns of social interaction within subgroups of the population..."
I'm *so* glad You did this research, M Loury. And You explain it so well.
"That’s a simplified version of the theory. But one of the implications of this idea is that self-segregation is a recipe for disaster for poor communities, and for anyone seeking to transcend their origins."
I think this may relate to something You said a bit ago about how Black culture was important to You. My question is this: Can one *have* a strictly "Black culture" unless there's self-segregation by skin color?
I'm reminded of a profile I think I might-a seen over at FBT. Anyway, it was about a young Black woman who was very successful. I think mebbe with podcasting or YouTube or in some other entrepreneurial way. And one thing she regretted a little bit was that she had "lost some of her Blackness." I wish she'd explained the whys and hows of this happening. It was just the one comment.
I got a little sense of this conflict from Wesley Yang's "The Soul of Yellow Folks" as he is first generation Asian-American. I think this is a problem of *all* minorities, regardless of skin-color. How much to assimilate? How much to keep separate culture? Should one be upset if Your culture is assimilated into the majority's culture?
Dunno. TY again.
Cultural assimilation is at least a lot easier to do than marital assimilation. I suspect it can work much more quickly toward equality if people didn't resist it so much. You know who never worries about whether they're 'X enough'? White people. We don't worry that we're becoming 'too black', or 'too Asian' or whatever. I think 'culture' is one thing (esp for immigrants, preserving some of the way of the old country) but sometimes that 'culture' is based on something we'd like to eliminate (racism, the legacy of slavery) and that causes people to identify with abuse and failure, as opposed to, say, assimilating certain practices that clearly make others more successful (studying more, valuing education, taking more responsibility for one's personal outcomes, etc.)
One of the stupider ideas to come out of the left is the 'cultural appropriation' BS, which I think is only applicable in some areas, like where a dominant group makes money off something some other group developed that wasn't taken seriously until white people did it, or religious appropriation if one is misusing or misrepresenting the religion or its articles. Otherwise, it's a lot of silly-ass "You can't play with my toys for racist/bigoted reasons".
"Cultural Appropriation"-Whatever happened to imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?
Cultural Appropriation>? WTF? "Reason" is The Enlightenment,. Rational discourse ? Yeah, that be The Enlightenment. Science? Of course, dat be The Enlightenment, too.
Thank You. Agree.
“You can't do what you just got through proposing, force people to marry. That's tyrannical. That's so illiberal as to be beyond belief, even beyond the Chinese Communist Party, I should hope. “
Also, quite... biblical. Arguably for most of recorded human history and among known cultures coerced and forced marriages have been the norm. While I do agree it is indeed oppressive, it isnt wild from an anthropological perspective. It isn’t “beyond belief”. Perhaps it should be. But it has been a common belief.
Heck, why not build on what Plato contemplated and raise children communally and let the State transfer children around where “equity” can prevail?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion for all social rearing units! Abolish unequal social capital! Love is privilege!
And of course there ain’t nothing more conservative than good ol’ traditional forced marriages. What’s good for the marauding bandits of Moses should be good for Americans today.
This is something modern liberals and conservatives could embrace together!
I lived in a rural Appalachian community for the first 15 years of my life; my father left my mother before I was born, and my mother worked at Mcdonalds. We had no social connections, and no rolodex. I did very poorly in school, up until about 7th grade, mostly because I never did my homework.
In the summer of that year, I met a physician in my community who, for whatever reason, saw something in me that I don't think I ever saw in myself, and perhaps still don't, and that meeting changed the outcome of my life.
So based on my own experience I do believe that people are generally a product of their environment, but I don't believe government is the solution to this negative externality.
And I'd want to give another example of why I think poor people remain poor: my mother was an avid reader. She knew everything about pharmacuetical products. She loved pharmacy. She had stacks of books on Pharmacy. My mother's dream was to start her own pharmacy, but the regulation wouldn't allow it.
1. The pharmacy needs to be a certain number of meters, which makes rent more expensive, and almost impossible for the average person.
2. If you are not a pharmacist, you have to hire one, because only a certified pharmacist can dispence products.
3. Now the second requirement is understandable, and I think we can all agree on this piece of legislation, but the crazy thing is that my mother could have easily passed any examination at the college level that pertains to that industry. This is a woman who could have taken the test, passed the test, gotten certified, then started her own business. That business would have certainly lifted my family out of poverty.
In the old days, if one wanted to become an attorney all they had to do was pass the bar exam. Now, one has to take on 200K in debt. It took me about ten years to pay that down. And quite frankly, I felt it was uncessary. Everything I learned about the law, I learned from the book.
So anyways, I would want to argue that these are the types of entry barriers that also play a role in keeping poor people poor.
Those that blame racism for the social ills that plague inner city minorities should see what happens in rural Appalachia, which is predominately White.
That’s a great point. In this economy you can’t move yourself into a profession based on your own knowledge and passion pursuit, like your mother for pharmacy. These days one can acquire extensive knowledge being self taught, but that’s not enough because they need you to attend years or over a decade of schooling plus heavy debt in order to serve a high order profession.
Much of schooling today is a racket. It functions primarily for the financial benefit of employees of schools and only secondarily for the benefit of students or the larger society. A recent and clear demonstration was by the way so many k-12 schools responded to covid.
Law school is particularly bad, both functioning to financially benefit the school employees and artificially inflating the costs of acquiring legal aid.
As a Social Worker with an undergraduate degree in economics, this theory bears out my admittedly subjective experience.
Here is an interesting article on Black Nigerian immigrant success in the US.
https://medium.com/@joecarleton/why-nigerian-immigrants-are-the-most-successful-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s-23a7ea5a0832
Am working on a study of the differences between Latino (brown) and Black economic trajectories. The lumping in of these two disparate groups under the term “BIPOC” is one of the great abuses of the English language and logic itself. It’s clear by all the metrics including overall wealth, income, home ownership and entrepreneurship that Latino immigrants and 1st generation sons and daughters are making significant economic strides mirroring those made by past 19th and early 20th c immigrants such as Italians. Immigrant and conservative Latino values focused on family and faith are powerful drivers including for next Gen Latinos. Perhaps Latino social capital around family values, entrepreneurship and sacrifice are playing a role? Continuing my research and analysis of all that is unique about the POC of BIPOC -
The old Nature vs Nurture argument. I'd like to see what you come up with.