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Comment by supreme_sublime | Hacker News Reader

>Having problems fixing poverty? Really it's the fact that no good jobs will hire us.

There are only 3 things you need to do in order to not be permanently poor in the US -

1. Graduate High School 2. Don't have kids before you're married 3. Get a job, it doesn't have to be a "good" job.

Specifically with black America, it is very obvious that the vast amount of fatherless children is a huge problem. Single motherhood is associated (if not causally linked) with many very negative outcomes. This is a problem of culture and a lack of personal responsibility. Society does not make black Americans have kids disproportionately out of wedlock. Though it could be argued that the welfare programs enacted in the 60's have encouraged this behavior.

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The Success Sequence is bunk, here's some reading on it[1] but the basic idea is that in those three points you laid out number 3 does basically all the explanatory work, number one does a little work and number 2 does almost nothing.

>This is a problem of culture and a lack of personal responsibility.

Okay then where does that culture problem come from? Does it just emerge from the ether to grab black people and wipe away their "personal responsibility"? No, that culture emerges from the same society you're desperate to exonerate. There are many factors that influence that culture and systemic poverty is a huge one. You want to fix poverty in black America? Great, then hire them.

[1] http://www.demos.org/blog/8/5/15/economic-institutions-shoul...

http://www.demos.org/blog/8/13/15/success-sequence-extremely...

http://mattbruenig.com/2017/07/31/the-success-sequence-is-ab...

So the conclusion here is that failing to graduate high school and becoming a teen parent has little impact on life outcomes? I'm sure Bruenig is right when when he says that the ability to stay out of poverty is mostly determined by the ability to hold a job. But thats basically a tautology.

Did AEI shoe-horn in their pet theories into the analysis? Sure. On the other hand, does Bruenig (or anyone) believe that holding a job is casually independent from the sets of behavioral traits that lead people into failing high school and becoming teen parents?

> that culture emerges from the same society you're desperate to exonerate

Accusations of motivated reasoning cut both ways. He could say that you seem just as desperate to implicate society as he is to exonerate it.

>So the conclusion here is that failing to graduate high school and becoming a teen parent has little impact on life outcomes?

The conclusion is that it has little impact on your ability to not be "permanently poor" as the prior commenter stated.

>On the other hand, does Bruenig (or anyone) believe that holding a job is casually independent from the sets of behavioral traits that lead people into failing high school and becoming teen parents?

Saying "these things aren't independent" and saying "these things have a strong causal connection and here's the direction" are worlds apart so let's not treat the former as our motte and the latter as our bailey.

>Accusations of motivated reasoning cut both ways. He could say that you seem just as desperate to implicate society as he is to exonerate it.

Motivated reasoning requires a motivation, eg motivated reasoning would be '... that you're desperate to exonerate because you're racist.' But I never did that. And I don't mind the accusation that I'm implicating society here, I am.

The steelman of the Success Sequence (i.e. ignoring the shoe-horning that Bruenig pointed out) is that there are cultural/normative/behavioral tendencies that come prior to systemic oppression or poverty. These tendencies have a "strong casual relationship" with life outcomes like teen pregnancy, successfully holding jobs, etc.

Is there any conceivable evidence for this view that would be compelling to you? Is there a possible state of life outcomes that cannot be explained by pointing at "the system"?

> Motivated reasoning requires a motivation

Suppose X says to Y, "you are desperate for claim Z to be true." I think a strait-forward reading implies that X has some motivation to believe in Z independent of Z's truth value. No claim regarding the nature of the motive is necessary.

>The steelman of the Success Sequence

Well now I'm interested, what do you take to be the steelman of Bruenig's/my position?

>Is there any conceivable evidence for this view that would be compelling to you?

Well for one I'm not talking about behavioral tendencies writ large, I'm specifically talking about cultural and normative tendencies. Two you haven't posted any evidence that those come prior to systemic oppression.

>Is there a possible state of life outcomes that cannot be explained by pointing at "the system"?

Let's think about fish in an aquarium. Is there a possible state of the life outcome of a fish that isn't actually explained by pointing at the conditions of the tank? (I'm actually interested in your answer)

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