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Comment by benjohnson | Hacker News Reader

The hard part for me, is that if you do manage to climb up from poverty, you'll be accused of "white privilege."

I don't think accused is the right term, but it's also true that it is easier to "climb up from poverty" as a poor white person in the US than as a poor black person. Have a look at [1], particularly figure 1 on page 7 to see the transition probabilities by income for whites and blacks in the US. You'll see that whites are far more likely to move up in wealth from their parents. As a single number from the chart (in case you don't want to look at the whole thing), whites are about twice as likely as blacks to move upward from the 1-50 percentile range of parent income.

[1] https://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/econo...

What happens to the transition probabilities when you control for IQ?

The only place in that paper where you find those two letters next to each other is in the word "technique(s)".

Given what we know about the importance of IQ (and its distribution), I'd say it's a pretty bad paper. And citing it makes for a pretty bad argument.

You my friend have no idea what a bad argument is.

So control for IQ. Lets say we did. Sadly the statistics already say that a poor white person is more likely to "climb up from poverty" than a poor black person.

See the problem with your argument is that you somehow think that IQ is a factor here.

Lets say there are 10 job openings, and 3 of those jobs are run by people who are secretly prejudiced against black people and will come up with some excuse to not hire them.

That means for a white person there are 10 job openings and for a black person there are only 7, regardless of IQ.

So a white person and a black person with equal IQ do not have an equal situation in a country where the supremacy is white (even outside of racism and the like, there is always cultural bias which applies here).

The study controlled for cognitive abilities, it's graphed on figure 8c. "Consistent with previous studies linking AFQT scores to racial differences in adult outcomes (for example, Neal and Johnson, 1996; Cameron and Heckman, 2001), I do not interpret these scores as measuring innate endowments but rather as reflecting the accumulated differences in family background and other influences that are manifested in test scores." Please don't fall for naive evolutionary justifications for discrimination and don't criticize blindly.

'it is easier to "climb up from poverty" as a poor white person in the US than as a poor black person.'

In my specific case this may not have been true - race-based scholarships were not available to me because of the white color of my skin for example.

Rather than view everything through the lens of race, I'd be curious to see your numbers run with the split based on students of poor urban-schools vs students of better suburban schools.

The numbers were split not just by race, but also by parental income. Yes, if you're in the bottom 10 percentile of parental income as a white kid, it's harder to get scholarships than if you're black. Still, these kids are more likely to move up the income charts than their black counterparts, because even though race-based scholarships are more available, the other disadvantages outweigh them.

While I don't have the numbers at hand, I think it's unreasonable to expect that white children of parents in the bottom 10 percent of income are attending good suburban schools in significant numbers, because if you're in the bottom ten percent of income you probably can't afford to live in those regions, regardless of race.

I'm not saying that race is the most important factor, and I'd also like to see splits by schools and other factors. But I think parental income is extremely important, and even after controlling for that we see a very substantial racial component. If race-based scholarships were had such an overriding effect, we wouldn't be able to reproduce these statistics. If you have numbers that show that controlling for some other factor (like school quality) leaves no remaining racial component, definitely let me know, but given how large the disparity remains after controlling for parental income, I sincerely doubt it's the case.

"White privilege" isn't an accusation, it's a cultural reality, along with all sorts of other types of privilege. The point of invoking the concept is not to make people feel bad about being white, but rather simply understand that society isn't actually meritocratic. Opportunities arise via combinations of what you've done, unearned privilege (who you are), and random circumstance.

If you're a white guy and you climb up for poverty, be proud of what you accomplished. Please just don't look back at everyone who hasn't made it and think that they all could have done the same.

The concept of "privilege" is not a reality, it's one subjective way of looking at reality; one that most people don't subscribe to. This is an important distinction that is all too often forgotten.

I don't think you understand the concept. The fact that he doesn't mention being called a racial slur or any horrible interactions with the police is already "white privilege".

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