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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

> especially once you bring up age, gender and race of the perpetrators

Is there sufficient social support for the families of young black males? If not, it may make sense economically to provide it, if it would make American cities functional again.

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“social support” is what caused the problem in the first place.

If I'm not mistaken they never received any kind of reparations, so they've been a permanent underclass since slavery.

He is referring to 20th century social services meant to fix slums, that wound up making marriage something that could get you kicked out of public housing and on-books work something that could get you kicked off financial support. This is often blamed for making everything worse and contributing to the social disaster zones that were the large public housing projects in northern cities.

Any links or references to share? Does this have a name?

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a pretty accessible introduction to one of the most notorious public housing disasters in the US. It was available on Netflix at some point.

The name for welfare discouraging marriage is "the marriage penalty", but it's a general policy thing that people still argue about, so I couldn't find anything good about the old AFDC marriage penalties on short notice. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/wedding-bell-blues-marria... does a quick outline in passing.

It's a big topic. Some entries here:

https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies...

You'll have to get past the entities that profit off whatever problem(s) you are proposing solutions for first.

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