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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

My first boss was a black guy who graduated from Yale. It took 7 years before I was making more money than he did. I tried to get him to move to a new company, so I could get a signing bonus, and he could get a 30k raise, but had little interest. My father grew up as a poor white guy and had the same attitude. "I make a lot of money why strive for more?"

The people I work with have this attitude that 300k/year is expected (aka middle class) from a two income family. IMO, DNA has little impact on Black achievement, rather culture is "crushing" black America. When 80% of any population is not playing the game they hold the average hostage.

My personal theory is you tend to measure yourself in comparison the well to do people around you. If you fail to reach that level you are more likely to push your children up a notch. However, everyone needs to balance success vs. personal sacrifices and needs to decide when enough is enough.

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Switching jobs introduces a risk of not liking the new job. If you enjoy your current job and it pays you more than enough to make you happy, switching for $30k sounds like it would be a bad idea to me. Money can't buy happiness.

Having a comfortable job long term with this attitude is career suicide. Not only should you be constantly trying to advance financially, you need to be learning new things with different roles and environments. Else you risk putting all your eggs in one basket, with no where to go if your longtime comfortable position vanishes some day.

Financial gain is independent of learning new roles and environments. I wouldn't be comfortable in a job where I wasn't constantly expanding my knowledge and learning new things. However, once I make enough money to cover good food, nice housing, and a few adult toys, I couldn't care less about how much I earn. Making more money is a very small factor in my career decisions.

I seriously think the three contradicting people commenting on each others are right (P, GP, GGP). :-)

I think people differs a lot in these kind of priorities. (Well, maybe not so much on HN.)

My father grew up as a poor white guy and had the same attitude. "I make a lot of money why strive for more?"

This attitude is quite logical and reasonable if you consider relative achievement vs. absolute achievement. If you've started out near the back of the pack economically or socially, and make good, there's no shame in enjoying the fruits of your labors and directing your focus onto other things besides competition.

Money is one measure of success, but if you're making what you consider to be enough money, you may find other uses for your time whose utility is less obvious to other people but significant to you. Autonomy is often its own reward.

A family income of $300k is upper class, by the way. No one likes to call themselves rich, but $300k is at least in the top 10%, which is decidedly not middle.

If you're making 300k you're in the top one percent, or very near: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm

There's a lot of room at the bottom.

The top 1% of the total population, but if all your friends are investment bankers, the average doctor might seem poor.

They were talking about $300k from a two-income household. Not that it makes you middle class, but that $100k-$150k bracket is fairly large.

The data is per-household.

Well then. I guess I can't read. My bad.

I've seen the claim that black academic test scores are consistently one standard deviation below the norm regardless of the test: sat, gre, lsat, mcat, erb, afqt, whatever. Always one standard deviation. Unfortunately, that lends weight to the genetic argument.

People that are 1/4th black and identify themselves as black, have the same issue on standardized tests as people that are 3/4+% black. If DNA was the cause you would expect a non uniform distribution.

The typical black American is 85%+ genetically "African". A tiny slice of people misreporting race wouldn't impact things much.

And I don't follow your premise that inherent differences wouldn't be quantitatively consistent. That's how it is with all the other measurable differences between races.

People that are 3/4 "European" and 1/4 "African" and people that are 1/4 "European" and 3/4 "African" score the same on standardized tests. But, they don't have the same skin color / shade.

If there was a genetic based IQ difference you would expect the same shift as you see in skin color. But, that's not what happens, thus it's probably not a genetic trait.

> score the same on standardized tests

Statistically that's not true. I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Ahh, ok, this is a case of "[Citation Needed]" and I am going to ask you first.

PS: It's been a few years since I read that finding so it's going to take me a while to find it again.

Edit: Americans that are 1/4 "African" tend to identify themselves as African. This seems odd to me but it's actually the case.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/6dydh0fawxuuhg1r/

The African American adolescents had a lower birth weight, a lower verbal IQ, and a higher number of sexual partners than did White adolescents. For each characteristic, the mixed race mean fell between the means of the two parental populations.

Race is a social construct. You are what people say you are.

Races are extended families. People in a race are genetically and genealogically closer to each other than to people outside of it. This racial clustering of relatedness is empirically testable. Race is not a social construct.

You're conflating two distinct concepts. By the genetic definition, a 3/4 European 1/4 African would be white. By the social definition, a 3/4 European 1/4 African would be black.

According to whom?

My roommate in college was half-Haitian half-Portugese and identified more as European. My near 100% African-American buddy I played cards with identified himself as fully black. A half-Carib half-French (black skin tone) girl I knew identified as French. In London, a good friend who is half-Arabic half-Indian identifies equally as Arabic and Indian. My three-quarters Chinese one-quarter Japanese friend raised in Beijing identifies as pure Chinese. I think a 1/4th African 3/4ths European blood person raised in a predominantly black community would identify as black, and raised in a non-black community would identify as European.

All my data is from people who live in international coastal cities though, so maybe it's different in various provinces and less affluent middle-of-country areas.

Popular perception of race among Americans. The "one-drop rule" is widely attested, and for the most part is still true.

This can and does vary from country to country--mixed-race Brazilians are considered white in Brazil, but black if they immigrate to the United States.

You're using a fairly prescriptive definition of race. Race, as commonly used, is a social construct. Ancestry functions the way you describe, but as the example given above shows, "race" and ancestry are not directly related.

> "race" and ancestry are not directly related

Of course they are.

Ancestry is objective. Race is subjective. There is a many-to-many relationship between the two. If people say you're black, then you're black. Different groups may come to different conclusions on what your race is depending on varying social norms. If you disagree with this, then you're not using "race" in the same way that the rest of country is.

Why would that lend weight to the genetic argument?

Also, I have seen a lot of claims. I have seen claims that IQ is not even distributed in a bell curve.

In the actual book "The bell curve" there is also a small (non-normal) spike for very intelligent blacks, if I remember correctly.

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