The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
For the study, Upward Mobility and Discrimination: The Case of Asian Americans, compare his reporting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/29/the-r...
To Marginal Revolution's reporting: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/11/upw...
It's like they read totally different papers. Or Guo is just gonna talk about whatever he wants to talk about regardless of what's on his desk, I guess. Which might be what's happening here.
If you're really interested compare both of them to the study: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8J_qdFYwNJ6TXdRVkM5S3lMNUU...
So what the article should have said, is after COLA, Asians still have an "advantage" over Blacks and Hispanics. But the illusion is that they don't do better than Whites, they perform the same. Which is not the illusion most people had in mind.
If you look at "asians" you're looking at mostly confuscian based cultures and various Indian ethnicities, mostly admitted for residency for work purposes.
"Hispanic" in particular is any of a dozen different distinct cultures. Statistically, hispanics are an overlay grafted on top of whatever other category you're bickered in -- sort of like how Jewish culture transcends nationality. A consultant from Spain and a mestizo immigrant from Guatemala picking tomatoes are the same, but have little to do with each other at all.
I would assert that if you dig deeper into data you'd find that Asian ethnic groups are pulling ahead as a cohort in many ways in the same manner that the white ethnic societies did for white immigrant groups 100 years ago. The old boys club is shifting.
They absolutely, absolutely do have negative stereotypes towards Asians. There are a different set of negative stereotypes (and in fact, different stereotypes for East Asians, South Asians, and West Asians), but there very much are negative stereotypes towards those groups.
The effect of these stereotypes is sometimes mitigated by the fact that Asians, unlike African-Americans, largely came to the US (a) of their own free will, and (b) on work visas which explicitly bias selection in favor of previous wealth and education status. But on the other hand, in other cases, the effect of these stereotypes is enhanced by this difference as well - it depends on the situation in which they manifest.
yes they do.
>>The contrast between whites and Asians is particularly stark. Nearly 1 in 5 white Americans reside in rural counties, where a dollar goes a lot further. But 97 percent of Asian Americans live in or near a major city, where the cost of living is higher.
By definition of living in a lower income area and subsequently making less money, you are unable to live in a nicer, high cost of living area. Personal preference aside, this means you're living in a more desirable area (for many, by definition) and these areas tend to have more job opportunities.
>> Asian Americans, largely for historical reasons, cluster near expensive coastal cities. More than 25 percent of Asian Americans live in one of the four metro areas with the highest costs of living — Honolulu, San Jose, New York and San Francisco. Overall, about 73 percent live in metro areas with above-average costs, 24 percent live in metro areas with below-average costs, and 3 percent live in rural areas.
This is basically irrelevant. One could also say, Black Americans, largely for historical reasons, cluster near more Southern large cities and towns (Dallas, Georgia, New Orleans, etc.)
>> When we factor in these geographic patterns, the racial income gaps start to look a little different
Yeah, Asian Americans still are making much more than Black and Hispanics. If this is supposed to negate the assertion many make that "For that reason, Asian Americans have often been invoked as a way to excuse the income gaps between whites and blacks or whites and Hispanics..." this isn't doing a great job.
>> If you compare whites and Asian Americans with the same amount of schooling, Asian Americans actually make less money.
They should also compare Asian Americans with Black and Hispanic Americans too, for good measure.
---
This conclusion may be faulty, but I'm basically getting the following: for "elite Asians" (keep in mind, most Asians are not "elite"), they enjoy inklings of White privilege, if there's such a thing. However, they do not receive as much of said privilege as actual White people.
So controlling for their environment, Asians stand out less than they do just by looking at raw numbers. Compared to where they live, they stop outperforming whites, they just tend not to live in poor areas where whites also populate.
That's begging the question of why they tend to live where they do: whether someone lives in a high-income/high-cost/economically-productive area is in large part driven by whether they can git into that economy.
By your logic, I could take Americans in high-income areas and those in low-income areas and prove that the former don't stand out in terms of income (which is obviously silly).
Ok, but other things like online purchases and college tuition aren't affected by cost of living. If you live in a high cost of living area sending a kid to an Ivy is relatively cheaper for you than someone in a lower cost of living area.
Cost of living is high partially because there is higher demand for that place. Cincinnati isn't San Francisco.
I don't disagree with your point but this is a very strange example. Most people don't send their kids to Ivies (most don't even think about applying), and even fewer pay full price.
Also (AIUI) in the US most of the cost of education is in huge loans taken out by the child.
The yawning difference between Asians and whites mostly disappears after accounting for geography. But it's still quite large versus other segments (blacks, hispanics).
Based on the headline, I was expecting to see income convergence among the four groups. Not the case at all.
To an extent. I think some of them might not mind living in less expensive rural areas if they didn't need to be in proximity to their workplace or common areas of business.
We aren't exclusively talking ultra-wealthy billionaires here, I imagine the article is mostly concerned with the more common wealthy upper-middle class workers like programmers, doctors, etc.
COL is not at all a sunk cost like this article has you believe; places with higher COL are generally better places to live. it's actually is a good indicator for the hard to quantify value in living one place over another. In other words, you can't just blindly factor it out and call it a day.
There is real value in living in San Francisco vs bumblefuck. It's the whole reason people want to live there in the first place despite it's higher COL!
In turn for your extra COL, you generally get access to nearby airports for travel, access to good jobs, a variety of career choices, a wide assortment of options for food and social nightlife, etc. These things have real value. You pay for this value.
you can't just blindly factor out COL.
/s
It's also revealing of the author's personal biases that he considers living in expensive coastal cities to be a disadvantage. In nearly every other context it's considered an advantage, despite the cost of living; imported goods and travel are cheaper, and infrastructure is nicer. The education system also tends to be better in rich cities, although it is worse in California due to Proposition 13. Having tenure in growing cities (and therefore owning property) is also a significant advantage in terms of wealth. Someone who bought a $200,000 house in Indianapolis in 1980 is doing a lot worse than someone who bought a $200,000 house in LA in 1980.
Of course the really old money everywhere is dominated by white people, but most white people don't have access to that.
Or it shows that there is something about the statistically average black person that makes them less successful than the statistically average asian person. I don't claim to know what the difference is, but this is a fairly obvious inference to make. I'd actually say this is, a priori, a lot more likely than "everyone coincidentally discriminates against these particular racial groups but not any of these other ones".
My suspicion (not based on any hard evidence) is that much of this difference is accounted for by the vast and obvious cultural differences between the average asian person in the US and the average black person in the US. Most Asian (South or East) immigrant cultures in the US aggressively push for educational and professional success. Black culture in the US doesn't.
It's only to be expected then that not only do Asians lead blacks in educational attainment, they lead whites, too. And while I don't have the data, I wouldn't be surprised if this difference was greater relative to rural whites, and greater still relative to rural Southern whites.
If you don't understand that--as long as you remain convinced that Black culture is substantially distinct and uniquely (if at all) inferior--then it's easy to dismiss racism. But once you begin to see that, not only does the reality and the pervasiveness of systemic racism in this country become clear (especially the institutional racism of the Deep South), but the notion of a singular white culture disintegrates, and the concept of Americana fragments. All of a sudden the world is way more complex; even the relevant questions, let alone answers, become difficult to identify. That's no fun so I'm not surprised people remain willfully blind to it.
As a white kid that grew up eating fried chicken, cornbread, and watermelon, I agree with general thrust of this comment. I didn't even know this was "soul food" until I went college.
Economically and culturally, there's very little different between whites and blacks in the south, until of course race comes up. Cultural anti-black racism is a very real thing, both in the south and throughout the nation. The simple reason, is because no one wants to be the bottom of the sociological ladder, and well, at least I look superfically like the society's elite.
How would you change that prior if you were informed one of those groups had been enslaved on the basis of race for a couple of centuries, ruthlessly oppressed for another century, then blamed for most of the problems in the country for the lion's share of the next one, becoming the primary subject of every leadership discussion?
> Most Asian (South or East) immigrant cultures in the US aggressively push for educational and professional success. Black culture in the US doesn't.
Educational attainment is more difficult to translate into professional success for blacks in the US; black college graduates have twice the unemployment rate as white college graduates[1]. With the rising costs of education and the yawning gap between white wealth and black wealth, the value proposition is only becoming worse. In my experience black people think that their best chance of success lies in sales and/or entrepreneurship. The only other choice is being the best of the best.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/when-a-...
If you update that prior with what history actually shows, this is less the case than you'd imagine. From the paper underlying this post's article:
> Foreign-born Asians were barred from naturalization by the Naturalization Act of 1790. This Act excluded Asians from citizenship and voting except by birth, and created the important new legal category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship”…Asians experienced mob violence including lynchings and over 200 “roundups” from 1849-1906 (Pfaelzer, 2008), and hostility from anti-Asian clubs much like the Ku Klux Klan (e.g., the Asiatic Exclusion League, Chinese Exclusion League, Workingmen’s Party of CA), to an extent that does not appear to have any counterpart for blacks in CA history. Both Asians and blacks in CA could not testify against a white witness in court from 1853-73 (People v. Hall, 1853, see McClain, 1984), limiting Asians’ legal defense against white aggression. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” in 1907 barred further immigration of all “laborers” from China and Japan.
> …Asians have also faced intense economic discrimination. Many cities and states levied discriminatory taxes and fees on Asians (1852 Foreign Miner’s Tax, 1852 Commutation Tax, 1860 Fishing License, 1862 Police Tax, 1870 “queue” ordinance, 1870 sidewalk ordinance, and many others). Many professional schools and associations in CA excluded Asians (e.g., State Bar of CA), as did most labor unions (e.g., Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor), and many employers declined to hire Asians well into the 20th century (e.g., Mears, 1928, p. 194-204). From 1913-23, virtually all western states passed increasingly strict Alien Land Acts that prohibited foreign-born Asians from owning land or leasing land for extended periods. Asians also faced laws against marriage to whites (1905 amendment to Section 60 of the CA Civil Code) and U.S. citizens (Expatriation Act 1907, Cable Act 1922). From 1942-46, the US forcibly relocated over 100,000 mainland Japanese Americans (unlike other Axis nationalities, e.g. German or Italian Americans) to military detention camps, in practice destroying a large share of Japanese American wealth. In contrast, blacks in CA were eligible for citizenship and suffrage, were officially (though often not de facto) included in CA professional associations and labor unions that excluded Asians, were not covered by the Alien Land Acts, and were not confined or expropriated during WWII.
That isn't to say that Asian-Americans had it "worse" wrt discrimination (though as the quote above shows, they did in some significant ways); the histories of the two groups in the US is far from apples to apples. But the assumption that discrimination was historically categorically different is not really that well-supported.
Being enslaved for hundreds of years and after the emancipation being denied full rights I think has something to do with that. They were purposely held back as much as possible by white people. Not sure why you cannot see this.
Racism is what happens when people are surrounded by a society that asserts such stereotypes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
What you are therefore saying is that you as an individual can't think about culture in a way that isn't stereotyping of personal and group behavior.
Despite this not actually being what culture means, you are not alone in thinking this way.
I don't like this article, I also don't like the URM/NON-URM status that school systems make based on ethnicity alone. There are many fields in which non_urm (meaning not white or asian) preform better- and they call these negative gaps. A gap is an ABS there is no -Gap. Pardon my spelling mistakes.
Keep bending the data fool
This last presidential election was a great display of what I am talking about from both side. While one side was demonizing non-WASP, the other side banked its whole strategy on the fact that african-americans would surely vote for them (which is, when you think about it, basically saying that most people's vote cannot be predicted as they may flip/flop and are usually 50/50 +/- 5%, except for african-americans of course ...). And of course the next day, they were blamed responsible for the defeat.
As a data scientist we don't cook the books. It's the readers of our results who decide to Cook them.
On the second tab you can see demographics.
So even assuming the (unconvincing) argument that where asians live can account for the fact they are more successful than whites, how does their nonetheless COL-adjusted near parity (still ahead!) vs. whites undermine the idea that minorities can succeed in the USA?
It's easy and cheap to virtue-signal your care for this difficult problem, but the elephants in the room here are IQ and culture, and mainstream liberalism is frankly bordering on fraudulence with its refusal to confront these topics. If you actually care about fixing the worsening income and wealth gap between races - and I would suggest everyone should, as it is clearly toxic to our social fabric - it's long past time to have honest conversations about all of the potential underlying causes and possible solutions.
Sadly, the only way to even discuss culture's role without being labelled a bigot is to discuss the cultural differences within white Americans. When you're talking about how cultural traits prevalent in Appalachian communities like the one I grew up in exacerbate inequality, suddenly you have an audience. See the author J.D. Vance who wrote 'Hillbilly Elegy', and has subsequently become a darling of the political left.
It's funny, because my time spent in poor white communities and poor black communities allowed me to see how radically similar the two communities cultural traits often are. And also very similar is the fact that these communities have mixed within them families who go against the grain and succeed by not succumbing to the cultural norms around them.
Thing is, if we're honest, it's a lot easier to become popular as a minister or a politician when you tell a disenfranchised group of people that they are victims of someone else than to tell them they need to fix their own culture. Poor white families whose fathers abandon them have the same issues as black families whose fathers are absent, but the media would rather focus on the edge cases where racist cops shoot black men without cause.
Nobody ever asked black Americans to vote for a spokesman. Instead the media has decided that Al Sharpton and his ilk should be the ones consulted as to what black folks care about. He's in New York like they are, so it's easy for them and lucrative for him. In the meantime, kids hold signs saying "Black Lives Matter", but nobody wants to hold a sign that says "Black Dads Matter" even though a movement like that would do more to help black America than any government program. 70% of children being born out of wedlock has a huge effect, whether anyone is willing to admit it or not. And blaming incarceration solves nothing. The majority of absent fathers in the black community are not incarcerated.
It's not just that it's easier to become popular this way: political figures that are _already popular_ but even pay lip service to cultural effects are sharply criticized by intellectuals. Just look at the spate of articles recently (and throughout his presidency) faulting Barack Obama for the handful of times that he's mentioned the potential for culture to have an effect. He's also been unusually candid for a national politician in talking about the direct effects of racism, so the usual complaint that talking about culture is only a tactic for ignoring actual racism falls flat.
33% of black men go to prison. That creates a situation where there are far more unattached black females vs males.
What is the optimal mating strategy in an environment where the females vastly outnumber the males?
There is lots of evidence that black men are unfairly targeted by the police. So is the epidemic of absent fathers in the african american community an expected outcome of our current policies? Is this even a cultural issue or an issue that is created through government policy?
Black people know that "Black Dads Matter", but White people keep stealing them.
There are hundreds of issues of infinitely more substance than whether black children are conceived in wedlock.
What makes you a bigot isn't that you see that as something worth addressing. You're a bigot because, of all the problems facing black communities, you choose that one to judge them by.
"There are hundreds of issues of infinitely more substance than whether black children are conceived in wedlock."
This is where it's obvious that you are yet another non-black person who has never lived in a predominantly black community or extensively socialized with large groups of black folks in real contexts. I've attended black churches countless times, been a best man and/or a groomsman in two weddings with two very good friends who happen to be black, and my own wedding party was my brother, and white coworker, and two black men who are my oldest friends. I don't point out the lack of fathers in the black community because I'm a bigot. I point it out because I care and don't believe America can succeed without the betterment of black America.
Fatherless children are vastly more likely to end up in jail, dead, or at best drop-outs. You talk about drugs and poverty, and act as if being raised without a father doesn't directly impact that? Are you fucking serious? I'm not "judging" the black community for lack of fathers. I'm characterizing a real problem that is obviously a root cause of many others. People like you who reflexively jump to cries of "bigot" don't help. You hurt by enabling the demagogues to continue to act as if the real challenges imposed on blacks by systemic racism are equal to the challenges imposed by a broken culture that was created by white racism but has now, post Civil Rights Act, morphed into a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
Now if you excuse me I'm going to go home to my mixed-race children and continue to hate them since I'm such a bigot according to some dipshit on the internet. I'll have to kick my wife out too. Can't believe I didn't see she wasn't an Aryan before.
I've lived in predominantly black neighborhoods and I've stepped over blood trails and crime scene tape to go to work, buddy, if that means credibility to you. I've taken cover during driveby shootings. Safe to say I don't idealize poor, black communities.
My question to you is: what are you going to do about absentee fathers?
If longwinded moralization about family values fixed anything, black communities would all be Beverly Hills by now, but it doesn't, so we have to look at practical and evidence-based approaches, like increasing access to family planning and drug rehab. These are measurable and reliable solutions, whereas the Bill Cosby approach has not yet demonstrated an effect.
These discussions about distressed communities are centered around recognition for identifying one singular problem, rather than holistic approaches to fixing problems in that sphere, so I don't come to HN with high hopes.
Anyway, my regards to your wife and kids.
In the comments I've seen you post so far, the intolerant one is... you.
Basically, when you control for education level, Asians come out just behind whites while black and Hispanic minorities still get shafted. And that this didn't used to be the case, that Asians used to have a similar gap, which indicates that Americans have simply gotten less racist towards them. Presumably on such a large scale there shouldn't be a significant discrepancy of income for the same level of education.
The Post conveniently leaves out important parts of the paper's findings because it contradicts the conclusion they wanted to draw:
The process of institutional economic discrimination against Asians in America was equal to and in many cases stronger than that against black Americans. Hillger's paper argues that, once institutional discrimination was lifted, high-gradient societal discrimination was no match for market forces (suppressed wages for the same productivity from an Asian employee is an opportunity for easy arbitrage by a competent capitalist). These market forces did not have a similar convergence-to-white-income effect on the black labor pool, and Hillger's paper uses measures of productivity not dependent on education to at largely explain the variation.
I'm of the opinion that statistical discrimination is pretty messed up too, so this doesn't mean everything is right with the world and no further problems with racism exist. I also get that many people think that statistical racial discrimination is warranted, which leads to the kind of mental backflips necessary to write an article like this. But that doesn't change the fact that pretending that productivity differences are irrelevant is simply bad reporting by the Post: At best, it's shockingly shoddy and at worst it's simply dishonest.
Hillger's original paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8J_qdFYwNJ6TXdRVkM5S3lMNUU...
Some more concise analysis with excerpts from the paper: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/11/upw...
Source? You have no proof that any of these differences are due to racism rather than the underlying culture of each group.
You're living under a rock if you believe nobody is studying or confronting IQ and culture and how it relates to race. It's just it's not really intellectually profound to repeat and rehash the same old "scientific racism" that's been going on for the last century and a half, that's why you hear less of it.
I just graduated from an elite American college, and almost everyone there was extremely condescending about the idea that race and IQ were at all correlated. They felt similarly about racial culture and success. In these powerful people's eyes, the underperformance of non-White and non-Asian races is ~100% the fault of White people and their machinations.
Of course there's a good reason for that fad - scientific racism is a pseudoscience that was created in order to "prove" the inferiority of races and to justify colonialism, slavery, racism, social Darwinism, and racial eugenics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
The correlation between race and IQ is openly "admitted" right there in the into paragraph of the Wikipedia page! If academia is "hiding" it they sure are doing a bad job. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
I rarely comment on HN and usually just register a new account when I do. I can understand why people would register a throwaway though, considering the blind hostility people like you have in these types of discussions.
>The collation between race and IQ is openly "admitted" right there in the into paragraph of the Wikipedia page!
Wha? The lead calls it a "contentious debate" and the body cites quality sources that suggest a causal connection.
The article never claimed to undermine the idea that minorities can succeed in the USA. It claims to undermine the idea that Asian Americans (and minorities in general) can be more successful than whites in similar circumstances. And it has done a pretty good job at that. As the article shows, after adjusting for COL, Asians make as much as Whites, and in fact, make less than whites who are similarly qualified. I've yet to see anyone dispute the math presented.
You just described the Washington Post.
I mean, they said in their "news" section that the Ron Paul Institute was Russian Propaganda, which was just a part of their McCarthyite agenda against political dissenters[1]
I'd avoid anything by the WaPo, it's corporate media fake news.
1 - https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgrace...
>mainstream liberalism is frankly bordering on fraudulence with its refusal to confront these topics.
I would say it is fraudulent. The taboo on addressing racial differences, especially intelligence, in academia and the media is only taboo if it concludes whites are superior to minorities.
For example, "white people can't dance," is a culturally acceptable racist remark. "Asians are better at math" is also culturally acceptable. Any comment that breaks that rule is unacceptable. It's the same in academia and in the courts. If you publish research or a supreme court opinion that minorities are of lower intelligence, like the book, The Bell Curve, or in Justice Scalia's case, you will receive ridicule (and whether just coincidentally or as part of conspiracy theory territory - will be certain of dying a premature death)[2]. Publishing that minorities are above-average intelligence is perfectly acceptable, though [3]. Teaching through a college course that being white is a problem is also acceptable - that's because it fits the rule [4].
Queue everyone calling me alt-right or racist or something awful just for pointing out the fact that everyone knows. It's like 1984. I really hate racism. My best friend I grew up with on my street as a child is black, and I can tell you, kids grow up color blind and are not racist. It's this toxic political correctness and government that perpetuates problems of the past. I have no idea what the further agenda is in perpetuating inequality and inciting further anger and inequality. Everyone should be treated equal, especially in eyes of government. Where we are headed is we are already getting close to Harrison-Bergeron'ing people because of their skin color and past injustice.
All racism should not be tolerated.
If the problem with government is even worse than I thought then I will end up on some kind of "political dissidents" list just for spelling out these problems.
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve 3 - http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbi... 4 - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/midwest/ct-un...
When do we start having an honest conversation about reparations for slavery? Why do rich whites pass on ancestral wealth to their children, but not ancestral debts?