Culture still doesn’t explain poverty | Hacker News Reader

Culture still doesn’t explain poverty

bostonreview.net

50 pointsjamesbritt42 comments

Some research material I found on poverty:

Don't fall in the poverty trap, you might never get out (Best): http://trueslant.com/megancottrell/2009/11/13/dont-fall-in-t...

Economics of being poor (Second best): https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/0...

Poor nutrition stunts growth of millions: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/12/2740530.htm

Life on $234 a week: no fresh food, holidays or visits to the doctor: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/life-on-234-a-we... (You hear all about a dollar a day feeds the poor elsewhere)

The paradox of American poverty: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/...

Poverty not Taliban causing war: Afghans: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/18/2746886.htm

Statistics and pictures of children in poverty: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/poverty-forces...

Poor people spend 9% of yearly income on lottery tickets: http://www.walletpop.com/2010/05/31/poor-people-spend-9-of-i...

The poverty trap is a great article. The thing not mentioned is that you need two incomes to get by. "Poor" people generally have one.

Even folks who make more money can fall into this sort of realm. Say you have a couple where one person makes $100k, and the other $50k. Then children arrive. The person making $50k faces several years where their salary is essentially paying for childcare exclusively.

So you face this bizarre choice. Pay an outrageous sum of money and have people making $11/hr raise your children, or drop out of the workforce and become nearly unemployable when the kids get older.

I wish I could upvote this comment twice. There's a tremendous amount of data freely available and it doesn't take a PhD to see correlations between motivations and consequences.

To this list, I add:

http://www.amazon.com/American-Project-Rise-Modern-Ghetto/dp...

Tough read. Worth reading.

> nation to confront its collective guilt and responsibility for two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow

I reject collective guilt entirely. My ancestry is one of immigrating away from hardship, my great-grandparents were literally dirt poor, and despite it, my family has always been very cool and welcoming to people having a hard time of all backgrounds.

I have no collective guilt, and reject the idea as counterproductive nonsense. I'll lend a hand if I can be of assistance to someone who has taken responsibility for their own life, but I think it's dangerous and perverse to let people like the author saddle you with guilt even if you've never been part of the problem, and always part of the solution. It's perverse - I encourage you to accept none of that guilt and shame and bad feelings they're peddling. None.

Attention conservation notice - this article is more of a summary of the debate of over culture and poverty, a sort of "who said what when". I found it interesting because it mentioned a couple books I didn't know about that I now want to read. But the article itself hardly makes any evidence based contributions to the debate. So don't read the article expecting to learn something about the link between culture and poverty.

Culturalists confuse cause and effect, arguing that lack of social mobility among black youth is a product of their culture rather than the other way around.

I recognize this pattern. This is what happens when both sides of an argument perceive at least part of a feedback loop, but neither side perceives the feedback loop itself.

This was one thing I was starting to really dislike about the article - as if they hadn't quite plugged the output into the input. It's rather a chicken and egg - it was obviously started by many years of oppression, but now both the culture and the lack of social mobility are cause and effect - it's a big cycle, that needs to be tackled on both fronts not individually - black culture is a huge rebellion against the norms perpetrated by the square America, the same America that has locked them out of it, and in doing so making the only dignified reaction to reject it. Of course a disillusioned youth is going to ignore an education that is perceived as teaching culturally irrelevant principles and skills.

An (sort of) example from here in the UK is that in a local comprehensive school, teachers were getting a lot of flak for having less great English results than the local Catholic Grammar school. This completely ignored the fact that the vast majority of the intake at the comprehensive were people who did not speak English at home/spoke it as a second language, whereas of course the grammar school had their pick of the white, middle class students who'd passed the entrance exam. This of course is one in a multitude of reasons why school league tables are awful, but that's a tangent for another time.

You might be interested in reading this blog post which made adjustments to education statistics for that exact thing: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

Another interesting read. Not sure where they were going with the anti-liberal tangent, but ignoring that, it's quite a clever look at things. I would say that it needs to be a bit more in-depth than simply discounting 1st/2nd generation immigrants, but as I said, interesting nonetheless.

Then both sides yell at each other, both playing the racism card on the other which ensures that their positions entrench because they can't afford to listen to those racists over there, governments left without any effective guidance pick whichever allows them to politic better with no regard for whether it actually work, which inevitably ends up further feeding the feedback loop instead of shutting it down due to the second-order impacts their ineffective interventions have due to the fact they don't consider that they are working in a domain with a feedback loop instead of simple forces that don't interact, and it all just gets worse.

I wish more disciplines other than physics and mechanical engineers would be introduced to the idea that feedback loops are the norm and things that can be modelled with "simple first-order forces" are the exception. This misconception does so very, very much damage to us.

The social sciences in the US don't really understand time (yes, it's crazy but true). They see social dynamics as happening between forces instantaneously, with all the nuance of whether something happens first or last completely washed out of their regression.

Oh -- sociologists aren't necessarily as smart as physicists and mechanical engineers, ...

This debate makes me think of two engineers arguing whether the most important thing in a car are the spark plugs or the fuel injection system. Every time something goes wrong -- it doesn't start, it hits a tree, the brakes fail -- they go back to yelling "spark plugs!", "fuel injection!"

Call me cynical, but if we wait for academic social science to fix society, we are screwed...

Don't look down on the social sciences too much, there was a time when great battles were fought between the people who believed in Darwinian evolution and those who believed in Mendelian genetics.

I don't buy it. To believe the black family is in such a state purely because of racism is to believe racism is worse now than it was in the '60s.

In other words, you are saying African-American culture is the sole reason for all the problems blacks face in the U.S?

I'm sure that's helpful to the 6 year old child when he is given the book that explains the two different culture choices he has in life, and that he should select one, and it will automatically become his.

Even if this is true:

> In other words, you are saying African-American culture is the sole reason for all the problems blacks face in the U.S?

Why---apart from needless snark---should the following thought be necessary?

> I'm sure that's helpful to the 6 year old child when he is given the book that explains the two different culture choices he has in life, and that he should select one, and it will automatically become his.

The six year old born into poverty doesn't get a choice, regardless of race, because the chances are very high that he's the son of a single mother who either has access to a support network (grandparents, aunts/uncles) and works day and night OR who does little and relies on assistance and disability.

If that child is African-American, circumstances are often crueler. 1 in 9 black men (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html) in the key fatherhood ranges for 20-34 are in jail or prison.

The cultural issue is that in spite of (or because of) government intervention, the African-American family is in shambles. Public assistance essentially requires that able-bodied males get out of the picture, which is a large contributor to the fact that a two-parent household has been the exception for several generations. At the same time, society has become more cruel to the poor -- factory jobs don't exist, you need a car to function in society, and tax policy encourages the decay of cities in favor of suburbs, which are segregated by class. (no car, no life in suburb)

Most people in technical fields don't get this. The vast majority are from middle class backgrounds and got started with computers 'on their own' at home. There are no computers at home in poor families with a few hundred bucks a month in income.

If the child is born into poverty, it is exceedingly unlikely that his mother works day and night. Most likely she doesn't work at all and is not even looking for work.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf

>In other words, you are saying African-American culture is the sole reason for all the problems blacks face in the U.S?

Let me reword it a little and say I believe African-American culture is the sole reason for the additional problems blacks face in the U.S. today. You're never going to convince me blacks looking for an education or a job have a tougher time in 2010 than they did in 1960.

The destruction of the black family is the reason the numbers are so appalling today. Black people, more than any other demographic, are having children out of wedlock. Whitey isn't to blame for that. Black boys grow up without fathers in greater numbers and then, predictably, fail in greater numbers when it's time to become men. Somehow that cycle needs to be broken, but the break is going to have to come from within the black community. No amount of well-intentioned intervention from white liberals and government is going to be enough.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Redlining

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/rich-black-flunking/C...

I don't know that it is. But I suspect a more effective form of racism would be a subtler, better encoded form of racism.

That's either dangerously close to the line of the unprovable, or simply on the wrong side of it. Or "undisprovable", if you prefer. At some point a sufficiently "subtle" impact on behavior simply drops below the noise floor of normal human interactions, which aren't exactly a continuous party of peace and love no matter how you slice it.

Two studies which kind of demonstrate the "subtle" form of racism:

"Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?" - http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mullainathan/files/...

Another study that showed that whites with criminal records have a better change of getting a job callbacks compared with blacks without criminal records when qualifications were the same: http://ftp.iza.org/dp4469.pdf (the study was also done in Chicago with the same results)

Practice theory (Giddens and Bourdieu are the big authors) is an attempt to analyze the interaction of "structure" (social racism) and "habitus" (individual habits taken on because of growing up in a society). The interaction between class dynamics and internalized culture happens with white people too.

It would go a long way to elucidating the dynamics here (let me give a small town white example): white child grows up in poverty, learns aggressive habits to survive ("habitus") and cultural indicators like a "pimp roll" or bad grammar, tries to get a job (interfaces with "structure"), fails when he picks a fight with his boss or doesn't understand work ethic, his boss then confirms to himself never to hire anyone from that family, family continues to inculcate itself in aggressive alienated behaviors, family stays in poverty, rinse repeat...

You don't need racism to screw people over -- in fact, I think debates about racism hide the real important thing, which is class.

I agreed with much of it, until he inferred the " 'repertoire of infidelity' among low-income men" is because they don't have good jobs.

"Does it matter how they approach procreation, how they juggle 'doubt, duty, and destiny' when they are denied the jobs that are the sine qua non of parenthood?"

I think it DOES matter. It represents a level of maturity, respect for others, and thinking about the future. Those are principles that should be taught, and are often taught through culture. "It's all hopeless anyway" can explain why some fall victim to drugs and crime, but it's inexcusable to pull another person (the girl) or two (her baby) into the net. That is the essence of lack of responsibility.

Other than this central issue, I agree with much else of what he wrote.

When I first read this article, so many thoughts crowded into my mind that it was difficult to compose a coherent response. Since I often take the train through one of the less nice areas of Chicago, from time to time I catch myself gazing out at the dilapidated structures and piles of trash and thinking really hard about how a neighborhood goes from being founded in enterprise and hope to 'ruination.' I offer the following observations:

1. Hopelessness perpetuates from generation to generation, being passed from parent to child. Children are born to young, uneducated parents whose finances are already stretched to the limit. Not having been properly habilitated themselves, it is common for these parents to take their frustrations out on their children in the same way their parents did. So you've got this cycle of despair and depression that perpetuates across generations.

2. Certain characteristics of the impoverished class have been adopted by mainstream media -- particularly advertising media -- as if they are significant of some culture. Baggy clothing is used as an example. It's a little known thing that the 'zoot suit' of the from the 1930s and 1940s was considered a display of wealth. It meant that you could afford to have a suit made with volumes of fabric at a time when cloth was more dear than it is today. This display of wealth is consistent with the other characteristics of 'African American culture': large gold chains, gold teeth, everything covered in diamonds. At the risk of making a pun, this is a gold mine for advertising media. Think about it, it's an aggrandized display of excess that garners attention.

3. These characteristics do not define any kind of real culture. Last time I looked, there are more impoverished caucasian Americans than there are of any other skin tone. Careful examination will reveal that the dynamic is more or less the same regardless of the false delineation of 'race.' How different are spinning rims from the giant knobby tires on a Ford F250, really?

4. Which leads me to my final observation, in that I have for a long time considered identification with any sort of false 'culture' to be a form of self-segregation. History will show that encouraging a fractured 'hoi polo' is a very effective and powerful means of sustaining the status quo.

</two_cents>

There is a limit to what empirical study can reveal. I've always been uneasy about these studies from either side of the debate because they are almost always conducted by people who have no other connection to the black community.

That is, white researchers who live, work, and play among their white peers are drawing conclusions about a community they (socially) know nothing about. These researchers often have few/no black friends. Have never been to a predominantly black party. Never sat down in a black hair salon or barbershop and listened to the talk of the day.

How we expect accurate analysis that can lead to meaningful solutions is beyond me.

ETA: Persistent poverty in the black community is the result of many things. Misplaced and legitimate distrust of white people, misguided government programs, low expectations, too high expectations, racist laws, stereotypes about black intelligence, black people's internalization of those stereotypes...

Anyone expecting a conclusive study that comes down on one side or the other, or that narrows the problem/solution to any one issue is living a pipe dream.

How about this study from a black professor into why rich black kids still flunk: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/rich-black-flunking/C...

He got his reputation attacked when it was shown that there was a belief that the school should take care of everything (Parents didn't encourage/supervise, students didn't care, etc).

I'm familiar with the study and generally give it more weight than other studies by people who dip in and out of the black community solely to collect data.

That said, I don't think it's entirely wrong to think that if you send your child to school for 6-8 hours a day, they should actually come home having learned something.

I didn't have helicopter parents, my parents just watched for grades. No PTA meetings, no reviewing my hw, no private tutors... I grew up and went to schools in the hood, but still got great grades, took a dozen AP/advanced courses, was in IB, got into an ivy league college, etc. etc.

So there was definitely something going on at school with regard to student expectations, curriculum, and teacher quality (I had amazing teachers).

Sounds like you didn't read the study. The study showed that some kids thought education was uncool and 'being white'.

Actually, I read the study some time ago, and am very familiar with it's findings. My response was to your specific comment here:

"there was a belief that the school should take care of everything (Parents didn't encourage/supervise, students didn't care, etc)."

I thought that was clear...

freetochoose.tv

episode 4 of the 1980's series. specifically the debate section (second half of each program)

I admit to being quite unhappy about the "collective guilt and responsibility" line - Steinberg's parents likely emigrated to the USA after 1900, thus they were never in the country when slavery was happening, so he should know better.

In my case, one side was non-slave-owning Northerners since 1729 where slavery was never legal, and the other side of my family wasn't in the USA until 1913.

So how exactly am I or any of my family culpable?

An aside: the first case in Virginia which legalized/recognized slavery under the courts, was brought by Anthony Johnson, who was able to convince the court that John Casor was his slave. Johnson, the slaveholder, was himself African :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_%28American_Col...

Blaming culture is the Pontius Pilate method - the people who do so think "it is their choice, they suffer the consequences, so there is nothing we can or should do".

If chinese, Indians and Koreans do well is it only because white people haven't enough resources to keep them down too?

Are they doing well?

http://www.aafederation.org/research/wbp/Poverty%20Report%20...

http://www.chhayacdc.org/ourissues_sasians.html

Certainly median and average incomes (and outcomes) for Asians and Indians tend to be above average but is that because the group as a whole is outperforming or because the top end screws the picture? These are not rhetorical questions, I'm seriously asking - it seems like poverty rates in the Asian community are fairly high in NYC and other locations.

A few rich people on the "top end" can screw up the average, but they don't do very much to the median. If the median is higher that's pretty strong evidence that they are, as a whole, outperforming.

And yet in regions with significant Asian populations you see poverty rates in excess of the white population (although generally better than blacks and Latinos).

http://www.arthurhu.com/index/apoverty.htm (from the '90s, possibly outdated)

http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/Rankings.a...

http://diversityjobs.com/news/despite-having-more-household-...

http://www.asian-nation.org/demographics.shtml

Median income is only part of the story, especially when looking at national vs regional figures.

Yes, if you slice the stats fine enough you can eventually find some statement of apparent interest, but it comes from your stat slicing, not anything useful. You name the race and I'll find a location in the world where they have poverty rates in excess of some other race. It's not useful information.

This is why it's so important to first formulate a question, then consult the stats; examining the stats for questions is actually very dangerous, you'll always find something, but not necessarily something important. Particularly when you start moving the goalposts when the stats didn't say what you wanted them to say.

Particularly when you start moving the goalposts when the stats didn't say what you wanted them to say.

I'm taking issue with your statement "if chinese, Indians and Koreans do well" and the implication that these groups are doing well. First there is the definition of "do well" which I'm taking to mean "performing as well as the majority (white) demographics." And then you next have to look at the statistics you want to compare.

Income is one relevant stat, but not the only one. There are others like poverty, upward mobility, lifespan, incarceration, addition and so on. Yes, Asians in the aggregate have higher median incomes than whites even, but to look at that one stat and then say "okay, no problems, we're done here" is not helpful.

But mine is clearly the minority opinion here. Such is life.

'I'm taking issue with your statement "if chinese, Indians and Koreans do well"'

Check the author lines a bit more carefully, please.

"And then you next have to look at the statistics you want to compare."

Actually, you provided the stats, I didn't look for anything. The stats you provided failed to make the point you wanted them to make. Then I simply reacted to your moving of the goalposts.

The problem is that you're basically correct that you can't just look at one stat, so you don't understand why I'm not just agreeing with you, but my problem is that your point is vacuous without spending a lot more time on it. There is a sea of statistics out there and you can slice whatever result you want out of them. It takes a lot more work to actually establish causation or even real-world significance of such things, which you're not doing.

If everybody's being discriminated against, and I can bend the stats to show everybody's got some sort of disadvantage somewhere, then it isn't obvious that anybody is. More work is needed than merely citing the stats showing the particular localized problems. Nobody gets life handed to them on a silver platter as a result of their race. (Those that do get life handed to them on a silver platter get it by other means, primarily rich parents, which dominates the race concern.)

Chinese, Indians, and Koreans have a completely different history in America than African Americans. Your comment is simplistic and easily falls apart under basic levels of scrutiny.

Those groups mostly had the luxury of immigrating to America AFTER black people fought for the civil rights of ALL American citizens. They reaped the benefits of black struggles while experiencing very little of the viciousness of racism.

That's not to say that there is nothing to learn from these groups though.

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