It is from [Wilfred] Reilly we learn two-parent black families are substantially less likely to be poor than single-parent white families, and that between 1900 and 1960 African Americans had low crime rates relative to their numbers in the US population. This despite the well-documented presence of genuinely racist cops and judges throughout the period. We discover, too, that between 1900 and 1955, 85 percent of black families had both parents in the home raising their children and black unemployment rates were low. Between 1920 and 1940, American blacks actually had the highest marriage rates of any ethnic group in the US.
My hypothesis is that black culture broke up under the pressures of urbanization, as children of the great Northern Migration rejected the ways of their rural parents.
“ between 1900 and 1960 African Americans had low crime rates relative to their numbers in the US population”
Not sure what this means unless it means they had lower crime rates than whites. Not true. Barry Latzer shows in his scholarly book “The Roots of Violent Crime in America: From the Gilded Age through the Great Depression” that blacks had high rates of violent crime by 1900. Even in northern cities.
Replying to my self: but it IS true that black violent crime was much lower before, than after, 1965.
I assume you have looked at Thomas Sowell’s analysis that locates the central causal nexus of black culture brake-up in the outcomes of the very government policies designed to assist African Americans. Friedman also talked a lot about government programs as the most destructive force working against African Americans.
Other than the fact that Sowell could appear to be just finding what he wants to find, what is it about his arguments and evidence that you find unconvincing?
–“My hypothesis is that black culture broke up under the pressures of urbanization, as children of the great Northern Migration rejected the ways of their rural parents.”–
Why was black culture more impacted by urbanization than other groups, with respect to crime, out of wedlock births, etc?
Because blacks migrated in large numbers and did not have time to form communities. If you were an Italian migrating from Italy, you found a pre-existing Italian community that had some cultural strength. If you were a Black migrating from rural Mississippi to Detroit, maybe not so much.
I’m going on memory, but southern blacks have always had high crime rates relative to whites, including long before the Great Society.
I don’t think there is anything special about black dysfunction. Are any of their statistics radically different than those of 85 IQ whites? Fishtown has about a 50% bastardy rate. Possibly blacks are more violent even relative to IQ, but IQ is doing most of the lifting.
It is from [Wilfred] Reilly we learn…that between 1900 and 1960 African Americans had low crime rates relative to their numbers in the US population.
The ratio of nonwhite to white homicide rates in 1950 was 10.77, so I doubt Reilly is correct. That’s the victimization rate, but afaik race of victim and perpetrator have a strong (80%+?) correlation.
Sorry, but the “time to form communities” variable seems kinda weak.
How about the citizens from Viet Nam who were forced to hastily re-locate here during the 1970s? Did they have robust existing communities? If not, why the significant variation in crime rates or out-of-wedlock births for them vs. blacks?
Or the Irish fleeing the famine?
Is that really the case? I’m open to it as an explanation but it just jive with my priors (which admittedly may be wrong).
Weren’t blacks migrating in large numbers? Wasn’t segregation/redlining still a thing in a north, such that there would be communities of black people living in the same neighborhoods?
I’ve always had the sense that there was a large economic component. When women were able to marry the government instead of the fathers of their children, the family collapsed. Because blacks had lower earnings (and maybe different time preferences), welfare’s impact on their demographic was worse.
This is anecdote, but many of my ancestors migrated from small European towns to urbanized American cities early in the 20th century. Prenuptial births in that first generation were common despite religious norms against this, but stable marriages ensued. I hypothesize that mass migration to urban areas causes a cultural disruption (related to children growing up in a different environment than their parents), but I don’t know if or why this played out differently across ethnic groups.
Although I suspect that Sowell and Williams have the right of it, that government programs to help the poor did help people be poor and not successful and independent, I am also sympathetic to the notion that there is something wrong with cities. Part of my distaste for cities probably just comes from my preference for rural living and so personal bias, but cities seem to have a lot of problems in higher percentages per capita than suburban and rural areas in the same regions. Rural poverty is often deeper than urban, yet something about having a lot of people in a small area makes things worse.
Maybe it is just how cities are run, with much more top down control or something, I don’t know. I would be interested in seeing some serious investigation into what causes cities to have so many dysfunctions, controlling for the usual demographics.
This is a reasonable hypothesis. But it’s not testable. And it’s not actionable; if it’s true, it’s not clear what should be done and what policies should be advocated for.
Two common hypotheses that I think are wrong are genetics and racism. Genetics drives personality which surely plays some role, but especially issues like birth out of wedlock rates: those have fluctuated so drastically in recent history among populations that are basically ethnically+genetically homogeneous to consider genetics as a primary factor. The progressive hypothesis that racism drives things like poverty or births out of wedlock is also wrong, and I presume this crowd is already convinced of that.
What can be done about all the social dysfunctions of the world? Politically, Kling and this crowd can come up with some good policy ideas that will surely go no where in today’s political environment. I’m sincerely optimistic about growth, technology, and innovation improving everything.
Marriage rates have been collapsing across IQ lines in the developed world for several decades now. Genetics is the obvious culprit, though it may simply be bad genetics + government welfare + female earnings potential combo.
Arnold has already discussed “the solution”. If you want to reduce out of wedlock births, you have to make being a single mother miserable. Materially and socially (lots of shaming). That’s what worked before, it’s probably the only thing that will work. Arnold says he doesn’t have the stomach for that, so he’s not sure what else can be done.
It might be possible to make single motherhood miserable by comparison by showering married fathers with money from the government. Probably would have various kinds of bad unintended side effects, but still, one reason I think why college educated people have tended to have kids in married unions is that college educated men earn enough money for their wives to be stay at home moms. Maybe if the rest of the population had that out of wedlock birth rates would decline?
UMC tend to be two earner families. You don’t see a lot of SAHM until the men are making mega bank.
It’s simple, institutional America found it was relatively cheap to buy the loyalty of poor single women away from their potential poor single men, so they did.
To put icing on the cake they imposed a 100% marginal tax rate on married lower middle class couples.
Most well-adjusted adults wouldn’t support a policy that promised to make single mothers miserable. I wouldn’t. Some single mothers were right to leave cheating or abusive baby daddies, so I wouldn’t support extra shaming.
I do support limits in how much charitable social services are reasonable to expect from others for free. That may result in some human misery, but that’s not the goal.
I’ll agree with “most” but I don’t think that is “well adjusted”.
The best way for women not to marry abusive chads is not to date and fuck abusive chads in the first place. It’s like you don’t believe in female agency. The more negative the consequences for being romantically involved with dysfunctional men, the less often women will do so.
I think if we’re talking about baby daddies and not husbands, we’re talking about single mothers. As far as I’m concerned, a single mother is a mother who isn’t married.
Elimination of no fault divorce should be an important goal, and payment of alimony/child support should only ever happen if there was an at fault divorce and the husband was guilty of either a) cheating or b) actual physical violence for which he was arrested.
No cash welfare either. No food stamps, no section 8 housing, nothing.
Your options are a guaranteed public job and/or universal basic dorms as described by Robin Hanson.
On top of this, replace public school with per capita vouchers to families. If you’re married, you can convert your voucher to cash, staying at home and raising your children as a home schooling mother if you want. Not an option for single moms.
Niko+Davor, the argument isn’t that genetics drove the increase in social dysfunction, it’s that genetics explains most of the disparity between black and white rates of dysfunction.
OK, maybe that’s true. What policy recommendations can you offer based on that?
I believe genetics differences among individuals and among races has impact. I’m optimistic that society can have lower crime rates and happier families without changing genetics. Also, changing genetics is hard to do.
edit: lower crime rates and *have* happier families…
There are several policy recommendations that could reduce the absolute level of crime, but it is likely that even at lower absolute levels disparities in relative rates will remain.
For instance, there was a huge decrease in crime from 1990 to 2015, and yet we still had a retarded racial reckoning because the relative rates weren’t the same even though they were down a lot.
While urbanized blacks abandoning the norms of their rural parents and grandparents is one plausible theory, another relates to the fact that the civil rights acts of the 1960s led to middle class black families moving out of traditional all-black neighborhoods.
Despite racial segregation being a great evil, blacks “managed,“ that is, community norms that had evolved over the preceding century and more took advantage of the presence in most black communities of a certain mix of economic and social classes (whether rural or urban).
While the civil rights acts were, of course, morally just, and good policy by almost any measure, it is possible that the relatively rapid migration of middle-class blacks from communities that had evolved norms based on the unfortunate and long-standing reality of racial segregation led to a weakening of the communities from which they migrated.
That weakening wasn’t a “black thing.” The destabilizing result can be understood as coming from the fact that the community — be it Black, Irish or Jewish — functioned based on an emergent order that made the best of the social resources available to that community. The mix of resources in traditional black communities changed so quickly in the sixties and seventies that the communities in question were greatly challenged in how to adapt.
Just a theory. Dunno.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/city.htm
For those unfamiliar with Baltimore it has a very constricted city limits where the city and county are separate counties, with separate governance and school systems. This, combined with the metro area being heavily black, led to suburban flight on steroids.
The upshot on how suburban flight affects IQ.
Baltimore County Whites: 99
Baltimore City Whites: 86
Baltimore County Blacks: 86
Baltimore City Blacks: 76
Two notes:
The scores come from a Maryland public school math test. The wealthy whites of Baltimore city send their kids to expensive private schools. There are one or two white trash public schools left in the city where I suspect the IQ is low, anyone with means of any kind would not send their kids to Baltimore public schools.
If you’ve got an average IQ of 76 and no smart fraction to speak of, you are going to be a hellscape.