Pie Fight

Miss, that little boy crumpled on the ground over there pushed me

At least once a week now, the Guardian has a column bemoaning the cruelty and arrogance of atheists, and the dire lot of the religious in this country. For example, Madeline Bunting recently railed against outspoken atheists such as Richard Dawkins.

Don't get me wrong, I think Dawkins is a bore. But when they criticism him and his anti-religion ilk, Bunting and the burgeoning religious crew writing inthe Guardian appear to operate under the fallacy that it's only the anti-religious lot who are attempting to impose their values, and that religion is a poor bullied weakling. Tell that to the gays, Madeline (famous apologist for homophobic Muslim clerics). And tell that to the 17-year-old girl in Ireland who the religious crew is trying to force to stay in Ireland and bring her baby to term, rather than go to England for a termination, even though the baby has no head, and is guaranteed to die within three days of birth. And tell it, Madeline, to the UK women unfortunate enough to have as a doctor one of the 40% of GPs who say they would refuse to refer a woman on for an abortion, on 'moral grounds'.

Religion has been imposing itself on the rest of us for thousands and thousands of years. Just because in a relatively enlightened country such as the UK it has less power to do so than before, doesn't mean it still isn't doing it all the time, and still trying to do it even more. Just because you take this for granted, Maddy, doesn't mean it isnt' happening. So enough with this silly notion that religion is the victim because a handful of verbal atheists are giving it a heckling. It's been bullying us for years, and isn't going to stop until we force it to.

The economic value of lighter coloured skin

Belle Waring points to a study showing strong correlation between skin colour and economic success among recent immigrants to the US.

Immigrants with the lightest complexions earned, on average, about 8 to 15 percent more than those with the darkest skin tone after controlling for race and country of origin as well as for other factors related to earnings, including occupation, education, language skills, work history, type of visa and whether they were married to a U.S. citizen.

In fact, Hersch estimated that the negative impact of skin tone on earnings was equal to the benefit of education, with a particularly dark complexion virtually wiping out the advantage of education on earnings….

The trouble with diversity

Lizard Breath has a look at a book that argues that attention to diversity diverts us from a more important focus on inequality.

Via CT, a Valve seminar on this book.

Why do Koreans own foodstores in black neighbourhoods?

Why don't blacks own them? Here's the first sensible answer I've ever seen. Excellent stuff.

A number of folks commented on Mike's post about Andrew Young, essentially asking why African-Americans don't run corner stores and coffee shops. I don't know much about coffee shops, but let's take three categories of small businesses that immigrants tend to concentrate on: corner shops, dry cleaners, and doughnut shops. What do all these have in common? First, they are very low margin enterprises. They are only profitable if you can drive hourly wages down very low. This is possible if you engage in what I call (and refer to in my co-edited book called Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy in the US and UK, available to your left) "self-exploitation." These are enterprises that work mainly if you can make yourself and your family the labor pool, and make up for low average hourly wages with extremely long hours, both on the part of the owner and their family (whose labor is not directly compensated and not taxed). These type of enterprises don't work for African-Americans for two reasons. First, their reserve wage is above the (very low) effective hourly wage that these enterprises provide. Second, given their family structure, most African-Americans don't have recourse to uncompensated family labor. There's also a third factor, which is access to capital--many of these enterprises are originally capitalized through rotating capital arrangements, which depend on the high level of social trust that comes from fairly tight-knit immigrant communities. A more speculative fourth factor is that these enterprises often work because consumption among the relevant immigrant groups is often highly suppressed--closer to the level of their countries of origin than the US norm.

One way of summing up the reason that African-Americans aren't found in substantial numbers in these sorts of niches is that they are so thoroughly assimilated, in their expectations of return on labor, family structure, individualism, consumption patterns, etc. One doesn't need to explain the phenomenon under examination by recourse to the peculiar character of African-Americans--in fact, it is the phenomenon of low-margin immigrant businesses that has more of a cultural grounding. This can be seen in the fact that very few second-generation immigrants are found in such jobs. They "work" in providing an economic bridge into the American market economy, but they are almost always transitional--the second generation moves into the mainstream economy, typically through education. This is true both in Britain and the United States.

This is a very compacted version of a highly complicated story. Those interested in the details would be well-advised to take a look at the book, available here.

Diversity v the welfare state? outline for essay

This essay will look at the debate over whether or not diversity/multiculturalism decrease support for the welfare state. Will define multiculturalism (if necessary). First will look at Goodhart's argument in the UK. Will then look at very robust and well-research arguments coming from the US which support the notion that as diversity increases, European welfare states will become less solidaristic and more individualistic, as in US. Will then look at US's neighbour to the north, where observers of Canada argue that US can't be taken as master narrative. This is a point Taylor-Gooby makes in his own critique, and we will look at his argument for why Alesina's research, as robust as it is, may not be applicable to Europe and the UK. Finally, will look at another, perhaps less expected reason why the UK in particular may not have the same experiences as the US. (This will be Gilen's analysis of the media.)

Do I need to include something about Parekh to assuage my cruel overlords? Maybe just a sentence?

Diversity v the welfare state? Taylor-Gooby's take

From Is the future American? Or, can left politics preserve European welfare states from erosion through growing "racial" diversity? (2005)

Reactions and impressions

• His feeling is that Alesina et al's analysis is very robust, but thinks that it is far more relevant for the US than for the rest of the world. His main argument is that in the US, racial/ethnic fractionalisation predated the formation of leftist, very pro-welfare state political blocs (in fact, the US has none, he feels, by European standards), whereas in Europe, leftist political blocs were in place before diversity became a significant political factor, and have thus enabled European countries to negotiate rising diversity with less impact on the welfare state. In short, the order of events matter.
• While Alesina's analysis may be spot-on for the US, there is no evidence, he argues, that it holds for the rest of the world.
• He does concede that rising diversity does appear to have some negative impact on support for Europe's welfare states, but says that this is quite small. My own feeling on this is that it would not be surprising for it to have some effect, but that Goodhart and other pessimists are too quick to think that American experience transfers easily to Europe.
• Interestingly, he notes that in Alesina's 2004 book, he and Glaeser say that one of the key impacts of high levels of diversity is that it gives anti-welfare state politicians a tool with which to argue against welfare state expansion: rightist politicians exploit diversity to advance their anti-state agendas. Certainly this is what we saw with Ronald Reagan's apocryphal welfare queen in 1980.
• His feeling seems to be that this is a challenge to be dealt with, but that European countries have the structures in place to do so.

Notes from the reading

• Alesina et al claim that "US-Europe differences have more to do with the racial divisions than with deep cultural differences. As Europe has become more diverse, Europeans have become increasingly susceptible to exactly the same form of racist, anti-welfare demagoguery that worked so well in the US. We shall see whether the generous European welfare state can really survive in a heterogeneous society."
• T-G acknowledges that immigration, which is at historically high levels, has provided an opp for right wing attacks on the welfare state. If Alesina is correct, he says, diversity "may be a more serious challenge to the European heritage than economic globalisation or the growth of the single market."
• Though most welfare state spending is horizontal (ie smoothing out the individual's life cycle), most people think that it is largely vertical - he has researched this. This makes it potentially easy to exploit diversity.
• The difference in diversity explains 43% of the gap in social spending btwn the US and Europe, say Alesina. That is, it accounts for 3.2 percentage points of social spending difference, whereas there is actually a 7.3 p point diff. T-G calls Alesina's argument for causality "convincing"
• Concludes that diversity has much less impact on social spending outside the US, and says that this is because it is more widely supported across society and the left is there to fight for it in a way they can or do not in the US
• Diversity does have a negative impact on social spending outside the US, he finds, but one that is much weaker than in the US. "When a left wing influence is established nad has influenced political instituations... different patterns of development and path dependency are set in train. The presence of the left appears to be able to insulate welfare systems against the impact of greater diversity among citizens."

Do diversity (and multiculturalism) conflict with a strong welfare state?

Download attitudes_to_the_welfare_state_in_america.doc

Download banting_the_multicultural_welfare_state.doc

Download david_goodhart_discomfort_of_strangers.doc

Download multiculturalism_and_support_for_the_welfare_state_general.doc

Download why_doesnt_the_us_have_a_europeanstyle_welfare_state.doc

"Marriage is for white people"

Via Unfogged, a WaPo article on race and marriage.

But as a black woman, I have witnessed the outrage of girlfriends when the ex failed to show up for his weekend with the kids, and I've seen the disappointment of children who missed having a dad around. Having enjoyed a close relationship with my own father, I made a conscious decision that I wanted a husband, not a live-in boyfriend and not a "baby's daddy," when it came my time to mate and marry.

My time never came.

For years, I wondered why not. And then some 12-year-olds enlightened me.

"Marriage is for white people."

That's what one of my students told me some years back when I taught a career exploration class for sixth-graders at an elementary school in Southeast Washington. I was pleasantly surprised when the boys in the class stated that being a good father was a very important goal to them, more meaningful than making money or having a fancy title.

"That's wonderful!" I told my class. "I think I'll invite some couples in to talk about being married and rearing children."

"Oh, no," objected one student. "We're not interested in the part about marriage. Only about how to be good fathers."

And that's when the other boy chimed in, speaking as if the words left a nasty taste in his mouth: "Marriage is for white people."

He's right. At least statistically. The marriage rate for African Americans has been dropping since the 1960s, and today, we have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in the United States. In 2001, according to the U.S. Census, 43.3 percent of black men and 41.9 percent of black women in America had never been married, in contrast to 27.4 percent and 20.7 percent respectively for whites. African American women are the least likely in our society to marry. In the period between 1970 and 2001, the overall marriage rate in the United States declined by 17 percent; but for blacks, it fell by 34 percent. Such statistics have caused Howard University relationship therapist Audrey Chapman to point out that African Americans are the most uncoupled people in the country.

...

And here's the new twist. African American women aren't the only ones deciding that they can make do alone. Often what happens in black America is a sign of what the rest of America can eventually expect. In his 2003 book, "Mismatch: The Growing Gulf between Women and Men," Andrew Hacker noted that the structure of white families is evolving in the direction of that of black families of the 1960s. In 1960, 67 percent of black families were headed by a husband and wife, compared to 90.9 percent for whites. By 2000, the figure for white families had dropped to 79.8 percent. Births to unwed white mothers were 22.5 percent in 2001, compared to 2.3 percent in 1960. So my student who thought marriage is for white people may have to rethink that in the future.

What's going on with the black man?

This could be interesting: at Unfogged, LB disagrees strongly with a recent Orlando Patterson op-ed which blames black male failure on black male culture. (Update: here's a post from TPMCafe.) One to look into once the comments start landing.

To be satisfying, an explanation of how social groups differ in outcomes has to depend on a difference in inputs, and there’s an obvious candidate here: incarceration.

Women, for a variety of reasons, are vastly less likely to be incarcerated than men are; black women are far more integrated into what Patterson calls mainstream society than black men are. White men are vastly less likely to be incarcerated than black men are.

Here's a good comment (39):

In a general sense, what irritates me about 'the problem is the culture' explanations is that they're useless even if accurate. You can't change a culture through exhortation, you change it through structural factors. Structural factors are where all the levers are.

It's like people talking about how you can't blame the schools for bad educational outcomes, when the problem is poor parenting. Even where that's true, we can't fix the parenting, but we can change the schools. If there is a societal solution, it's going to be a structural one.

Here's the same guy in 48:

It's not necessarily possible to be sure of what will work before you've tried it, but cultures change, and they change because of changes in the structural environment in which they operate.

Perhaps an example of this would be the advent of welfare to work, which is leading to less poverty. But will that reduced poverty lead to better outcomes for the kids? (And if it does, will that include the boys?)

And here's 49:

LB:
Structural factors are where all the levers are.

Idealist:
I think you are wrong here. ... For example, if purely structural factors explained everything, ... This does not in any way say that structural changes are not important ... I just do not think they would be sufficient.

She's not saying they explain everything, she's saying they're all we can really affect through policy. Certain structural differences can encourage cultural changes, others can impede them. Certainly I think our analysis needs an emphasis on understanding these cultural factors so that they can inform our policy decisions, but nothing you say refutes LB's assertion that "structural factors are where all the levers are."

And onward...

#48:
Can't offer research, although some may be referred to in the link. I never thought the day would come when I would do this, but Malcolm Gladwell wrote very well on this subject in this long New Yorker piece:
http://www.gladwell.com/1996/1996_04_29_a_black.htm

An early piece, very personal to him. The image of African-Americans pretending to be Jamaicans to get jobs is unforgettable.

Finally, there is a bit of banter about the possibility of parenting classes.

Strong black woman, struggling black man

Notes after reading Katherine Boo's article "The Black Gender Gap", fron the Atlantic Monthly, 1 FEb 03. She's talking about how many black women are finding themselves a bit of the honest eight, while relatively few black men are.

• From a peak of 5.1m families in 1994, welfare roles have dropped to 2m
• Poverty rates for blacks is at an all-time low, which to me means that Clinton's welfare reforms, even though unnecessarily punitive in comparison to those of the UK, are a better option than what existed before
• Black teenagers are having fewer babies - is this a result of the punitive aspects? What does the research say about this?
• Median income for black households is at its highest level ever, $27,000
• In the 90s, employment figures increased dramatically for black women, with a lot of the gain coming among single mums
• At the same time, employment figures for black men have remained stagnant
• Black women are now more likely to work than white or hispanic women
• For non-college educated males, Hispanics work at about the same rate as whites, while blacks trail by 30 percentage points
• Black women now earn 96% of what white women earn, but that still leaves them at only $15,000/year.
• Working black men average $20k, but that's only 70% of what white men bring down
• It's harder to craft policies for poor and/or low-skill men than for women, for a variety or reasons. One is that employers generally perceive women to be more trainable and a better employment risk
• She says that a key policy change was the acknowledgement that "rectifying disincentives and adjusting outlooks among the poor costs more in the short run than issuing welfare checks." But since 1996, the US govt has been willing to pay those short term costs on behalf of poor women. Why not for poor men? At least in part because poor men don't appear to cost the public as much as poor women, because poor women are often supporting children. Obviously, this equation is only surface level: men help create children, and should be supporting them. But the reality is that when the cheques are being cut to support children, in many cases they're being cut because their mothers rather than their dads don't have money. And doing right by women means doing right by kids, the next generation