Commenters bring these topics up a lot. They also show up occasionally in excerpts that I quote. I want to put my own positions out there, for the record.
On race, my position is that we should treat people as individuals. One hundred years ago, Progressives were racist, even eugenicist. In the 1950s and 196s, Progressives were closer to my current position. Now they are against treating people as individuals. They think that they are fighting racism, but in my view they are perpetuating it (and perpetrating it).
I believe that as a society we are approximately treating people as individuals. So when outcomes as tallied by race or sex are disparate, I do not automatically assume racism or sexism is the cause. On the contrary, I assume otherwise.
On college admissions, as you know, my position is that they should be done by lottery. The determination of whether the student is capable of handling the courses should be made after admission, not before.
On immigration, my position is that we should have a more open front door and a less open back door. There should be fewer hurdles to impede legal immigration. The Center for American Progress is actually close to my position.
Build a generous and well-functioning legal immigration system that can be responsive to the nation’s changing needs. This would include realistic and independent evidence-based avenues for immigration that allow families to stay together and businesses to get the workers they need, while enhancing all workers’ rights to fair and increasing wages, safe working conditions, and the opportunity to thrive together. The rules of such a system would be designed to recognize the fact that the only way to have an immigration system that works is to more closely align supply and demand, rather than force the system to adhere to artificial caps, untethered from reality and revisited only once in a generation at best. Importantly, if immigration were successfully channeled through a functioning regulatory system, enforcement resources could instead be dedicated to preventing individuals from entering the country outside of that system and to appropriate enforcement actions necessary to maintain the integrity of that system and U.S. borders, which remain central to the very notion of national sovereignty.
I disagree with the idea of trying to figure out which people to allow to immigrate. Instead, I would prefer to use a price system.
Charge the would-be immigrant a fee, say $10,000, to obtain the right to get on the path toward citizenship. Of course, if these immigrants are immediately eligible for government benefits, such as Medicaid and food stamps, then the fee should be higher.
If employers or relatives or bleeding-hearts are motivated to bring in particular individuals, then those sponsors can pony up the money. Note that the bleeding-heart funds could handle the asylum cases.
To close the back door, we would need to reduce the potential rewards from illegal immigration, increase the penalties for it, and increase the probability of getting caught and incurring the penalties. What I would say to bleeding hearts is that if you don’t like to see would-be immigrants suffer because of such policies, you can put up the money to enable them to immigrate legally.
Amen. Well said.
I don’t think admission processes are broken. In all the discussions about the efficacy of education the one factor that is missing in the discussion is the idea of ranking students. A lottery system would eliminate the implicit ranking system as well remove a key feedback mechanism for secondary school students.
I think the key feature of a price-based immigration system is simplicity. My criticism is that it is too simple and skews towards older individuals.
“A lottery system would eliminate the implicit ranking system as well remove a key feedback mechanism for secondary school students.”
I don’t think it would. At least not necessarily. One interesting comment about the whole university admissions bribing scandal was that nobody was fearing their kids would flunk out after cheating to get in and nobody was bribing their kid’s way into Caltech. A better alternative to highly selective admissions is truly challenging courses of study. So, in the post-lottery era, a university that wanted to remain elite would have to stop coasting of the back of its admissions committee and make it actually difficult to graduate rather than just difficult to matriculate. They would have to genuinely challenge their students. And non-elite students would come to avoid such places for (justified) fears of failing.
Is there a STEM curriculum that is not truly challenging?
If you are willing to suffer a little brain distortion, math can be easy. But you will end up a autistic geek, unsociable, unloved.
Several points:
1) $10,000 – Immigration is triple overnight.
2) I surprised you are simple on illegal immigration here like the federal government can snap their fingers and say it relatively end.
2a) There are a lot micro-economic actors that ‘support’ illegal immigrants. Farmers in California, landscapers in Texas, in house maid/nurse support and citizen families housing their non-citizen mother.
2b) If the government was serious about illegal immigration, they would over-fine small business. Would you agree with that? (Large businesses are very careful here.)
Illegal immigration belongs to a class of things that could be solved with sufficient will, but the will isn’t there. Singapore tortures illegal immigrants and people that employ them. Hence no illegal immigration. Israel has its wall. Other countries achieve the same effect with sometimes less dramatic solutions.
It’s not that we don’t know the solutions, they just aren’t politically feasible.
Isn’t that my point here? There are a lot actors that economically support “illegal immigration” happening in their own way. Our state has been dealing with illegal immigration and seasonal agriculture since WW2 and how many middle class homeowners in California and Texas have wondered about their landscapers only speaking Spanish.
I better yet go to any Trump Hotel in 2016 before the press started sniffing around! (I bet 20 – 30% of workforce in Florida hotels had questionable immigration papers.)
That sounds like median voter will to complain a lot about illegal immigration but little to stop it. (Or even ‘support it’ with the landscaper they hire.)
1) Do we fine the small landscapers a bunch here? It has worked for Wal-Mart but do we politically accept that. Do we want to fine middle class homeowners for using wrong landscapers? And yes why did ICE not raid Trump hotels?
2) Do we stop work and student VISAs? That is where most illegal immigrants are coming from today. (Mexican border hoppers continue to be down.)
2) At anything less than $100K, we are going to total immigration up. That is what the Trump base wants not just illegal immigration.
3) Question for the good Professor, would you agree to employers fronting the money for immigrants? Anything around $10K, I bet California would pay to bring somebody across the border!
My point is simply that if you don’t like a particular tradeoff, there are others, if you’ve got the stomach for it.
We could reduce mass incarceration to some degree if we re-instituted corporal punishment or did what was necessary to catch criminals more effectively.
We could ease the problems involved with school segregation if we had a low bar for expelling trouble makers, implemented better discipline procedures, and allowed better student tracking based on ability level.
When people complain about thing XYZ, there is always a solution, they just aren’t thrilled about the solution. Often they want a solution that involves little pain for themselves or even profit for themselves. They are OK if that solution causes a lot of pain for someone else.
If any of these things: immigration, incarceration, segregation, etc were really as important to people as they claim, we could come up with better solutions. The thing is they aren’t important to people. Not enough to pay the price involved, only important enough to bitch about and make someone else pay.
That’s one way in which Arnold’s proposal to “put a price on it and let the bleeding hearts pay it” is a big improvement. The issue is that on some of the things they want the price is so high we all know nobody is going to pay it.
asdf,
>—“Illegal immigration belongs to a class of things that could be solved with sufficient will, but the will isn’t there. Singapore tortures illegal immigrants and people that employ them.”
Why so discouraged? The dream is real. Trump explicitly endorsed torture as policy in his campaign.
And he has implemented it by jailing even legal asylum seekers in barbaric conditions while separating them from their young children, sometimes permanently.
The dream of your “solution” is real. We have come so far from those dark days when we naively thought that cruel and unusual punishments were bad and that you had to be convicted of a crime before being punished.
You’ll know the dream has been achieved when people fear immigrating illegally enough to stop immigrating illegally.
As long as they continue break the law it is due to a combination of either believing they won’t get caught or believing that the consequences won’t be dire enough (or both).
Given my math above, that successful illegal immigration promises hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime value per person who manages the feat, it would take some very effective and severe enforcement to stop it.
It’s a fine way of doing things, but the devil is in the details.
I’ve seen credible math that blacks have a net cost the state of -$10,000 a year and Hispanics -$4,000 a year on average over their lifetimes. Those are direct costs to the state only, and they don’t adjust for things like allocating additional per capita law enforcement expense to groups more likely to commit crimes. It also assigns no value to non-direct-state-related costs or political/cultural effects, despite the fact one could value those things at close to infinity with reasonable proof.
So dealing with just direct costs only over a 75 year lifetime that’s:
$10,000 * 75 = $750,000
$4,000 * 75 = $300,000
Are any fruit pickers or their sponsors going to cough up that kind of money? Not really.
That is kind of the point though, people immigrate because they can push their negative externalities on someone else through violence.
Of course those numbers would probably be high if we are considering Asian immigrants, but if we are really going to have one price for everyone its going to have to be the average (or worse, because of course the incentive effect will mean its underpriced for the worst).
If you want the number to be in the realm of actual affordability, then you need to get into the business of deciding who can immigrate. We could probably charge $100k a person and it still be affordable for all the potential Google Founders or even decent programmers and dentists, provided that price was only available to them. Of course then it looks a lot like the same points based system the rest of the OECD implemented.
“figure out which people to allow to immigrate” is like an insurer doing underwriting.
If you don’t do any underwriting you will get massive anti-selection. You will then have to raise your price to protect against this, but as a result of raising your price the better risks won’t buy your policy, causing you to raise your price further. This creates a death spiral.
So in order to keep price competitive in a manner with wide appeal, the insurer has to do underwriting to screen out the bad risks. As with anything else, underwriting has costs and benefits that have to be weighed economically against one another.
But if you can’t make underwriting work in a relatively efficient manner you shouldn’t be issuing policies (citizenships). There is lots of insurance people would buy but it isn’t offered because the underwriting costs make it too impractical. I used to review many instances of this where the loss ratios had gotten out of control because there was no economically effective way to prevent abuse by the policy holders, and thus they just had to stop selling the policies.
If you want to use a price system to issue citizenship, and you want that price to be affordable to more then an elite, and you want it to be truly value neutral or better for the existing citizens, you will need to do some serious underwriting of the applicant pool. And to make it economical, you will probably need to make some sweeping generalizations to keep the underwriting costs down (like the points systems for the rest of the OECD do).
It’s a fine way of doing things…
If you try to assemble a car by combining the most expensive parts on the market regardless of brand or model, you will do worse than if you buy ordinary parts that fit together.
Search of askblog for “Putnam” finds no mention of his research that found diversity harms social trust. Interestingly, the very first Putnam-related comment that turned up discusses exactly that. (http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-new-robert-putnam-book/#comment-457428)
It’s possible to make a moral case that anti-racism should trump practical concerns. It’s also possible to argue Putnam (and subsequent research echoing him) is mistaken, or that his work doesn’t tell us much specifically about the effects of diverse immigration. I don’t see Kling making either of these arguments. Instead he makes a conclusory statement that we should ignore identity.
As you know, it’s almost a cliche on the right to quote Lee Kuan Yew on this subject: “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” I believe Kling’s approach will produce even more of the fractious, tribal politics he detests.
Sure, hence my point that there are all sorts of costs that are harder to put a number to but could easily be infinite.
The point is simply that “we just need a pricing mechanism” doesn’t do much for you. Even accounting for the most basic direct costs, you would need a 50-100 times higher then the one Arnold through out there. And we know that if it was that high, almost nobody would pay it, so we are back to square one.
P.S. My memory is bad. I won’t post direct links because of filter.
Those -$10k/-$4k figures come from an analysis of affirmative action, which I guess you could throw on top of the direct fiscal effects.
The source on fiscal impact places Blacks at at -$10k and Hispanic at -$7k, so pretty close and why I remembered it that way. The author notes while additional per capita consumption of services is one factor, the main driver of the negative fiscal impact is the dismally low tax receipts from minorities.
Of course judging how well Indian-Americans do this nation economically, under your system we would end up paying an Indian Immigrant to move here!
We would end up paying some of them, not all of them, and probably only a tiny fraction of the ones in India today.
Only a tiny fraction of the people in India could afford $10K apiece.
That group who could afford it are probably those most happy to stay there in the first place and also those most able to do a fine job of supporting themselves here in the U.S. as most Indian immigrants already do with greater success than native born Americans.
@Yancey
Correct, Indians appear to be a lot of different sub-groups that vary quit a bit, which makes sense given India’s history. Awhile back people use to talk about India like it could compete with China (and sometimes looked at this as a democracy vs autocracy matchup), but this was based on the fact that both Indian and Chinese immigrants in the West seemed top tier. One you get past the top tier, China has a deeper genetic bench whereas India’s genetics fall off a cliff. Now China is so obviously superior to India nobody talks that way anymore.
@Greg
Correct, by the time you start charging enough for citizenship that only high IQ upper middle class people can afford it, most of them don’t want to move to a foreign culture. The only ones that do and exist in large numbers are those whose countries are poorer than their IQ would suggest, usually because they have a couple decades bout of communist stupidity.
This is a temporary state of affairs, and once those countries are rich too there will be as little demand to emigrate as there is in the rest of the OECD.
asdf,
Why limit your historical look backwards at Chinese history to merely “a couple decades bout of communist stupidity”?
China was among the world’s poorest nations for at least a few centuries before communism. That is the main reason it was vulnerable to communism in the first place.
During a good portion of American history, Chinese immigrants were among the most feared and reviled. And thought to be among the least intelligent of course.
Isn’t it remarkable how quickly their “genetics” has improved?
There aren’t many examples of non-european cultures that managed to industrialize before colonization. The major one is Japan, but we already know what IQ testing shows about them. It’s very difficult to modernize at rapidly without succumbing to invasion by superior foes or internal divisions and chaos. I always loved the narrative Dan Carlin gave of this in “Supernova in the East, Part 1”.
China has a long history of strong civilizations and human accomplishment. It was “overpopulated” in the sense that all societies before industrialization were fundamentally Malthusian. Due to their efficient use of rice agriculture and their cleanliness and efficient sanitation systems, they were able to maintain a higher population albeit at a lower level of per capita consumption compared to other civilizations (like say of Europe, where living in our own shit made it impossible to achieve those population levels without plagues). So it was poor in a per capita sense, though their absolute population level was a sign of their intense productivity within those Malthusian limits.
On top of that there was the local concerns for the Chinese. They had to start dealing with Europeans earlier then the Japanese due to geography. They were not an isolated island. They were on the declining end of the current ruling dynasty which wasn’t even a native Han dynasty. I’ll leave it to you to research all the particulars of the hundred years of humiliation, but bottom line it wasn’t all that different then what happened to the whole rest of the world at the same time.
Actually, our economy is over-charging a lot of Indian and Chinese Immigrants but they are called Student Visa that go to our universities.
@Greg G
During a good portion of American history, Chinese immigrants were … thought to be among the least intelligent of course.
Francis Galton (1873) on the Chinese:
“The Chinaman … is endowed with a remarkable aptitude for a high material civilization. He is seen to the least advantage in his own country, where a temporary dark age still prevails, which has not sapped the genius of the race, though it has stunted the development of each member of it by the rigid enforcement of an effete system of classical education which treats originality as a social crime. All the bad parts of his character, as his lying and servility, spring from timidity due to an education that has cowed him, and no treatment is better calculated to remedy that evil than location in a free settlement. The natural capacity of the Chinaman shows itself by the success with which, notwithstanding his timidity, he competes with strangers, wherever he may reside. The Chinese emigrants possess an extraordinary instinct for political and social organization; they contrive to establish for themselves a police and internal government, and they give no trouble to their rulers so long as they are left to manage those matters by themselves. They are good-tempered, frugal, industrious, saving, commercially inclined, and extraordinarily prolific.”
chedolf,
Well, there’s one data point and not even one from America at that.
Meanwhile, back in America, panic about the “Yellow Peril” was reaching a fever pitch. Only nine years later the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. This effectively banned Chinese immigration for 60 years after being enthusiastically renewed twice.
This law was wildly popular. It was lobbied for on the grounds that the Chinese were not only a threat to American job seekers but also prone to drug addiction, prostitution, crime and, of course, a threat to the virtue of white women (“They are sending rapists.”) I’ve been unable to find anyone who attributed these qualities to high intelligence.
Greg,
I haven’t encountered any data on Chinese immigrants from 100 years ago that matches the rigor I’ve seen in The Bell Curve. It’s also obvious that there were a ton of factors going on at that time that aren’t relevant today (consider malnutrition, war, anarchy, selection).
I imagine every single stereotype of every single person has existed at one point or another, including positive ones like linked above.
The relevant question is whether there is adequate data dating from that time that would disprove modern research as done by Murray, etc. I haven’t found any.
Also, I wouldn’t bark up this tree. Most East Asians believe in this genetics stuff. People like LKY were able to discuss this stuff openly and base national policy on it. It’s pretty widespread in Asia. They aren’t huge fans of the anti-Asian actions taken in the name of diversity and equality.
asdf,
Your points about how much it mattered to the Chinese whether or not they developed the rice agriculture that could feed large populations and whether or not someone else industrialized even one generation earlier are excellent ones. But they undermine your simple IQ story.
As Jared Diamond has shown, developing the kind of high production agriculture and domestication of animals that could produce the food surpluses to support large populations was a crucial step towards modern civilization. That was what led to the further division of labor. But the ability to develop those technologies had much more to do with geography than intelligence. No matter how smart you are, you can’t grow rice in the many parts of the world where it will not thrive naturally. and you can only domesticate the animals that can live naturally in your geographic area.
These areas tend to lie on an east west axis rather than a north south axis due to changes in climate. Cultural knowledge of these technologies spreads very quickly especially as compared to evolutionary changes in individual intelligence.
In fact, the latest advances in the understanding of the evolution of intelligence have centered around how we are highly adapted for rapid cultural evolution. Joseph Henrich has done the best work in this area. He points out that if you took a couple dozen of the very highest IQ individuals in the western world and dropped them in a hunter gatherer society left to their own devices most or all would quickly starve to death while the local hunter gatherers marveled at how they were to stupid to even feed themselves.
Cultural change often happens very slowly in stable societies not facing major challenges to their survival but can happen with astonishing speed.
Consider Australian history. Britain populated eastern Australia as a penal colony. They sent there what they considered to be the worst sort of misfits who you would call “low IQ white trash.” And yet, in just a few generations, those same people had built a thriving modern society that is doing as well as the U.K. itself. Genes for intelligence don’t evolve that fast. Culture does.
Diamond’s thesis was retarded. If environment shapes genetics, then differing environments lead to different genetics. It’s a self refuting a piece as they come, and I’ve always enjoyed Steve Sailers asides on Diamond.
Look, history after WWII happened. It was possible to believe some of this Diamond nonsense if you stop the clock before non-whites had a chance to shine. But it’s been several decades since then. We’ve seen who pulled ahead and who hasn’t. Both at the country level and the individual level. The results replicate across so many circumstances it’s undeniable now. I can forgive anti-racists of 1960, their experiment hadn’t been run yet. But it’s 2019. The data is in. Diamond ignored this in his book because it would fall apart if he did.
“He points out that if you took a couple dozen of the very highest IQ individuals in the western world and dropped them in a hunter gatherer society left to their own devices most or all would quickly starve to death while the local hunter gatherers marveled at how they were to stupid to even feed themselves.”
What’s your point? We don’t live in a hunter gatherer society. We live in a modern industrial society. The only thing that matters is if you have the skills to succeed in that environment. I already know most of us are goners if things go all Mad Max.
I’ll do you one better. The Steppe Horse Archers were one of the most dominant skilled individuals in all of human history until recently. Now their ability to fire a bow from horseback is useless for programming PCs. Gheghis Kahn once conquered the world, now Mongolia is a backwater.
P.S. Some of Australia was populated with criminals, though not all of it. A total of 162,000 convicts were transported between 1788 to 1868 there were 162,000 convicts sent to Australia and New Zealand. For comparison the total population of Australia alone in 1868 was 1.5 million.
It’s also not clear that they specifically selected low IQ people, just criminals. Which under English law at the time basically amounted to petty crimes.
“If you did something wrong in England between 1788 and 1868, your punishment was probably transportation. If you’re part of the majority who ride peak hour public transport to work everyday, it’s not hard to recognize that this retribution is torture. These transported folk weren’t rapists or murderers. Those guys were killed right off the bat.
Instead, the crimes punishable by transportation were petty. Things that got you shoved onto a cramped, scurvy-ridden boat included: stealing fish from ponds or rivers (fishing?); taking someone’s handkerchief or hairbrush; theft of bacon; throwing fireworks; burning clothes; or being a 10-year-old fit for slavery. You know, the small stuff.”
It was also a dumping ground for political misfits like say people who wanted Irish independence.
So yeah, I guess your two bit biased knowledge of history isn’t going to work here.
asdf,
>—“Diamond’s thesis was retarded. If environment shapes genetics, then differing environments lead to different genetics.”
Diamond’s central argument was NOT that “environment shapes genetics.” It was that the same basic genetics will produce very different results in very different environments.
As always, you are assuming your conclusion which is that all results are explainable by IQ test results if.
As for whether or not petty crimes indicate low IQ, you are eager enough to conclude they do if the petty criminal has dark skin.
Greg G,
In the early 1970s, I had to read a number of papers by people like Richard Hernstein and Arthur Jensen. They all said that Chinese had equal or higher IQs than Europeans.
Admittedly, they were not household names. The Bell Curve was several decades in the future. But a lot of the research behind “East Asians and Europeans are–on average–considerably smarter than Africans” is not new at all. It dates to well before the obvious economic rise of Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore, and PR China.
Roger,
So then, you are saying that, approximately a century after we began banning Chinese immigration for 60 years due to an extremely widespread belief that they were the most undesirable of immigrants, it was discovered that that wasn’t true at all.
I would not conclude from that that that popular biases, based largely on which minority ethnic groups are enjoying the most success at a given time, should be trusted.
Do you think what is written in The Bell Curve is bias? Is there specific data within it that you disagree with? Which data? Why?
What about all the other sources that show the exact same thing? I could list dozens of other similar resources with the same conclusions.
I get it. YOU ARE NOT A RACIST! This is so central to your character, self image, ideology, whatever that if the whole world had to burn to maintain it, then the whole world can just burn down.
Some of us don’t need to burn down the entire world to avoid dealing with facts.
Yes, that was Diamonds thesis. And that is why it’s so absurd. The same MASSIVE ENVIRONMENTAL DIFFERENCES that he claims have caused the state of the world as it is today are the same MASSIVE ENVIRONMENTAL DIFFERENCES that could alter genetics over relatively short timelines.
The whole reason that he has to stop the book before the modern era is that as modern environments equalize some groups excel and some don’t, based on the past environments that had selective pressure upon them.
You can go read Gregory Clark’s books if you want a preview of how selective environment impacts genes.
Greg G,
I would not conclude that either.
What I would conclude is that the idea that ““East Asians and Europeans are–on average–considerably smarter than Africans” is not something that alt-righters pulled out of their ass when they noticed how well Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and PR China were doing. It is something that has 50 years of scholarship behind it (admittedly, scholarship that lots of people don’t like).
There is already a market for immigrant entry. Fees seem to reflect the expected value of US residence and the human capital of the person. The lower end is not so far from the $10K that you mention. The high end is substantially more than your hypothetical. I am not sure how authoritative this source is but it is consistent with other numbers I have seen. https://openborders.info/human-smuggling-fees/
“Fees seem to reflect the expected value of US residence and the human capital of the person.”
No. That’s only for the marginal migrant, and anyway, is discounted to compensate for the considerable risks involved.
Smuggling resources are not scarce, and the market is very competitive, price-discrimination difficult, and with profits not much better than what it takes to pay the wages of typical Mexican criminals. So there is lots of consumer surplus which is hard to measure. But it’s the price plus that unobservable surplus then magnified to eliminate the risk discount that is the typical perceived expected value, which can easily exceed the smuggling price by an order of magnitude or more.
So, those prices can only give us a clue of what a ceiling of a legal “tariff” could be such that illegal migrants don’t choose smuggling instead as the cheaper option. Cheaper smuggling might the “riskier” option, but that depends on the chances of getting caught, and the consequences, under a regime in which anyone can come in if they just pay a higher fee. Right now the consequences under an officially much stricter regime are not much of a deterrent.
This is not much different than the kind of analysis one might perform for the “legalize it and then tax it” approach to contraband or excise taxes or import restrictions on prescription drugs. E.g., if you raise cigarette taxes too high, you will create a arbitrage opportunity, so people will start smuggling them in from cheaper places.
I think fee-based visas are a great idea, but I would modify them in two ways:
1) instead of a fixed fee, there ought to be a global auction
2) the fees should not go to the government, but should instead be split among all citizen. I see the fee as just remittance for the immigrant’s infringement on the existing citizens’ property rights (I.e. use of common property, traffic, crowds, etc). Remitting fees to existing citizens would also make the case for closing the back door immigration much stronger.
The results of the auction would be based on the supply of slots being auctioned off. What criteria should be used for determining the number of slots? Should we use the feedback of what price results to adjust the number of slots offered each year?
That’s a good point. I suppose the simple answer would be to have a fixed reserve for each auction. If an auction fails to meet the reserve, then that would end the auctions for that week/month/etc.
The other point I would clarify is that prospective non-citizen auction visa holders would agree to waive their rights against governmental search and seizure. The government would then vet the prospective citizen and be able to bring a case against granting citizenship (and possibly a refund of the auction bid)
“So when outcomes as tallied by race or sex are disparate, I do not automatically assume racism or sexism is the cause. On the contrary, I assume otherwise.”
That is an even worse approach than assuming racism or sexism. If the circumstances require an explanation, such as in cases of government related outcomes, then maybe we should just investigate further, and not assume anything.
Investigating further may sometimes be warranted, but no, assuming it’s not racism or sexism isn’t worse. It’s clearly the sounder assumption. Statistically speaking, what are the odds is a society that’s highly heterogeneous in every conceivable respect that there won’t be significant differences between Mano groups? And indeed this is how we usually think: we ignore the vast majority of disparities; and for ‘historically marginalized’ groups we ignore disparities in the ‘wrong direction.’ We say ‘must just be noise or something innocuous.’ Assuming a given disparity is probably caused by discrimination is an approach grounded in an absurd null hypothesis.
You investigate when there is reasonable cause to, just like with everything else in life. It takes a little wisdom. Of course you don’t launch an investigation over every disparity.
The important thing is to be willing to consider that there may be a problem and there may not be a problem in almost any social decision making apparatus.
The enemy here is when people dig in and apply their larger resentments to their position in life, and the decisions they make, instead of remaining evidence based.
There are large numbers of people on both sides of this And mistakes happen a lot, in both directions. There are lots of people who are too sensitive about race, a smaller number of racists, and a lot of people who just don’t want to hear it.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
I believe that as a society we are approximately treating people as individuals. So when outcomes as tallied by race or sex are disparate, I do not automatically assume racism or sexism is the cause. On the contrary, I assume otherwise.
I don’t think we should automatically assume that racism is the cause, but I don’t think we should assume otherwise either. One thing about race is that it’s always whites who are assuming that racism isn’t the cause of disparate outcomes for blacks, instead (say) asking black people about their lived experiences, and trusting that they aren’t lying about them.
They might have experiences which would disprove the premise that society approximately treats people as individuals.
Another thing is that many people use the assumption that disparate outcomes are *not* caused by racism, to justify *not* treating people as individuals.
I.e. “Society treats people as individuals, so therefore black people’s average economic outcomes are caused by innate inferiority, so therefore it’s okay to treat black people as a group as inferiors.”
I do think that if white people thought that black people were on average less intelligent (for instance), you can bet that they would not treat them as individuals. They would treat them all as less intelligent.
They might have experiences which would disprove the premise that society approximately treats people as individuals.
The term for this is anecdata.
Then perhaps do a comprehensive survey and compare the experiences of whites and blacks. Or look at the statistical data on how many people with “black sounding” names get job interviews.
People aren’t very good raconteurs of their own experiences. If they were we might conclude no one has ever gotten a speeding ticket for actually speeding. It’s always because the cop is just a jerk. And when there’s a ready made narrative for why the cop is a jerk (‘I’m black, so he must be a racist’) people will latch onto it. Given that large, well controlled studies tend to find that traffic cops aren’t actually racist in who they pull over, whenever a black person says, “I get pulled over all the time because I’m black of course” he probably actually got pulled over for speeding, just the same as most white people who don’t think they deserve their tickets. Surveys only tell you what people think is going on.
I’d also be curious if studies on hiring rates of people with ‘black sounding names’ assessed whether this characteristic was independently predictive of productivity or performance. One may find this morally irrelevant, but the I think discriminating from malice vs. discrimination from a profit-maximization standpoint are two very different phenomena with different implications.
I think the studies on traffic cops go both ways. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/10/12/policing/
Who do you believe? Everyone’s got their own narratives and their statistics to support their own narratives.
But I think there is value in understanding other people’s perceptions. Even if you think the perceptions are incorrect, if you know that they are authentically held, then you can understand people motivations and reactions as authentic responses to perceived injustice – rather than as some sort of sinister plot against white people.
Besides there are still plenty of living black people who remember segregation and times before the CRA. I don’t think the recollections of more racist times dies that easily. It’s not like the CRA flipped a switch and made racism disappear.
Okay, but at least consider the fact that black/white income gaps aren’t huge when you control for education (around 10% for those who are college educated, but slightly larger for those who are not, which isn’t nothing, but it’s not apartheid SA, either) and that Asians are eating both white and black people’s lunches, income wise, so maybe at least consider the possibility that skin color isn’t totally determinant of one’s life outcome in this country? Pretty please?
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_RFD.asp
I definitely don’t think it’s skin color is “totally determinant” of outcome.
I just don’t think we should discount the idea that racism, or the legacy of racism, is a factor, which is what I see a lot of people doing. Personally, I’m inclined to think there’s a ind of self-perpetuating mix of lingering effects of past racism, problems with black culture (partly caused by past racism), and current racism. I think there’s a kind of positive feedback cycle, wherein black people’s low SES leads to problems which lead to more racism, which leads to low SES. Like maybe human societies tend towards these attractor states where there’s a dominant rich class and an oppressed poor class.
I mean even if the difference between the dominant tribe and the non-dominant one, maybe this tiny difference is enough to push them into distinct socio-economic clusters with significantly different incomes, just though internally reinforcing cycles of class discrimination and inequality. For instance, are the “untouchables” in India really significantly less intelligent than Brahmins, and if so, is that innate or is it caused by the relative poverty of “untouchables”? See what I mean?
Agreed, it’s all possible. But … every significant group of immigrants were looked down on when they arrived. Japanese-Americans even had their property taken and were forced into relocation camps during WW II.
On average, some of those groups did poorly and some did well. Some did significantly better than the natives after a few generations. (Japanese-American per capita income is well above the national average.)
My sense of the history is that the native reaction to an immigrant is much less important than the immigrant’s reaction to America.
Many immigrants can overcome white privilege or WASP privilege or whatever. This makes me skeptical of narratives of white privilege when it comes to American blacks.
@hazel
I think most people would acknowledge racism as a *factor*. The question is how much of a factor? You gave three causes, two of which are racism and the other you thought was caused in part by racism, so you obviously believe it to be a big factor.
I think the three axes model fits pretty well here (like most issues). You’re clearly more on the oppressed vs oppressor axis. The more racist side is civilization-barbarism and thinks group differences justifies immigration restrictions etc, while the “treat people as individuals” folks are more liberty-coercion oriented.
I quoted The Bell Curve at length here, but it got blocked.
You can find the relevant chapter where Charles proves conclusively that racism has essentially been removed as *a factor* by the mid 1960s, at least in the north. After that, it becomes mathematically obvious that minorities are getting a boost from affirmative action, not a detriment due to racism. I’d put the value of affirmative action over a lifetime for blacks at around $750,000 per person.
As Nate says, it’s dodging to say “its a factor”. How much of a factor? How do we measure it? How do we weigh it against other thumbs on the scale? It’s not good enough to throw up ones hands, you can actually do the math.
“I do think that if white people thought that black people were on average less intelligent (for instance), you can bet that they would not treat them as individuals.”
This is interesting because it’s a quote about treating people as individuals that doesn’t treat people as individuals. If you really thought people were individuals, you wouldn’t think of “white people” as doing anything.
Also, I don’t agree with it. You can treat people as individuals regardless of how smart you think they are. Doesn’t seem that hard, but would guess it’s harder for progressives.
Don’t mean to take shots at progressives at the end. Just think it’s harder when viewing people primarily as members of some gender or race. It doesn’t just go one way; I would guess people further right (e.g. asdf) have a harder time treating people as individuals too.
In one revision of that sentence I had an “on average” for the white people, but I deleted it in later revisions, because I thought it sounded snarky. But yes, I meant to say that on average white people would tend to discriminate against blacks and then we would be back to NOT having blacks being treated as “approximately equal”.
And yes, you CAN treat people as individuals even if you think that whatever grouping you are categorizing them in is on average less intelligent, but not everyone is going to do that. In fact, most people probably won’t. We’re not all angels.
We know that short people are less intelligent on average than tall people. We know it’s probably mainly innate, rather than ‘social’. Do people treat short people as less equal? Would anyone actually try to argue with a straight face that belief in this innate disparity, predicted by an immutable physical trait, constitutes belief in the genetic inferiority of short people?
Disparities like this abound. By and large they’re ignored by pretty much everyone.
Well, that really speaks to the social construction of “race” and racism as a sociological phenomenon. Why did society fixate on skin color instead of height? They’re both equally visible. And yet we categorize people by skin color instead of height. For some reason people are able to see height as just a correlation, probably caused by environmental factors like pre-natal nutrition or something, whereas skin-color/intelligence they jump to the conclusion that it’s all genetics and people with dark skin color just get treated as if they were stupid automatically. It’s not rational.
Yeah I agree with this. I reject the notion that most people won’t able to treat others as individuals just because they’re aware of average differences between groups. In fact, forget about group averages, take confirmed, actual differences — do you treat your not-as-smart friends or family as anything less than individuals or second class citizens?
I find this reassuring, because the alternative is what? (Probably something like the status quo actually — denial by those on the left and an obsession with it (e.g. Quillette, commentators here) on the right.) It’s my understanding that the science on average differences between groups (race as well as gender) is pretty clear. Whether or how people are able to cope with that fact doesn’t make it more or less true.
Please try a little harder. I agree this is a real disparity, but we don’t consciously characterize our decisions about people that way.
Here’s a test for you. Have you ever heard anyone say “I’d rather hire someone taller” (NBA excluded!) or “I don’t want to live near someone who is under 5’6”? Surely you must admit that some people don’t want to live next to a black family. You wouldn’t have to leave this post to figure out that happens.
@nate: My baseline prediction is your horrifying alternative. I predict that black people will continue to perform about the same for reasons that are not fixable and are nobody’s fault. I predict that they will continue to be pissed about this, and that white people will continue to swing between optimism and pessimism about social justice with a cycle time of about 20 years. I predict that future generations will continue to have these arguments until interbreeding results in a population where most everybody is about as black as everyone else.
I’d tear
like a wolf
at bureaucracy.
-Vladimir Mayakovsky
What I think is most often missed in conversations around immigration, is the root cause of the influx from Central and South America. Why are all of these people suddenly leaving their countries and heading north. Well, their countries have devolved into violent chaos. Most people stop there, and chalk it up to “its just another third world hell hole that can’t provide basic safety for its people”.
As recently as 2009, the U.S. has been meddling in the constitutional affairs of Central American countries, like in the case of Honduras:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-us-role-in-the-honduras-coup-and-subsequent-violence_b_5766c7ebe4b0092652d7a138
This is on top of the role the U.S. has playing in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the past in supporting coups and the like. Its like this feigned ignorance of the U.S. complicity allows us to disrupt democratic processes, and then when it all goes south be able to say, “well this isn’t our problem, stay in your own countries!”
You forgot to mention United Fruit. While the US has certainly meddled there in the past, there is no way American foreign policy is a driving force behind these countries’ economic and social problems. Their problems are far more entrenched than that, especially countries like Honduras and El Salvador with long histories of instability, factionalism, and internal violence. These countries would not be much better off than they are had the US never touched them.
See this headline, “Homicides have fallen dramatically in Honduras. So why are people still fleeing?”
https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-honduras-violence-20181214-story.html
You assert that in central America that “countries have devolved into violent chaos”. This is absurd. The opposite has happened.
I would suggest the simple explanation that despite crime rates dropping, that people in Honduras and similar nations are more aware of the better living conditions in the US, and more aware of the realistic options to penetrate into the US despite laws designed to stop them.
Next, on most scales of suffering and human misery, Central America ranks is not as bad as many places in Africa or Asia, but Central American has a more geographically convenient route into the US.
Another question is why relatively smaller numbers of people from Africa are choosing to penetrate into the US. I would bet on those flows increasing, particularly if border crossings are decriminalized.
“There should be fewer hurdles to impede legal immigration. ”
The current mess is untenable.
First, repeal the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965, as amendeded and the the Immigration Act of 1990.
Then simply and decentralize.
US Congress should pass a two sentence bill authorizing a ““… To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, …” specifying that “each state and local government shall establish a uniform rule of naturalization to address the local needs and conditions of the jurisdiction, and no reciprocity need be afforded between jurisdictions with respect to the naturalized citizens who may be treated as a second class of citizen whose rights may be abridged in accordance with local law.”
By all means abolish ICE. And remove immigration cases from the jurisdiction of federal courts while you are at it. Just recognize the state and local government to administer and enforce immigration laws. They were stripped of this authority by judicial fiat.
Up until 1875, the 10th Amendment reserved the rules of immigration to the States. The first Federal law was enacted in 1875. The U.S. Supreme Court issed a diktat the next year claiming that immigration regulation was an exclusively Federal authority. The first time the federal government actually got involved bureaucratically was with the establishment of the Immigration Service in 1891. Freeing the US from the extra-constitutional tyranny of the Supreme Court will take some doing so all Supreme Court nominees should be screened carefully to ensure that they will recognize the role of the 10th amendment in the US constitutional system.
Problem solved.
And if that is too radical a reform, then at least consider as a model Canada’s system of shared authority between province and federal government:
“Under a shared jurisdiction between Ottawa and the provinces, Canada operates a two-tiered immigration system, offering programs for skilled workers, at both federal and provincial levels.
Through a network of Nominee Programs (PNP), almost all of Canada’s ten provinces and three territories can nominate skilled worker candidates for admission to Canada with the specific skills required by their local economies. Successful candidates who receive a provincial or territorial nomination can then apply for Canadian permanent residence through federal immigration authorities. This is an important component of all provincial programs.”
One suspects one does not see the hyper-political polarization and stratospheric levels of endemic political violence in Canada that one sees in the US, because Canada has a functioning form of federalism that has not been erased by judicial fiat.
With regard to immigration, there’s just no getting around the political issue lurking behind it, which is that the Californian One-Party-State problem will go nationwide. Indeed, progressives are counting on this happening everywhere but especially in Texas and Florida, hoping immigrants and their descendants will turn those and other places blue for good, and the progressives are completely open about the demographic logic of this strategy.
In budget negotiations, if you’ve got a project that you believe is a top priority, but which other people oppose for its costs, you might be willing to kill another program you like, but they want dead, as an offer of compromise and attempt to acheive a net positive results. Walk back six steps, but advance a dozen.
We don’t see anything like those kinds of offers or concessions to restrictionists of other things they want in exchange for the political suicide which will result from liberalization.
The immigrants may not be cooperating with the genocidal scheme to ethnically cleanse the US of whites.
An article in Quillette yesterday entitled “Immigration Is Changing America Less than You Think” by John A. Litwinski goes through the technicalities of the racial categorizations that underlie the US apartheid system. He notes:
“the majority (53 percent) of America’s 52 million Hispanics and Latinos self-identify as white on the Census. Other surveys show an even higher rate (65 percent) at which Hispanics self-identify as white. And indeed, most Hispanics and Latinos descend partially or entirely from Europeans who emigrated to the New World in centuries past. They also are overwhelmingly Christian, like most other Americans. So, it is not at all clear that whites—which includes Hispanic whites—will ever be a minority in America.
As Thomas Edsall has observed in the New York Times, ‘When Hispanics who identify themselves as white are added in, the white share of the population actually grew modestly between 2000 and 2017 from 75.1 percent to 76.6 percent.’ ”
He does not mention it, but elsewhere many have noted that even thought the media may want to call their favorite superstars and new faces of the democrat party “women of color,” technically AOC is white as are the Arabs Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
He does point out that hispanic immigrants are not as monolithic a voting group as African Americans:
“Trump performed about as well among Hispanic men (32 percent) as he did with college-educated white women (35 percent).
In other major races with less polarizing figures, such as the 2016 North Carolina Senate race, the Republican won more Hispanic votes than his Democratic rival (49 percent versus 48 percent). The Florida Senate race the same year saw the Republican take 48 percent of the Hispanic vote, about the same as his Democratic opponent (50 percent). Notably, on the same Florida ballot, Trump received 35 percent of the Hispanic vote, indicating that while his rhetoric turned off some Hispanic voters, others remained drawn to his message.”
Democrats can call lower taxes, deregulation, and crime reduction “fascist” all day long till the cows come home, but people will still support these policies regardless. In the end, competence will always trump conniving corruption.
Consider two points of view about one of the positions expressed in this post, “Charge the would-be immigrant a fee, say $10,000, to obtain the right to get on the path toward citizenship.”:
1. This is a non-racial common sense approach to managing immigration
2. This approach favors those with money and will have a substantial disparate racial impact.
Obviously, Arnold doesn’t view this proposal as racist, but if you pile up enough of this kind of stuff, if you are poor and brown skinned, it begins to feel like you are being consistently boxed out.
A lot of life takes place in-between, in a benefit of the doubt, gray area zone. The wins and losses in these areas tend to play out differently for people of different races and different classes. We should absolutely fight for viewing people as individuals, but we can at least admit we need to try a little harder at it.
True, but immigration to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand almost always requires a plane ticket. Economic barriers have many forms.
There is a case to be made for simple, scalable, and understandable solutions. Kling’s solution is far superior to the status quo U.S. immigration policy.
Simple, scalable, and understandable are great attributes only within your primary goals. They can never become your primary goals. Kling’s solution is a few toss away sentences.
What exactly is the purpose of Kling’s proposal? Is it good for the US to only inject older wealthy immigrants?
I do understand the desire to make a pure financial economic decisions but I still think there is value of refugee Immigrants:
1) Is there any better way to help Venezuelan people and make a political statement, then taking Venezuelan refugees with pledges of Catholic Church helping them? (I bet these refugees vote Republican as the loudest Venezuelan voices are from Florida.
Related: the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights just issued a report on racial disparities in school discipline:
See: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/racial-disparities-and-school-discipline/
As Kirsanow (who dissented along with Heroit) points out, the commission majority takes it for granted, despite tremendous evidence to the contrary (e.g., rates of gang membership), that underlying rates of transgression are equal, therefore any disparities result from racist discrimination, and thus reforms that ensure less discipline or alternatives to discipline for “over-disciplined” groups are warranted.
Recently, people have been pondering the question of why our politics has grown so nasty and vicious and why there is such animus for members of the other party. One proposed answer has been social media.
But this kind of thing makes conservatives – especially those with kids in public schools – really, really angry with progressives – willing to fight their agenda by any means necessary – and has nothing to do with social media. The personal stakes are huge: the good order and discipline and safety of the places where their kids spend most of their waking hours.
Trostsky said “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Likewise, one may not want to care about politics or what the members of a political movement think, but what they think “cares about you”, and so there is little choice but to invest more energy and passion in opposing that harm, and increased nastiness is one of the predictable results.
If we didn’t have to share public schools or have one-size-fits-all woke regulation of discipline, then it’s all water off a duck’s back, and one can go Lebowski and say, “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” But we do, so the Lebowski option is unfortunately off the table.
The report mentions Baltimore, but let’s put some raw reality to it.
These are all from Baltimore County (the ?white/safe/rich? suburbs).
Black girl beats shit out of white girl (and I mean girls, are they even teenagers yet?):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok7DBe9oiQA
High School Graduation Brawl:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_CqmM1IrBc
Four Teenage Girls Assault Pregnant Elementary School Teacher and then Carjack Her:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYDIY8K7lnI
I could post dozens more, some much worse, from just the last few years, but this is what you can dig up in five minutes on youtube.
P.S. The recent black superintend of Baltimore County Schools is naturally in jail now for all sorts of crimes, like all the other politicians around here.
I admire Kling’s open position on these controversial issues. How about language? Should Spanish speaking school districts be allowed to formally mandate standard Spanish? Same question for English speaking school districts.
Kling advocates E-Verify lottery for higher ed. Those who lose the lottery are denied the right to purchase college course enrollment and are denied community membership standing with campus borders. Interesting.
Re: “If employers or relatives or bleeding-hearts are motivated to bring in particular individuals, then those sponsors can pony up the money. Note that the bleeding-heart funds could handle the asylum cases.”
Various internet technologies (Paypal, GoFundMe, listservs, etc.) have greatly reduced transactions costs of philanthropy. Why doesn’t Arnold Kling’s good-sense mechanism get traction?
The snag is that bleeding hearts deeply believe that only government solutions to social or national problems truly count. Libertarians—mindful of public-choice issues, and of coercion intrinsic to majority rule—like to say, “Lose the ‘we.'” Bleeding hearts don’t want to lose the we!
See Daniel Klein’s classic essay, “The People’s Romance: Why People Love Government (as Much as They Do)”:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=502623
And see Pierre Lemieux’s little essay, “The Vacuity of the Political ‘We.'”:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2014/Lemieuxwe.html
Re: “I disagree with the idea of trying to figure out which people to allow to immigrate. Instead, I would prefer to use a price system. Charge the would-be immigrant a fee, say $10,000, to obtain the right to get on the path toward citizenship.”
Commenters have expressed concern that a substantial entry fee would exclude the very poor; i.e., those who most need to migrate to the U.S.
But wouldn’t a market for migration loans emerge and at least partly solve this problem? Presumably, such markets already exist in imperfect form for illegal migration. It seems implausible that loan performance in credit markets for illegal migration rests mainly on coercion. Presumably, some people know how to spot good credit risks among the poor who wish to migrate. In any case, in open, legal migration markets, financial intermediaries would have incentives to figure out how to spot who will repay.
My issue expressed in the first comment is that it tends to favor older immigrants over younger ones. People accumulate wealth as they age. Age is an important criteria in various immigration scoring systems. You want them young.
The old don’t have much reason to immigrate, besides retirement benefits, which those with a lot of money don’t need.
People immigrate when they are young because they are building a life. The older you are, the harder it is to start a new life. I’m in my mid 30s and the idea of moving to another city involves lots of sacrifices of things I’ve built up here. Moving to another country in middle age…that would take something extreme.
Actually I have not a whole of bleeding hearts on the poor immigration. (OK I made a note about Venezuela who probably vote Republican btw. That is what happens with refugees that escape communism/socialism.)
Now what I see Professor is missing on illegal immigration is they simply cross the border asking nobody and find jobs picking crops in California or Texas. And there many economic actors that are willing to break the law and hire workers. TRUMP HOTELS were literally 20 – 30% of the Florida according to Washington Post. That is Trump himself! (May be exaggeration but there is enough evidence.) Again the real solutions (fine small businesses out of business, or fining homeowners) are not consider
Presumably, such markets already exist in imperfect form for illegal migration. It seems implausible that loan performance in credit markets for illegal migration rests mainly on coercion.
My guess any market on loans for immigrants would completely depend on coercion as many of the ‘illegal immigrant’ traders are basically border gangsters. (And how many employers of illegal immigrants like the workers because they can not go to labor boards?) And yea the ones that facilitate worker visa for Filipino workers in California have questionable ethics as well.
And we joke in California that in 25 years, Republican Hispanic-Americans will complain to Filipino guest worker/illegal immigrants.
It’s very rare to get high value loans for unsecured capital. It’s just too hard to enforce in a way that actually recoups losses effectively when the person doesn’t pay. In most cases such loans need to be secured by some guarantee. For instance, the USG guarantees student loans.
That said, is there really going to be a loan market to lend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fruit pickers? With their low earnings, is it realistic to think they will pay it back?
The system right now works by arbitrage. The illegal immigrant pays someone a few grand to be smuggled in, and then the illegal receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in state benefits. The difference between what they get and what they pay basically comes out of the pockets of USG taxpayers. Without that theft, there is no way this system will reach equilibrium.
I could maybe see a situation where very talented but poor members of third world countries could get sponsored by natives on the grounds that their talents would lead to above average earnings that could repay a loan. But then we are basically saying that the same kind of people that get in on a points system would get in on this payment system.
One more comment. Kling gave a great, honest, believable high level overview of his opinion. But there’s a lot more on these issues.
I’d like Kling to review Whiteshift or interview Eric Kaufmann on the issue.