This completely ignores the elephant in the room that the supply way outstrips demand, and therefore the selection process naturally starts to incorporate many features additional to simply merit. If there are sufficient candidates in the well-off rubric why should we as a society artificially push anyone else into the arena? At least the well-off folks won't have their lives ruined if they fail to get tenure.
Seems rather dystopian to argue that it is good for society that poor people don't get opportunities because they can't weather failure as well as rich people.
> At least the well-off folks won't have their lives ruined if they fail to get tenure.
Which I read as pointing to the fact that poor people will have to invest almost all or actually all of their savings and income into their education. Someone with more fortunate circumstances might be able to use half of their savings or let their parents pay for it.
I wasn't arguing against the notion that rich people can weather failure better. That is objectively true. I was arguing against the notion that this is an acceptable outcome for society which was implied by the question asked in the prior sentence:
>why should we as a society artificially push anyone else into the arena?
We don't even need to get into the practical reasons that other comments mentioned. This is an inherently unjust way for society to be structured. That alone is enough reason to push for change.
My intention was not necessarily to imply that, but literally ask myself the original question - why push people into this when the outcome for them will likely be poor? Perhaps a good followup is to ask is, what can we do to both get a more diverse pool of academics without punishing those without means? I would think a massive expansion of the tenure track program would be needed, which is kind of what it was created for in the first place, just got too saturated. But that has its own slew of problems.
>why push people into this when the outcome for them will likely be poor?
You have used the word "push" multiple times and I'm not sure what you mean by that. I would frame it as "allow" and not "push" as the motivation at an individual level comes from the individual. The goal should be to remove obstacles that prevent poor people from joining academy. That isn't the same thing as pushing poor people into academia even if the end result is effectively the same at a societal level.
Either way, I simply think the answer to this question is self-evident based on the morals we claim to have as a society. We literally call it the American Dream. The station of one's birth should not eliminate a career like academia.
Sure, one example of what I have in mind are various efforts across the board to advertise "STEM"/"STEAM" careers, teach kids programming, promote STEM competitions, run STEM courses, etc. etc. This presumably "pushes" some fraction of people into these careers that otherwise would not have gone; but there is no corresponding increase in funding or safety nets. It's not a question of allowed or not - of course anyone is already welcome and able to join academia at least in the USA, it's just that the not well-off population probably drops off before the finish line due to financial constraints.
It is just semantics, but I don't consider that pushing kids into specific career paths. I tend to think of it like any other school subject. Would people say that having an English literature class in middle school is pushing kids to become writers or teaching high school kids calculus pushes them to be mathematicians? I instead view it as exposing kids to a wider breadth of topics in order to allow them to better self select what career paths interest them. It is still ultimately up to the individual kid to find the topic engaging and stick with it.
I'd argue that's exactly the world we already live in and mostly by design.
Another comment mentioned that science was a hobby for the aristocracy and I agree. Because of the big wealth inequality it seems to remain so as shown by the study.
Not sure how we can fix any of that within the current landscape though. It really seems to me like it's only really doable with huge systemic changes that will take many revolutions to happen.
Welcome to the archetypal mind of the conservative. When your axiom is "the current order is just and appropriate" then unconsciously every data point aligns to that principle. The wealthy are good and deserve thier advantage. The poor are bad and they deserve their disadvantage. The outcast or morally abhorrent as they stand opposed to the just order. It's nuts, but that's how they think. They are literally Slytherin and proud of it. It's an insanely dangerous mindset and we should call them out for it. It naturally creates a wall between in group and out group. Any ideology that fosters such division should be fought against. The future, if we are to have one must foster the expansion of our empathy, not it's contraction. It's literally the fight between good and evil. For both sides and from both perspectives. There can be no reconciliation or melding of views. Yin and Yang, light and dark. The internet has laid bare this basic divide and there is a war coming in America. Maybe even a literal war.
It's not just america.
It will be the foundation of the next world war.
The fight is between collectivism and individualism.
Collectivization requires that all sacrifice and all gain, lashed together.
Individualism allows for some to sacrifice and for some to gain, devil take the hindmost.
The questions facing those of us undecided on our allegiance are:
Is our morality objective?
Are we willing to die for a stranger?
Are we willing to risk being ruled if we are uncomfortable ruling?
Do we truely want the same things?
Is harm minimization or gain maximization a better long-term strategy?
> If there are sufficient candidates in the well-off rubric why should we as a society artificially push anyone else into the arena?
1. You get better prepared people. Any society based on nepotism is doomed to fail.
2. You get different views on how to solve problems. People with different background have different experiences that give a wider view of the world.
3. It is fair. Injustice is a bad way of running a society.
> At least the well-off folks won't have their lives ruined if they fail to get tenure.
Everybody in a society has a right to a good life. That someone does not get a tenure does not mean that their life has ended, there are many possibilities in life and governments have to provide safety nets to help people to get back on their feet.
I agree with your points. However, I think we still have the problem that there is too much supply, and pushing more people into it does them a disservice.
Yes, it helps the scientific establishment re: points 1. and 2. As for 3., perhaps true, but I'm not sure it helps those individuals and thus conflicts with the next point that "Everybody in a society has a right to a good life."
This may be colored with a US-centric point of view because social safety nets are not great, and if they existed to a greater extent maybe my criticism would be mitigated and it would be fine to push against the market. But without that I think many people are better off pursuing opportunities more appropriate for them.
Perhaps parents with PhDs pass on genetic traits that support their offspring in the competition for PhDs and faculty positions. Unless the analysis controls for that dynamic, the research cannot correctly measure "socioeconomic" effects. As far as I can tell, the study does not attempt to do so.
Eugenics has been shown time and time again to be junk/non science. This is like criticizing a dermatology study for not "controlling" for the possibility of lizard people.
GP isn't referring to eugenics. GP is pointing out that there may be heritable traits that lead one to be more successful in a PhD program. This could be grit, determination, ability to focus, or ability to recognize patterns. It would be surprising if there were no heritable traits that affected success in PhD programs.
GPs comment is no more eugenicist than someone pointing out that children of NBA players are more likely to play in the NBA because height is somewhat heritable.
Possibly, and that's what the whole video is about. The point is that we don't know how much of the difference is behavioral or related to wealth if we don't even try to consider the possible effects of heritability.
Or it could be that children of PhDs come from an environment where they know what’s required to get a PhD. Neither of my parents had bachelor’s degrees. I had no idea that any PhD worth its salt would be something that the PhD student was paid to attend rather than would pay to attend.
And as an aside, my cousin’s husband has a PhD and yet none of his kids have graduate degrees, while in my family, out of three brothers, there’s a DVM, and MS and me with a MS and MFA.
No one is debating whether there are environmental factors. Surely there are. The point is that there are also likely heritable factors. These cannot be erased. And without measuring them, we don't know how much of a "problem" it is that many professors have PhD parents.
Same thought here. They could look at children of PhDs versus children of MBAs/JDs. If you compare with the whole US population you're missing a lot of nuance.
I suppose what you're looking for is a study based on children adopted by PhDs.
My intuition says genetics is vastly less important than memetics. Success is almost certainly proportional to ability to manage dopamine and I think nurture is probably vastly more important than nature (although I think nature can assert itself forcefully).
This certainly seems to suggest that genetics probably is not a key factor:
Because things like success are the result of many factors, I think the study is fair even in the absence of genetics. I have a hard time believing that genetics being a dominating factor for outcome would not be an obvious/major/easily discovered and proven finding.
I completely disagree. From my experience it's virtually 100% genetics.
The reason it's not an "obvious/major/easily discovered and proven finding" is because it's basically illegal research. Anyone who tries to study the genetics of success gets their reputation and career destroyed because race and genetics are also linked.
The kids end up like their birth parents, their economics or social environment makes little difference.
Some kids are so opposed to how their parents are they actually move out (in early teens) and live with other people, and have little contact with their parents.
And despite that, they still end up just like their parents once they are past the teen stage.
It's also amazing to see how some kids are just like their father, some like their mother, and some a mix of both (some traits from one parent, some from the other parent).
But you don't see kids who are unlike either parent.
> I have a hard time believing that genetics being a dominating factor for outcome would not be an obvious/major/easily discovered and proven finding.
IQ is 57-80% heritable [1]. It's not the same as probability of getting a PhD, but it's hard to argue it wouldn't be a significant (it doesn't have to be "dominating", as you put it) factor.
Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to
have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that
disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis.[11][12]
[13][14] The scientific consensus is that genetics does not
explain average differences in IQ test performance between
racial groups.[15][16][17][18][19][20]
I think if you stepped outside of your shoes and said "would someone who disagrees with me find the way I have conducted myself convincing?" you wouldn't like the answer.
No, you are asking for social reinforcement of your idea to make you feel good about what appears on the outside to be quite unpleasant beliefs that wouldn't fly around educated people.
You are invoking a conspiracy to justify your belief.
Systemic racial discrimination in academia (despite Democrats outnumbering Republicans 10 to 1 in faculty [1] - curiously few studies look at whether that might be due to discrimination) is a perfectly analogous conspiracy, yet it is accepted by default.
However, you are correct - cherry-picking which parts of an article to believe is not very convincing. So let me substantiate my claim:
The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. [2]
That was in 1985. Nowadays, it is done openly: Nature publicly stated they will not publish studies that may "harm" (broadly defined) various groups [3], regardless of validity, and commitments to diversity are officially required by one fifth of academic jobs [4].
Of course, if we're talking about discrimination in academia, we skipped a step: as your own quotation implies ("it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis"), there are group IQ disparities. Since IQ is a useful (if imperfect) measure of academic ability, from that alone we would expect disparate outcomes, even in a perfect meritocracy. It does not matter if the IQ disparities are genetic, cultural, or socio-economic in origin (or some combination thereof).
Though it is strange. Bizarre even. Nearly every other heritable human trait - height, skin pigmentation, lactose tolerance, eye and hair color, bone density, sickle cell trait, muscle composition, high altitude adaptation [5], alcohol metabolism [6], etc., is unevenly distributed among human groups. Yet even though IQ and personality are both heritable [7] and variable, they're the rare exception, perfectly equally distributed among all human groups? Nature truly works in mysterious ways.
This is a fair point. I think another point about this is how someone is socialized or raised by their parents. It could be that people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds value PhD work more so than others so they are more likely to attempt to do it.
I don't really see the point in making the claim that there is some kind of bias against people from poorer backgrounds. It just inflames things. Maybe people from poorer backgrounds prefer to seek jobs with higher salaries.
> I think another point about this is how someone is socialized or raised by their parents.
Speaking as someone who went through grad school, there is an enormous amount of information that no one will tell you about unless you know to ask. Otherwise, they'll just assume you know. Basic parts of how academia works are not really explained or communicated to new grad students. So people with parents in academia, or with prior experience, can offer their children huge gains by simply explaining how certain processes work or what it actually means to excel as a grad student to prepare for the job hunt. It's not always "do good research", it could also be "make sure you make a relationship with so-and-so". Asymmetrical information can be a powerful explainer and tool.
Science was traditionally the hobby of the aristocracy, and the middle-class scientist is only a very recent invention.
It's a shame that the career seems to be reverting to a track that only the independently wealthy can pursue. Governments funding basic science as a long term investment in R&D is essential to building and maintaining a large and diverse population of experts to draw from for new ideas and innovations.
Science pays significantly worse that almost anything else you can do with the same skillset. The only real money making pipeline in physics is to immediately go into finance after getting your PhD, for example. Everyone else who stays in research is taking a pay cut in exchange for doing work they are passionate about.
On the one hand I think it's a good thing for science that the vast majority of people who only want to make money leave the field. The problem is the barrier to entry for people who really just want to do science. Most of this in the form of the cost of undergrad education, and PhD program sripends being too low to support a family.
I saw this anecdotally in grad school. Despite coming from a solidly middle class family I was definitely on the poorer side of my colleagues at the R1 I attended.
You also see it in pretty much any field that confers status in exchange for lower pay. Starkest example I can think of is journalism, where you do a lot of schooling and low-paid or unpaid internships before you're able to get your first low-paying job.
IIRC Graeber put some observations about this effect in Bullshit Jobs, especially as it relates to creatively or ethically fulfilling jobs with some decent social status attached to them. Media, non-profit careers, that kind of thing.
Journalism has also become a sort of "status" job post-watergate for a lot of Ivy leaguers. The steps from journalism to "media consultant" are pretty small and there's a huge network effect of 'who you know' coming into play. Going to the same school as a judge or politician can open doors.
This is the same way in pretty much all creative fields, though. Museums and galleries are a particularly egregious example. You can start working there for peanuts as a student and find out your fellow student colleagues regularly go to the French Riviera to "recharge" for a weekend.
I'd much rather the children of wealthy families went into research or the arts - as long as they are not bad at what they do and displace more talented people by being connected - rather than they go into finance or management and make more money.
IANARK (rich kid) but I imagine they see how unfulfilling the money chase is growing up and choose other paths. Which is good for them and good for society. I bet this is part of the "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" dynamic.
These studies seem to consistently play down the importance of "culture." By that, I mean that some families tend to place very great importance on education and learning (and consequently prioritize it above other activities), and these families are likely to be ones where the parents hold a bachelors/masters/phd degree.
Somehow, the studies focus almost completely on the economic status that the family derives out of higher education and attribute all the benefits to income. Sure, there's definitely a link between how much time you can afford to spend on academics when you're poor, but after a threshold -- probably somewhere near middle income families -- the economic status starts to matter less and less, and the importance and priority accorded to education starts to matter a lot more.
Kids from these families can also foresee their career path more clearly on account of having a parent already in the field. It's a natural and obvious effect, but to see this success as a negative and attribute it almost completely to income and nepotism is disingenuous.
Agree it completely simplifies it so that it can lean in on inequality plot so they can leverage get more engagement.
The family culture on science and education has a much greater weighting then money on outcome. I wonder if they could add that weighting to the equation how different the story line is. I am not discounting that money has benefits but theres a common narrative/fallacy that having the money drives outcomes. It's useless without culture.
To be fair to the researchers the amount of effort to determine culture is more challenging -- requiring at minimum some kind of questionnaire.
I think it's because the idea of culture is deeply offensive to individualistic Americans. Individual outcomes must either be the result of starting conditions (parent income/education/etc), or individual effort. Either way, you can think of each person individually, in terms of those variables.
For people used to that model, it makes no sense to talk about "culture"--where outcomes depend on groups of individuals reinforcing norms. My parents both have masters degrees, most of their friends have at least a masters degree. They're still upset my brother never got past his bachelors (even though the reason he didn't is that he went from an Ivy into finance). When my parents get together with their friends they talk at length about where their kids are on the educational/career ladder. If you have the slightest inclination to follow the herd and care about what your parents think (which most kids do) then of course culture has a tremendous impact.
Spot on. Culture is a taboo topic for Americans, although they're as influenced by it as it anyone else. The only kind of "culture" they can acknowledge (generalizing here but once I saw this, I couldn't unsee it) is one that is created with purpose, for a short term, like in software companies. Not the organic, multi-generation, undirected type.
It's not taboo on the right. You can find right-wingers who'll talk your ear off about how culture is what's "wrong" with, say, black America, all day long. Shit, if there are any first or second generation black African immigrants nearby while you're talking, they might chime in to strongly agree—I've seen that enough times that I'd say there's some substantial body of that demographic that's sympathetic to that point of view.
Now, maybe you can dismiss this as a thin veneer over outright racism, but it's also not the only culture-related thing they're happy to talk about. They're huge on culture—at least, they're huge on talking about it.
(for the record, my own politics are farther left than most elected Democrats, on practically every issue—I'm not striking a blow for "my tribe" here)
Having looked you up and getting a profile, I would agree that culture is a factor but I still put it in the bucket of “unconfirmed significance”. Funny how stereotypes recall memories, but I am parts repulsed and parts impressed by the pigeonhole you fill. Anyways, it’s perhaps less about you than the milieu you represent.
I imagine you can apply culture similarly to why white Americans would choose their own to advance up career ladders.
Looking at your post history I suspect we are culturally not that different. That culture certainly seems like it helped (discouraging dating when young, getting and staying married, having children which creates motivation, etc).
White Americans don’t “choose their own to advance.” People from my part of the world, and yours, are way more likely to favor their own ethnic groups.
I agree with you on ethnic favoring in some sense, but it’s a complex topic.
And white Americans have an entire culture reinforcing their customs, way of life, ways of interacting, etc. All this contributes to how a corporate culture is very accommodating to the dominant culture. For example Sunday as a weekend is not a mere cultural relic but actively supports a particular culture.
I see people often point to hard-working of Asian cultures to contrast against the “under performing” minorities like black culture. But I think this undersells a lot of structural discrimination and history.
Anyways, this is why I have skepticism towards “model minorities” wanting to integrate into white culture customs and assume a dominant position in society. A lot of the narrative of “hard-working immigrant” and cultural exceptionalism ignores the sociopolitical context of why certain minority groups are underprivileged.
And in Bangladesh where I’m from Friday and Saturday are the weekend days to accommodate Friday prayers. People would get very mad if foreigners came to Bangladesh and complained about that. To me, it’s more of an assimilation into “white culture” to come to America as a foreigner and then loudly insist that the dominant culture change to accommodate you. It’s quintessential white American individualism.
The situation of ADOS is of course different. Their ancestors didn’t come here as voluntary immigrants to an already developed country. There is no comparison. But I think that point cuts both ways. How I act as an invited guest in this country isn’t any commentary on the entirely unrelated political situation of ADOS people. It would be utterly disingenuous of me to complain about a system where people like me do far better in nearly every metric than the dominant culture.
Foreignness in America is quite different consider how traces of native peoples have been erased and marginalized. And if American culture is to deliver on an individualistic promise, we should expect to see more changes in the dominant culture. But white cultural dominance has a fragile ego, having been established through violence and discrimination, which by the way is not so unique as far as dominant cultures go.
But discussions of culture will inevitably touch on the factors that gave rise to certain features. So the fact that many black Americans have ancestry in slaves trafficked to the US, is not separable from the discussion on why Asian Americans are discriminated in higher education admissions.
Anyways, call what I say rooted in Americanism or what have you, the fact is Bangladeshi culture has a much different history than American culture, so calls to be accommodating of other cultures in America strike a different tone than it would in trying to change Bangladeshi culture (itself rooted in a reaction against erasure of language and culture).
Finally, all of this is to say, while culture has an influence in some regards, it’s not so separate from the wealth gaps and inequities which stratify folks.
I mean, the process by which I came to have an Arabic surname coming from a place 3,000 miles away from the Middle East was not exactly bunnies and rainbows.
I hear what you’re saying, but it seems to me like you’re calling for a moral double standard. It implicitly assumes that Americans have a capacity to behave to a higher standard than Bangladeshis or Indians or Chinese. I remember talking with someone about Trump voters, and I mentioned I had no trouble understanding them because they’re reacting just like Bangladeshis would if the shoe were on the other foot. And this very liberal white lady says disgustedly: “well, this isn’t Bangladesh.” One of the only times I’ve ever encountered a white American express to my face that they believe they’re morally superior.
No moral double standard, just standard. I believe American culture is deficient in many aspects, and so requires change and criticism is one vehicle for this. Similarly, Arab, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, etc culture will have its deficiencies.
For a long time America has this belief of “exceptionalism” and sometimes to a crazy degree where its people act like they are the center of the world. That the cracks are showing and people are recognizing unfairness is a laudable thing.
Your first paragraph makes a great observation, that your culture is intrinsically tied to historical factors, in this case political dominance and religious and cultural spread.
So the habits a person of a certain culture has, these are rooted in what they inherited of this culture. These habits are a result of historical influences, which includes previously mentioned inequities, wealth gaps, etc.
> I think it's because the idea of culture is deeply offensive to individualistic Americans.
These studies often break down when looking at the same data broken down by racial groups because it simply can't explain Asian-American scores. Poor Asian immigrant households fare much better than other races at the same socio-economic level, so much so that certain authors have started to use the term "white adjacent" [0] to get around the issue.
No, because there are group effects. When you’re a poor Chinese kid in queens living in an ethnic neighborhood where most kids do math tutoring on weekends, that will reinforce that behavior and discourage negative behaviors, such as skipping your math tutoring. Studies show that friends and parents of friends have a bigger impact on children than their parents.
> Kids from these families can also foresee their career path more clearly
This is very true. However I still think among people I knew, wealth counts for more.
For example when I was in grad school one of the professors in our department liked to proudly remark that he was proof that you could have a viable career even if you change your field substantially in a second post-doc. Eventually I heard someone else explain it as, "Well, if your parents make a large donation to the lab then the PI will accept you as a free (no cost to the lab) post-doc and train you." In contrast, people I knew from academic families but with relatively middle-class financial means still got railroaded / pigeonholed into the areas where they specialized, even though they were much better at navigating academia than I was.
I know, the above is just anecdotes. How could we resolve it? I dunno, run a study? But as you say wealth is much easier to measure than culture, so we may be stuck with our respective perspectives for a while...
All it takes to deflate the narrative is a look at the success rate of recent immigrants to the USA and compare that to those who have been there for generations. An honest observer will notice that e.g. Nigerian immigrants do much better on average than "African Americans" (an odd name given that those Nigerian immigrants are far more "African" than those who claimed this name for themselves). This difference in outcome can not be due to the often-claimed "systemic racism" since that would affect a Nigerian fresh out of Lagos just as much. What, then, is the difference? That thing which these studies studiously avoid: culture.
Here's a few excerpts from an article [1] on the subject of Nigerians immigrants to the USA outperforming nearly all other groups - and yes, they outperform native-born Caucasians:
Education is an essential part of our culture ... we were encouraged to excel. Parents expected it of us ...
Sometimes that is why Nigerians in diaspora — especially the first generation — can be reluctant to talk about race and racial barriers, because we are conditioned to not say, ‘It is not going to work for me because . . . ’. They don’t want to talk about racial bias. They want to talk about the opportunities...
By not looking for "racism" but taking their lot in their own hands this group of people ended up as one of the most successful [2] ethnic groups in the USA. Had the narrative around "systemic racism" been true this would not be the case, i.e. the narrative is false. It is not just false but it is pernicious in that it leads to exactly the lack of success which these studies claim to want to solve.
> because we are conditioned to not say, ‘It is not going to work for me because . . . ’. They don’t want to talk about racial bias. They want to talk about the opportunities...
As an immigrant raising “children of color” in America, this keeps me up at night. My parents never taught me to expect racism and so I’ve never encountered it in any meaningful sense living in this country.
But folks are on a kick about it now and want to teach my kids to think that way, and I think it’s setting them up for failure. How does it help my kids to be looking for and see racism? Even if one of them grows up and has a racist boss, can they really do anything about it? They can’t. It just means they need to work harder.
What can you do, other than telling your children that aiming for success is no more "acting white" than it is "acting Nigerian" or "acting Indian" or "acting Russian" or whatever? Speak up when the race baiters support their narrative, go to school board meetings and let the cabal know you're not having any of it. Home school if that is feasible, especially when your have access to a group of like-minded neighbours. Don't allow the narrative to go by without speaking up against it no matter when it comes up - in the media, in popular culture, at social gatherings, in church or mosque or synagogue or temple, etc. Don't be preachy but just state the facts as you know and have experienced them. You may be called out on doing so, may be accused of acting against your own interests, acting "white", being an uncle Tom and more of such but that is a hurdle you'll have to take - it just means you're getting close to the target.
Also, vote according to what candidates have done and what they promise to do, not according to "how people like you are supposed to vote". The people pushing this narrative do so because they expect to gain or keep power by portraying themselves as representatives of people like you, let them know they do not represent you and that their false narrative is not welcome because of the reasons you stated. While voting - and letting people know why you did so - won't solve the immediate problems caused by these false prophets it does help to deflate their narrative. There is a whole industry and economy built around keeping the narrative alive - Thomas Sowell had written extensively about this - so it won't just disappear overnight but once enough people speak up against it out will be hard for them to keep up the appearance of being righteous... and they'll change their target to some other identity category like gender or religion (this is already happening).
The tricky thing is that in my social context, the (liberal) white people are the ones encouraging minority kids to adopt an unhealthy, race conscious attitude. It puts me in the awkward position of having to emphasize race to gently remind my daughter that her dad and grandparents know way more about how to be brown in America than her teachers do.
By the way, “Uncle Tom” is too obvious. The new dog whistle is “pick me.”
How do they react when you confront them with your own experience of parents never telling you to expect racism and thus never encountering it in any meaningful sense? This should not be possible according to the narrative unless you were living in that one special area where systemic racism did not exist, i.e. Utopia. Even more interesting is to know how they react when confronted with the fact that their narrative leads people to believe their fate to be preordained in that they will always be held back. The '...so why even try...' is tacked on through countless programs aiming for 'equity' - equality of outcome - where the state will provide for those who fail to do so by themselves. It is here where people make careers based on the narrative, here in this 'welfare-industrial complex' (to paraphrase Eisenhower) which grows as large as it is allowed to grow. The larger it grows, the more people have their livelihood staked on its existence either through employment or by being recipients of its handouts. This large group of people has an incentive to vote for those who promise to keep up the narrative which in turn ensures that even more young people are caught in its snares by being convinced they do not have any chance to succeed 'so why even try'. It is a vicious circle which needs to be stopped somehow, the narrative needs to be punctured and those caught by it need to be shown they can succeed without the need for government-enforced 'equity'.
Completely missing the mark here. Talking about education as part of the culture, is not also taking into account that African American communities were discriminated over a long period of time and had their culture and ability to build wealth suppressed. Nigerians were colonized, it’s true, but African Americans were enslaved and then subject to Jim-Crow era laws in addition to the current-day legal regime, which no doubt influenced African American culture and neighborhoods and basically most aspects of life. If you look at Nigeria today, there are certainly many parts of Nigeria where “western education” is not valued. But when you look at Nigerians who immigrated to the US, you’re not seeing the representative Nigerian demographic, just a small (elite) slice.
Additionally, you’re selecting out of the population when you just look at the minorities that were able to immigrate to the US. You should compare minorities that came to the US in representative chunks of the greater population — perhaps war refugees although even these communities have skews based on the nature of their immigration to the US.
I agree with your first point. As to your second, it’s notable that Nigerian Americans have greater mobility even than similarly educated whites: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001... (“Controlling for age, education, and disability, the wages of second-generation Nigerian Americans have reached parity with those of third- and higher generation whites.”)
That is great for Nigerian Americans perhaps speaks also to other factors in their favor. Would be curious to see breakdowns in lineage.
As for descendants of slaves in the US, please check out these lectures by Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary, and her theory on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome. She did much research and readings into the history of American blacks and compared with other peoples. Her work focuses on how healing can occur after centuries of generational trauma.
Specifically, check out minutes 15:19 (bookmark “Systemic generational trauma” to 32:47 “Denigrating the Child”.)
2: https://youtu.be/BGjSday7f_8
This great talk on the history of slavery and Jim Crow in the US and explains how both black and white Americans have trauma leftover from the legacy of discrimination.
Finally, as a desi person I must add that our (especially older) communities are often quick to deride and hold racism against African Americans. There is much belief in exceptionalism in immigrants to the US contrasted against the “failed” minorities. Well, as the child of immigrants, I anecdotally see that much of the success comes from a continuity and sense of belonging from family, values, religion, etc which while colonized, still maintain memories former glories. In contrast, American slaves were ripped out from their historical context and shipped transatlantic.
So as the professor notes, talking about “culture” and saying “it’s their culture” is really a misnomer and attempt to distract from the very real trauma that continues to be inflicted.
> Well, as the child of immigrants, I anecdotally see that much of the success comes from a continuity and sense of belonging from family, values, religion, etc
Please take a look at the lectures, indeed culture is influential in individual behavior but culture is often used as a cover for more nefarious iniquities. Culture is often also a product of these. So when we talk about culture to dismiss why wealth gaps or injustices are important, then we are distracting from root causes.
Culture in America goes hand-in-hand with socioeconomic status. A substantial portion of desis and Nigerians in America are of the highest economic class back in their respective homes, and they're coming from that culture. If that culture erodes as it can over generations, their social/economic mobility patterns start following that of the rest of Americans'.
In America, today, in streets you can potentially see folks who lived in a time before the civil rights movement. It's an alarming contrast which is being overlooked: the immigrant Africans from moneyed and successful families and the other group couldn't drink from the same fountain as his fellow man, and not be able to send their kids to the good schools
> Culture in America goes hand-in-hand with socioeconomic status. A substantial portion of desis and Nigerians in America are of the highest economic class back in their respective homes, and they're coming from that culture. If that culture erodes as it can over generations, their social/economic mobility patterns start following that of the rest of Americans'.
I think most Americans would fight you on even that second sentence. Because that implies culture matters. And that maybe it would help Appalachians get out of multi-generational poverty if they absorbed culture from Nigerian immigrants.
That aside, culture in America often doesn’t track with socioeconomic status. Many Chinese Americans, for example, came to California as laborers and the overtook white Californians. Vietnamese Americans came here as refugees and did the same. Asians have the highest poverty rate in NYC, but also dominate the selective admissions schools.
I think what is missing from a lot of these conversations, particularly in academia, is the topic of meritocracy.
Does being black make you a measurably worse candidate (in aggregate)? Does being black mean you will have a harder time succeeding in a meritocracy?
If the answer is no, then what we see in terms of results are a matter of personal choice and there is no business in performing interventions.
If the answer is yes, then the follow up question is why?
If the answer is genetics, that is incredibly hazardous with extremely bleak societal consequences.
If the answer is parental wealth, that means as long as black people (in aggregate) are poor, black candidates (in aggregate) are going to be measurably worse.
The obvious conclusion that an academic or DEI executive must reach is that meritocracy promotes systemic "-isms". The obvious conclusion is that the only way to deal with the problem are social programs or reparative efforts (reparations -- such as affirmative action).
This _also_ presupposes it's actually a meritocracy - unless "knowing a guy that knows a guy" gives someone merit, or our interpretation of merit, or our approximation of merit.
And, just as your series of rhetorical questions also directs, that has long-reaching consequences.
>If the answer is parental wealth, that means as long as black people (in aggregate) are poor, black candidates (in aggregate) are going to be measurably worse
This just means it will take more than one generation to reach a random socioeconomic distribution, which is exactly what you would expect. If you have two buckets, poor & not poor, with a 10% chance to escape poverty, the system will reach random equilibrium eventually. It might just take a long time (10 generations to get within 5% of a random distribution in this example).
If outcomes are based on parental wealth (races treated equal), you will eventually achieve a random race distribution among social classes.
If outcomes are based on biased treatment due to skin color (not wealth), the system will not reach a random racial equilibrium.
We know parental wealth produces better performing children (merit). This is one reason why growing up in poverty is considered a bad thing (lost potential).
The question then becomes (1) do we care more about having meritocratic systems or racial equality. If we care more about racial economic equality, the question then becomes (2) how much are we willing to deviate from meritocracy to achieve racial economic equality. The more you deviate from meritocracy, the faster racial equality will be achieved.
I think these are both valid questions and worth discussing openly.
Your initial post rubbed me the wrong way, but the change is intellectually satisfying.
I think the major component missing on the "do more" side is generational suffering, I think the major component on the other side is "why do I have to sacrifice for my parents sins."
Ultimately it is not "us vs them" and the solution does not have to be zero sum. That framing, the default framing, is bad for everyone. All of these discussions should come down to one core idea. Take more money from the rich and give it to the poor in the form of social programs in order to promote a more efficient and productive society. A rising tide lifts all boats.
People can exist in a state of deprivation, satisfaction, and excess. As a society we have a responsibility to minimize deprivation. If we minimize deprivation, I think institutions will be able to stay meritocratic (which benefits society) without being corrupted by culture wars and political battles. I think that is probably the happy medium.
Thanks for giving it a reread. I edited my post quite heavily to spell out my point and avoid language that might induce knee-jerk reactions to the idea.
I think I broadly agree with what you are saying. The zero sum part comes into the picture when people consider it in terms of stack ranking, opposed to total suffering or deprivation. To advance from last place in a stack, someone needs to go down. Unfortunately so much of the conversation is mired in this framing that it is difficult to escape - so I am glad to find someone else willing to look beyond it.
I do think there is a fundamental conflict between merit and an expectation of equal outcomes. How could there not be given the massive harm and intergenerational legacy of slavery. That is to say, we must deal with the world as it is, and this incudes real differences in merit, not because of genetics, but due to a harm so great the impacts are still persistent today. By way of metaphor, you can't beat someone bloody today, and expect them to perform with average merit tomorrow.
The sad but inescapable truth is that this damage will persist for generations to come, no matter how much we tilt the scales of competition or break the rules.
It is my personal opinion that we should double down on blinding our institutions to race, ensure equality of competition, while doing our best to help the poor engage in productive society, independent of race.
I think many people would find this disagreeable, but I think it is the only solution compatible with treating people equally as induvial humans.
When I was doing my phd I noticed many advantages those that had parents which already navigated the system. Building up my C.V. with publications, workshops, presentations, teaching work, writing in public etc. (evidence of competence) is an impossible job to do when I figured out I needed this at the the end of my PhD to get the professor job. My colleagues that knew all this portfolio building and what is in and what is relevant had a huge leap up. I was just happy to finish with my publications and thesis.
There is also a tonne of relationship building opportunities that I didn't realize I had after I finished. So, many things are also unsaid that when my children go in I will know how to help them navigate.
Big thing for me as well. I didn't even know about internships or research assistant summer positions until too late often. Part of the reason why I left academia.
Outreach really does work and would have helped me.
So many opportunities and how to pace yourself. Keeps going. So much is about being in the right places at the right time. Learning this for the first time you going to make mistakes.
I'm confused. The title says parent's income affects career, the start of video says 1/4 of academics have at least one parent holding phd, the end of video says diversity is important because it brings different way of thinking so we need different gender, race, socioeconomic status, country of origin. Feels like many things conflating together.
Anecdotally, most people who are successful in their career are either having parents in the same profession, or have parents providing secure childhood/early adult that allows them brew their career.
Programmer parents, professional music player parents, having access to computer programmer at early age, etc. The first shoulder of giants are from parents, isn't it?
Agreed. As with many of these studies, it assumes that parental nurturing and education has no bearing on individual merit. As if a Mozart, educated in music from the age of three had the same merit as an orphan who never saw an instrument.
There is a subtle bait and switch from merit (capability at time of assessment) to learning potential (at the time of conception).
You might expect groups on average to have the same a potential at conception, but their merit and capability is impacted by their environment.
> The qualifications for being a professor should be related to your capability as a scientist, your ability to teach, and quality as a mentor. It should not be related to your parent's income or education level.
You can stop listening after this (0:45) because this is where the blunder is. The complaint is that most professors have a parent with a PhD. They also make comparisons with the average population. First off, only 1.2% of Americans have a PhD. So we're likely working with outlier data to begin with and you can't compare with the average population in a simple way. Second off, we need to account for household trends. I'll claim that it is quite common that children follow in the footsteps of their parents and this isn't unique to academics. I say this as someone who is at the tail end of my PhD and where I am the only one on either side of my family that is even involved in STEM. My peers had very different childhoods than I did and it is unsurprising that growing up in an academic culture results in them following along. Most of my family followed the rest of my family in pursuing business and sales. I grew up hearing sales terms and strategies all my life. Friends learned calculus early because their parents knew it and taught it to them. Why the difference? Because both our families used different tools to navigate their lives and had a different set of objectives for what is important to success and thus taught their children that.
Why is this important? Because the premise is asking how to "resolve" this issue and create a more equitable system. There's two important factors we need to understand: what assumptions have been made and what is the causal graph. For the assumptions, one that seems fair was made but actually isn't. The assumption made is that your parent's education level does not correlate with your abilities as a scientist/educator/mentor. But this is a bad assumption. A better assumption to start with it: a randomly selected child has a similar upper bound in their capacity as a scientist/educator/mentor. Why are these different? Because the environments these children grew up in are different. Even if you are born of poor professors (or even grad students) then you're still going to grow up in an academic household, hearing academic terms and having academic frameworks for thinking. Grow up in a household like mine and you hear about the Ivory Tower and how stuck up academics are. We can't ignore 30 years of someone's life and make accurate conclusions about outcomes. The children who grew up in academic households likely got closer to their upper limit capacity as a scientist/educator/mentor than the child who didn't. They have gotten more education/training, even if everything else is held equal (income, schooling, health, etc). Given more training, we should expect a bias!
There is a lot of talk about equity, equality, and meritocracy going on these days but without real understanding of what any of these things are. I'm sorry, but none of these things exist and they cannot exist. To achieve any of these systems would result in revoke one's free will, to make humans robotic. This is a choice we need to make. It is incredibly hard to measure things, and if we rely just on measurements we'll make grave errors (see the state of ML). There is a lot of noise in the system and we can't ignore it. I'm not saying we shouldn't make the world better (including being more fair and reducing nepotism), but we can't pretend that the world is simple. This idea of "good enough" or "if you understand it you can explain it to a layman" are terrible notions and only take us steps back. Yes, they work for many cases but they do not work for complex systems. The history of human kind has been a history of increasing complexity. We are adaptable creatures, but this is something difficult to adapt to given our evolutionary constraints. But we...
> the qualifications for being a professor should be related to your capability as a scientist your ability to teach and your quality as a mentor.
> should not be related to your parents income or education level but unfortunately this is the case
His initial assertion is that being a professor should be related to your ability to teach, but he cannot see the relationship between higher parental income level or higher parental education level and a person's ability to teach.
Nor does he pay much attention to the idea that a parent with expertise is like a very motivated private tutor for that expertise.
> this would ignore the economic component as the study also found that on average academics come from wealthier families this would likely mean that they went to more expensive schools and could afford more expensive colleges previous
Here the guy in the video catches a brief glimpse of awakening, an understanding that economic factors make you (in aggregate) a better candidate.
This is the core idea of the liberal definition of woke. Without understanding this core principle, you can't see the systemic racism. You can't have a cohsive, coherrant, or convincing narrative.
> the more money we receive from our parents the more likely we are to continue on to do a PhD
Here again the guy in the video is dangerously close to understanding that people who aren't spending time meeting their basic needs are more able to spend time becoming qualified to be a professor.
> the more prestigious the university the more likely faculty is to have a PhD parent this means that more prestigious universities are hiring from a smaller pool
Here the guy in the video contradicts himself. Prestigious universities have way more choice and therefore they are able to be more selective. The demographics the candidates come from are smaller, but that does not mean the pool of options is small. Here we see again, that the author does not understand that more money is the same thing as more meritorious candidate, by his own definition of merit.
If the most meritorious candidates come from a narrow set of people then we would expect more selective institutions to have a narrow set of staff.
Since the guy does not see that that the distribution of merit itself is not equal among various sets of people, the guy is prevented from seeing the truth.
> diversity is so important we want people from different backgrounds as they bring a different way of thinking which is crucial to science
Here we see the author starting to change his definition of merit. Merit is no longer scientific capability and ability to teach and mentor alone, but also defined by their diverse perspective.
> this means that when hiring new faculty committees should consider all aspects of diversity gender race socioeconomic status country of origin and many more this will help to maximize
And this is the contradiction that so enrages conservative people. The video starts out saying choose professors based on merit, and ends with lets choose factors other than merit.
The guy in the video is still sleeping while dreaming of being awake.
Anectodally, this reminds me of a discussion I heard coming from a former boss, discussing a team which had two junior graphic designers and one of them was being let go.
He concluded that it was a shame that the one who was somewhat more resourceful, or arguebly slightly more competent tool-wise, was just not at the same level as the other one because that other one you could see that was exposed to arts from a young age, so it could naturally argue about colors and aesthetic in a way the other one just couldn't grasp. He was just He just couldn't see how he could eventually overcome this gap with his peers, and he would most likely have that difficulty throughout his career.
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[ 0.84 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] thread> At least the well-off folks won't have their lives ruined if they fail to get tenure.
Which I read as pointing to the fact that poor people will have to invest almost all or actually all of their savings and income into their education. Someone with more fortunate circumstances might be able to use half of their savings or let their parents pay for it.
>why should we as a society artificially push anyone else into the arena?
We don't even need to get into the practical reasons that other comments mentioned. This is an inherently unjust way for society to be structured. That alone is enough reason to push for change.
My intention was not necessarily to imply that, but literally ask myself the original question - why push people into this when the outcome for them will likely be poor? Perhaps a good followup is to ask is, what can we do to both get a more diverse pool of academics without punishing those without means? I would think a massive expansion of the tenure track program would be needed, which is kind of what it was created for in the first place, just got too saturated. But that has its own slew of problems.
You have used the word "push" multiple times and I'm not sure what you mean by that. I would frame it as "allow" and not "push" as the motivation at an individual level comes from the individual. The goal should be to remove obstacles that prevent poor people from joining academy. That isn't the same thing as pushing poor people into academia even if the end result is effectively the same at a societal level.
Either way, I simply think the answer to this question is self-evident based on the morals we claim to have as a society. We literally call it the American Dream. The station of one's birth should not eliminate a career like academia.
Sure, one example of what I have in mind are various efforts across the board to advertise "STEM"/"STEAM" careers, teach kids programming, promote STEM competitions, run STEM courses, etc. etc. This presumably "pushes" some fraction of people into these careers that otherwise would not have gone; but there is no corresponding increase in funding or safety nets. It's not a question of allowed or not - of course anyone is already welcome and able to join academia at least in the USA, it's just that the not well-off population probably drops off before the finish line due to financial constraints.
Another comment mentioned that science was a hobby for the aristocracy and I agree. Because of the big wealth inequality it seems to remain so as shown by the study.
Not sure how we can fix any of that within the current landscape though. It really seems to me like it's only really doable with huge systemic changes that will take many revolutions to happen.
The fight is between collectivism and individualism.
Collectivization requires that all sacrifice and all gain, lashed together.
Individualism allows for some to sacrifice and for some to gain, devil take the hindmost.
The questions facing those of us undecided on our allegiance are:
Is our morality objective? Are we willing to die for a stranger? Are we willing to risk being ruled if we are uncomfortable ruling? Do we truely want the same things? Is harm minimization or gain maximization a better long-term strategy?
1. You get better prepared people. Any society based on nepotism is doomed to fail.
2. You get different views on how to solve problems. People with different background have different experiences that give a wider view of the world.
3. It is fair. Injustice is a bad way of running a society.
> At least the well-off folks won't have their lives ruined if they fail to get tenure.
Everybody in a society has a right to a good life. That someone does not get a tenure does not mean that their life has ended, there are many possibilities in life and governments have to provide safety nets to help people to get back on their feet.
This may be colored with a US-centric point of view because social safety nets are not great, and if they existed to a greater extent maybe my criticism would be mitigated and it would be fine to push against the market. But without that I think many people are better off pursuing opportunities more appropriate for them.
So the downtrodden shouldn't ever attempt anything. Also why is this a binary between tenure and financial ruin?
GPs comment is no more eugenicist than someone pointing out that children of NBA players are more likely to play in the NBA because height is somewhat heritable.
And as an aside, my cousin’s husband has a PhD and yet none of his kids have graduate degrees, while in my family, out of three brothers, there’s a DVM, and MS and me with a MS and MFA.
My intuition says genetics is vastly less important than memetics. Success is almost certainly proportional to ability to manage dopamine and I think nurture is probably vastly more important than nature (although I think nature can assert itself forcefully).
This certainly seems to suggest that genetics probably is not a key factor:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-pe...
Because things like success are the result of many factors, I think the study is fair even in the absence of genetics. I have a hard time believing that genetics being a dominating factor for outcome would not be an obvious/major/easily discovered and proven finding.
The reason it's not an "obvious/major/easily discovered and proven finding" is because it's basically illegal research. Anyone who tries to study the genetics of success gets their reputation and career destroyed because race and genetics are also linked.
I have a strong feeling that I am going to regret asking this, but what exactly is your experience?
The kids end up like their birth parents, their economics or social environment makes little difference.
Some kids are so opposed to how their parents are they actually move out (in early teens) and live with other people, and have little contact with their parents.
And despite that, they still end up just like their parents once they are past the teen stage.
It's also amazing to see how some kids are just like their father, some like their mother, and some a mix of both (some traits from one parent, some from the other parent).
But you don't see kids who are unlike either parent.
IQ is 57-80% heritable [1]. It's not the same as probability of getting a PhD, but it's hard to argue it wouldn't be a significant (it doesn't have to be "dominating", as you put it) factor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
No, you are asking for social reinforcement of your idea to make you feel good about what appears on the outside to be quite unpleasant beliefs that wouldn't fly around educated people.
You are invoking a conspiracy to justify your belief.
However, you are correct - cherry-picking which parts of an article to believe is not very convincing. So let me substantiate my claim:
The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. [2]
That was in 1985. Nowadays, it is done openly: Nature publicly stated they will not publish studies that may "harm" (broadly defined) various groups [3], regardless of validity, and commitments to diversity are officially required by one fifth of academic jobs [4].
Of course, if we're talking about discrimination in academia, we skipped a step: as your own quotation implies ("it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis"), there are group IQ disparities. Since IQ is a useful (if imperfect) measure of academic ability, from that alone we would expect disparate outcomes, even in a perfect meritocracy. It does not matter if the IQ disparities are genetic, cultural, or socio-economic in origin (or some combination thereof).
Though it is strange. Bizarre even. Nearly every other heritable human trait - height, skin pigmentation, lactose tolerance, eye and hair color, bone density, sickle cell trait, muscle composition, high altitude adaptation [5], alcohol metabolism [6], etc., is unevenly distributed among human groups. Yet even though IQ and personality are both heritable [7] and variable, they're the rare exception, perfectly equally distributed among all human groups? Nature truly works in mysterious ways.
[1] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...
[2] https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2
[4] https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_adaptation_in_hu...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction
[7] https://www.nature.com/articles/tp201596
I don't really see the point in making the claim that there is some kind of bias against people from poorer backgrounds. It just inflames things. Maybe people from poorer backgrounds prefer to seek jobs with higher salaries.
Speaking as someone who went through grad school, there is an enormous amount of information that no one will tell you about unless you know to ask. Otherwise, they'll just assume you know. Basic parts of how academia works are not really explained or communicated to new grad students. So people with parents in academia, or with prior experience, can offer their children huge gains by simply explaining how certain processes work or what it actually means to excel as a grad student to prepare for the job hunt. It's not always "do good research", it could also be "make sure you make a relationship with so-and-so". Asymmetrical information can be a powerful explainer and tool.
It's a shame that the career seems to be reverting to a track that only the independently wealthy can pursue. Governments funding basic science as a long term investment in R&D is essential to building and maintaining a large and diverse population of experts to draw from for new ideas and innovations.
On the one hand I think it's a good thing for science that the vast majority of people who only want to make money leave the field. The problem is the barrier to entry for people who really just want to do science. Most of this in the form of the cost of undergrad education, and PhD program sripends being too low to support a family.
You also see it in pretty much any field that confers status in exchange for lower pay. Starkest example I can think of is journalism, where you do a lot of schooling and low-paid or unpaid internships before you're able to get your first low-paying job.
This is the same way in pretty much all creative fields, though. Museums and galleries are a particularly egregious example. You can start working there for peanuts as a student and find out your fellow student colleagues regularly go to the French Riviera to "recharge" for a weekend.
IANARK (rich kid) but I imagine they see how unfulfilling the money chase is growing up and choose other paths. Which is good for them and good for society. I bet this is part of the "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" dynamic.
Somehow, the studies focus almost completely on the economic status that the family derives out of higher education and attribute all the benefits to income. Sure, there's definitely a link between how much time you can afford to spend on academics when you're poor, but after a threshold -- probably somewhere near middle income families -- the economic status starts to matter less and less, and the importance and priority accorded to education starts to matter a lot more.
Kids from these families can also foresee their career path more clearly on account of having a parent already in the field. It's a natural and obvious effect, but to see this success as a negative and attribute it almost completely to income and nepotism is disingenuous.
The family culture on science and education has a much greater weighting then money on outcome. I wonder if they could add that weighting to the equation how different the story line is. I am not discounting that money has benefits but theres a common narrative/fallacy that having the money drives outcomes. It's useless without culture.
To be fair to the researchers the amount of effort to determine culture is more challenging -- requiring at minimum some kind of questionnaire.
For people used to that model, it makes no sense to talk about "culture"--where outcomes depend on groups of individuals reinforcing norms. My parents both have masters degrees, most of their friends have at least a masters degree. They're still upset my brother never got past his bachelors (even though the reason he didn't is that he went from an Ivy into finance). When my parents get together with their friends they talk at length about where their kids are on the educational/career ladder. If you have the slightest inclination to follow the herd and care about what your parents think (which most kids do) then of course culture has a tremendous impact.
Now, maybe you can dismiss this as a thin veneer over outright racism, but it's also not the only culture-related thing they're happy to talk about. They're huge on culture—at least, they're huge on talking about it.
(for the record, my own politics are farther left than most elected Democrats, on practically every issue—I'm not striking a blow for "my tribe" here)
I imagine you can apply culture similarly to why white Americans would choose their own to advance up career ladders.
White Americans don’t “choose their own to advance.” People from my part of the world, and yours, are way more likely to favor their own ethnic groups.
And white Americans have an entire culture reinforcing their customs, way of life, ways of interacting, etc. All this contributes to how a corporate culture is very accommodating to the dominant culture. For example Sunday as a weekend is not a mere cultural relic but actively supports a particular culture.
I see people often point to hard-working of Asian cultures to contrast against the “under performing” minorities like black culture. But I think this undersells a lot of structural discrimination and history.
Anyways, this is why I have skepticism towards “model minorities” wanting to integrate into white culture customs and assume a dominant position in society. A lot of the narrative of “hard-working immigrant” and cultural exceptionalism ignores the sociopolitical context of why certain minority groups are underprivileged.
The situation of ADOS is of course different. Their ancestors didn’t come here as voluntary immigrants to an already developed country. There is no comparison. But I think that point cuts both ways. How I act as an invited guest in this country isn’t any commentary on the entirely unrelated political situation of ADOS people. It would be utterly disingenuous of me to complain about a system where people like me do far better in nearly every metric than the dominant culture.
But discussions of culture will inevitably touch on the factors that gave rise to certain features. So the fact that many black Americans have ancestry in slaves trafficked to the US, is not separable from the discussion on why Asian Americans are discriminated in higher education admissions.
Anyways, call what I say rooted in Americanism or what have you, the fact is Bangladeshi culture has a much different history than American culture, so calls to be accommodating of other cultures in America strike a different tone than it would in trying to change Bangladeshi culture (itself rooted in a reaction against erasure of language and culture).
Finally, all of this is to say, while culture has an influence in some regards, it’s not so separate from the wealth gaps and inequities which stratify folks.
I hear what you’re saying, but it seems to me like you’re calling for a moral double standard. It implicitly assumes that Americans have a capacity to behave to a higher standard than Bangladeshis or Indians or Chinese. I remember talking with someone about Trump voters, and I mentioned I had no trouble understanding them because they’re reacting just like Bangladeshis would if the shoe were on the other foot. And this very liberal white lady says disgustedly: “well, this isn’t Bangladesh.” One of the only times I’ve ever encountered a white American express to my face that they believe they’re morally superior.
For a long time America has this belief of “exceptionalism” and sometimes to a crazy degree where its people act like they are the center of the world. That the cracks are showing and people are recognizing unfairness is a laudable thing.
Your first paragraph makes a great observation, that your culture is intrinsically tied to historical factors, in this case political dominance and religious and cultural spread.
So the habits a person of a certain culture has, these are rooted in what they inherited of this culture. These habits are a result of historical influences, which includes previously mentioned inequities, wealth gaps, etc.
These studies often break down when looking at the same data broken down by racial groups because it simply can't explain Asian-American scores. Poor Asian immigrant households fare much better than other races at the same socio-economic level, so much so that certain authors have started to use the term "white adjacent" [0] to get around the issue.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/critical-race-theory-has-no-idea-wh...
This is very true. However I still think among people I knew, wealth counts for more.
For example when I was in grad school one of the professors in our department liked to proudly remark that he was proof that you could have a viable career even if you change your field substantially in a second post-doc. Eventually I heard someone else explain it as, "Well, if your parents make a large donation to the lab then the PI will accept you as a free (no cost to the lab) post-doc and train you." In contrast, people I knew from academic families but with relatively middle-class financial means still got railroaded / pigeonholed into the areas where they specialized, even though they were much better at navigating academia than I was.
I know, the above is just anecdotes. How could we resolve it? I dunno, run a study? But as you say wealth is much easier to measure than culture, so we may be stuck with our respective perspectives for a while...
Here's a few excerpts from an article [1] on the subject of Nigerians immigrants to the USA outperforming nearly all other groups - and yes, they outperform native-born Caucasians:
Education is an essential part of our culture ... we were encouraged to excel. Parents expected it of us ...
Sometimes that is why Nigerians in diaspora — especially the first generation — can be reluctant to talk about race and racial barriers, because we are conditioned to not say, ‘It is not going to work for me because . . . ’. They don’t want to talk about racial bias. They want to talk about the opportunities...
By not looking for "racism" but taking their lot in their own hands this group of people ended up as one of the most successful [2] ethnic groups in the USA. Had the narrative around "systemic racism" been true this would not be the case, i.e. the narrative is false. It is not just false but it is pernicious in that it leads to exactly the lack of success which these studies claim to want to solve.
[1] https://africans-in-america.com/2020/10/30/what-makes-nigeri...
[2] https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/spotchecks/yes-nigerian-...
As an immigrant raising “children of color” in America, this keeps me up at night. My parents never taught me to expect racism and so I’ve never encountered it in any meaningful sense living in this country.
But folks are on a kick about it now and want to teach my kids to think that way, and I think it’s setting them up for failure. How does it help my kids to be looking for and see racism? Even if one of them grows up and has a racist boss, can they really do anything about it? They can’t. It just means they need to work harder.
Also, vote according to what candidates have done and what they promise to do, not according to "how people like you are supposed to vote". The people pushing this narrative do so because they expect to gain or keep power by portraying themselves as representatives of people like you, let them know they do not represent you and that their false narrative is not welcome because of the reasons you stated. While voting - and letting people know why you did so - won't solve the immediate problems caused by these false prophets it does help to deflate their narrative. There is a whole industry and economy built around keeping the narrative alive - Thomas Sowell had written extensively about this - so it won't just disappear overnight but once enough people speak up against it out will be hard for them to keep up the appearance of being righteous... and they'll change their target to some other identity category like gender or religion (this is already happening).
By the way, “Uncle Tom” is too obvious. The new dog whistle is “pick me.”
Additionally, you’re selecting out of the population when you just look at the minorities that were able to immigrate to the US. You should compare minorities that came to the US in representative chunks of the greater population — perhaps war refugees although even these communities have skews based on the nature of their immigration to the US.
As for descendants of slaves in the US, please check out these lectures by Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary, and her theory on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome. She did much research and readings into the history of American blacks and compared with other peoples. Her work focuses on how healing can occur after centuries of generational trauma.
1: https://youtu.be/g6H7gGUQIFs
Specifically, check out minutes 15:19 (bookmark “Systemic generational trauma” to 32:47 “Denigrating the Child”.)
2: https://youtu.be/BGjSday7f_8 This great talk on the history of slavery and Jim Crow in the US and explains how both black and white Americans have trauma leftover from the legacy of discrimination.
Finally, as a desi person I must add that our (especially older) communities are often quick to deride and hold racism against African Americans. There is much belief in exceptionalism in immigrants to the US contrasted against the “failed” minorities. Well, as the child of immigrants, I anecdotally see that much of the success comes from a continuity and sense of belonging from family, values, religion, etc which while colonized, still maintain memories former glories. In contrast, American slaves were ripped out from their historical context and shipped transatlantic.
So as the professor notes, talking about “culture” and saying “it’s their culture” is really a misnomer and attempt to distract from the very real trauma that continues to be inflicted.
Isn't this what most people would call culture?
In America, today, in streets you can potentially see folks who lived in a time before the civil rights movement. It's an alarming contrast which is being overlooked: the immigrant Africans from moneyed and successful families and the other group couldn't drink from the same fountain as his fellow man, and not be able to send their kids to the good schools
I think most Americans would fight you on even that second sentence. Because that implies culture matters. And that maybe it would help Appalachians get out of multi-generational poverty if they absorbed culture from Nigerian immigrants.
That aside, culture in America often doesn’t track with socioeconomic status. Many Chinese Americans, for example, came to California as laborers and the overtook white Californians. Vietnamese Americans came here as refugees and did the same. Asians have the highest poverty rate in NYC, but also dominate the selective admissions schools.
Does being black make you a measurably worse candidate (in aggregate)? Does being black mean you will have a harder time succeeding in a meritocracy?
If the answer is no, then what we see in terms of results are a matter of personal choice and there is no business in performing interventions.
If the answer is yes, then the follow up question is why?
If the answer is genetics, that is incredibly hazardous with extremely bleak societal consequences.
If the answer is parental wealth, that means as long as black people (in aggregate) are poor, black candidates (in aggregate) are going to be measurably worse.
The obvious conclusion that an academic or DEI executive must reach is that meritocracy promotes systemic "-isms". The obvious conclusion is that the only way to deal with the problem are social programs or reparative efforts (reparations -- such as affirmative action).
And, just as your series of rhetorical questions also directs, that has long-reaching consequences.
This just means it will take more than one generation to reach a random socioeconomic distribution, which is exactly what you would expect. If you have two buckets, poor & not poor, with a 10% chance to escape poverty, the system will reach random equilibrium eventually. It might just take a long time (10 generations to get within 5% of a random distribution in this example).
If outcomes are based on parental wealth (races treated equal), you will eventually achieve a random race distribution among social classes.
If outcomes are based on biased treatment due to skin color (not wealth), the system will not reach a random racial equilibrium.
We know parental wealth produces better performing children (merit). This is one reason why growing up in poverty is considered a bad thing (lost potential).
The question then becomes (1) do we care more about having meritocratic systems or racial equality. If we care more about racial economic equality, the question then becomes (2) how much are we willing to deviate from meritocracy to achieve racial economic equality. The more you deviate from meritocracy, the faster racial equality will be achieved.
I think these are both valid questions and worth discussing openly.
I think the major component missing on the "do more" side is generational suffering, I think the major component on the other side is "why do I have to sacrifice for my parents sins."
Ultimately it is not "us vs them" and the solution does not have to be zero sum. That framing, the default framing, is bad for everyone. All of these discussions should come down to one core idea. Take more money from the rich and give it to the poor in the form of social programs in order to promote a more efficient and productive society. A rising tide lifts all boats.
People can exist in a state of deprivation, satisfaction, and excess. As a society we have a responsibility to minimize deprivation. If we minimize deprivation, I think institutions will be able to stay meritocratic (which benefits society) without being corrupted by culture wars and political battles. I think that is probably the happy medium.
I think I broadly agree with what you are saying. The zero sum part comes into the picture when people consider it in terms of stack ranking, opposed to total suffering or deprivation. To advance from last place in a stack, someone needs to go down. Unfortunately so much of the conversation is mired in this framing that it is difficult to escape - so I am glad to find someone else willing to look beyond it.
I do think there is a fundamental conflict between merit and an expectation of equal outcomes. How could there not be given the massive harm and intergenerational legacy of slavery. That is to say, we must deal with the world as it is, and this incudes real differences in merit, not because of genetics, but due to a harm so great the impacts are still persistent today. By way of metaphor, you can't beat someone bloody today, and expect them to perform with average merit tomorrow.
The sad but inescapable truth is that this damage will persist for generations to come, no matter how much we tilt the scales of competition or break the rules.
It is my personal opinion that we should double down on blinding our institutions to race, ensure equality of competition, while doing our best to help the poor engage in productive society, independent of race.
I think many people would find this disagreeable, but I think it is the only solution compatible with treating people equally as induvial humans.
There is also a tonne of relationship building opportunities that I didn't realize I had after I finished. So, many things are also unsaid that when my children go in I will know how to help them navigate.
Outreach really does work and would have helped me.
Anecdotally, most people who are successful in their career are either having parents in the same profession, or have parents providing secure childhood/early adult that allows them brew their career.
Programmer parents, professional music player parents, having access to computer programmer at early age, etc. The first shoulder of giants are from parents, isn't it?
There is a subtle bait and switch from merit (capability at time of assessment) to learning potential (at the time of conception).
You might expect groups on average to have the same a potential at conception, but their merit and capability is impacted by their environment.
You can stop listening after this (0:45) because this is where the blunder is. The complaint is that most professors have a parent with a PhD. They also make comparisons with the average population. First off, only 1.2% of Americans have a PhD. So we're likely working with outlier data to begin with and you can't compare with the average population in a simple way. Second off, we need to account for household trends. I'll claim that it is quite common that children follow in the footsteps of their parents and this isn't unique to academics. I say this as someone who is at the tail end of my PhD and where I am the only one on either side of my family that is even involved in STEM. My peers had very different childhoods than I did and it is unsurprising that growing up in an academic culture results in them following along. Most of my family followed the rest of my family in pursuing business and sales. I grew up hearing sales terms and strategies all my life. Friends learned calculus early because their parents knew it and taught it to them. Why the difference? Because both our families used different tools to navigate their lives and had a different set of objectives for what is important to success and thus taught their children that.
Why is this important? Because the premise is asking how to "resolve" this issue and create a more equitable system. There's two important factors we need to understand: what assumptions have been made and what is the causal graph. For the assumptions, one that seems fair was made but actually isn't. The assumption made is that your parent's education level does not correlate with your abilities as a scientist/educator/mentor. But this is a bad assumption. A better assumption to start with it: a randomly selected child has a similar upper bound in their capacity as a scientist/educator/mentor. Why are these different? Because the environments these children grew up in are different. Even if you are born of poor professors (or even grad students) then you're still going to grow up in an academic household, hearing academic terms and having academic frameworks for thinking. Grow up in a household like mine and you hear about the Ivory Tower and how stuck up academics are. We can't ignore 30 years of someone's life and make accurate conclusions about outcomes. The children who grew up in academic households likely got closer to their upper limit capacity as a scientist/educator/mentor than the child who didn't. They have gotten more education/training, even if everything else is held equal (income, schooling, health, etc). Given more training, we should expect a bias!
There is a lot of talk about equity, equality, and meritocracy going on these days but without real understanding of what any of these things are. I'm sorry, but none of these things exist and they cannot exist. To achieve any of these systems would result in revoke one's free will, to make humans robotic. This is a choice we need to make. It is incredibly hard to measure things, and if we rely just on measurements we'll make grave errors (see the state of ML). There is a lot of noise in the system and we can't ignore it. I'm not saying we shouldn't make the world better (including being more fair and reducing nepotism), but we can't pretend that the world is simple. This idea of "good enough" or "if you understand it you can explain it to a layman" are terrible notions and only take us steps back. Yes, they work for many cases but they do not work for complex systems. The history of human kind has been a history of increasing complexity. We are adaptable creatures, but this is something difficult to adapt to given our evolutionary constraints. But we...
> should not be related to your parents income or education level but unfortunately this is the case
His initial assertion is that being a professor should be related to your ability to teach, but he cannot see the relationship between higher parental income level or higher parental education level and a person's ability to teach.
Nor does he pay much attention to the idea that a parent with expertise is like a very motivated private tutor for that expertise.
> this would ignore the economic component as the study also found that on average academics come from wealthier families this would likely mean that they went to more expensive schools and could afford more expensive colleges previous
Here the guy in the video catches a brief glimpse of awakening, an understanding that economic factors make you (in aggregate) a better candidate.
This is the core idea of the liberal definition of woke. Without understanding this core principle, you can't see the systemic racism. You can't have a cohsive, coherrant, or convincing narrative.
> the more money we receive from our parents the more likely we are to continue on to do a PhD
Here again the guy in the video is dangerously close to understanding that people who aren't spending time meeting their basic needs are more able to spend time becoming qualified to be a professor.
> the more prestigious the university the more likely faculty is to have a PhD parent this means that more prestigious universities are hiring from a smaller pool
Here the guy in the video contradicts himself. Prestigious universities have way more choice and therefore they are able to be more selective. The demographics the candidates come from are smaller, but that does not mean the pool of options is small. Here we see again, that the author does not understand that more money is the same thing as more meritorious candidate, by his own definition of merit.
If the most meritorious candidates come from a narrow set of people then we would expect more selective institutions to have a narrow set of staff.
Since the guy does not see that that the distribution of merit itself is not equal among various sets of people, the guy is prevented from seeing the truth.
> diversity is so important we want people from different backgrounds as they bring a different way of thinking which is crucial to science
Here we see the author starting to change his definition of merit. Merit is no longer scientific capability and ability to teach and mentor alone, but also defined by their diverse perspective.
> this means that when hiring new faculty committees should consider all aspects of diversity gender race socioeconomic status country of origin and many more this will help to maximize
And this is the contradiction that so enrages conservative people. The video starts out saying choose professors based on merit, and ends with lets choose factors other than merit.
The guy in the video is still sleeping while dreaming of being awake.
He concluded that it was a shame that the one who was somewhat more resourceful, or arguebly slightly more competent tool-wise, was just not at the same level as the other one because that other one you could see that was exposed to arts from a young age, so it could naturally argue about colors and aesthetic in a way the other one just couldn't grasp. He was just He just couldn't see how he could eventually overcome this gap with his peers, and he would most likely have that difficulty throughout his career.