You can also tell employers "no". I did it in the last round and of 6 companies that tried a leetcode-style interview, only 1 ended talks. I received offers from the other 5 despite not giving them a bullshit timed algo interview.
that's great, I developed multiple succesful products and have 25 years of experience and told several "no" recently and they all decided to not interview me.
I am happy to hear that. Developers have a lot more power to change things than they realise. If all developers simply refused to do leet code style interviews, employees would very quickly stop doing them.
If you honestly believe that companies operate as meritocracies I have a bridge to sell you. Nepotism still runs rampant, attractive people get more job offers, promotions, and pay, networking still trounces experience and credentials when it comes to finding work, and credentials themselves are largely about wealth signaling.
Seniority is at least an objective measure, even if it is a terrible one. Besides which, no one says that's how a union has to work.
In a really extreme example of union membership, it relies on a lottery system. The lottery tickets are only given to current members. The current members give this to family members or sell the ticket for tens of thousands of dollars.
The union can post jobs internally and they have to evaluate internal candidates first. Some places I’ve worked even have it set up so that internal union members are sent to school for training before they will open it up to external hiring.
Credentialing. Union can enforce specific credentials that would then keep people otherwise qualified out.
I think these (which are scenarios I’ve seen) are worse than the current system where if you have the skills and can demonstrate them, then you can get a high paying job.
the current system does not guarantee a high paying job if you have the skills and can demonstrate them. it requires that you go through timed coding tests which are unrelated to what you will be doing, and which you have to study for first, despite already having done all that in college, and despite that college possibly being ivy league, and despite having years of experience and released succesful products.
They're not bullshit, they're secondary contradictions to the primary contradiction of bourgeoisie vs proletarians. The secondary contradictions do affect real people and are a great way to rally people together by showing solidarity to each other.
This really does frustrate me - that racism is usually seen in the spectrum of the "whites vs blacks" narrative - but Asian-Americans are usually disregarded, or it's not "real" racism.
Sure, they don't have the same pay disparity as blacks (although there is still inequality within the cohort itself) - however, that's largely been a result of higher educational attainment, and the work ethic of Asians - and ignores the barriers they've had to overcome to get to that level.
However, there is still a level of casual racism - and even in the last year, a lot of anti-Asian assaults across America.
Also, this is an anecdote, in many places I've worked at, it's very common that management and above are mostly white males, but all the Asians are non-management. I've wondered how much of that is due to some cultural issue, versus how much is due to some bias in the system.
It's interesting to see the achievement gap despite policies at top institutions that are increasingly trying to get rid of objective measurement, and instead focus on "holistic" approach.
Lowell HS, here in SF, is a prime example [0], but also the lawsuits brought against Ivy League institutions [1] [2] [3]
Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, Adobe, Zoom, NetApp- a who's who of Silicon Valley. There is zero evidence of American companies ignoring talented Asian executives- the shareholder could care less as long as the stock progresses.
Well of course, the anti-racists quite literally believe that 'whiteness' is the gold standard by which every other race, including the asians, who have far surpassed the whites, ought to be held, because deep down inside they believe whites are the ideal.
You see it everywhere. For example, the race chart here lists whites first. For other charts where category has no particular ordering (for example, technical competence), the bars were ordered by current salary. It's not even by relative share of the population, because there are more hispanics than blacks I believe.
Also, I wonder how the presence of 'other' throws off the numbers, because I bet many blacks are used to putting in 'other'. I know as a minority myself, I often check 'other' on these forms. It's no one's business and will only serve to hurt you.
Can you expand on what you mean when you say Asians have far surpassed the whites? Are you strictly referring to salary, or other things like power and beauty standards?
Last time I checked, white people in the US weren't aspiring to attain Asian beauty standards.
No, androgynous dress did not originate in KPop Asia. That is an incredibly shallow and probably wrong take. Look at Little Richard or any other androgynous star from the 50s and 60s. It was a thing long before that too.
> Is it time to talk about the gap between Blacks and Asians instead?
The problem isn't so much what value you put on the groups, as the gap itself.
Think of it more generically:
gap<Race, Salary>
Anytime you'd see a big gap, it would be cause for concern, because we value that similar work should provide similar compensation no matter your race.
And if you see that the gap is caused by the distribution of the type of work, for example, raceX is more likely to do work that pays more than raceZ. Well that's also an issue, because we value equal opportunity between races, and the assumption is if opportunity was truly equal, the data should not show a big gap in the choices of work made between races, especially for highly paid professions. At least it shouldn't show that without a clear explanation as to why that might be, which we don't have today.
I understand 100% where you come from with that comment, it can get annoying to feel personally blamed for inequality, where the real blame could be historical, or accidental, but I'd only say to try and be the better man, and get past that, because focusing on the "blame" both as a recipient or activist wanting to lash it out is counterproductive, keep the focus on the issue and discussions of solutions I think is the healthy path forward for everyone.
And you're right, articles like this one could also try harder at that.
Whites not born in rich anglo countries are still perceived as privileged despite a lot of them growing up in much harder conditions than your average black person in tech.
Citation for what? That I cant apply for diversity internships despite growing up in a family with 10k/pa budget?
And no...this is not shitloads of money where I am coming from.
> despite a lot of them growing up in much harder conditions than your average black person in tech.
How would you know? And how do you measure it?
It was harder to grow up in Kiev because you were in worse poverty than blacks in the US. Possibly. Were you also discriminated against in Kiev? Was your family broken, and your community broken? Did you have a failing school system relative to others in your community? It goes on. The point is there are many systems that make up "black in America" that doesn't translate to only family income.
I measure it by the number of opportunities one has or had in the past.Your practical education happens later because you did not have access to computers in any form.
You can't travel not only because of your passport but also because you simply cannot afford it.One cannot simply just go from Ukraine to a richer country in Europe like you can in the US.
>It was harder to grow up in Kiev because you were in worse poverty than blacks in the US. Possibly. Were you also discriminated against in Kiev? Was your family broken, and your community broken? Did you have a failing school system relative to others in your community?
You were always discriminated in Eastern Europe because of your lack of connections and corruption.Inept people have always had an upper hand here.
I dont know what you mean by "family broken".Many EE families were broken.I come from such family.After the fall of iron curtain i grew up in relative poverty where my mother had no job and she was constantly harassed by her drug addicted partner.My father dumped us long time ago and simply did not care.
What do you consider a broken community? You mean one where mafia runs free and where you cant go to the police because they are corrupt? Yes those were the times of 90s.
>The point is there are many systems that make up "black in America" that doesn't translate to only family income.
I think you dont understand the reality here.Being "already" in America makes you incredibly privileged.I remember EE STEM PHD engineers earning better wages frying chicken in the US than doing what they have actually studied for back home.
I am glad americans are finally acknowledging this phenomenon (BBT scene with russian janitor/physicist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd8sDquNYw) but since this is not their problem it is overshadowed by your racial wars.
I want to preface that it's a very strong claim to say that the true and accurate cause would be culture, and claiming the possibility isn't good enough, you'd need to strongly demonstrate evidence that this is the real contributing factor.
Having said that, Culture could be an explanation, but it would still be a problem, because children should have equal opportunity, and if it were true that culture can affect your opportunities, then it wouldn't be fair to have some children born into a culture that diminishes their opportunity. That's why we have a lot of laws already related to restricting certain ways you can raise your kids, like mandatory school, bans on corporal punishments, requirements to meet their basic needs, etc.
Beyond that, there are questions around culture as well, such as, would it be culture on its own? Or culture within a particular environment that might favor against certain cultures? And this might not even be in an actively and conscious discriminatory fashion. It could be as an accidental effect of compounding factors. For example, imagine that a particular market buying power is dominated by mostly people of culture A, they have the money, but as someone of culture B, you might not be able to understand or relate to that market and thus fail to appeal to them, meaning your business will be less successful as an effect of that.
Another big question around culture would be historical, for example, if you include in culture say a tendency to be illiterate, or a lack of insistence on intellectualism or education or reading, etc. It is possible the historical context influenced such a culture and did so unfairly.
My point basically is that first I think it's very early to really advance that the cause could be cultural and there are many other possibilities just as likely if not more. And even if culture is a factor, it's not a justification, and we should still strive to address the unequal opportunities it creates.
> claiming the possibility isn't good enough, you'd need to strongly demonstrate evidence
This is true for anyone making any claim here, including the claim that it is race alone (which i am pointing out is unaccounted for in op post)
> it wouldn't be fair to have some children born into a culture that diminishes their opportunity
I wholeheartedly disagree. It depends on what a culture values and monetary outcomes isnt everything. As an example, American culture is very different from my own (based in EU though ive lived and am frequently in the US). Our culture is generally less work centric, which may look like worse outcomes on paper, but there are so many things that cant be or aren't measured.
> This is true for anyone making any claim here, including the claim that it is race alone (which i am pointing out is unaccounted for in op post)
That's not the claim being made, the claim is the observed gap when grouping the data by race. That is a fact of the data as represented.
Why that gap exists is an open question, and so is how to potentially reduce the gap.
I think the fact that some people like you jump to believe immediately that it could be due to culture is just showing of your inherent bias. The same is true for those immediately jumping to believe it is caused by racism, that's showing of their inherent bias too.
Bias is unsubtiantied beliefs that you bring to the search space.
> Our culture is generally less work centric, which may look like worse outcomes on paper, but there are so many things that cant be or aren't measured
Three things. The first is that the article is about American jobs in the US. That means culturally we're talking about sub-groups within an American cultural context. The second is that we're comparing the same jobs in the same sector against each other. And the third is that I'd be interested in testing your theory, if true, it would mean that it should predict that if you grouped US tech salaries by your EU based culture, we should also see a lower pay compared to white American culture. I think that be interesting if the data was available for it. And if that does show, then I'd start to say that your theory is on the path of being more demonstrated correct, since it shows predictive capabilities.
I will claim that all races have different sub-cultures and that sub-cultures are more important than race. If you are white and grow up in a poor uneducated sub-culture where education is strongly discouraged, the opportunities you have will be very different from a white person growing up in a sub-culture where going to University is expected and encouraged. The same goes for any other race.
Yes, I agree, the environment probably matters to some extent, even possibly to a large (maybe even largest) extent.
I think it all matters what people mean by culture. Is access to capital, good education, mentoring, support in developmental growth, time (time to learn, study, play, etc.), and safety/care (loving parents, health issues taken care of, well fed, comfortable living/sleeping, etc.) is included in "culture" or is that separate?
Anyways, I wouldn't be surprised if those environmental elements play a big factor, and it's likely that some races simply line up more perfectly with those things as well which could explain why in turn you see the data show a gap between races.
But if by culture we mean things like music, native spoken and written language, traditions and customs, spiritual/religious beliefs, foods, clothes, art, folklore, etc. Well I don't know, I feel those would likely play less of a role.
I think some people might also imply "values" when they mean "culture". But I feel that possibly translates into environmental factors. Like if you don't value caring for your kid, helping them with their homework, encouraging them to read, learn, go to school, and all that, well it probably just leads to similarly deficient environmental factors, like maybe ending up in an environment with bad education, no mentorship, lack of safety and all that.
I agree. Culture is a large umbrella term. I am mainly talking about the unquestioned assumptions, values and expectations of people living in the sub-culture. Especially how the sub-culture, and especially parents, value (or not) education and intellectual pursuits. People of different races but sharing compatible sub-cultures have a lot more in common than people of the same race that don’t.
What I wonder though is how useful the distinction becomes.
Maybe I'm reading into it, but I feel some people want to say that it's their fault, because their culture doesn't value education and intellectual pursuits and honesty, and hard work, etc.
And it seems to become a justification why they don't deserve any help or support or special treatment.
But to me, it seems to be exactly why something would need to be done. You don't actually choose your culture, you're born into it, and that seems unfair if by culture we imply those essential things that matter for success in life.
Especially if we talk about certain races, where other races probably directly contributed to that culture by forcibly curbing their interest in education, intellectualism and ambitions.
The distinction is important because you can’t change race but you can change culture. However it isn’t easy and it has to start with the children. It is too late for the adults. And any practical solution (boarding schools for talented kids designed to extract them from their dysfunctional culture) has serious negative consequences as well. Australia tried to change the culture of the indigenous population and it ended badly. It is a very hard problem. Especially because the feedback loop of the culture is self-reinforcing. When I lived in the US I remember talking to a successful well-educated African-American that I worked with who said he was called an “Icecream” (black on the outside white on the inside) by other African-Americans! In other words, people in his community resented his success instead of celebrating it. That just blew my mind.
What you're saying to me here sounds to be talking about culture as in clothing, language, food, music, hairstyles, etc.
I find more modern efforts are probably going to yield much better effects on value of education, intellectualism and work ethics. And those are things like actual financial support and investment into better schooling for underprivileged neighborhoods, better access to loans, more access to paid for higher education programs, and yes, even things like accepting more people from those "cultures" into high paying jobs, and good graduate programs and schools, even if they aren't necessarily the top performers, as long as they still show the qualities needed to succeed.
Otherwise you've got a chicken and egg problem, so you need to take the ones that show promise to be able to break out, and really give them that chance and help them doing so, that can break the cycle.
I'm happy to adapt this to not a traditional notion of "race", there are white sub-culture like you say that suffer from these difficulties as well, and I think they'd need similar support.
Tangentially, on the topic of "ice-cream", I think you're simplifying things. It's a well known issue where hiding your culture (as in the way you dress, talk, eat, joke, the music you listen too, etc.) when your culture is surrounded by negative bias, can be necessary for yourself to enter higher financial spheres. Being called an ice-cream doesn't mean that the person was a cop out because they have a good job or make good money, it generally means that they adopted actual white cultural norms, as in, clothing, hairstyles, accent, behaviors, etc. And not as-in, honesty, hard working, and intellectualism.
The variance of personality between individuals is around 40-60% genetic in origin (i.e. genes have a huge impact on personality). Given this, if you believe personality has any impact on career selection at all, a differing distribution of career selection between sexes and races would be an expected outcome, no discrimination or bias necessary.
That's the problem, that's why I said unless we have a very good explanation.
It's easy to fit some model over any data to explain it, but that doesn't make it a very good explanation.
So what we would need is very strong evidence that the surprising data we see is the result of some inherent cause, and not that of a sub-optimal system. Until then, the possibility that the system is sub-optimal remains, and the data continues to be surprising.
Just so we're on the same page, me and the article is talking about an observed pay gap between people employed in the US for the SAME tech job roles. I think you're debating something tangential.
I was addressing your comment on equality of outcome:
And if you see that the gap is caused by the distribution of the type of work, for example, raceX is more likely to do work that pays more than raceZ. Well that's also an issue, because we value equal opportunity between races, and the assumption is if opportunity was truly equal, the data should not show a big gap in the choices of work made between races
Oh I see. Well in that case I think you're probably referring to the study of twin grown appart, for which in a large number of cases both twins turned out to have ended up doing very similar work?
I think it's a big leap to assume that the genes that are similar between twins and which are responsible for such similar outcomes would also be similar between individuals of the same skin color.
For example, even once the study looked into non-identical twin, the similarities in outcomes drastically started to drop.
I'm not denying the possibility, when you still don't have a sure explanation lots of things are still a possibility. But I think you're jumping ahead with your conclusion a little too hastily, and in my opinion, I still think the data is surprising and that we don't really know why this difference in distribution really exists.
Furthermore, I'll add that modern genetic research is really putting in question our traditional categorization of "race".
> In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.
What modern availability of large scale genetic data tells us, is that what we call "black", "white" and "asian" actually have very little genetic variance and uniqueness, and that it's actually possible some white people are closer genetically to some black people than they'd be to other white people.
Which would mean that if you grouped by traditional notion of race, like skin color, you might not be grouping by genetic similarities at all. That would reinforce the possibility then that the difference in the distribution is not genetic, but possibly socio-cultural.
there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded. It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions.
The title is is not representative of what the article is saying; no serious scientist is making the claim that race is a social construct. They're just saying we shouldn't make medical or other assumptions about individuals based on race, which is of course true.
The idea that races don't exist is a postmodern rejection of science based on a political agenda, and you should be skeptical of folks pushing it. If you study biology or evolution at any reasonable length the notion is just silly.
Crude analysis of gender pay gap. What is the difference in experience level, hours worked, industry, etc.? Pay gap "headed in the wrong direction" could easily be more women entering the field at a junior level, which would actually be heading in the right direction.
It's also self-reported. Men, they say, in general are "bolder". That translates to over-stating and/or those with something to "brag" about are more likely to respond.
While I believe "boldness" is more related to personality than to gender, I have noticed the "bragging bias" you've described quite a bit. But it goes both ways. That is to say "people respond to surveys when they have something to say." If you believe you're being paid too little, you're just as likely to chime in as somebody who wants to brag about their pay. It's the folks in the middle who end up not chiming in, out of the belief that they have little insight to offer. Because of this, ootional surveys oftentime yield biases towards the extremes.
Multiple studies show men on average apply for jobs they are not fully qualified for. Women on the other hand are more "conservative" and take less risk (so to speak).
Yes, of course, there are variations from person to person, sans gender. But there are also gender-centric cultural norms.
More formally, this is the origin story for Simpson's paradox: when you combine subgroups, trends can disappear or even reverse. The more dimensions you analyze, the close to 'truth' you can get.
This is why you have such varying claims about stuff like women earning equal pay with men. People who want social change (activists, politicans) group together the entire population, and come to the conclusion that women make 83 cents on the dollar. But when you break out along other dimensions (age/YOE, occupation, hours worked), the gap is reduced. But never eliminated!
"The more dimensions you analyze, the close to 'truth' you can get."
Data scientist here. The above is not the correct takeaway from Simpson's paradox. It is not generally correct that the trends seen in subdivided groups are closer to truth than overall groups; sometimes the opposite is the case. It depends entirely on what the divisions are and whether they make sense.
With regard to gender-based pay disparity, there are a multiplicity of factors, from the most obvious ("equal pay for equal work") to other factors such as the fact that professions largely staffed by women tend to get paid less than professions largely staffed by men. For instance childcare is miserably compensated, despite being a position of high responsibility and impact.
The consensus regarding women during the pandemic (not limited to tech workers) was that women have disproportionately sacrificed their careers to cover the needs of childcare and at-home schooling during the pandemic.
Should people who sacrifice their careers for noble goals be paid less?
Not that I am demanding an answer from you specifically. It's just a weird question in the context of a country where wage labor is the only real source of income for individuals.
What does “paid less” even mean in this context? If you sacrifice your career, you sacrifice the remuneration you were receiving from it. It’s part of the career…
In a market driven economy: yes. It’s the same reason why game developers are paid less than developers in other high skill jobs: game developers are willing to get paid less in return for working on games.
Without defining truth and correct, the rejoinder makes little sense, your data science credentials notwithstanding.
What seems like a plausible interpretation to my un-credentialed, low-IQ self is:
1. Within dimension comparisons in this instance may suggest that “like” populations are similar across gender, suggesting that there is no bias in how tech compensates women and men.
2. The distribution of said dimensions differing between men and women may reflect exogenous effects that are not controllable by tech since they’re upstream of the tech hiring process.
Regarding Simpson's paradox, you can see a good treatment here [0] describing whether splitting a group is correct or not (based on causality); see Section 2.2 specifically.
> The above is not the correct takeaway from Simpson's paradox. It is not generally correct that the trends seen in subdivided groups are closer to truth than overall groups;
This is why the word truth was in scare quotes. And the word 'can' was also doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I'm pretty sure the origin of the wage gap is just that relatively, income is a bigger status booster for men than it is for women. Women have other status boosters like being seen as a good parent, and if you look at those dimensions there's a gap in favor of women. People are simply, on average, optimizing for what benefits them most in society, and those things are different for men and women.
This explains observations like, when a field becomes more lucrative, it attracts more men. Or when a field becomes less lucrative, men abandon it and it ends up disproportionately female. So even if there's equal pay for the same job, men will earn more on average by being more likely to pursue the higher earning jobs.
Of course, we could say the fact that society values different things in men and women is sexism. That's true, but I'm not convinced it's sexism exclusively against women: a man who'd rather spend time with his kids is also negatively affected by society pushing him to be a breadwinner instead.
In the end, do wages matter more than general life satisfaction (not sure if either gender does better here), or other measures like life expectancy (which favors women)?
I agree. Also because men has to compete hard to be an attractive mate for woman. Woman have more choices than men and are smart enough to pick men who are more successful in life.
I rarely see these discussions encompass minority populations. With an astounding amount of tech work being done by minority/immigrant populations, I always find it’s a voice that’s missing.
Which populations are we talking about? In the USA, I presume?
AFAIK - there isn’t an astounding amount of work being done by descendants of american slaves, people who are hispanic, native american, or pacific islander. So, maybe you can speak about which minorities you mean specifically.
while we are fighting over gender and race gaps, we fail to notice the gap between tech salaries and salaries of marketing and sales executives, C level roles, lawyers and so on.
It's true, but if we do manage to mostly equalize those (and in an ideal world they would be!), it will really sharpen the criticism of the top because there will be nothing left to divide us.
There will never be a lack of divisions the elites can foster in the populace. If you had told me that in the middle of a pandemic, people would politicize medicinal measures and vaccinations, i would have laughed.
We don't have to win over right-wingers, they're a lost cause. I think among the broad left, the contradictions of race and gender are healing slowly. For example, a black marxist professor told me that in the 1960s white people could not show up to a police brutality protest, but now the George Floyd protests were fully mixed race.
The condition of the capitalist system is declining and more people are feeling it. By removing things the elites can point to, we narrow their ability to navigate.
The right wing is turning to conspiracy and nationalism as they usually do. However, they are the minority of the country (the friends and family of the ownership class is necessarily smaller than the prolaterians), they just have the ability to do a LOT of damage.
I did oversimplify sorry. There's a hard core of the right wing that has a class interest in their political beliefs (. There's also a mass base they've assembled out of the working class based on fascist ideas of nationalism, xenophobia, creating hierarchies of races, genders, etc that they believe they're superior to, and some kind of conviction that capitalism is either meritocratic or will give them personally a shot at the top.
The key is for the working class right wing, these ideas are often against their material interest in either the short or long term and so they are a softer core that can be peeled away. Probably not with direct appeals, but by substantive action.
Only about 30-40% of the country are convicted right wingers, somewhere between a minority and a super-minority of the population, and a reasonable fraction (guessing 5-10%) of them would be peeled away by a positive material change in their circumstances by a re-distributive economic policy.
Isn’t beloved white and left politician Bernie Sanders famous for a photo of him as a young adult being dragged away from an African American rights protest by police?
I spent just a few seconds looking at photos of 1960’s police brutality photos on Google and see white people in most of them.
Good time to also point out that conservative voters make up something like 24-25% of the population and liberal voters roughly the same. Half the population doesn’t vote in general though the numbers are higher for presidential elections than your average election.
That's pretty interesting in the photos. Will have to discuss with some friends. I believe the professor, but there might be subtle differences between the different kinds of protests.
EDIT: Looking at some side-by-sides with the George Floyd protests, it seems apparent to me that while there were some non-black participants in the 1960s, the proportion of them significantly increased.
Communities of color are the least likely to be vaccinated and have good reason to distrust the medical establishment and the government. Call that politicization if you want but their reasons go back far beyond the start of this pandemic.
Dude, the git master branch is divisive, somehow. There will never be an end to it, it's an entertainment/outrage complex with billions in funding.
Ignoring class divisions and real-world material conditions while we get rich and kibbitz about trivialities is the whole point, you can't run out of trivialities.
To be trivial means to be unimportant, but there is a difference between unimportant and irrelevant. For example, if we found that factor X led to minorities making y% less, but y was 0.00000001, then factor X is trivial, but depending on what you're doing, it may be relevant t the discussion at hand.
Often though today, the things mentioned are not only trivial (not having any meaningful effect) but also irrelevant (in that the causal relationship hypothesized is extremely strained if not non-existent).
You're right about that, there will never be an end to trivialities, but I think that if movements focus on material issues (some of which are cultural) we can find ways to knit together a stronger coalition. I struggle with this too, what's the right emphasis to focus on?
Right now the US is so divided and there's no strong left coalition to make demands. I feel we are in a nascent rebuilding phase where we have to knit together groups and build groups from unorganized elements. My current thinking is that these are issues people care about, so we should help them and explicitly link them into economic class struggle so that the nascent coalitions build towards something.
People that engage in the movements in any capacity AND talk with class conscious activists become more radical over time. Participation in solely liberal movements can do it too, but mostly to the point where the people participate feel something is missing as the liberal demands always undershoot the problem. They need to read and talk to socialists, and socialists need to listen more than they talk in those conversations.
If you're talking about actually being involved in the community, I'm all for that, although it's hard in the age of social media even before covid.
My ire is for the tech 'activists' who spend their time deciding which innocent turns of phrase should be banned or which marvel movies needed more representation.
Yea I can't even force myself to care about the git branch name issue or which propaganda film needs different coats of paint.
I've been slacking recently because of my fear of COVID-19, but previously I'd been doing community and workplace organizing. The real world is the only place that will actually improve things. The pandemic is a real bummer.
Even without covid it's hard. We're in an atomized society where everyone's earning to their ability and then consuming services/goods from global corps, it's hard to build community. I don't have an answer here.. maybe we need religion again minus the homophobia.
Agree completely, that's why they say the biggest decline in recent years has been the middle class, so much attention in making sure everyone in the middle is equally in the middle, and less focus on the fact that the middle is itself on a decline.
You can't just define the middle class according to arbitrary income bands, as the presenter in your link does. The middle class is an ideal: a single family home, yearly vacations, pensions, etc. The presenter is pretending like we're complaining about the cost of Netflix subscriptions when we're actually complaining about major expenses like housing and education being less affordable relative to wages over time. I stopped watching after the presenter started comparing silent films to the MCU to prove how great our quality of life is today. It's a wildly disingenuous take and misses the entire point.
He might not be, but the way he is giving a talk, wearing a suit, has the video up on YouTube, and speaks as if he is very knowledgeable on the matter, if he were to be incorrect or ignorant, it would still have a disingenuous effect on the viewer, even if he doesn't know that he's wrong or ignorant and totally believes his own body odor smells of roses.
And notice I said "if he were to be incorrect or ignorant", I have not tried to fact check or anything what he's saying in the talk, and so I'm making no claim to the accuracy and veracity of it.
Besides the convenient mischaracterization of claims that the middle class is shrinking, I assume a "Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education," with a Ph.D. in Economics, would be aware of everything I wrote above and focus on those more important aspects.
Not saying youre wrong per se, but the problem with these sorts of loose definitions is that one can bend the definition to make whichever point one wishes to.
I think you make a valid point. I also think boiling the middle class down to some percentile range of income leaves us without any reason for the term itself. So maybe the percentile ranges alone aren't actually saying the same thing as "middle class."
But if someone wants to stand in front of a slide deck and explain why people who think the middle class is shrinking for the worse are wrong, I think they should either explain why that definition of the middle class is wrong, or explain why that particular definition of the middle class is not shrinking for the worse. Otherwise they're just talking past each other.
I don’t think it misses the point at all. The world is amazing today, and a larger number of people than ever get to experience an extraordinary standard of living.
And I totally think it’s true that people don’t realize how much they’re spending on modern conveniences that could be easily cut out if they wanted to live more cheaply.
amazing? years ago you could buy a house as a single person for cheap, you could save for retirement easily, no college debt, blablabla. what are you talking about? current and previous generation have it much more difficult than the boomer generation. without insanely high salaries you won't be able to buy a house in the bay area and pay for everything else.
In this particular case, the presenter is talking about the US middle class, and not worldwide trends, where I would otherwise agree with your sentiment.
So I really do think it's missing the point to say that the middle class isn't actually shrinking because we've got all these great new gadgets and services instead of traditional middle class trappings like housing. Compared to prior years, the difference in housing affordability relative to median income is equal to hundreds of maxed-out iPhones. [1],[2] Avoiding a new iPhone purchase or canceling a Blue Apron subscription won't make up the difference. These things aren't priced equivalently, and frugality doesn't work if one is completely priced out of the market.
First the income levels he is talking about in the middle class can easily pay for the life style you are talking about both in my area, and the region the Professor is from (PA) so I am not sure what you believe the middle class is
Second it does not matter where you place the income bands, the fact of the matter is people are making more money today then they did in the 1970's out pacing inflation which factors in things like housing prices. People today can afford MORE than people in 1970's did
In some ways the cost of netflix is what people are complaining about, it is sad you discounted everything said simply because you misunderstood the point he was making.
As to education people should be upset not with the cost of education but with the evaporation of good paying jobs that do not need an education. No society can last if the education system can not produce employable workers in 12 years of schooling. The fact that employers are requiring an additional 4 years for the vast majority of good paying jobs shows a clear problem with our government run educational system, so simply adding on 4 more years to the government paid system is likely not going to resolve that problem. However the only thing people are demanded today is free college not fixing the K-12 system so employers will recognize a high school diploma as enough education for the majority of their positions
To close I bet you can find a region, like silicon valley, where this data does not apply, but for the US on the whole people are better off, and if Silicon valley is where people are worse off then maybe it time to move away from the poop ridden streets and come to middle America where things are much better...
I'm just thinking purely of the distribution. Imagine you had 3 points and a scale of low to high, where low is always the lowest data-point, and high is always the highest data-point:
Low <---------------> High
P1 p2 p3
Here p2 is the middle class, and you're saying that p2 moved to be closer to p3? Like say:
Most sales reps are not especially well-compensated... it is a brutal job. The sales superstars and sales execs earn a lot but IMO absolutely deserve it. Any of those guys work WAY harder than any software dev. And have no idea how much money they're going to make until last day of the quarter. Rough stuff.
Lawyers I can see the case against, but remember that they are paying off a ton of debt, and missed a couple years of earnings in law school.
And the reason you don't see sales rep interview drama is that it's pretty simple. You hire people out of school or based on previous record and if they don't make their numbers even if mostly based on customer issues outside of their control, they don't get their bonuses or get let go.
The relevant quote I've heard is that "Sales managers have no trouble firing people."
Sales people will always be close to the money, by definition, and C-suite will always have the most equity (because they carry the most risk by dint of them being the face of the company).
The markets were white hot during COVID, and while lots of businesses suffered, lots went to the god damn moon
These numbers have more to do with who is responding to the optional IEEE benefits survey (the IEEE target demographic) than it does actual salaries.
There is a lot that seems odd with these numbers and they do not appear to be not very representative as they are poorly sampled and undersampled. the very first chart shows slow steady growth and in the others we see tons of massive jumps - for instance they show median male salary jumping from 112k in 2018 to 156k in 2020. That would be an insane jump for an entire industry in 2 years (unless the sampling is poor as is the case here).
Recognizing that the odds of this thread turning into a ****show are high, a piece of general advice:
Note whatever you feel compelled to say within the first 5 minutes of your deciding to leave a comment here. Discard it. Write an entirely new comment. Post that instead.
yep, its telling that most of the comments are rushing to make excuses as to why what the article says might not be true.
Not to say the article is the gospel truth, and something unexpected might be occurring, but the fact that it seems to be poster's first reflex says a lot.
Would have liked to see these numbers adjusted for cost of living. Making $145,000 in silicon valley is not anywhere comparable to making $145,000 in Podunk Florida, and thus I'm not sure what value to derive from this data, with respect to my own earnings.
Just scroll down and they provide a regional breakdown and the median difference is about 20k. So it actually makes sense for the median engineer to move to a cheaper location.
Geez, where the heck do any of these people work?!? I am a unix/linux expert, Ph.D. in computer engineering, and have been a tenure track professor (left to go back to systems administration due to an emergency which caused a family move).
Honestly, I have a lot of good experience. I thought I had a good job. I do not make anywhere near what the lowest of those salaries are, and my B.S. is not only in EECE, but I have a lot of analog design experience. Wholy mackerel, where do I sign up for the bottom of the line entry level position at any of those places?
Doesn’t EE/CE stuff generally cap out lower than software?
But anyway I feel you’re experience in regards to salary is going to depend on a number of different things like the market/industry/domain you’re in the market/industry/domain you started or established yourself in, etc.
Sure, but I did not think there was a $50k difference, and that would be me picking a pretty low figure from those graphs. I mean, the median given by the article is literally $60k more than some of the higher paid people I know.
And I am not EE/CE in my current role, I teach CS at a uni.
Yeah I guess I’m kinda confused. I’m really shocked to see industries like “consumer electronics” at the top, because of how many times I’ve heard of EEs jumping into mundane software roles because the pay is so much higher.
These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. Which kinds of people are participating in this IEEE study? I bet those people fit into different demographics and receive different compensation relative to the rest of tech.
The real comp numbers are much higher, since these numbers exclude profit sharing, which is greater than base salary for an experience engineer at Big Tech.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadOn the graph: White - 155k Black - 130k Asian - 156k
Is it time to talk about the gap between Blacks and Asians instead?
/s
Seniority is at least an objective measure, even if it is a terrible one. Besides which, no one says that's how a union has to work.
Hey, I need a new webcam for interviews because this 720p can’t seem to get decent lighting really does a number ob me there.
The union can post jobs internally and they have to evaluate internal candidates first. Some places I’ve worked even have it set up so that internal union members are sent to school for training before they will open it up to external hiring.
Credentialing. Union can enforce specific credentials that would then keep people otherwise qualified out.
I think these (which are scenarios I’ve seen) are worse than the current system where if you have the skills and can demonstrate them, then you can get a high paying job.
Sure, they don't have the same pay disparity as blacks (although there is still inequality within the cohort itself) - however, that's largely been a result of higher educational attainment, and the work ethic of Asians - and ignores the barriers they've had to overcome to get to that level.
However, there is still a level of casual racism - and even in the last year, a lot of anti-Asian assaults across America.
Also, this is an anecdote, in many places I've worked at, it's very common that management and above are mostly white males, but all the Asians are non-management. I've wondered how much of that is due to some cultural issue, versus how much is due to some bias in the system.
Is your model of the world falsifiable?
Lowell HS, here in SF, is a prime example [0], but also the lawsuits brought against Ivy League institutions [1] [2] [3]
[0] https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/San-Francisco-Lowel...
[1] https://spectator.org/asian-discrimination-sat-requirements/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/13/yale-illegally-discriminates...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/07/living/feat-mindy-kaling-brot...
Could you elaborate?
You see it everywhere. For example, the race chart here lists whites first. For other charts where category has no particular ordering (for example, technical competence), the bars were ordered by current salary. It's not even by relative share of the population, because there are more hispanics than blacks I believe.
Also, I wonder how the presence of 'other' throws off the numbers, because I bet many blacks are used to putting in 'other'. I know as a minority myself, I often check 'other' on these forms. It's no one's business and will only serve to hurt you.
Last time I checked, white people in the US weren't aspiring to attain Asian beauty standards.
Really?
Androgenous / gender non-conforming dress originated in KPop/anime/manga. Same with the slim aesthetic for men.
E-girls/boys are all the rage these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-girls_and_e-boys
Asians are quietly, but strongly breaking in to the charisma of the upper class. See the popularity of the movie Crazy Rich Asians.
In terms of power, it's debatable, but China seems like a more powerful nation than the United States every day that passes.
The problem isn't so much what value you put on the groups, as the gap itself.
Think of it more generically:
Anytime you'd see a big gap, it would be cause for concern, because we value that similar work should provide similar compensation no matter your race.And if you see that the gap is caused by the distribution of the type of work, for example, raceX is more likely to do work that pays more than raceZ. Well that's also an issue, because we value equal opportunity between races, and the assumption is if opportunity was truly equal, the data should not show a big gap in the choices of work made between races, especially for highly paid professions. At least it shouldn't show that without a clear explanation as to why that might be, which we don't have today.
I understand 100% where you come from with that comment, it can get annoying to feel personally blamed for inequality, where the real blame could be historical, or accidental, but I'd only say to try and be the better man, and get past that, because focusing on the "blame" both as a recipient or activist wanting to lash it out is counterproductive, keep the focus on the issue and discussions of solutions I think is the healthy path forward for everyone.
And you're right, articles like this one could also try harder at that.
How would you know? And how do you measure it?
It was harder to grow up in Kiev because you were in worse poverty than blacks in the US. Possibly. Were you also discriminated against in Kiev? Was your family broken, and your community broken? Did you have a failing school system relative to others in your community? It goes on. The point is there are many systems that make up "black in America" that doesn't translate to only family income.
Citation required.
I measure it by the number of opportunities one has or had in the past.Your practical education happens later because you did not have access to computers in any form.
You can't travel not only because of your passport but also because you simply cannot afford it.One cannot simply just go from Ukraine to a richer country in Europe like you can in the US.
It's simply the lack of available opportunities that hinders any progress.Even for world class engineers like Michal Zalewski that was the case: http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2015/03/on-journeys.html
>It was harder to grow up in Kiev because you were in worse poverty than blacks in the US. Possibly. Were you also discriminated against in Kiev? Was your family broken, and your community broken? Did you have a failing school system relative to others in your community?
You were always discriminated in Eastern Europe because of your lack of connections and corruption.Inept people have always had an upper hand here.
I dont know what you mean by "family broken".Many EE families were broken.I come from such family.After the fall of iron curtain i grew up in relative poverty where my mother had no job and she was constantly harassed by her drug addicted partner.My father dumped us long time ago and simply did not care.
What do you consider a broken community? You mean one where mafia runs free and where you cant go to the police because they are corrupt? Yes those were the times of 90s.
>The point is there are many systems that make up "black in America" that doesn't translate to only family income.
I think you dont understand the reality here.Being "already" in America makes you incredibly privileged.I remember EE STEM PHD engineers earning better wages frying chicken in the US than doing what they have actually studied for back home.
I am glad americans are finally acknowledging this phenomenon (BBT scene with russian janitor/physicist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd8sDquNYw) but since this is not their problem it is overshadowed by your racial wars.
It still makes me angry and sad though...
I can understand that would be the case wrt race but what about different cultures?
Having said that, Culture could be an explanation, but it would still be a problem, because children should have equal opportunity, and if it were true that culture can affect your opportunities, then it wouldn't be fair to have some children born into a culture that diminishes their opportunity. That's why we have a lot of laws already related to restricting certain ways you can raise your kids, like mandatory school, bans on corporal punishments, requirements to meet their basic needs, etc.
Beyond that, there are questions around culture as well, such as, would it be culture on its own? Or culture within a particular environment that might favor against certain cultures? And this might not even be in an actively and conscious discriminatory fashion. It could be as an accidental effect of compounding factors. For example, imagine that a particular market buying power is dominated by mostly people of culture A, they have the money, but as someone of culture B, you might not be able to understand or relate to that market and thus fail to appeal to them, meaning your business will be less successful as an effect of that.
Another big question around culture would be historical, for example, if you include in culture say a tendency to be illiterate, or a lack of insistence on intellectualism or education or reading, etc. It is possible the historical context influenced such a culture and did so unfairly.
My point basically is that first I think it's very early to really advance that the cause could be cultural and there are many other possibilities just as likely if not more. And even if culture is a factor, it's not a justification, and we should still strive to address the unequal opportunities it creates.
This is true for anyone making any claim here, including the claim that it is race alone (which i am pointing out is unaccounted for in op post)
> it wouldn't be fair to have some children born into a culture that diminishes their opportunity
I wholeheartedly disagree. It depends on what a culture values and monetary outcomes isnt everything. As an example, American culture is very different from my own (based in EU though ive lived and am frequently in the US). Our culture is generally less work centric, which may look like worse outcomes on paper, but there are so many things that cant be or aren't measured.
That's not the claim being made, the claim is the observed gap when grouping the data by race. That is a fact of the data as represented.
Why that gap exists is an open question, and so is how to potentially reduce the gap.
I think the fact that some people like you jump to believe immediately that it could be due to culture is just showing of your inherent bias. The same is true for those immediately jumping to believe it is caused by racism, that's showing of their inherent bias too.
Bias is unsubtiantied beliefs that you bring to the search space.
> Our culture is generally less work centric, which may look like worse outcomes on paper, but there are so many things that cant be or aren't measured
Three things. The first is that the article is about American jobs in the US. That means culturally we're talking about sub-groups within an American cultural context. The second is that we're comparing the same jobs in the same sector against each other. And the third is that I'd be interested in testing your theory, if true, it would mean that it should predict that if you grouped US tech salaries by your EU based culture, we should also see a lower pay compared to white American culture. I think that be interesting if the data was available for it. And if that does show, then I'd start to say that your theory is on the path of being more demonstrated correct, since it shows predictive capabilities.
I think it all matters what people mean by culture. Is access to capital, good education, mentoring, support in developmental growth, time (time to learn, study, play, etc.), and safety/care (loving parents, health issues taken care of, well fed, comfortable living/sleeping, etc.) is included in "culture" or is that separate?
Anyways, I wouldn't be surprised if those environmental elements play a big factor, and it's likely that some races simply line up more perfectly with those things as well which could explain why in turn you see the data show a gap between races.
But if by culture we mean things like music, native spoken and written language, traditions and customs, spiritual/religious beliefs, foods, clothes, art, folklore, etc. Well I don't know, I feel those would likely play less of a role.
I think some people might also imply "values" when they mean "culture". But I feel that possibly translates into environmental factors. Like if you don't value caring for your kid, helping them with their homework, encouraging them to read, learn, go to school, and all that, well it probably just leads to similarly deficient environmental factors, like maybe ending up in an environment with bad education, no mentorship, lack of safety and all that.
Maybe I'm reading into it, but I feel some people want to say that it's their fault, because their culture doesn't value education and intellectual pursuits and honesty, and hard work, etc.
And it seems to become a justification why they don't deserve any help or support or special treatment.
But to me, it seems to be exactly why something would need to be done. You don't actually choose your culture, you're born into it, and that seems unfair if by culture we imply those essential things that matter for success in life.
Especially if we talk about certain races, where other races probably directly contributed to that culture by forcibly curbing their interest in education, intellectualism and ambitions.
I find more modern efforts are probably going to yield much better effects on value of education, intellectualism and work ethics. And those are things like actual financial support and investment into better schooling for underprivileged neighborhoods, better access to loans, more access to paid for higher education programs, and yes, even things like accepting more people from those "cultures" into high paying jobs, and good graduate programs and schools, even if they aren't necessarily the top performers, as long as they still show the qualities needed to succeed.
Otherwise you've got a chicken and egg problem, so you need to take the ones that show promise to be able to break out, and really give them that chance and help them doing so, that can break the cycle.
I'm happy to adapt this to not a traditional notion of "race", there are white sub-culture like you say that suffer from these difficulties as well, and I think they'd need similar support.
Tangentially, on the topic of "ice-cream", I think you're simplifying things. It's a well known issue where hiding your culture (as in the way you dress, talk, eat, joke, the music you listen too, etc.) when your culture is surrounded by negative bias, can be necessary for yourself to enter higher financial spheres. Being called an ice-cream doesn't mean that the person was a cop out because they have a good job or make good money, it generally means that they adopted actual white cultural norms, as in, clothing, hairstyles, accent, behaviors, etc. And not as-in, honesty, hard working, and intellectualism.
That's the problem, that's why I said unless we have a very good explanation.
It's easy to fit some model over any data to explain it, but that doesn't make it a very good explanation.
So what we would need is very strong evidence that the surprising data we see is the result of some inherent cause, and not that of a sub-optimal system. Until then, the possibility that the system is sub-optimal remains, and the data continues to be surprising.
And if you see that the gap is caused by the distribution of the type of work, for example, raceX is more likely to do work that pays more than raceZ. Well that's also an issue, because we value equal opportunity between races, and the assumption is if opportunity was truly equal, the data should not show a big gap in the choices of work made between races
I think it's a big leap to assume that the genes that are similar between twins and which are responsible for such similar outcomes would also be similar between individuals of the same skin color.
For example, even once the study looked into non-identical twin, the similarities in outcomes drastically started to drop.
I'm not denying the possibility, when you still don't have a sure explanation lots of things are still a possibility. But I think you're jumping ahead with your conclusion a little too hastily, and in my opinion, I still think the data is surprising and that we don't really know why this difference in distribution really exists.
Furthermore, I'll add that modern genetic research is really putting in question our traditional categorization of "race".
> In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.
-- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...
What modern availability of large scale genetic data tells us, is that what we call "black", "white" and "asian" actually have very little genetic variance and uniqueness, and that it's actually possible some white people are closer genetically to some black people than they'd be to other white people.
Which would mean that if you grouped by traditional notion of race, like skin color, you might not be grouping by genetic similarities at all. That would reinforce the possibility then that the difference in the distribution is not genetic, but possibly socio-cultural.
there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded. It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions.
The title is is not representative of what the article is saying; no serious scientist is making the claim that race is a social construct. They're just saying we shouldn't make medical or other assumptions about individuals based on race, which is of course true.
The idea that races don't exist is a postmodern rejection of science based on a political agenda, and you should be skeptical of folks pushing it. If you study biology or evolution at any reasonable length the notion is just silly.
Source: I've analyzed survey data a lot
Yes, of course, there are variations from person to person, sans gender. But there are also gender-centric cultural norms.
This is why you have such varying claims about stuff like women earning equal pay with men. People who want social change (activists, politicans) group together the entire population, and come to the conclusion that women make 83 cents on the dollar. But when you break out along other dimensions (age/YOE, occupation, hours worked), the gap is reduced. But never eliminated!
What I'd really like to do some day is be smart enough to replicate https://www.metafilter.com/126704/with-numbers-like-these-wh... and see how more recent census data compares.
Data scientist here. The above is not the correct takeaway from Simpson's paradox. It is not generally correct that the trends seen in subdivided groups are closer to truth than overall groups; sometimes the opposite is the case. It depends entirely on what the divisions are and whether they make sense.
With regard to gender-based pay disparity, there are a multiplicity of factors, from the most obvious ("equal pay for equal work") to other factors such as the fact that professions largely staffed by women tend to get paid less than professions largely staffed by men. For instance childcare is miserably compensated, despite being a position of high responsibility and impact.
The consensus regarding women during the pandemic (not limited to tech workers) was that women have disproportionately sacrificed their careers to cover the needs of childcare and at-home schooling during the pandemic.
Not that I am demanding an answer from you specifically. It's just a weird question in the context of a country where wage labor is the only real source of income for individuals.
What seems like a plausible interpretation to my un-credentialed, low-IQ self is: 1. Within dimension comparisons in this instance may suggest that “like” populations are similar across gender, suggesting that there is no bias in how tech compensates women and men. 2. The distribution of said dimensions differing between men and women may reflect exogenous effects that are not controllable by tech since they’re upstream of the tech hiring process.
[0] http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r414.pdf
This is why the word truth was in scare quotes. And the word 'can' was also doing a lot of work in that sentence.
https://www.payscale.com/data/gender-pay-gap
The controlled salary (same job/qualifications) for Asians, have both men and women earning the same (women a tad higher even).
This explains observations like, when a field becomes more lucrative, it attracts more men. Or when a field becomes less lucrative, men abandon it and it ends up disproportionately female. So even if there's equal pay for the same job, men will earn more on average by being more likely to pursue the higher earning jobs.
Of course, we could say the fact that society values different things in men and women is sexism. That's true, but I'm not convinced it's sexism exclusively against women: a man who'd rather spend time with his kids is also negatively affected by society pushing him to be a breadwinner instead.
In the end, do wages matter more than general life satisfaction (not sure if either gender does better here), or other measures like life expectancy (which favors women)?
AFAIK - there isn’t an astounding amount of work being done by descendants of american slaves, people who are hispanic, native american, or pacific islander. So, maybe you can speak about which minorities you mean specifically.
The condition of the capitalist system is declining and more people are feeling it. By removing things the elites can point to, we narrow their ability to navigate.
The right wing is turning to conspiracy and nationalism as they usually do. However, they are the minority of the country (the friends and family of the ownership class is necessarily smaller than the prolaterians), they just have the ability to do a LOT of damage.
The key is for the working class right wing, these ideas are often against their material interest in either the short or long term and so they are a softer core that can be peeled away. Probably not with direct appeals, but by substantive action.
Only about 30-40% of the country are convicted right wingers, somewhere between a minority and a super-minority of the population, and a reasonable fraction (guessing 5-10%) of them would be peeled away by a positive material change in their circumstances by a re-distributive economic policy.
I spent just a few seconds looking at photos of 1960’s police brutality photos on Google and see white people in most of them.
https://www.google.com/search?q=1960%27s+police+brutality+pr...
Good time to also point out that conservative voters make up something like 24-25% of the population and liberal voters roughly the same. Half the population doesn’t vote in general though the numbers are higher for presidential elections than your average election.
https://www.kanopy.com/product/berkeley-sixties
EDIT: Looking at some side-by-sides with the George Floyd protests, it seems apparent to me that while there were some non-black participants in the 1960s, the proportion of them significantly increased.
https://www.google.com/search?q=george+floyd+protests&tbm=is...
Ignoring class divisions and real-world material conditions while we get rich and kibbitz about trivialities is the whole point, you can't run out of trivialities.
Spot on. I'd add... you can't run out of irrelevant trivialities.
Often though today, the things mentioned are not only trivial (not having any meaningful effect) but also irrelevant (in that the causal relationship hypothesized is extremely strained if not non-existent).
Right now the US is so divided and there's no strong left coalition to make demands. I feel we are in a nascent rebuilding phase where we have to knit together groups and build groups from unorganized elements. My current thinking is that these are issues people care about, so we should help them and explicitly link them into economic class struggle so that the nascent coalitions build towards something.
People that engage in the movements in any capacity AND talk with class conscious activists become more radical over time. Participation in solely liberal movements can do it too, but mostly to the point where the people participate feel something is missing as the liberal demands always undershoot the problem. They need to read and talk to socialists, and socialists need to listen more than they talk in those conversations.
My ire is for the tech 'activists' who spend their time deciding which innocent turns of phrase should be banned or which marvel movies needed more representation.
I've been slacking recently because of my fear of COVID-19, but previously I'd been doing community and workplace organizing. The real world is the only place that will actually improve things. The pandemic is a real bummer.
https://youtu.be/4J5s6aZCPSg?t=499
And notice I said "if he were to be incorrect or ignorant", I have not tried to fact check or anything what he's saying in the talk, and so I'm making no claim to the accuracy and veracity of it.
Not saying youre wrong per se, but the problem with these sorts of loose definitions is that one can bend the definition to make whichever point one wishes to.
But if someone wants to stand in front of a slide deck and explain why people who think the middle class is shrinking for the worse are wrong, I think they should either explain why that definition of the middle class is wrong, or explain why that particular definition of the middle class is not shrinking for the worse. Otherwise they're just talking past each other.
And I totally think it’s true that people don’t realize how much they’re spending on modern conveniences that could be easily cut out if they wanted to live more cheaply.
So I really do think it's missing the point to say that the middle class isn't actually shrinking because we've got all these great new gadgets and services instead of traditional middle class trappings like housing. Compared to prior years, the difference in housing affordability relative to median income is equal to hundreds of maxed-out iPhones. [1],[2] Avoiding a new iPhone purchase or canceling a Blue Apron subscription won't make up the difference. These things aren't priced equivalently, and frugality doesn't work if one is completely priced out of the market.
[1] https://quotewizard.com/news/posts/americas-unaffordable-hou...
[2] https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
Second it does not matter where you place the income bands, the fact of the matter is people are making more money today then they did in the 1970's out pacing inflation which factors in things like housing prices. People today can afford MORE than people in 1970's did
In some ways the cost of netflix is what people are complaining about, it is sad you discounted everything said simply because you misunderstood the point he was making.
As to education people should be upset not with the cost of education but with the evaporation of good paying jobs that do not need an education. No society can last if the education system can not produce employable workers in 12 years of schooling. The fact that employers are requiring an additional 4 years for the vast majority of good paying jobs shows a clear problem with our government run educational system, so simply adding on 4 more years to the government paid system is likely not going to resolve that problem. However the only thing people are demanded today is free college not fixing the K-12 system so employers will recognize a high school diploma as enough education for the majority of their positions
To close I bet you can find a region, like silicon valley, where this data does not apply, but for the US on the whole people are better off, and if Silicon valley is where people are worse off then maybe it time to move away from the poop ridden streets and come to middle America where things are much better...
Lawyers I can see the case against, but remember that they are paying off a ton of debt, and missed a couple years of earnings in law school.
The relevant quote I've heard is that "Sales managers have no trouble firing people."
Sales people will always be close to the money, by definition, and C-suite will always have the most equity (because they carry the most risk by dint of them being the face of the company).
The markets were white hot during COVID, and while lots of businesses suffered, lots went to the god damn moon
Sometimes this stuff really bums me out..time to get on leetcode I guess!
There is a lot that seems odd with these numbers and they do not appear to be not very representative as they are poorly sampled and undersampled. the very first chart shows slow steady growth and in the others we see tons of massive jumps - for instance they show median male salary jumping from 112k in 2018 to 156k in 2020. That would be an insane jump for an entire industry in 2 years (unless the sampling is poor as is the case here).
Note whatever you feel compelled to say within the first 5 minutes of your deciding to leave a comment here. Discard it. Write an entirely new comment. Post that instead.
Not to say the article is the gospel truth, and something unexpected might be occurring, but the fact that it seems to be poster's first reflex says a lot.
Honestly, I have a lot of good experience. I thought I had a good job. I do not make anywhere near what the lowest of those salaries are, and my B.S. is not only in EECE, but I have a lot of analog design experience. Wholy mackerel, where do I sign up for the bottom of the line entry level position at any of those places?
But anyway I feel you’re experience in regards to salary is going to depend on a number of different things like the market/industry/domain you’re in the market/industry/domain you started or established yourself in, etc.
And I am not EE/CE in my current role, I teach CS at a uni.