Facts that have affected generations and driven a part of your population to the lowest levels are, indeed, political. Especially if they point out facts you don't like.
Aree you going to say the same thing about Jim Crow laws? There has been a systematic will to enslave and degrade black people in America, and this is a continuing effort.
I am posting from the century where, for example, the war on drugs is still a thing, which affects black communities more. I'm posting from the century where an African American will get a harsher sentence than a white person, for the same offence or crime.
Because you're not arguing facts, by ignoring them if not flat out suggesting they don't exist in the present time, what you've written is worthy of legitimate ad hominem attack. And that's because the problem is with you, the person. You are a deeply ignorant and foolish person - whether it's malice or not I cannot say. But it is damaging to your personal credibility and is damaging to discourse by speaking mistruth.
Jim Crow laws are from 1965, they directly connect to this country's history of slavery. That is not "so old" at all. And variations of Jim Crow laws still persist to this day, hence the Voting Rights Acts. That there are clever derivatives of these practices does not at all mean "they are so old they have no resemblance of". Yes foolish person, they do have resemblance of.
Oh, it gets better: "Temin advocates doing away with the belief that private agencies can act in the interest of all citizens in the way that public entities can, and should"
Makes sense to me. Private agencies must act in the interest of themselves in a fiduciary sense, even outside of market forces.
Once you involve market forces, and worse, the issuing of stock leading to ownership by a class that demands immediate returns of money for their investment, private agencies are seemingly required to screw over citizens, because that's how you extract money from them in large quantities.
Contrasted to that, the bureaucracy of public entities is a much more insignificant problem. Public internet might be sort of 'third world', but right now they are kicking our butts in that, and Comcast might be working hard (meh…) but they are not working for you, they are working to extract capital out of you in the most efficient manner possible.
Once you include the caveat of 'all citizens' (even in Podunkville) it's not even an argument anymore. There's an assumption that it's right and proper to hose Podunkville because they're not the big city and shouldn't have nice things if their productivity doesn't warrant it, and this assumption is fair to challenge or even contradict outright. I'm rooting for Podunkville (the big city doesn't need my ideological help) so I'm in favor of public entities.
I guess we'll be seeing some experimentation, in that we're likely to see a heavy swing to privatization right now, and most likely a counter-swing in four to eight years. Should be worth keeping track of how it all works. That 'all citizens', though, that's a conditional which is at the heart of the discussion.
The distinction between private for profit and not for profit is a distinction without a difference. It just means that outside shareholders aren't making money, but you'll find that stakeholders in a lot of not for profit companies are just as interested in making money as for profits. The stakeholder are often just the employees.
How exactly is this a political slant? Slavery is directly responsible for the mass genocide and economic subjugation of African Americans for the past two centuries. Beyond that, it set the stage for the civil war, which crystallized the economic disparity between north and south forever.
Now, I'm a white guy, my father owned a small business after selling his scanning electron microscope company to a bigger player. He paid for my University education outright including rent. I had to work for any spending money I wanted, but I basically had a free ride into my current programming job.
A poor black kid living in a high-violent-crime area who is the child of a minimum-wage-working single mother, is not going to have the same chances.
If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed.
This is (according to this article and others) traceable in a large part back to slavery. But it also comes from gererational poverty. Lack of parental resources leading to malnutrition, which leads to inattention in school, parental long hours at work leads to a lack of attention and corrective feedback. Or the parents are addicted to something and modelling bad behavior to begin with.
The child in these cases starts innocent and realistically has an infantessemal chance of success.
The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty.
Free breakfast and lunch for kids, raise minimum wage, etc...
The Palmer Luckey's of the world have to catch on to just how fucking privileged they are as middle class white kids.
These articles don't deserve to be rejected outright under "bias" they're based on real solid research.
> The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty.
It'd be even better to end institutionalized racism, institute a mass pardon program, and pay reparations to the victims of Nixon's stupid escalation of the war on plants:
At the time [1994], I was writing a book
about the politics of drug prohibition. I
started to ask Ehrlichman a series of
earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently
waved away. “You want to know what this was
really all about?” he asked with the
bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace
and a stretch in federal prison, had little
left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968,
and the Nixon White House after that, had two
enemies: the antiwar left and black people.
You understand what I’m saying? We knew we
couldn’t make it illegal to be either against
the war or black, but by getting the public
to associate the hippies with marijuana and
blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing
both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their leaders,
raid their homes, break up their meetings,
and vilify them night after night on the
evening news. Did we know we were lying about
the drugs? Of course we did.”
edit: John Taylor Gatto [1] points out in one of his books that black families were pretty stable post-civil-war, until the governments started sending black men to prison for teh ganja. Children do better when they have a father around.
I miss-wrote. It sounded like I thought there was ONE solution required. Clearly you have a point and there is far more to the story and there isn't any reason I can think of why you wouldn't be able to do both of these and more.
You had 'intact family privilege' not white privilege.
'Generational poverty' explanation fails since it didn't seem to be a big issue for Vietnamese boat people, Iranian refugees, Cubans, or various other very poor minorities who succeeded.
'The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty.'
After 60 years of that, no serious improvement. And huge losses in intact family privilege. Black illegitimacy went from 25% to 70%.
Not in spite of these guilt-easing handout programs - but because of them. They discourage intact families. Like Saudi oil money or giving cash to a meth addict, the free funds paradoxically harm the recipient by reinforcing their problems permanently while easing the symptoms only temporarily.
Well, not precisely, he was a single dad as well. But I take your point, along with another commenter who says "mass pardon program" (which one would expect to have the effect of bringing some fathers home)
Maybe it's a case of yes, and.
I'm certainly a little embarrassed for making it sound like I knew one solution would fix it. I definitely meant "among other things"
Overall the situation is pretty fucked. There will have to be more than one solution all pointing towards the same goal.
I don't agree that there has been 60 years of a failed taxation experiment. In fact from the 30's to the 80's the middle class grew massively which was a period of high taxation, while from about '85 to now, under voodoo trickle down, we've seen massive GDP growth but virtually none of those gains going to the middle class.
We really need to increase the amount of support in the social network.
My mother is a child psychologist who works primarily with victims of crime and, overwhelmingly, African-Americans. She's come to the conclusion that there are specific parenting faults that you find in the African-American population that you don't find in other similarly-impoverished populations and she believes that they're a legacy of slavery. Parenting abilities/tendencies/techniques are all passed down through the generations. We, as humans, learn our parenting by being parented. But, too often during slavery, this chain was broken. Children were ripped away from their parents and that accumulation of parenting practice was lost.
Since involved parents are the single biggest determining factor in educational outcomes and education is the surest way out of poverty, this legacy of slavery rings the most true to me as the explanation for why African-Americans find it so much harder to break out of the cycle of poverty than other minority groups.
Perhaps the best group to compare with are more recent immigrants from Africa. I have a number of friends who's parents came to the US from Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia. They had very little when they arrived here and have the same skin color which is purported to be such a disadvantage to the African-American population. And while they've universally told me that they have experienced discrimination and prejudice, they've also not had much difficulty lifting themselves out of poverty by the second generation.
> If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed.
I'm curious if you've ever lived in these areas and had friends that fit the description of your comment.
I think you'll find that inner city kids get just as many breaks as suburban white kids. You'd have a point if it was the black ghetto kid in the suburbs being caught at a party - but within the city environment absolutely no way. The kids who got in trouble for that stuff growing up were on their 14th chance.
I lived in such a neighborhood and had local friends growing up. It took a lot to get arrested for something as simple as a joint. You were generally well known as a troublemaker by then, and rightfully so.
The typical response to those issues was dumping out the liquor/drugs and telling the kid to go home unless he was a known problem, in which case yeah - the cops used broken window policing to get them off the streets.
It's a red queen's race. On the one hand you can give free lunches to kids who don't have enough to eat. You put together a volunteer after-school study group to help the kids get their grades up. Meanwhile, the rich kid has private tutors coaching him on SAT prep for several years, he belongs to multiple extracurricular clubs, maybe he gets a summer internship at a Cravath System style law firm or a job as a page in Washington, maybe he wins a medal at the International Math Olympiad...
We're not going to solve inequality by nudging people up from the bottom. We've gotta tackle the elephant in the room: capital pays more and capital is easier to move around than labour. That's all there is to it.
Indeed. It began with slavery and stayed with us in various forms of oppression up to and including today. But America is great so we're going to take it back to Jim Crow.
Your comment is being downvoted because you dismiss the article based on the first sentence and offer no specific criticism. We can do better than that here.
If you want to refine the cause of inequality, that's fair, but on the face of it, calling it political and somehow therefore invalid or a weak argument, is itself weak and invalid.
I'd refine it by saying the reason is when exploitation is considered valid and moral, it exists for a purpose. It is OK to select your targets, where you gain and they lose, if they don't stop you. It's finders keepers losers weepers. It's a game of might makes right. You either agree that there are superior people with superior ideas and it's morally OK to exploit others, or you don't. But I consider exploitation the superset cause of inequality.
The specific instance of this exploitation in American history has been various kinds of servitude, varying from targeting races (African, Chinese, Irish, Italian). And even today there's exploitation that's class based: trying to make public institutions in a democratic tradition a pay for play, or privatized. Justice, education, privacy - these are products to be paid for, and if you can't pay, you get none or you get lower quality versions.
One solution that isn't mentioned is improving our voting process. U.S. ranks something like 30th in voter turnout. Given that you're more likely to vote if you're well-educated/higher income, white and older means many of the disenfranchised referred to in this article aren't represented in govt.
He writes that the upper class of FTE workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some groups and not others, largely along racial lines.
The idea that raising the top marginal tax rates 3-5% or raising the minimum wage 4 or 5 bucks will combat inequality is laughable.
The cognitive dissonance between the cause of class (and the related race) inequality and the policies suggested to combat it never fail to blow my mind.
Slavery was a legal, government subsidized industry. The Jim Crow south that systematically stripped the black community of their property rights was built on a system of state and federal laws. The highly regulated, highly subsidized mortgage loan industry had reams of racially divisive rules that barred the black community from building generational wealth during the most important period of general economic prosperity in perhaps the history of the world following WWII.
American governments spent 200 years systematically robbing various ethnic groups of their rights, but bullshit pieces like this blame it on affluent white people that vote for candidates that have ideological problems with the minimum wage.
Gimme a break.
The cause of economic inequality is several generations of government disrespect of individual property rights and monetary policy that slants competition toward those that can pool assets - banks.
The amount of money being pumped into the economy by the federal reserve has done things like supercharge housing prices, because nobody can find a safe place to dump their new money, it all goes into real estate.
This jacks up the price of housing for the middle class and poor to a ridiculous degree, to the point that in many markets over 75% (!) of post tax income is being spent on housing.
I suspect this is the real reason we aren't seeing inflation from so much money being poured into the economy, all the money of the "have nots" is being sucked away by insane real estate costs, thus the prices of goods that are traditionally tracked by inflation indicators are unable to rise.
This is what is meant by the erosive power of monetary policy, in a very real way it is destroying the wealth of everybody but the 1%, because they cant do anything but pour an increasing large share of their earnings into housing costs (which continue to escalate).
There's other more ways in which monetary policy siphons this eroded wealth to the rich. Mostly by foisting people and less-than-full-agency aggregation of 99%er wealth (pension fund manangers, etc) into corporate welfare via the stock market (because you need to make a return on investment to preserve wealth in the face of inflation). Another way the linkage between our monetary policy and economic structure creates inequality is by enabling the wealthy to take advantage of leveraged investments schemes (Forex, ETFs, etc) off of low-interest rate sources - the ibanks that fund these sorts of activities have a much more direct access to the federal reserve than you or I.
The 'capitalism screws the poor' narrative is so tiresome, not because it is oft repeated, but because it truly misses the structural reasons why the capitalist system we have now screws the poor.
Please - Look up the monetists, who proposed 20% overnight lending rates to combat erosion (inflation/stagflation) back in the 1980s. The erosion we are experiencing is a brand of Monetary policy called Keynesianism - being ultra low interest rates to simulate growth - on the theory that growth would offset inflation; it did, but only - it appears - because wealth growth concentrated instead of disseminated. We are at the end game of Keynesianism, where we have to force a currency change to offset the dilution resulting from negative interest rates.
That was a mouthful - point being - if this interests you, it's probably worth checking out monetists; they predicted our current spectre of stagflation.
Which is all to say - monetary policy is a useful tool, a good rope - for pulling in inflation by raising the interest rate - but pushing a rope for stimulating it. Not all monetary policy is negative; the overnight lending rate was always intended to operate with a premium to punish poor lenders and reward good ones, and stimulate the economy by lowering lending burdens in times of stress, but monetary policy was never intended to replace fiscal and regulatory burden sharing between civilizations aims and capital investments. But that's what it's become - all capital investments are now passed off, in failure, to ultra low interest rates or bail outs, which is skewing the market.
Even the monetists have a crazy appeal to authority that somehow an expert should "track the growth of the economy" (for some definition of "growth" and for some definition of "economy") and match inflation. All this does is Rob from the poor the social benefits of technological price deflation to chase this mythical good of "stability". Stability just means keeping the rich rich.
Ultimately even self proclaimed monetist Alan Greenspan couldn't keep his hands off the dials and creatively interpreted economic growth to mean something that was nonsensical to anyone except the investment class.
well inflation generally robs the poor (and everyone else[0]) of the value of their money. By rob, I mean 'nonconsensually alter in the negative direction relative to the natural state'. Technology is supposed to be the 'tide that lifts all boats'. What few people understand is that the primary mechanism by which it does this is by lower prices, because that doesn't fit the narrative of "deflation is bad for poor people" (it's not).
I suppose it's a bit loose to say that the poor are entitled to ameliorative effects of technology - but they are entitled to not be cheated by the government, and if they weren't cheated by the government then they would be enjoying a higher quality of life from lower prices.
Yes, obviously Greenspan acted as a Keynesian, but he was trained and continues to believe himself a monetarist. That's the point. Monetarism still believes in the seductive idea that stability can be achieved by fiddling with the money supply - they just would prefer to relegate it to some computer program or something algorithmic, but that STILL encodes the normative biases of the individuals who choose the criteria for the algorithms. So even if you could have a 'top man' in place that is so virtuous or autistic as to keep his hands off the dials during crises, it would STILL screw the poor. Point being: There's no categorical difference between a Keynesian and a Monetarist, just a matter of degree of recklessness.
[0] but other people have means to protect themselves from inflation, mostly investments which yield higher than inflation. Really rich people benefit greatly from leveraged financial instruments, which are tougher in a deflationary regime. In other words, via inflation we are stealing from the poor to make it easier for the wealthy to get really wealthy, and it seems the recurring pattern when society gets overleveraged, the solution is to bail out the really wealthy - socializing the pain of risk.
> Monetarism still believes in the seductive idea that stability can be achieved by fiddling with the money supply
I think you've hit the nail on the head. This is my belief as well; while it is apparent that monetary policy can be useful, the old adage goes "if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail".
It appears that instead of doing the correct (and politically difficult) thing from a fiscal, tax, and policy perspective, we just keep lowering the interest rates and waiting for the next upswing.
Which where the Chilean experiment[1] with apolitical fiscal policies will be interesting to observe. I've not seen much on it since, but it'll certainly be tested in the not too distant future.
You're asking most of the right questions. But the real question you should be asking is this: what's the solution?
Slavery. Jim Crow. Subsidized discrimination. The war on drugs. Several generations of government coercion used for evil. Peter Temin is advocating to fix the problem with more coercion.
Am I supposed to believe that we've somehow evolved past prejudice? That prejudiced people won't gain influential office and use Temin's prescriptions to target those they hate? Sounds like more of the same.
Let's break the wheel and give everyone the same opportunity.
Raising the minimum wage is definitely not the answer. It causes market distortions and hurts business and the people as a group who it should be helping.
As a bleeding heart libertarian, I always wonder why liberals want to place more burdens on business - force them to pay more in wages and health benefits - instead of just having the government provide health care and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit and make it easier for employers to pass the EiTC to eligible workers through the payroll tax.
In other words, just like the government can have business pass taxes to the government on behalf of the employees why not just the opposite, have the government give businesses credits to pay employees through the already existing EITC?
> Many cities, which house a disproportionate portion of the black (and increasingly, Latino) population, lack adequate funding for schools.
This is quizzical. Most cities spend more money per pupil than suburbs and rural areas; which suggests that poor education in urban areas is a function of institutional corruption and not lack of funding.
I think you might mean "This is questionable". Quizzical is an adjective applied to people's expressions or behavior, implying that they are puzzled, confused, or questioning. It is not an appropriate word for suggesting that an argument is dubious.
[Assume a standard grammar Nazi mea culpa here, if language corrections are annoying to you.]
i read gp as using quizzical as a verb meaning the sentence induced in thæm 'expressions or behavior, implying that they are puzzled, confused, or questioning.'
[Assume a standard grammar allied powers mea culpa here, if language corrections are annoying to you.]
I suspect the so-called Allied powers are trying to instigate a war, but we will not be provoked.
> i read gp as using quizzical as a verb
That reading of gp's intent, while plausible, still involves an in-apt usage of the word. At best, you might say "This makes me quizzical", but that would still be an awkward way to express your doubts about the validity of the argument.
Where are you getting that data from? From what I have seen, public schools rely a lot on parental donations to go beyond a low base level of education, and city schools on average don't have as much parental involvement compared to good suburban schools, and so have less to spend overall per student.
> which suggests that poor education in urban areas is a function of institutional corruption and not lack of funding.
It also has to do with lack of support at home. Suburban households are more likely to make sure their kids do their homework, come to parent teacher conferences, and discipline their kids when they do wrong.
Poorer families lack the resources and time to make that happen. My sister has taught at 3 such schools over 10 years and lack of parental support for education is the norm.
No it doesn't. The cost of living is much higher in cities than in rural areas, plus land is more expensive so schools' physical expansion is tightly constrained, opening a new school is very expensive and so on.
I’m pushing 40 and side with the article. It takes about 20 years of paying one’s dues to really understand how broken the entire system is. How much effort year after year it takes to tread water, to climb slower than one is capable of, to get pushed back by debt and doing what others tell us. That’s the part I’d specifically like to do away with - the rat race. I’m older, more broken today, but no more capable than I was when I was 20. I mostly see the wasted time and how others happened to land on the lucky side of things. Now that I have some semblance of stability in my life, I’d prefer to give it all away if it allowed others to self-actualize earlier. I’m wondering if this is something one either groks or doesn’t, and how to communicate with people who only talk but don’t listen.
The view expressed in the article is not surprising when reading two other articles (see below) that appeared not long ago here in HN, one of which was flagged (I tend to suspect that these theses hit a little too close to home for some and hence the immediate dismissal).
53 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadAree you going to say the same thing about Jim Crow laws? There has been a systematic will to enslave and degrade black people in America, and this is a continuing effort.
Are you mad, or are you posting from the wrong century?
Reality is tough, huh?
Jim Crow laws are from 1965, they directly connect to this country's history of slavery. That is not "so old" at all. And variations of Jim Crow laws still persist to this day, hence the Voting Rights Acts. That there are clever derivatives of these practices does not at all mean "they are so old they have no resemblance of". Yes foolish person, they do have resemblance of.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pasadena-texas-voting-ri...
For some book ideas so you can work on your ignorance of this present day relevant history: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/chris-hayes-...
Once you involve market forces, and worse, the issuing of stock leading to ownership by a class that demands immediate returns of money for their investment, private agencies are seemingly required to screw over citizens, because that's how you extract money from them in large quantities.
Contrasted to that, the bureaucracy of public entities is a much more insignificant problem. Public internet might be sort of 'third world', but right now they are kicking our butts in that, and Comcast might be working hard (meh…) but they are not working for you, they are working to extract capital out of you in the most efficient manner possible.
Once you include the caveat of 'all citizens' (even in Podunkville) it's not even an argument anymore. There's an assumption that it's right and proper to hose Podunkville because they're not the big city and shouldn't have nice things if their productivity doesn't warrant it, and this assumption is fair to challenge or even contradict outright. I'm rooting for Podunkville (the big city doesn't need my ideological help) so I'm in favor of public entities.
I guess we'll be seeing some experimentation, in that we're likely to see a heavy swing to privatization right now, and most likely a counter-swing in four to eight years. Should be worth keeping track of how it all works. That 'all citizens', though, that's a conditional which is at the heart of the discussion.
He makes a strong point.
Now, I'm a white guy, my father owned a small business after selling his scanning electron microscope company to a bigger player. He paid for my University education outright including rent. I had to work for any spending money I wanted, but I basically had a free ride into my current programming job.
A poor black kid living in a high-violent-crime area who is the child of a minimum-wage-working single mother, is not going to have the same chances.
If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed.
This is (according to this article and others) traceable in a large part back to slavery. But it also comes from gererational poverty. Lack of parental resources leading to malnutrition, which leads to inattention in school, parental long hours at work leads to a lack of attention and corrective feedback. Or the parents are addicted to something and modelling bad behavior to begin with.
The child in these cases starts innocent and realistically has an infantessemal chance of success.
The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty.
Free breakfast and lunch for kids, raise minimum wage, etc...
The Palmer Luckey's of the world have to catch on to just how fucking privileged they are as middle class white kids.
These articles don't deserve to be rejected outright under "bias" they're based on real solid research.
It'd be even better to end institutionalized racism, institute a mass pardon program, and pay reparations to the victims of Nixon's stupid escalation of the war on plants:
- Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpe...edit: John Taylor Gatto [1] points out in one of his books that black families were pretty stable post-civil-war, until the governments started sending black men to prison for teh ganja. Children do better when they have a father around.
[1] https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/
'Generational poverty' explanation fails since it didn't seem to be a big issue for Vietnamese boat people, Iranian refugees, Cubans, or various other very poor minorities who succeeded.
'The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty.'
After 60 years of that, no serious improvement. And huge losses in intact family privilege. Black illegitimacy went from 25% to 70%.
Not in spite of these guilt-easing handout programs - but because of them. They discourage intact families. Like Saudi oil money or giving cash to a meth addict, the free funds paradoxically harm the recipient by reinforcing their problems permanently while easing the symptoms only temporarily.
Maybe it's a case of yes, and.
I'm certainly a little embarrassed for making it sound like I knew one solution would fix it. I definitely meant "among other things"
Overall the situation is pretty fucked. There will have to be more than one solution all pointing towards the same goal.
I don't agree that there has been 60 years of a failed taxation experiment. In fact from the 30's to the 80's the middle class grew massively which was a period of high taxation, while from about '85 to now, under voodoo trickle down, we've seen massive GDP growth but virtually none of those gains going to the middle class.
We really need to increase the amount of support in the social network.
Since involved parents are the single biggest determining factor in educational outcomes and education is the surest way out of poverty, this legacy of slavery rings the most true to me as the explanation for why African-Americans find it so much harder to break out of the cycle of poverty than other minority groups.
Perhaps the best group to compare with are more recent immigrants from Africa. I have a number of friends who's parents came to the US from Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia. They had very little when they arrived here and have the same skin color which is purported to be such a disadvantage to the African-American population. And while they've universally told me that they have experienced discrimination and prejudice, they've also not had much difficulty lifting themselves out of poverty by the second generation.
I'm curious if you've ever lived in these areas and had friends that fit the description of your comment.
I think you'll find that inner city kids get just as many breaks as suburban white kids. You'd have a point if it was the black ghetto kid in the suburbs being caught at a party - but within the city environment absolutely no way. The kids who got in trouble for that stuff growing up were on their 14th chance.
I lived in such a neighborhood and had local friends growing up. It took a lot to get arrested for something as simple as a joint. You were generally well known as a troublemaker by then, and rightfully so.
The typical response to those issues was dumping out the liquor/drugs and telling the kid to go home unless he was a known problem, in which case yeah - the cops used broken window policing to get them off the streets.
We're not going to solve inequality by nudging people up from the bottom. We've gotta tackle the elephant in the room: capital pays more and capital is easier to move around than labour. That's all there is to it.
If you want to refine the cause of inequality, that's fair, but on the face of it, calling it political and somehow therefore invalid or a weak argument, is itself weak and invalid.
I'd refine it by saying the reason is when exploitation is considered valid and moral, it exists for a purpose. It is OK to select your targets, where you gain and they lose, if they don't stop you. It's finders keepers losers weepers. It's a game of might makes right. You either agree that there are superior people with superior ideas and it's morally OK to exploit others, or you don't. But I consider exploitation the superset cause of inequality.
The specific instance of this exploitation in American history has been various kinds of servitude, varying from targeting races (African, Chinese, Irish, Italian). And even today there's exploitation that's class based: trying to make public institutions in a democratic tradition a pay for play, or privatized. Justice, education, privacy - these are products to be paid for, and if you can't pay, you get none or you get lower quality versions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He writes that the upper class of FTE workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some groups and not others, largely along racial lines.
The idea that raising the top marginal tax rates 3-5% or raising the minimum wage 4 or 5 bucks will combat inequality is laughable.
The cognitive dissonance between the cause of class (and the related race) inequality and the policies suggested to combat it never fail to blow my mind.
Slavery was a legal, government subsidized industry. The Jim Crow south that systematically stripped the black community of their property rights was built on a system of state and federal laws. The highly regulated, highly subsidized mortgage loan industry had reams of racially divisive rules that barred the black community from building generational wealth during the most important period of general economic prosperity in perhaps the history of the world following WWII.
American governments spent 200 years systematically robbing various ethnic groups of their rights, but bullshit pieces like this blame it on affluent white people that vote for candidates that have ideological problems with the minimum wage.
Gimme a break.
The cause of economic inequality is several generations of government disrespect of individual property rights and monetary policy that slants competition toward those that can pool assets - banks.
This jacks up the price of housing for the middle class and poor to a ridiculous degree, to the point that in many markets over 75% (!) of post tax income is being spent on housing.
I suspect this is the real reason we aren't seeing inflation from so much money being poured into the economy, all the money of the "have nots" is being sucked away by insane real estate costs, thus the prices of goods that are traditionally tracked by inflation indicators are unable to rise.
This is what is meant by the erosive power of monetary policy, in a very real way it is destroying the wealth of everybody but the 1%, because they cant do anything but pour an increasing large share of their earnings into housing costs (which continue to escalate).
There's other more ways in which monetary policy siphons this eroded wealth to the rich. Mostly by foisting people and less-than-full-agency aggregation of 99%er wealth (pension fund manangers, etc) into corporate welfare via the stock market (because you need to make a return on investment to preserve wealth in the face of inflation). Another way the linkage between our monetary policy and economic structure creates inequality is by enabling the wealthy to take advantage of leveraged investments schemes (Forex, ETFs, etc) off of low-interest rate sources - the ibanks that fund these sorts of activities have a much more direct access to the federal reserve than you or I.
The 'capitalism screws the poor' narrative is so tiresome, not because it is oft repeated, but because it truly misses the structural reasons why the capitalist system we have now screws the poor.
That was a mouthful - point being - if this interests you, it's probably worth checking out monetists; they predicted our current spectre of stagflation.
Which is all to say - monetary policy is a useful tool, a good rope - for pulling in inflation by raising the interest rate - but pushing a rope for stimulating it. Not all monetary policy is negative; the overnight lending rate was always intended to operate with a premium to punish poor lenders and reward good ones, and stimulate the economy by lowering lending burdens in times of stress, but monetary policy was never intended to replace fiscal and regulatory burden sharing between civilizations aims and capital investments. But that's what it's become - all capital investments are now passed off, in failure, to ultra low interest rates or bail outs, which is skewing the market.
Ultimately even self proclaimed monetist Alan Greenspan couldn't keep his hands off the dials and creatively interpreted economic growth to mean something that was nonsensical to anyone except the investment class.
Also, Greenspan was clearly a Keynesian - and, IMO, rather/depressingly naive or proud, from his bio. Smart guy, horse blinders.
I suppose it's a bit loose to say that the poor are entitled to ameliorative effects of technology - but they are entitled to not be cheated by the government, and if they weren't cheated by the government then they would be enjoying a higher quality of life from lower prices.
Yes, obviously Greenspan acted as a Keynesian, but he was trained and continues to believe himself a monetarist. That's the point. Monetarism still believes in the seductive idea that stability can be achieved by fiddling with the money supply - they just would prefer to relegate it to some computer program or something algorithmic, but that STILL encodes the normative biases of the individuals who choose the criteria for the algorithms. So even if you could have a 'top man' in place that is so virtuous or autistic as to keep his hands off the dials during crises, it would STILL screw the poor. Point being: There's no categorical difference between a Keynesian and a Monetarist, just a matter of degree of recklessness.
[0] but other people have means to protect themselves from inflation, mostly investments which yield higher than inflation. Really rich people benefit greatly from leveraged financial instruments, which are tougher in a deflationary regime. In other words, via inflation we are stealing from the poor to make it easier for the wealthy to get really wealthy, and it seems the recurring pattern when society gets overleveraged, the solution is to bail out the really wealthy - socializing the pain of risk.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. This is my belief as well; while it is apparent that monetary policy can be useful, the old adage goes "if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail".
It appears that instead of doing the correct (and politically difficult) thing from a fiscal, tax, and policy perspective, we just keep lowering the interest rates and waiting for the next upswing.
Which where the Chilean experiment[1] with apolitical fiscal policies will be interesting to observe. I've not seen much on it since, but it'll certainly be tested in the not too distant future.
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/fiscal-p...
And who makes up the government that writes and votes on these laws? And who uses their money to influence the people in these positions?
My guess is the upper class of FTE works in the top 1/5 of the population? Although, maybe it's more apt to say the 1% or 0.1% who are not workers?
Does the author include the business owners and elites in their top 1/5 of the population? Or are they a different subset as they are not workers?
Slavery. Jim Crow. Subsidized discrimination. The war on drugs. Several generations of government coercion used for evil. Peter Temin is advocating to fix the problem with more coercion.
Am I supposed to believe that we've somehow evolved past prejudice? That prejudiced people won't gain influential office and use Temin's prescriptions to target those they hate? Sounds like more of the same.
Let's break the wheel and give everyone the same opportunity.
As a bleeding heart libertarian, I always wonder why liberals want to place more burdens on business - force them to pay more in wages and health benefits - instead of just having the government provide health care and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit and make it easier for employers to pass the EiTC to eligible workers through the payroll tax.
In other words, just like the government can have business pass taxes to the government on behalf of the employees why not just the opposite, have the government give businesses credits to pay employees through the already existing EITC?
This is quizzical. Most cities spend more money per pupil than suburbs and rural areas; which suggests that poor education in urban areas is a function of institutional corruption and not lack of funding.
I think you might mean "This is questionable". Quizzical is an adjective applied to people's expressions or behavior, implying that they are puzzled, confused, or questioning. It is not an appropriate word for suggesting that an argument is dubious.
[Assume a standard grammar Nazi mea culpa here, if language corrections are annoying to you.]
[Assume a standard grammar allied powers mea culpa here, if language corrections are annoying to you.]
> thæm
I suspect the so-called Allied powers are trying to instigate a war, but we will not be provoked.
> i read gp as using quizzical as a verb
That reading of gp's intent, while plausible, still involves an in-apt usage of the word. At best, you might say "This makes me quizzical", but that would still be an awkward way to express your doubts about the validity of the argument.
It also has to do with lack of support at home. Suburban households are more likely to make sure their kids do their homework, come to parent teacher conferences, and discipline their kids when they do wrong.
Poorer families lack the resources and time to make that happen. My sister has taught at 3 such schools over 10 years and lack of parental support for education is the norm.
I think we're going to need more concrete recommendations than that.
[1] America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-is-r... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14158310
[2] Why Poverty Is Like a Disease http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/why-poverty-is-like-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14201822