One argument comes from the left. It says history has dealt blacks a bad hand and we have been oppressed and we have been beaten and abused. What can you expect but that you would see pathological behavior? It’s fixed by the historical inheritance. The wealth gap is what it is because we didn’t get the hand down from our parents because they didn’t get the hand down from their parents. What can we do? The crime rate is what it is, the test scores and what they are, et cetera. Fixed by history. Predetermined.
And the genetic argument. It’s in your genes. What can we expect? Do the best you can. We’ll respect you as a human being, but we won’t expect you to be doing calculus and we won’t expect you to be performing at a high level. And if we see that you’re not a good parent or that you break the law frequently or that you’re more often involved in violence, while we regret that, we can’t say that we’re surprised. Because after all your genetic et cetera.
I excerpted half of it, and I am short-changing you if you don’t go read the whole “aria.”
I myself wrote that there are three narratives for racial gaps. As Loury points out, the oppression narrative and the genetic narrative deprive blacks of moral agency and hope. The third narrative, which I prefer, is cultural characteristics that can change. That essay was influenced by listening to and reading Loury. It also was influenced by reading The Mind Club. Recall this blog post.
I am not so sure that cultural explanations provide all that much reason for hope. Culture tends to be pretty hard to change, with the recent changes in culture only coming about because of technologies that put human beings in a truly novel environment (anti-biotics and contraceptives, and ridiculously abundant calories). I think that if culture is the primary reason, a reasonable person would expect not much to change over the next generation or so.
If culture is the reason, and black culture has made no advancement in 50+ years anywhere in the world, and at the same time formerly oppressed cultures like Asians surpassed whites, can’t we conclude that blacks have the worst culture ever?
If blacks can change that culture and choose not to, aren’t they terrible people? The worst people ever? Why should others bother putting up with them?
Where does culture leave us as an explanation? It doesn’t seem uplifting, but indicting.
Given that it probably isn’t culture, doesn’t that mean that we will get more of the same from the last 50 years. People will summon the effort and will to Do Something. They will be frustrated when they fail, because they are destined to fail. When they fail they will want to blame something. If blacks have agency…won’t they blame blacks. Is that were this so supposed to go. Thinking blacks are evil and terrible human beings making the worst moral choices of any people in the world over and over again. Sounds like a recipe for super duper mega racism to me.
If it’s culture, then it does make a strong case for assimilation, which I think is what most people who argue it’s culture propose: that black people would be better off if the had children later and/or only when married, stayed in school, avoided prolonged unemployment, etc. What would induce that, who knows. The state not actively rewarding having children out of wedlock might be a start. Maybe promoting Seventh Day Adventism or Mormonism in black communities (half-joking).
The rest of your post though, no, because culture isn’t a choice; people aren’t necessarily much freer from culture than from biology. The near perfect correlation between religion of upbringing and religion in adulthood is one example of that.
The government is more than happy to do social engineering, but I suspect most pro-social versions of social engineering that could be proposed will be denounced by the left.
Note that the left has recently increased the child tax credit, has defended expanded unemployment insurance, and has a strong ally in the teachers unions.
Are you prepared to let poor kids go hungry or without medical care? That is what it would take. At the end of the day black out of wedlock birth is not all that different then low IQ our do wedlock birth for whites. Nobody knows how to make the lower classes get and stay married without dire need as the motivator, and destitution the punishment for failure.
And if blacks are trying to reform their culture to be more bourgeoise, why are they culturally, socially, and politically aligned with the left, which hates bourgeois norms?
In general I think the simplest case to be made is that black enjoy their degeneracy, want others to pay for it, and vote for the party they offers to pay for it.
Robin Hanson had an interesting idea in the universal basic dorms concept, in which those in need could live in the dorms which would provide for their residents needs. One aspect of the dorm life is that it would be low status. If you replace all poverty-related transfers with basic dorms that people are free to live in, it would help push people towards behaviors that make them self sufficient so they wouldn’t have to live in the dorms.
In my vision it would be quite paternalistic: if you live under the taxpayers’ roof, you have to follow the rules. They will be simple (though clean) accommodations and eat at a cafeteria available only to residents. If you want to sleep in your own bed at night, you have to be indoors by 10PM, otherwise the dorms are locked and you’ll have to sleep in a commons room, on a couch if one is available. If you need clothes, you tell a dorm employee what your measurements are and they pick out something for you at a thrift store. Residents who are violent are either kicked out or handed over to police, depending on the situation.
Technically a better deal from communism: to each according to their needs, but anyone can work to build up savings so that they can have more than they need by leaving the dorms.
They were called workhouses in Dickens. Scrouge was a fan and even the Victorians turned against them.
I just did a thread (https://twitter.com/CandideIII/status/1409963869527678976) on Riis’ classic 1890 book _How the Other Half Lives_. Among other things, he describes dorms (run by private charity) for street children. They functioned in a fashion similar to what you propose, except the kids paid a bit for lodging and food (below cost, but not a trivial sum either) and were as free to come and go “as any hotel guests”, and were overseen by the donors directly rather than by a bureaucracy. Riis says they were quite successful.
If culture isn’t a choice, how is it functionally different from genetics? I thought the whole point of it being culture is that you can choose to change it, thus it’s so much more hopeful then genetics.
If culture isn’t chosen, and only outside forces can change your culture, how is that any different then saying blacks have no agency?
I think the general opposition to workhouses involved squalid conditions and, well, hard labor.
The basic dorms would be clean and not require work. But from a social status perspective, it’s kinda like living with your parents. And you don’t get to make most decisions about your life.
The purpose of the dorms is to allow self selection based on need (of course, some people may be cheap and not care about choice or status, but I suspect that’s not a large population).
“the oppression narrative and the genetic narrative deprive blacks of moral agency and hope.”
They do nothing of the sort. Once again, when the categories don’t trigger Who-over-Whom crimestop deference, people can think perfectly clearly about these matters. But if you put the wrong, socially sensitive entries into Group 1 and Group 2, brains go *TILT* like an old pinball machine.
I’m not sure if that line is missing a ‘respectively’, which is the difference between having to rebut two claims or four, but it doesn’t matter, because all four are wrong. This is inappropriately mixing concepts that apply to individuals on a concrete basis on the one hand, or collectives on a statistical basis on the other.
Without getting into the whole philosophical discussion about free will and “just deserts, credit, and culpability”, to the extent one sees people as something more than complicated deterministic machines of a mere bundle of influences, and with regards to crime, the genetic narrative does not deprive anyone of moral agency.
Consider the statement with different Group 1 and Group 2, “Due to different genetics, in practically every place and time, males commit about an order of magnitude more violent crime than females, and there is practically nothing short of crime-eliminating sci-fi scenarios that any society can do about this ratio.”
Ah, not so triggering now, just common sense about human nature. At any rate, that is just a statistical comparison. Does that imply that either the males or females on an individual lack moral agency? Hardly.
It just means that men and women are different, on average, as a statistical matter, in terms of their tendency to experience violent impulses, but that, to the extent each individual has free will and conscious control over their actions sufficient to override powerful emotions, they still have moral agency to decide whether or not to act in accordance with or in defiance of those impulses, to whatever extent is sufficient to hold their morally culpable for their transgressions and accountable for their harms. This is all completely uncontroversial, or perhaps was for all human history until about 10 minutes ago.
Furthermore, why would the influences of genes or oppression have any more or less an impact on “agency” than a claim that it is the external environment of culture that can influence / determine / condition individual behaviors just as much as those other factors? It’s this just the old behaviorist framework, which is equally agency-minimizing? That doesn’t restore ‘agency’ or autonomy over the alternative narratives, it just makes something else responsible for its absence.
As for “hope” for closing the gaps, the oppressive narrative provides plenty of that. Indeed, it is 100% hope! Get rid of the oppression and you get rid of the gaps, QED. Encouraging people to continue to hope in the empirically impossible is precisely what got us into this mess.
In the alternative we could encourage people to face reality and accept things for how they are, but, despite whatever limitations or constraints they may have, to have the right, healthy, mature adult attitude about it, to let go of envy and resentments, and to be appreciative and grateful for the many blessings of living in modern civilization which their ancestors could hardly have imagined.
I don’t think Loury has really thought through the real answers to whole ‘spiritual’ aspect of this problem. They already figured all this out in classical antiquity – no need to reinvent the wheel.
The genetic explanation does not deny people moral agency, but it does say that agency will be less successful in certain attempts.
I have felt that lack of hope many times: my singing voice, my declining athletic ability, so many more.
And how did you handle those bad feelz?
Blame and vilify someone else? Give in to your envy and demonize the objects of your resentments? Indulge an inferiority complex and demand compensation for the unfair inequality in the world? Agitate for a radical revolution and lust for the humiliation of innocents?
Or maybe you did the whole mature adult thing, stoically progressed through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, which ended in *facing and accepting reality*, however unfortunate it might be, and then moving on with your life, with malice toward none, with charity for all, striving to make the best of what you’ve got?
That gives us a hint at exactly the scale of the “cultural and spiritual” intervention that would be required to get us out of this mess, which is no “tweak” by any means.
Rather stirring post. Nicely written.
+1
If Handle had his own blog I’d be a regular.
“The genetic explanation does not deny people moral agency, but it does say that agency will be less successful in certain attempts.”
very nice. I will steal at some point.
There’s another subtle aspect the question of “moral agency”, which is that any chain of reasoning can always look back one more step.
So, McWhorter’s is willing to attribute some of the gaps to certain unfortunately gap-promoting features of American “black culture”, but then that just raises the question of where those features and that culture came from? And here his narrative is just as much in favor of blacks “being acted upon” instead of acting, in saying that this culture is just the natural, reasonable, and predictable reaction to what *other bad whites* – the real actors with autonomous initiative and moral agency – *did to them*.
And if you are explaining behaviors and attitudes in terms of being a contingency determined by the decisions and actions of *other, different people*, then you are just playing the same dehumanizing game of absolving the members of a group from genuine moral agency and responsibility for their decisions.
Fundamentally, if you start from a position of mood affiliation such that blacks cannot ever be at fault for these gaps, then the logical implication is that they also cannot ever get the credit for pulling themselves out.
At best you could rely on a kind of pervasive, entrenched, and enervating “False Consciousness” of fatalistic inevitability, and that only by sudden and widespread epiphany as to its falseness (i.e., “getting woke” to the truth about agency) could suddenly inspire people to take matters into their own hands and improve their lot in life by their own efforts.
Speaking of 2006, Culture or Institutions. TGGP comments and repeats Derb’s quip, “Culture? Culture? What does that mean? Where does it come from? What are the upstream variables?”
The fact that we have been going in circles and getting nowhere – indeed regressing – for those past 15 years, demonstrates that Derb is right.
We all “know culture when we see it”, know that it’s important, but no one can get anywhere at that level of generality, without digging into the sometimes less than comfortable specifics. If ‘culture’ is used as a generic catch-all that encompasses absolutely anything that has influence on behaviors, then it makes any attempt to understand the details of what is really going on totally futile.
If the past few decades have taught us anything, it is just not intellectually productive or useful to discuss these topics with a term as imprecise and prone to evasive abuses as ‘culture’. The reason we need those upstream variables to be articulated is because otherwise there is no possibility of communicating a well-defined model of how things work.
One problem here is that it’s hard to agree on a conventional semantics in which people generally agree on the the limits of the word. If we talk about “black culture” having something to do with “black crime levels”, which is true enough, then we have to ask whether the incentives created by throttling the criminal justice system’s vigilance and levels of effectiveness up or down also counts as within “black culture” or is better considered something external to it, an intervention “from the outside”, as it were.
If the criminal justice system is an environmental influence on behavior ‘outside’ black culture, then, even discounting oppression and genetic narratives, if crime or incarceration levels go up or down, we still cannot infer any ‘cultural’ cause from the inside as opposed to changes in the system of control from the outside. Are we really “controlling for cultural factors” then, or not?
What I’m getting at is that sometimes people use ‘culture’ to mean “the attitudes, preferences, inclinations, values, and beliefs which which one’s social scene / upbringing / reference social group has *acculturated* one into” – which imagines it as a kind of combination of psychological states that has been established within particular individuals, “They think that way because in their culture they are taught to think that way”, and that this is really different from thinking of ‘culture’ as literally anything in the environment of incentives and influences which can include policy interventions from on-high.
Getting back to the “moral agency and hope” question for a second, if these external controls are included in possible “cultural” interventions, then if you think about it, you’ll see that it leads to both fatalistic and terribly dehumanizing conclusions – that there is nothing one can do except just ratchet up the external controls on this population.
As a metaphor, we may say that it is salmon nature to swim upstream to spawn, but that how far they get on any particular day depends on the strength of the opposing current. Likewise, just because we see changes in behaviors over time, doesn’t mean that we can infer that “black culture” or “Asian culture” has changed, to the exclusion of various external currents.
Furthermore, even if we get into the specific upstream variables and find an aspect of black culture that is strongly contributing to some gap, what exactly are we going to do about it in these theoretically ameliorative interventions (and would any of these actually pass muster with Libertarians?)
Let’s say we discover a strong, likely causal correlation between “hours listening to gangsta rap” and both drug abuse and criminal violence. Uh … ok, what’s next? Somebody (who?) asks Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, WorldStarHipHop, and all the rest to paternalistically “reduce the distribution” of such music? We know how progressives would react, and jump on such censorship as intolerably racist and a kind of ‘colonial’ / ‘white savior’ attitude, the classic mission civilisatrice that is the white man’s burden.
That leaves us with a kind of implied category of politically-acceptable interventions which will affect everyone’s internal cultures and which will somehow improve black scores or decrease crime rates *much more* than it does for anyone else. Without getting into specific examples of what one is talking about in terms of potential “cultural improvements”, believing this set is not empty seems to be engaging in wishful thinking.
It’s all three. The question is what percent of the variance(R^2) in any particular gap such as wealth or finishing high school can be explained by culture, genetics, or history. Reality is so complex and nuanced there is no way to dismiss any or assume only one or a small number of variables are at play. In that sense culture, genetics, and history are inadequate descriptors because each is more of a concept than an actual real world phenomena like the wether or some individual allele. Each term bundles together everything and anything that could be defined under such broad ideas.
Culture is an enormous term that can refer to everything from how you prepare fish to what kind of hats you wear. The relevant cultural issues would in my view be attitudes and specific behaviors. Attitudes towards authority, emphasis on education, tendency towards saving over consumption. Be precise in your language. What behaviors and attitudes on average do you believe explain meaningful social differences amongst groups? Years of schooling? Specific courses studied?
Genetics is also vast. In everyday speech when people talk about genetics we are basically talking about biological units that convey hereditary information. In fact, the human genome has roughly 1.5 billion base pairs and at present only a handful have been identified as relating to intelligence or educational attainment. When you say something is genetic, what specific genes are we talking about? Are epigenetics at play?
Finally, there is history. A lot has happened so far in the course of human events. No one event or phenomena will be sufficient in explaining anything today. For example past wealth ownership may influence modern wealth ownership. Past policies relating to anti-malaria programs or removing lead or arsenic may be culpable. Here things can get really tricky because history only happens once. We get almost no natural experiments and many significant events are one offs. Was the Cvil Rights bill a key turning point? How do you know for sure?
Individually any of the specific examples I offered will probably have some correlation in a regression analysis. Maybe 10% of the variance in the modern wealth gap is explained by ancestral land ownership in 1870. If black Americans owned less land then, we may have found some piece of data worth knowing. Whether or not we then take this into the politcal realm is another matter. Just my thoughts.
And then there is the question of how much “culture” is genetic. In Arnold’s substack, he pointed out that black kids do half as much homework as white kids, and suggested that if black kids did homework more like white kids, “the gap” in achievement would be narrowed.
But it stands to reason that smarter kids are more likely to do homework. The cultural/behavioral gap in homework may well be partly a disguised gap in genetics. So the attempt to change culture/behavior may have less effect than expected.
(That may also be why “kids who do more homework are more successful.” It’s not the homework. It’s the underlying intelligence.)
I’m sure lots of culture and culture differences are genetic and lots are non-genetic. From a practical policy perspective you can’t easily change genetics. Instead, focus on creating the conditions in which there are more happy career + lifestyle pathways for the masses. I know lots of normal people who didn’t do well in school who have successful adult lives in real estate, in nursing, or I know people who work in shipping logistics which is a field I don’t know much about, but offers middle class salary.
On the other hand, doing more homework is also likely to be due to family circumstances. Both parents who emphasize it, and parents who were good students themselves and thus are able to give their kids the tips and tricks they learned. A kid with parents who were good at writing the papers and such will have a personal coach with experience. Family circumstances are dominant which is exactly what the Coleman Report found in 1966. (Search Conversable Economist for a post on a 50th anniversary symposium on the Coleman report)
Now, objectively, schools, teachers should be teaching kids how to study, how to improve their papers, but the majority give token instruction, if any at all. Certainly not personalized help night after night. A few students maybe, but if the student isn’t a trier in the first place they are unlikely to get much independent teacher help.
“The overall conclusion of the Coleman Report—that family background is far and away the most important determinant of educational achievement and attainment—is as convincing today as it was fifty years ago.”
–“Still No Effect of Resources, Even in the New Gilded Age?”, Morgan and Sung,
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2016, The Coleman Report on Equal Educational Opportunity: 50 Years Later, Conversable Economist
Gee, is there a genetic component to “family background”?
One of the biggest of “family circumstances” is that kids share up to 100% of their parents’ DNA.
We desperately want all those things to be independent of genetics and to be immensely changeable. They are not.
Until the damn teachers started grading homework and giving lower grades to students who didn’t do it, which has created problems by misrepresenting the abilities of the smart and non-compliant or low IQ and compliant.
The problem with the “lingering effects of white supremacy” narrative is that other groups have done pretty darn well, economically, in various places, including the United States, despite being marginalized and discriminated against. The concept of a “market dominant minority” as coined by Amy Chua shows how various ethnic groups have managed to do significantly better than the majorities.
That’s one big problem: it’s not true. A bigger problem is that it fosters counterproductive racial group resentments. It encourages non-whites to resent whites, whites to resent the education system, and guilts whites that do well.
I would suggest what motivates the “lingering effects of white supremacy” narrative is politics and branding present-day Republicans as the villains of history and society. Much of the political left that dominates education is more concerned with humiliating and destroying their present-day political rivals than with simply helping people in the present or giving a neutral version of history.
More black people are doing well. Anecdotally, I personally am married into a large black family, I know tons of black people personally, lots of the younger generation are doing well in nursing, as doctors, as real estate agents, etc.
One policy idea that would help people of all races, but particularly blacks as a group: reduce math requirements to regular jobs. I know lots of black people who want to go into nursing or teaching, and the math requirements are a big obstacle. Yet, the people who pass those barriers to entry don’t use or know math at all. I’m a math major. I love math. I effortlessly got a perfect score on the math SAT+GRE which is normal for most people who go on to math grad school. But most other people don’t enjoy math; the idea that people going into K-12 education or nursing won’t actually use or need math on the job, but are blocked from entry is a bad idea.
I do agree with Kling’s idea of reducing focus on racial group differences and rather building more opportunities for the masses, not by race.
The one good thing about being dead 50 years from now is that I won’t have to read this exact same discussion when it is being repeated by that day’s intellectual class.
You don’t have to read it today. Just surf on over to somewhere else. The Internet does let you change the channel.
My point is that this discussion was being held when I was a teenager. Nothing changed in the intervening years, and nothing is going change in the next half century. These are intractable problems- it is time to recognize this. Blacks will either help themselves or they won’t, but I am done caring about it, done discussing it, and done thinking much about it. Let’s try indifference for a change.
“You may not be interested in war … “
In a January, 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a liberal Democratic Senator but then President Nixon’s Urban Affairs counselor”, wrote a widely leaked memo saying, “The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect’. …we may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades,”
We know how that worked out.
Arnold,
Let’s take specific examples:
1) you speak highly of a brookings institute study saying that high poverty schools cause bad academic outcomes. That same study (and many like it) are behind efforts to redistrict schools to balance low income students (usually racial balance is what Low income is a proxy for). Howard county, which you live in, just went through a huge school districting battle over this issue.
Were the parents opposed to this change racist? Selfish? Did you support or oppose this effort?
Can we expect this redistricing to have a measurable effect on student outcomes over the next few decades? Have similar efforts happened in the past?
If historical patterns persist and households resort their residence based on the new school attendance lines, should the school districts be continually updated? Or should we go further and ensure people have to live in diverse areas (like Singapore does)?
Please don’t reply that you support vouchers or whatever other school reform. Here is a real proposal really happening where you live based on your suggestion. Yea or nay?
2) I used to do tutoring at one of those Asian cram schools. I had a student that clearly wasn’t bright, but his parents had those “cultural attitudes” about homework and study that supposedly make them so smart. They went broke having him study 70 hours a week, but he never made progress and was miserable.
Is this your plan for raising black achievement? Could blacks studying less not be a reasonable response to the incentives low in people face? I.e. you do less studying when a additional studying has low output in terms of mastery of subject.
Why do you think you know better then blacks people what their ideal level of studying should be? Do you think you have asymmetric insight about how the should be spending their time?
If blacks continue to not study the proper amount, whose fault is that? What do you propose be done about it?
If blacks won’t study enough to become productive members of society, should we keep paying to educate them? To use our tax dollars to subsidize them in other ways? I mean they are choosing to be so ignorant and unproductive they can’t even pay their own bills.
I think a big part of the problem is the definition of “achievement”. Blacks, like every other group, will always have comparative advantage in many fields, and like every other group will tend to particularly esteem the fields in which they excel. For this reason in general every group thinks they are superior and every group is right. I have many reasons to believe that they have absolute advantage in many fields but who knows. Blacks in America have outsize achievements in sports and the performing arts, which are fields which are very visible and esteemed by the general public – more than being mathematicians. I think a big part of the problem is that a group which is actually quite successful in X is being taught to be upset because they are less successful in Y. I don’t lose any sleep over the fact that my ethnic group is greatly under-represented in professional sports.
“I think a big part of the problem is that a group which is actually quite successful in X is being taught to be upset because they are less successful in Y.”
Hear hear! And you can apply this same thought to a lot of other current controversies.
People talk a lot about the overall levels of wealth or income inequality, or of that *between* races, but not so much about the gini coefficients *within* races. Blacks tend to have a noticeably higher skew than non-hispanic whites, with their their income gini being about 10-15% higher.
To be fair, it *is* kind of unfair and tragic when one’s strengths or advantages happen to be in fields which are winner-take-all tournament markets given the demand structure of the particular economic situation one happens to be dealing with.
In today’s developed countries, if you are better with numbers than average, then even being only as elite as “1 out of 10” means you will probably be able to achieve a respectable and comfortable middle-class existence without too much struggle, which some would call “gifts of grace” and others might call “marketable talent privilege”. As talent marketability in that area declines, lifestyle declines, but gradually.
If, on the other hand, your strength is in athletics or music, things are more Malthusian in nature, and you need to be at something more like the 1 in 100,000 level of eliteness to capitalize on your talents, and everybody below that gets scraps or nothing. The difference between “Gold!” and “Who?” is often pretty slim.
In this regard, blacks yet again provide a kind of canary-in-the-coalmine warning to the rest of us about what happens when the markets rapidly shift and the value of certain forms of labor and common capabilities suddenly drops below that which is sufficient to provide the incentives that encourage the maintenance of bourgeois values and respectable and dignified lifestyles.
I don’t think the “cultural change” gets you out of the hole if the genetic argument holds water.
That would require a change to the marginal value of low-IQ (i.e. physical) labor, when the prevailing trend is toward a massively growing premium on high-IQ labor.
I do agree that cultural change toward “bourgeoisie values” could get a cohort to a “middle class” average outcome, but the middle class is also being squeezed because companies are busy automating away the middle management filing cabinet jobs.
Note: I hold no romantic attachment to the “middle class,” so it’s disappearance doesn’t concern me, but it’s hard to promise something that might not be there.
Arnold’s emotional preference for the cultural narrative, as he calls it, is scientifically uninformed. He needs to read David Reich’s “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past,” Robert Plomin’s “Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are” and similar works by people who know genetics. It is one of the most solidly established findings of social science that there are wide differences among ancestry groups (races) in personality traits, abilities (including IQ), and social behavior, and that these have a substantial genetic component. That of course says nothing about any particular individual, but it is a reality that needs to be faced.
Well, the fact is that “races” are mostly arbitrary, and if average iq is so important for nation’s success, then how come “high-iq” Mongolia has such a low GDP compared to e.g. Barbados?
Let me personalize this.
I lived near a building that gave subsidized rent to Teach For America grads working in Baltimore public schools. I talked to them sometimes.
Each of these people wasted a portion of their lives on a dead end. Some steady knew it, some wild later know it. Time and experience made cynics of them all.
If you were advising one of these kids whether to waste their 20s on this endeavor, would you say “culture is what matters and we all need to do our part” or “the kids you are tryi g to help can’t be helped because of their genetics, do something better with your life”.
I think the latter is the decent thing to do and the former is self indulgent advice that you should feel ashamed to give. Throwing away people’s lives on a lie is terrible and immoral.
The same goes for funding the venture as well and all of the people who had their tax dollars wasted in it.
This isn’t some uplifting story about black hope. It’s a tragic story of throwing away peoples lives on a lie.
Everyone here seems to be treating genetics as immutable, and reason for doom and gloom.
This is the 21st century. Biobanks with genotype and phenotype data for hundreds of thousands of people are a thing. CRISPR is a thing. There are more IVF than non-IVF babies in my immediate circle (ok, that’s unusual to the point of almost being personally identifying, but it’s a proof of concept). Although the rich can be expected to have earlier access to gene editing and similar technologies, the aspirational poor should ultimately have more to gain, and there are enough people at the cutting edge of these fields who want to ensure the aspirational poor aren’t hard- or soft-locked out by economics.
So I claim that there is reason to be more optimistic about the prospects for the grandchildren of today’s African-Americans if genetics is significant than if it’s “just” culture. (We can see how little progress has been made re: culture in the last two generations.) This isn’t to say that the “democratic transhumanist” vision I’m outlining will be easy to realize; I’m sure that readers can identify several major challenges that stand in the way. But I believe that it’s possible, and that it’s worth aiming for. I try to reason out what policy changes today bring us closer to that tomorrow, and further from other less-desirable tomorrows.
Nobody knows if or when you will be able to eliminate racial gaps via genetic engineering. People speculate a lot, but nobody actually knows. And whatever the probabilities, they aren’t going to actually help anyone alive today or even someone having a child in the immediate term.
So what’s really the pitch here? Let’s ignore this problem because a technology that might or might not exist on an unknown timeline might solve the issue? Name a political or social problem for which that isn’t true?
Moreover, there is no way to know if something will solve a problem. Vast increases in material wealth didn’t end people complaining about inequality or poverty. The invention of the medical technology necessary to do transgender surgery merely created a whole new class of supposed oppressed with their own issues and demands.
Until we start to see concrete medical options we can actually debate and act on, I think it’s reasonable for people to debate this issue as if the possibility doesn’t exist.
But yes, as to your point that culture seems harder to change then genes in a successful crisper era that is correct. Genetics is the way more optimistic option if your timeline is multiple generations.
Semiconductor manufacturing is now incredibly precise. It’ll probably take several decades, but I don’t see why you’d believe that CRISPR-like technologies will never come close to that level of precision, barring some self-inflicted apocalypse (which I’ll grant is a real risk). I believe that collaboratively figuring out appropriate sets of edits to perform is probably the harder problem… for social as well as technical reasons.
The social side is a big reason to think about this now. What I’m describing requires a lot of trust between ordinary citizens and technical experts. That needs to be built up over time. How can we get there from here, given the depressing state of affairs in America today?
One path leads through Africa. It has a billion people, and enough independent countries that despite high rates of war, corruption, and other failure modes, there are some that are doing a genuinely good job of self-government. The most prominent such country is Rwanda; although its absolute position is still quite low (more than a decade behind India, which is in turn multiple decades behind China and Mexico), it has a very popular leader who sees Lee Kuan Yew as a role model and has been effective so far at selecting development policies that can succeed with the people he has. Suppose it’ll take 60 years for the technical side of the genetic problem to be solved. If Rwanda continues along its current path, it’ll plausibly take about that long for it to approach the frontier of what’s achievable without genetic engineering. If it gets there, it could very well have all the trust relationships that are necessary for the democratic transhumanist solution to work. Other countries, and parts of the American underclass, can follow.
There are other possible paths. The bottom line is that this vision provides hope, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a false hope. As you note, a critical problem today is that ROI on most attempts to help African-Americans is poor; but that’s not because there are no opportunities with good ROI. It’s largely because Western organizations which otherwise have compatible values are basically prohibited from honestly discussing the current state of affairs, so most of them are blind in the same way. (Note that individuals can and have accomplished quite a bit, though again the best example of this is in Africa rather than the US: Bill Gates vs. malaria.) And a key reason this prohibition exists is that probably-false hope is widely considered to be better than no hope.
I agree that widespread application of genetic engineering will introduce problems of its own. So have many other technological advances. Some groups of people may opt out for good reasons (and, contra “Meditations on Moloch”, I don’t think they’re doomed; the Amish are doing fine today). But it stands to be the solution to the biggest social problem we have today.
I’m against the idea that we should lie about genetic realities today, make decisions with long term negative consequences based on that denial, and then hope that a technological change comes along and bails us out of those consequences. That strikes me as irresponsible and unnecessary.
I don’t understand why anyone cares about whether black people have hope of achieving some particular aim. I understand it as a political/social coalition bargain, or as a psychological indulgence, but not as a mature response to life. I don’t find them sympathetic subjects, and I don’t think their inability to acquire certain ends is some tragedyd I’m supposed to lament to such a degree I sabotage my society.
“I’m against the idea that we should lie about genetic realities today, make decisions with long term negative consequences based on that denial”
And I’m against that too. Reread my comment. The major positive example I gave involved Rwanda, with a leader who takes Lee Kuan Yew seriously. LKY is not known for lying about genetic realities. Rwanda is well-positioned to demonstrate that facing reality can yield maximal progress, rather than the loss of hope that many fear.
“and then hope that a technological change comes along and bails us out of those consequences.”
The only “bailout” involved here is for the collective decision to bring African slaves to the US in the 17th-19th centuries. Nothing I suggest involves digging deeper into our current hole; instead, it is about observing that it’ll take a while to climb halfway out, and then technology can take us the rest of the way when we otherwise might get stuck. I explicitly noted that this technology is unlikely to help a low-trust society.
“I don’t understand why anyone cares about whether black people have hope of achieving some particular aim. I understand it as a political/social coalition bargain, or as a psychological indulgence, but not as a mature response to life. I don’t find them sympathetic subjects, and I don’t think their inability to acquire certain ends is some tragedy I’m supposed to lament to such a degree I sabotage my society.”
I understand. I don’t blame you. I believe in reducing the burden placed on people like you. And I believe that moving in the direction I’ve described would accomplish that, even though it may not line up perfectly with your preferences.
“The soft bigotry of low expectations”, a phrase coined by George W. Bush about 20 years ago, seems to fit the two attitudes that Loury critiques. How disappointing that we have not eliminated such prejudices even after two decades.
Suppose a white storekeeper sees a black and a white teenager. If he thinks, “I better keep an eye on the black teenager. Given the evil legacy of slavery, he is more likely to steal than the white teenager,” we would all hopefully recognize that as (hard) bigotry. If the black teenager does shoplift and we excuse such behavior using the same rationalization about the legacy of slavery, then that’s soft bigotry. It’s bigotry because it’s based on the same low expectations, i.e., prejudices, held by the storekeeper. The fact that we may sympathize with the black teen may make the bigotry “soft”, but it’s bigotry nonetheless. In fact, the “soft” nature of the bigotry makes it more insidious, more difficult to identify and root out.
It is impossible to justify low expectations of antisocial behavior and low academic performance as the inevitable byproducts of history and/or genetics without at least inadvertently conceding (hard) bigots’ identical low expectations from the exact same underlying historical and/or genetic causes, as some of the comments above illustrate. Soft bigotry begets hard bigotry.
They aren’t prejudices, they are accurate statistical models used to model human behavior accurately and maximize human welfare n response. How long will your war on noticing go on? When blacks still diss appoint in all the same ways 20 years from now will you still cry bigot every time someone tries not to get robbed?
I actually do notice — that variation across individuals far out swamps variation across racial groups. Do you?
I guess not. Many people simply don’t want to. I don’t know why. But it is the case, their “Identity” is more important to them than other things…
BC – Is it bigotry to see a young man and an older woman come in and think. “I better keep an eye on the young guy, He is more likely to steal than the older woman.”?
In both cases. the storekeeper is practicing “statistical discrimination”, or if you want to make it sound fancier, acting on a Bayesian prior.
It is unfortunately pointless in these times to argue about the proper meaning of ‘bigotry’ or ‘hate’ or ‘racism’ or ‘phobia’ or any of these loaded words. We all want a word like ‘bigot’ to include all the stuff we don’t like, but exclude beliefs and behavior we think are valid and legitimate.
Without agreement about what actions fit in which moral categories, there can be no hope of a productive semantics.
There’s no way around this, as some people try with “irrational animus” (see, e.g., Romer (1996) – and all the writing was on the wall back then), as that just moves the question to, “What is and isn’t ‘irrational’?” and at the end of the day the real question is always “Who gets to decide?”