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COMPOUND INTEREST IS THE LEAST POWERFUL FORCE IN THE UNIVERSE
Posted on May 26, 2014 by Scott Alexander
I.
I’m still iffy on Vox. Some of its reporting is excellent – their article on
Governor Cuomo and the shift away from progressivism in the Democratic Party was
especially enlightening. Other parts, especially the editorials, are atrocious
and utterly without subtlety.
Ezra Klein’s article on compound interest was the latter.
> The reaction to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ magisterial essay on the lingering effects
> of American racism is polarized around people’s reaction to the word
> “reparations.” But much of the story he tells is about something simpler, and
> completely uncontroversial: the power of compound interest.
>
> You might remember, as a kid, getting this problem on a test: Would you rather
> have $10,000 per day for 30 days or a penny that doubled in value every day
> for 30 days?
>
> The answer, of course, is you want the penny that doubles in value every day.
> If you take the $10,000 you end up with $300,000 after the first month. Take
> the penny and you end with about $5 million.
>
> What Coates shows is that white America has, for hundreds of years, used
> deadly force, racist laws, biased courts and housing segregation to wrest the
> power of compound interest for itself. The word he keeps coming back to is
> “plunder.” White America built its wealth by stealing the work of
> African-Americans and then, when that became illegal, it added to its wealth
> by plundering from the work and young assets of African-Americans. And then,
> crucially, it let compound interest work its magic.
>
> Today, white America is one of the richest and most powerful populations the
> world has ever known. And it wonders why African Americans just can’t seem to
> keep up. “In America,” Coates writes, “there is a strange and powerful belief
> that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing
> begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.”
>
> […]
>
> “The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by
> wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear
> masquerading as laughter,” Coates writes. It’s also the intellectually
> unserious response of people who believe that because they never owned slaves
> or drank from a whites-only water fountain they weren’t the beneficiaries of
> American racism. They may not be the villains of American racism, but they are
> the beneficiaries of it. The average white southerner in 1832 was far poorer
> than the average white southerner today, and part of that vast increase in
> wealth and income and knowledge and social networks is the result of compound
> interest working its magic on what the slaveowners and the segregationists
> stole.
>
> It’s as simple and clear as a child’s math problem. The people who benefitted
> most from American racism weren’t the white men who stole the penny. It’s the
> people who held onto the penny while it doubled and doubled and doubled and
> doubled.
There are many many complicated moral arguments for and against reparations.
Like Klein, I don’t want to get into any of them except the financial aspect of
how much modern whites benefit from the lingering effects of slavery, and how
much modern blacks are harmed by them.
I want to make one very loose argument and then one based off of empirical
research.
The loose argument is that the best way to determine whether modern whites have
gained from owning slaves (and I know Klein’s argument takes into account other
forms of oppression beyond slavery, but slaves will be a good first
approximation) is to see if formerly slave-owning societies are richer than
formerly non-slave-owning societies.
The state with the highest percent slaves before the Civil War was South
Carolina, with Mississippi number two. Mississippi is the poorest, and South
Carolina the fifth poorest of the fifty states today. Except for Virginia, every
single state in the former Confederacy is poorer than the US average.
This is somewhat confounded by the high level of poor blacks in these states,
but remains true even when you look only at the income of white residents. For
example, if Mississippi whites were their own state, they would be 39th out of
50 in terms of per capita income. South Carolingians would do better but still
be below the national average. If all states suddenly became all white,
Mississippi and South Carolina would drop right back down to the bottom.
So the whites who had the most opportunity to benefit from a supposed ability to
earn compound interest on slavery earnings clearly didn’t do that.
While one could make the argument that the gains from slavery left Mississippi
and the Deep South to enrich all whites, this seems a bit forced. The US was
much less interconnected in those days. And other places that had no connection
to slavery still outperform the Deep South: Italian whites, for example, still
do comfortably better than whites from most Southern states.
One could always argue that Southerners would be even poorer today if not from
all the compound interest they received on their slavery earnings. But Southern
poverty is already a bit of a puzzle. To make them too much poorer would require
them to descend into levels of squalor totally unknown in any First World
country.
I think we should at least look at an alternate hypothesis: people are really
really really bad at passing ill-gotten wealth through more than a generation or
two.
II.
The descendants of rich people tend to stay rich even three hundred years later.
For example, Gregory Clark looked at social mobility in Sweden. A famously
mobile society, Sweden is also a good place to study social mobility since
nobles and commoners had different last names back when the feudal system was in
place around 1700. Non-nobles are forbidden to change to noble-sounding surnames
even today, so names should be a fossil record of who’s descended from the
really rich people.
Clark found that among highly-educated well-paying professions like doctors and
lawyers, people with aristocratic surnames are represented around four to six
times the level expected by chance. He uses this to describe a statistic “b”
signifying the rate of regression to the mean with each generation.
Suppose nobles are eight times more likely to be doctors at the end of the
feudal period. If b is low, say 0.35, then they will quickly regress to the
population’s average – according to Clark’s graph, it will take about 80 – 90
years (= 3 – 4 generations?) before this happens. If b is high, say 0.75, it
will take practically forever – he demonstrates that even after 200 years, there
will be noticeable differences.
Clark finds b to be between 0.6 and 0.8 in Sweden, and then goes on to show it
is similar pretty much everywhere and across all time periods. The Economist
describes his research by saying:
> With surprising consistency across countries and eras, mobility is found to be
> painfully slow. Birth has predicted more than 50% of one’s income or education
> status, Mr Clark reckons. Erasing the legacy of past prosperity takes 10-15
> generations rather than the three or four implied by sunnier estimates. So the
> shadow of 18th-century wealth still darkens income distributions today.
This sounds very promising for Ezra Klein’s compound interest argument and
really bad for my “Southerners are really bad at holding on to wealth” argument.
But Clark takes it in a totally different direction. The Economist again:
> The most unexpected finding [is that] efforts to democratise education and
> eliminate discrimination over the past century appear to have had no
> discernible effect on mobility, leading Mr Clark to conclude that mobility is
> strongly linked to underlying social competence—an “inescapable inherited”
> trait. Only the intermarriage of people who are more prosperous and educated
> with those less fortunate will dilute the genetic resources of well-off
> families, slowly pushing them back towards the average and preventing the rise
> of a permanent overclass.
I just want to briefly pause our economics discussion to point out that
Professor Clark has written two books on his theories, and they they are called
A Farewell to Alms
and The Son Also Rises. Please take a moment to be delighted by that.
III.
Okay, so wealth lasts a really long time, and Klein thinks that’s because of
compound interest and Clark thinks it’s because of “inescapably inherited social
competence” which sounds a lot like a euphemism for genes. To differentiate
between these two hypotheses we would need to randomly select a bunch of people,
give them a lot of wealth, and follow them for a couple of generations to see
whether their descendants compounded that advantage or regressed back to their
genetically programmed level.
I am familiar with only one well-studied example of this happening.
In 1830 the government stole the land of the Cherokee Indians. Lots of white
people wanted to settle the newly available territory, so the state of Georgia
proposed a lottery, where the winners would get large fertile farms on the
conquered area. Not only were the farms available in the lottery much bigger
than those owned by the average Georgia farmer at the time, but lottery winners
were totally allowed to sell the farm they had just won to someone else and
pocket the cash. Nearly every single white person in Georgia at the time entered
the lottery, because hey, free money.
Bleakley and Ferrie track the winners and losers of the land lottery for several
generations. They find that the first-generation winners did very well. The
average farm won in the lottery was worth $900 in 1830 dollars, which was the
equivalent of three years’ unskilled labor (so think about $60000 today). It was
also a gift that kept on giving, since most people would farm the land and be
able to grow lucrative crops every year indefinitely. According to the study
“two decades after the lottery, winners are on average $700 richer than a
comparable population that did not win the lottery”. Remember, this is back when
$700 was real money.
In a second study, they look at the effect a couple of generations down the
line. They find:
> Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than
> the sons of non-winners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher
> literacy or school attendance than non-winners’ grandchildren. This suggests
> only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human
> capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more
> important role for other factors that persist through family lines […]
>
> [This] should have relaxed the budget constraint faced by poorer households
> and allowed them to invest more in the human capital of their children. If
> human capital was unaffected in the next generations, this is evidence in
> favor of the view recently advanced by Clark and Cummins that a substantial
> portion of the intergenerational correlation in outcomes is driven by
> fundamental, family-specific effects (the family’s cultural and genetic
> infrastructure)
Studies of modern-day lottery winners show much the same, albeit on a
much-reduced time scale. And closer to the original issue, studies attempting to
compare enslaved blacks versus free blacks appear to show it didn’t actually
take that many generations for outcomes to equalize.
IV.
I am disappointed that all we have to go off of are these kinds of hints and
whispers.
This seems like maybe the most important question in economics. Certainly in
sociology. It seems terribly important to public policy, not just in terms of
reparations but in how much we spend helping poor families and more important
how we help poor families. If Clark’s view is right, the best we can do is
alleviate their suffering by making sure that being poor isn’t an especially
unpleasant state and everyone has good access to social services. If Klein is
right, we should be making huge cash transfers to get people out of poverty
traps so that their descendents will reap the compound interest and become rich.
(there’s also the slight confounding factor of the South being demolished during
the Civil War, which could disprove Klein’s particular example while not
necessarily supporting Clark or the general case)
I want to repeat Clark’s quote to the Economist for emphasis:
> The most unexpected finding [is that] efforts to democratise education and
> eliminate discrimination over the past century appear to have had no
> discernible effect on mobility.
If Clark is right, almost everything we’re doing is a waste of time.
There are some good arguments about why poverty might make people less
successful over long time periods, like cognitive load effects. But there are
also some good counterarguments – if that’s true, how come the second-generation
descendents of Vietnamese boat people, who came to America with nothing, now
have notably higher household incomes than white Mississippians, with all their
years of benefitting off other people’s slave labor?
Overall, these are the sort of really complicated problems I would have expected
a supposedly more sophisticated media outlet like Vox to cover or help raise
awareness on.
Instead it uses mere assertion to tell use that denial of compound interest is
an “intellectually unserious response” and that Klein’s case is “as simple and
clear as a child’s math problem.”
Sorry, Vox. I’ll keep reading you for your occasional article about the case for
raising chickens in virtual reality. But intelligent and sophisticated you are
not.
EDIT: Tyler Cowen gives a different perspective on the same Klein article over
at Marginal Revolution
EDIT 2: The quote I stole the title from is probably not legit
EDIT 3: One could try to reconcile Klein and Clark by saying that sure, wealth
doesn’t persist in families across generations but it does in societies
(presumably it gets transferred from family to family within the society but
continues to exist). But then there would be no reason to favor white people and
their descendants as especial beneficiaries.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged economics, politics, reverse
voxsplaining. Bookmark the permalink or link without comments.
← Apologia Pro Vita Sua
On Types of Typologies →
151 RESPONSES TO COMPOUND INTEREST IS THE LEAST POWERFUL FORCE IN THE UNIVERSE
Reverse order
1. anon says:
May 26, 2014 at 6:44 pm ~new~
Only a very small portion of all possible policies that might help the poor
escape poverty have ever been tried. Clark’s work is empirical, but through
most of history no one has been making a serious effort to help the poor.
The more modern and committed policies are the important ones, and they
haven’t been successful, but there are still a lot of policies to be
considered besides those.
Social science is still in its infancy. If it ever grows up and good
policies are put into place, then inequality will stop being so persistent.
Heritability is determined in a specific environmental context, which is
something Clark’s work never seems to address.
Hide
* Vaniver says:
May 26, 2014 at 11:55 pm ~new~
> Clark’s work is empirical, but through most of history no one has been
> making a serious effort to help the poor.
I think this claim would come as a great surprise to many of the people
who, throughout history, did make a serious effort to help the poor.
Hide ↑
* anon says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:52 am ~new~
You’re framing the issue in terms of individual efforts. I’m thinking
in terms of national resources.
Hide ↑
* Blaine says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:56 pm ~new~
I think, perhaps, another way to think of your point is in terms of
“all specifiable poor helping policies,” which is not necessarily
equal to resource expenditure. We can look at all of the unique ways
the poor can be or could’ve been helped and notice that there are (I
would wager a guess) a near inexhaustible number of them.
As far as computation spent narrowing down the solution space is
concerned, we’ve hardly done a thing.
Hide ↑
2. B.B. says:
May 26, 2014 at 6:54 pm ~new~
Scott Alexander said:
There are some good arguments about why poverty might make people less
successful over long time periods, like cognitive load effects.
Wicherts & Scholten criticize Mullainathan, et al’s “Poverty Impedes
Cognitive Function” article here.
Hide
3. Oligopsony says:
May 26, 2014 at 6:58 pm ~new~
{a “ridiculously slimy thing for [me] to do”}
Hide
* suntzuanime says:
May 26, 2014 at 7:01 pm ~new~
This is a ridiculously slimy thing for you to do. Delete your comment.
You can organize whatever you want on your own website, but to undercut
Scott in the comments of his own website and demand he not look is a
gross abuse of hospitality.
Hide ↑
* Cyan says:
May 26, 2014 at 7:21 pm ~new~
Scott doesn’t need to click on it to learn that it’s a link to
predictionbook.com, and the demand not to look at it until after the
next post makes the subject of the prediction obvious.
That you describe this as “slimy” and “undercutting” is baffling to me.
Is it the mere fact that Oligopsony is trying to record predictions
about the next post that you find objectionable, or is it the content
of the specific proposition Oligopsony chose, or something else
entirely?
Hide ↑
* Oligopsony says:
May 26, 2014 at 7:24 pm ~new~
I employed some negative-valence words where I could have used
neutral-valence ones, so I would agree with Sun Tzu Anime that it
actually was pointlessly rude.
Hide ↑
* Cyan says:
May 26, 2014 at 8:04 pm ~new~
Oligopsony: If suntzuanime had said it was pointlessly rude, I
wouldn’t have been baffled; “slimy” has connotations of immorality,
and “undercutting” is just odd…
Hide ↑
* suntzuanime says:
May 26, 2014 at 8:23 pm ~new~
Being rude to someone to their face is rude, but that’s part of the
rough-and-tumble nature of the free internet we all enjoy so long as
it does not go too far.
Being rude about someone behind their back to all their friends and
commentators, that’s what’s slimy.
Hide ↑
* Cyan says:
May 26, 2014 at 8:33 pm ~new~
suntzuanime: But Oligopsony didn’t say “never click this link” — he
said “only click it after your next post”. I wouldn’t characterize
that as behind Scott’s back, especially considering that the hurdle
imposed by writing “don’t follow this link” doesn’t even rise to the
level of security through obscurity.
Hide ↑
* Oligopsony says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:10 pm ~new~
The prediction was incorrect; downgrade my credibility by however
much you downgrade these things.
Hide ↑
* anon says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:48 pm ~new~
Am upgrading your credibility in response to you telling me to
downgrade your credibility. Only higher than baseline credibility
people do that.
Hide ↑
4. suntzuanime says:
May 26, 2014 at 7:00 pm ~new~
Maybe the devastation caused by the Civil War, which devastated the South
much more than the North, wiped out the gains of slavery and impoverished
those states? This maybe undercuts the case for reparations, because it
means that slaveholders have already been substantially punished for their
evil behavior.
Maybe after the South became full of black people who weren’t slaves, the
racist slaveowners who got rich off slavery said “to heck with this” and
moved elsewhere, leaving only the poor whites? It would be better to track
former slaveowner families, rather than former slaveowning states, because
families can move.
Hide
* Steve Reilly says:
May 26, 2014 at 7:54 pm ~new~
Your first point is possible, but consider Germany and Japan after a more
recent, and more devastating war. No one looking at economic figures for
those countries today would realize what happened in them in the mid
1940s. By the same token, I don’t think anyone looking at economic
figures for the south today would realize that Sherman burned Atlanta and
spared Savannah, for instance. Whatever the reason for the relative
poverty of the South, I don’t think the Civil War is it.
Hide ↑
* nydwracu says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:46 pm ~new~
Consider Germany and Japan after a more recent, more devastating war,
followed by American-led rebuilding campaigns attempting to redevelop
them as quickly and as much as possible to prevent the spread of
Communism, to understand the South, which was subject to a devastating
war followed by periodic social upheavals and not a whole hell of a lot
of redevelopment from outside, probably due in part to age-old enmities
between them and the people who would have done the redevelopment. (And
in part to the fact that there was no way in hell the South would turn
Communist or whatever.)
Also, I haven’t checked this at all so this is pure speculation, but my
guess is that hotter areas and highlands [with a possible exception for
the ones out west, which were only recently settled] tend to be poorer,
and the South has both.
Hide ↑
* suntzuanime says:
May 26, 2014 at 11:01 pm ~new~
Channeling Robin Hanson, “Reconstruction was not about
reconstruction”?
Hide ↑
* Steve Reilly says:
May 26, 2014 at 11:24 pm ~new~
Yes, Germany and Japan received money from the US federal government.
So did the South. Still does, as southern states receive more than
they get.
Social upheavals might be a better explanation. The South had social
upheavals, but Germany had the Berlin Wall, and from what I can tell
the former East Germany is pretty markedly different than the former
West.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-disappointing-reunification-how-the-east-was-lost-a-703802.html
Also you might be right about the heat. I just moved from New York to
South Carolina, and Christ it’s hot.
Hide ↑
* peterdjones says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:23 pm ~new~
Don’t forget that Germany and Japan were not allowed armies of their
own until recently…that’s a saving.
Hide ↑
* Zathille says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:34 pm ~new~
Technically, they were allowed military infrastucture so long as they
were employed for self-defense only, which usually meant less
military strenght. Of course, the political palatability of pacifist
constitutional clauses seems to be decreasing in some quarters.
Hide ↑
* Nornagest says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:00 pm ~new~
The Bundeswehr was created in 1955, the Japanese SDF in 1952 or 1954
depending on how you’re counting. That’s not too recent in the
context of post-WWII history.
The JSDF might call itself a civil defense force instead of an army,
but that’s splitting hairs — by most measures it’s one of the more
powerful militaries in Asia. Both it and the Bundeswehr are
constitutionally forbidden from offensive warfare, but the JSDF seems
more serious about it; the Bundeswehr for example sent troops to
Afghanistan. That’s more a matter of domestic policy than an American
imposition, though, and has been for some time.
Hide ↑
* Eli says:
May 27, 2014 at 1:15 am ~new~
MAJOR confounder: the South has been poorer overall than the North
since the Industrial Revolution, as the North shifted to an
industrial-capitalist mode of production (manufacturing, technology,
finance, services) while the South tried to remain fundamentally based
on agriculture and resource extraction, with bits of manufacturing
eventually splashed in as a way for originally Northern or foreign
companies to save money on labor.
My hypothesis: the Southern white slaveholding families could have been
massively, multigenerationally rich after the Civil War, but by reason
of sheer cultural preference they bit their region’s livelihood on
chief industries that turned out to be just plain less productive than
the industries more favored in the North.
So now the South is really, really poor (like, Third World poor in some
parts), but hey, at least they have farming. That is, after all, what
they wanted.
Oh, and politics. I have no idea why, but for some goddamn reason the
South is able to dominate the politics of the entire USA.
Hide ↑
* suntzuanime says:
May 27, 2014 at 1:20 am ~new~
If the South were able to dominate the politics of the entire USA, we
wouldn’t have integrated schools.
Hide ↑
* ADifferentAnonymous says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:17 pm ~new~
Well, less populated (rural) states are advantaged by
non-proportional representation in the senate and the attending
electoral college advantage. Which is why we have a staunchly
conservative Senate fighting a liberal House… oh, wait.
But seriously, I think this is a case of median US politics being a
lot more Southern than your beliefs and therefore looking Southern to
you while also being a lot more Northern than what the southerners
believe. I’m pretty sure the southerners think the yankee elites are
running the show…
Hide ↑
* Damien says:
June 1, 2014 at 1:01 am ~new~
The case for reparations doesn’t stop with slavery. There’s also 100
years of Jim Crow — including forced black labor via prisons — plus
sundown towns, redlining, labor discrimination…
The South, and elsewhere, has had oppotunity to profit from blacks since
slavery.
“If the South were able to dominate the politics of the entire USA, we
wouldn’t have integrated schools.”
There was a shift. But the (white) South has definitely had a
disproportionate political influence — in fact helped by the end of
slavery, as blacks went from being counted as 3/5 of people to 5/5 of
people for Congressional representation, while still not getting a vote
in the South for 100 years.
Hide ↑
* Benjamin David Steele says:
June 1, 2014 at 7:52 am ~new~
“The case for reparations doesn’t stop with slavery. There’s also 100
years of Jim Crow — including forced black labor via prisons — plus
sundown towns, redlining, labor discrimination…”
I’m glad you mentioned all of that. There are so many good books on all
of those topics and more.
It’s not as if these are unknown things that we are forced to speculate
about. There is a lot of data about, for example, the racial prejudice
in housing sales this past century. Also, there is a massive amount of
research that shows racism continues in every aspect of our society to
this day, structurally and institutionally.
We have all this knowledge about what did happen and what continues to
happen. But yet the discussions about race in this country involve
people who have read little if anything about the topic. One of the
best books written recently about racism is The New Jim Crow. Every
American should read that book to understand the actual data for why
people make such arguments as reparations, but probably only a tiny
fraction of a percentage of Americans have or will ever read that book.
This makes meaningful public debate almost impossible.
Hide ↑
* hyperfluous says:
June 25, 2014 at 9:46 pm ~new~
The purpose of reparations is not to punish the slaveholders, but to
compensate blacks for the effects of generations of varying degrees of
affirmative action for whites. Also, considerable wealth was produced by
slavery when it was legal in the north for two centuries.
Hide ↑
5. Joe from London says:
May 26, 2014 at 7:20 pm ~new~
Confounder: discrimination in favour of people with aristocratic surnames.
http://publications.iadb.org/bitstream/handle/11319/3325/An%20Experimental%20Study%20of%20Labor%20Market%20Discrimination%3A%20Gender,%20Social%20Class%20and%20Neighborhood%20in%20Chile.pdf?sequence=1
Hide
* James James says:
May 27, 2014 at 6:07 am ~new~
Yes but the causation could go the other way — if people with
aristocratic surnames tend to be more capable, then it makes sense to
hire them.
Hide ↑
* suntzuanime says:
May 27, 2014 at 6:34 am ~new~
Statistical discrimination could amplify a small underlying effect.
Hide ↑
6. Amanda L. says:
May 26, 2014 at 7:23 pm ~new~
This is interesting! I’m going to check out A Farewell to Alms and The Son
Also Rises from my library.
To counterbalance “simple exposure –> unwarranted increase in belief”
effects, could anyone recommend me one or two of the best books arguing
against Clark’s claims of primarily genetic causes for lack of social
mobility? Thank you in advance.
Hide
* Charlie says:
May 26, 2014 at 8:16 pm ~new~
I don’t think Clark claimed causes were primarily genetic – I think that
was Scott’s interpretation of something “inescapably inherited.” Culture
can be pretty inescapable too, and my prior for Clark referring to both
culture and genes is high.
This looks like a nice article summarizing effects of parenting.
Hide ↑
* Amanda L. says:
May 26, 2014 at 11:50 pm ~new~
Thanks!
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* anon says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:54 am ~new~
No. Clark says that the lack of mobility is a good thing, as it shows
we’ve reached a society where genetics are the only thing that matters.
With reference to culture, Clark emphasizes that his work holds up
across time and space, implying it’s not a cultural effect. You should
view one of his TED talks, or something, if you doubt my
characterization of his work.
Hide ↑
* Zathille says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:12 am ~new~
But if his findings hold across time, how can we say we’ve reached a
society where genetics are the only thing that matters since saying
so pressuposes it’s a recent devellopment?
Perhaps I misunderstood?
Hide ↑
* Charlie says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:44 pm ~new~
Good suggestion to look for a talk by Clark!
When I found one on Youtube, he did indeed seem to be sidling towards
a genetic explanation. The disparity he has to explain is between the
generation-to-generation correlation and the long-term correlation.
Treating single-generation mobility as “noise” the blurs out
long-term mobility (caused by genes for intelligence, or people who
pay you more if you have a nice last name, or long-term persistence
in peer groups, or genes for height that cause you to be more
popular), is reasonable, if a bit dismisssive of single-generation
mobility.
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* Paul Torek says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:06 pm ~new~
Nice find, thanks.
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7. Matthew says:
May 26, 2014 at 8:30 pm ~new~
What, no hat tip for the link to the virtual reality chickens?
Also on Vox, I chewed out Yglesias on Twitter for letting the “Not All Men”
explainer abomination on Vox , with a link to “Weakmen are superweapons,”
but he ignored me.
Hide
* Scott Alexander says:
May 26, 2014 at 9:59 pm ~new~
Sorry, I actually saw it on Facebook today. I had missed that. Still,
good link.
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8. jaimeastorga2000 says:
May 26, 2014 at 8:36 pm ~new~
> If Clark’s view is right, the best we can do is alleviate their suffering
> by making sure that being poor isn’t an especially unpleasant state and
> everyone has good access to social services.
There are non-consequentialist moral intuitions which would take a
different approaches towards the poor depending on whether their condition
is caused by factors inherent or external to themselves. Within certain
kinds of utilitarianism, an argument could be made for humanely reducing
the poor’s numbers through e.g. a one-child policy, so that the future need
not contain a class of people who are doomed through their own nature to
have an specially low quality of life.
Hide
9. Luke says:
May 26, 2014 at 8:38 pm ~new~
I mostly read Vox for their context-setting overviews of major world news
stories that I otherwise wouldn’t bother to understand.
Hide
10. Anonymous says:
May 26, 2014 at 9:18 pm ~new~
>The state with the highest percent slaves before the Civil War was South
Carolina, with Mississippi number two. Mississippi is the poorest, and
South Carolina the fifth poorest of the fifty states today. Except for
Virginia, every single state in the former Confederacy is poorer than the
US average.
Confound: I think Slave owning states were *always* less wealthy than free
states.
Wealthy societies may be less likely own slaves because Cthulhu swims left?
Slave owning states were agrarian rather than manufacturing? Who knows…but
comparing free and slave state wealth is a bad way to go about making the
point you’re trying to make.
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* Scott Alexander says:
May 26, 2014 at 9:58 pm ~new~
I don’t think that’s a confound. If slave-owning societies couldn’t get
rich even when they had slaves, that’s a counter to Klein’s point that
white people got lots of money from slavery.
I guess it could be a confound if the South was poorer even before it had
slaves, but I don’t think there was a before.
Hide ↑
* ADifferentAnonymous says:
May 27, 2014 at 12:13 pm ~new~
The slaveowning lineages do predate slavery, though there may not be
statistics on the average wealth of slaveowners’ European ancestors. On
the other hand, there’s a much more accessible before which is ‘before
the northern states didn’t have slaves’.
But whether or not there are good alternatives, looking at the current
wealth levels without even a nod to initial conditions is not a
statistically sound way to determine the effect of slavery (though it’s
a reasonable way to gauge whether white affluence is predominantly due
to slavery). I suggest you edit to at least acknowledge that the
evidence is weak, since if this post were my first time reading you I
would have formed an estimate of your statistical literacy well below
the true value.
The rest of the post is great, though. I wonder whether or not it
carries further: do lineages bounce back from artificial setbacks as
quickly as they lose artificial gains? Off the top of my head, the
Jewish population looks kind of like an inescapable-inheritance-rich
group that always bounces back, but that’s about the loosest historical
argument one can make.
Hide ↑
* hyperfluous says:
June 26, 2014 at 12:05 pm ~new~
It seems to me that limiting the analysis of the wealth accrued through
slave labor to Southern states is flawed. Didn’t a lot of the wealth
produced in the south accrue to the north through tariffs, etc.? wasn’t
that one of the primary justifications for secession?
Hide ↑
* Anthony says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:02 pm ~new~
No, it isn’t. If the non-slave class (whites) of the slave states were
less wealthy than the members of that same class from non-slave states,
that is further evidence that the non-slave class did not significantly
materially benefit from slavery, even if individual members of that class
did. More specifically, it’s evidence that slavery hurt non-slaveholding
whites, as well, because without slavery, overall whites would have been
wealthier, even if slave-owners would not have been.
Slavery got a huge boost from the cotton gin – before it, slavery was in
decline; after, it became more lucrative for the slave owners, as they
could do *some* of the manufacturing work involved in turning cotton
plants into clothes.
Hide ↑
* White Girl says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:04 am ~new~
I think that’s right. This is all just anecdotal, but I come from a
formerly slave-owning family, and we’re noticeably richer than the USA
average. When we have our yearly formerly-slave-owning-families
get-togethers, most people seem to be richer than the USA average.
We’re even-more-noticeably richer than average for the South.
Hide ↑
* Nancy Lebovitz says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:11 am ~new~
There might be a selective effect– better off people are more likely
to go to the reunions.
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* White Girl says:
May 27, 2014 at 5:27 pm ~new~
Nancy–that’s very possible! There’s also the effects, though, of
intelligence correlating both with extra success and with a
reluctance to attend slaveowner reunions.
Hide ↑
* Douglas Knight says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:12 pm ~new~
In the beginning, the whites of South Carolina were the wealthiest
whites: it was founded as a retirement home for people who made fortunes
running sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean.
Hide ↑
* Andy says:
May 27, 2014 at 11:38 pm ~new~
Yes, and one can argue that as the most divorced from popular opinion
outside their own state, they were always the most virulently
states-rights-ish of the South, and the most contemptuous of the idea
that anyone would object to slavery that they just dismissed the entire
conversation or anything resembling the Principle of Charity.
The state was also the most aristocratic in structure, with both
literacy and property requirements to vote, and voters didn’t even vote
directly for President – the state Legislature allocated the state’s
electoral votes. Call that another nail in the coffin of the idea that
Reactionary states wouldn’t engage in war – South Carolina was the most
irascible and fire-breathing lunatic state, until Sherman burned it
down in the last year of the Civil War while the rest of the South,
especially Georgia was pretty much going “You got us into this, you
deserve it!”
Hide ↑
* peterdjones says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:06 pm ~new~
Virtual upvote
Hide ↑
* Randy M says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:37 pm ~new~
Do reactionaries say that “Reactionary states” (meaning, what
exactly?) won’t go to war, or that they won’t go on grand crusades to
spread ideology x?
Hide ↑
* Andy says:
June 1, 2014 at 9:41 am ~new~
> Do reactionaries say that “Reactionary states” (meaning, what
> exactly?) won’t go to war, or that they won’t go on grand crusades
> to spread ideology x?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/22/apart-from-better-sanitation-and-medicine-and-education-and-irrigation-and-public-health-and-roads-and-public-order-what-has-modernity-done-for-us/
> This claim I received mostly from blog posts I can’t find right now
> and from discussions with Michael Anissimov. It goes that when
> states are fully sovereign, self-interested, and run by noble
> classes – as they were long ago – their wars are rare, as short as
> possible, and mostly fought in a civilized way.
I suspect the parable of Fnargl (where an omnipotent, gold-maximizing
alien brings about world peace and prosperity) also gets mixed in
here somewhere.
I define “Reactionary state” as a state where the governing
structure, whether corporate or monarchic in nature, feels secure and
works for its own interests, not for the good of the people
underneath.
But there’s all kinds of reasons to go to war based off pride, or
history, or kings can be completely nuts, all of which were in play
in South Carolina.
EDIT:Most telling was the complete and utter lack of respect many
Southern intelligentsia, especially the South Carolina
“fire-breathers,” had for any Northern opinion and sensibilities. The
Reactionary position relies on monarchs negotiating with each other
rather than going to war, and the South Carolinans had absolutely no
respect for the North. My favorites were the theory that Northerners,
being descended from Anglo-Saxon peasants, were naturally inclined to
be submissive to Southerners descended from Normans, and the
politician who offered to drink all the blood spilled as a result of
secession, though he never went through with it.
Hide ↑
* Manfred Buehler says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:33 am ~new~
What does “Cthulhu swims left” mean?
Hide ↑
* Vanzetti says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:45 am ~new~
Neo-reaction meme. Comparing social progress to Cthulhu.
It’s bloody stupid, but telling. They essentially admit they can’t win.
Hide ↑
* suntzuanime says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:59 am ~new~
If I remember my Lovecraft Mythos correctly, Cthulhu was dealt a
temporary setback by driving a boat into his head. Better than
nothing!
Hide ↑
* Vanzetti says:
May 27, 2014 at 6:08 am ~new~
>If I remember my Lovecraft Mythos correctly, Cthulhu was dealt a
temporary setback by driving a boat into his head
There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness
as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and
a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant
the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then
there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the
scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously
recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened
every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
This was one incredibly temporary setback. Or perhaps Cthulhu is just
gaseous…
Hide ↑
* ADifferentAnonymous says:
May 27, 2014 at 12:19 pm ~new~
But don’t assume someone using it is NR. Leftish folks around here
sometimes use this terminology as well because a) better to use a
term loaded against you than one loaded in your favor and b) it
really is quite catchy.
Hide ↑
* nyan_sandwich says:
May 27, 2014 at 11:24 pm ~new~
@suntzuanime
That part was stupid and I consider it to be non-canon. I don’t know
what Lovecraft was thinking.
Cthulhu is nigh-unstoppable.
Hide ↑
* Misha says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:04 pm ~new~
Cthulu always does x doesn’t mean he’s definitely going to win. It
just means you know what will happen when you summon him. There are
other elder gods and even stranger entities
Hide ↑
* Anonymous says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:17 am ~new~
It’s originally from Moldbug, but this Anonymous is using it
differently, to mean that richer societies become more left-wing.
Hide ↑
11. Oligopsony says:
May 26, 2014 at 9:24 pm ~new~
Slavery (and more coercive labor regimes generally) tended to be
established in lower-tech extractive economies, and to develop
self-reinforcing institutions around that – while also enriching the global
economy as a whole, because deepening of comparative advantage – so it
doesn’t seem incorrect to me to say that the gains of slavery
systematically radiated outwards. Acemoglu and Robinson have the
generally-accepted empirics here, though deeper causal explanations can be
found in world-systems theory (if you’re like me or Multiheaded) or race
realism (if you’re like James Donald or Piano) or __________ (if you’re a
cool dude who comes up with her own theory.)
Hide
* Piano says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:03 pm ~new~
From wikipedia: “World-systems theory asks several key questions: … How
is the world-system affected by changes in its components (nations,
ethnic groups, social classes, etc.)?”
Why is race realism at odds with world-systems theory?
Hide ↑
* Oligopsony says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:07 pm ~new~
No one says that explanations need to be rivalrous! (Though in this
case I would say that WST is useful for constructionist accounts of
ethnogenesis.)
Hide ↑
* Ken Arromdee says:
May 26, 2014 at 11:14 pm ~new~
Insofar as slavery enriches the global economy (or even the US economy),
that means that the gain from slavery was distributed throughout the
whole population, both black and white, and that still undercuts the case
for reparations because black people benefit from there being a strong
economy just as much as white people do.
Hide ↑
12. whales says:
May 26, 2014 at 9:34 pm ~new~
I don’t think Ezra Klein’s summary was particularly good, although I do
think to frame this as a response to him you have to note that he’s using
compound interest as a metaphor for more than returns on wealth derived
from slavery, even if all you’re considered with is “the financial aspect
of how much modern whites benefit from the lingering effects of slavery.”
On the other hand, now just talking about what happened to that wealth, I
think calling some of your points “hints and whispers” is even a bit
generous. I’ve found we basically have start with the assumption that any
two situations in social science are incomparable, and that it takes a lot
of work to justify comparisons when it’s even possible. I wouldn’t expect
to be able to find a general theory of generational transmission and
compounding of wealth and social status as simple and broadly applicable as
you seem to be looking for. (But I’m sure we agree more than we disagree —
there are really important unanswered questions here.)
In particular, the argument about white poverty is (as you observe)
extremely loose. Yes, any tighter arguments have to either explain it or
explain it away, but I don’t think that’s nearly as hard as you do. Can you
really not think of any other reasons for general poverty extending to
whites in the South? To start with, there’s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Era#Material_devastation_of_the_South_in_1865,
and I’m sure there are plenty of detailed studies about the next 150 years.
Hide
* Scott Alexander says:
May 26, 2014 at 9:57 pm ~new~
I totally agree the South was destroyed in the Civil War and that’s a big
part of why it’s poor. But that is a reason why it’s poor, not a
counterargument to it being poor.
If all the wealth produced by slavery was destroyed in the Civil War,
that would be a strong argument against Klein’s position that modern
whites continue to reap the benefits of slavery.
Hide ↑
* Anthony says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:17 pm ~new~
Without having read either Klein’s or Coates’ articles, I think you’re
missing at least part of the argument – that racial exclusion since
1865 has kept blacks from becoming as wealthy as they would have. Not
necessarily that blacks were exploited (stolen from), but that they
were excluded from the opportunities to become wealthy that whites had.
Therefore, it’s not necessarily slavery that reparations are owed for,
but (also) Jim Crow.
I can think of a couple of counters to that argument:
1) Black incomes relative to whites rose significantly from about 1945
to about 1965, while legal barriers to blacks mostly stayed in place;
while that relative increase has stalled since 1965, even though legal
barriers have been pretty much eliminated, and those which were
eliminated earlier (schools) would have started to have economic
effects after about that time.
2) Deliberate granting of benefits to blacks, such as affirmative
action in schools, jobs, and contracting, have not produced results
beyond the life of the direct beneficiary – the kids don’t do better
than would be expected given their pre-benefit family situation unless
they, too, get those benefits.
Hide ↑
* nydwracu says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:37 pm ~new~
> Deliberate granting of benefits to blacks, such as affirmative
> action…
I’ve been looking for a place in this thread to reference the Patrick
Chavis case. This is that place. n = 1, yes, but it’s a hell of a 1.
(An interesting historical note: Nicholas Lemann, who was mentioned
in that thread, was president of the Harvard Crimson in the mid-70s,
during which time both Lemann and the Crimson enthusiastically
endorsed the Khmer Rouge.)
Hide ↑
* Douglas Knight says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:25 pm ~new~
> I totally agree the South was destroyed in the Civil War and that’s a
> big part of why it’s poor.
What can this mean, other than endorsing compound interest? Of course
this negates Klein’s argument, but it sure sounds like you are arguing:
No crime was committed, and it was committed by someone else.
Hide ↑
* Scott Alexander says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:41 pm ~new~
That’s a really good point.
Maybe a better phrasing would be “slavery produced lots of wealth. If
slavery had lasted forever, that increased level of wealth might have
continued indefinitely. If slavery had ended peacefully, that level
of wealth would have decayed gradually over many generations, like
the wealth in some of the examples above. However, in fact it was all
wiped out at once in the Civil War. Thereafter, the South was
regressed to the level it would have attained anyway without
slavery.”
It would be very interesting to compare states that were devastated
in the Civil War to similar states that were not devastated, and see
if the devastation produced a lasting effect (compound interest) or
was quickly recovered from (cultural-genetic infrastructure). My
guess would be the latter.
But I admit it was a stupid phrasing that reveals I’m not thinking
too clearly or consistently about this stuff.
Hide ↑
* Douglas Knight says:
May 26, 2014 at 11:08 pm ~new~
You understood me, but I should have emphasized that I was
identifying the “that’s a big part of why it’s poor” part with
compound interest.
Hide ↑
* whales says:
May 27, 2014 at 12:04 am ~new~
Sure, I mentioned it as a reason that the South is hardly evidence that
people are bad at passing down slavery-derived wealth. If you believe
that all of that wealth was destroyed, then it’s a point against
Klein’s metaphor, although as I and others are pointing out there’s a
lot more to it. But, anyway, if some of slavery alone’s “quadrillions
of dollars” (that Klein cites as practically besides the point,
questionable as that figure might be) survived elsewhere, for example
in the northern US economy which was rather reliant on Southern
agriculture, you’d want to account for that.
As another aside, what do you think is happening when individual wealth
“decays”?
Hide ↑
* whales says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:40 pm ~new~
Oh, sorry, just saw your Edit 3:
“One could try to reconcile Klein and Clark by saying that sure,
wealth doesn’t persist in families across generations but it does in
societies (presumably it gets transferred from family to family
within the society but continues to exist). But then there would be
no reason to favor white people and their descendants as especial
beneficiaries.”
It seems to me that white people disproportionately benefiting from
the wealth of society is exactly what happened.
Hide ↑
* Randy M says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:33 am ~new~
Surely looking at social science to analyze the situation is better than
taking a metaphor from personal finances and assuming it holds
explanatory power?
Hide ↑
* whales says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:44 pm ~new~
Yeah, social science done well ought to give you more predictive power
and a better mental model. But what I think of as explanatory power
ultimately derives from a detailed causal account of what happened (of
which TNC’s article is part), and that social-science results of this
kind are in a sense just better metaphors, or heuristics that tell us
where to look for an explanation.
Hide ↑
13. Douglas Knight says:
May 26, 2014 at 9:45 pm ~new~
It is important to point out that Clark’s b is a long-term average.
Measured in the short term, it is much lower. That is a direct measurement
of the fact that if the children are richer or poorer than the parents, the
grandchildren will regress to the grandparent. It is not a truly randomized
experiment, as in the case of the Cherokee land, but it is a measurement
that has been done on many more sunjects in many more places and times.
Hide
14. Handle says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:26 pm ~new~
Better than the lottery, we have plenty of examples of black men getting
very, very rich on the merits of their own successes, despite all their
social disadvantages. In addition to the low but certainly not negligible
representation in the typically high-earning career fields, there are
celebrities of various kinds in sports (Ali!, Mayweather!), music (Jay Z!
Dr. Dre!), and media (Oprah!), and there are also men who have become
extremely wealthy in the illegal drug trade.
If Klein were right, their grandchildren would be in the top tier of the US
distribution. If Clark is right, we’ll probably see reversion to the mean
of their genetic heritage. What do we actually observe?
Here’s another way to look at this question. A black man and a white man
both start out broke but talented and hard-working and make it through med
school and residency and are now practicing doctors out of debt and earning
the same high salary and accumulating wealth.
If we are going to redistribute from the white doctor to the black doctor
because of their ancestry, then what special wealth benefit from society
did the white doctor get that the black doctor didn’t when they are both
getting paid something approximating their market marginal productivity?
Hide
* Scott Alexander says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:34 pm ~new~
Can you explain why we would see reversion to the genetic mean of their
heritage? If genetics was involved in their success, presumably they
would have excellent genes that their children would inherit.
(and okay, they would marry people who might not have such genes. But
that applies equally for all races and I think we’re magicking it away by
saying assortative mating)
Also, you might be interested in the Ta-Nehisi Coales article that Klein
was commenting on, which has some really good discussion on how racism
especially affected high-performing blacks and their ability to save and
pass on money. Although I think this is less now, I don’t think the
current generation of successful blacks has had time to have
grandchildren to study.
Hide ↑
* Oligopsony says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:49 pm ~new~
Assume what I take to be Handle’s priors, which being that whites have
on average better genes (for things we care about here) than blacks.
Assume also that success is an additive function of G, genes, and other
shit, O.
If we take a sample of a black man and a white man with equivalent
G+Os, then insofar as whites have better Gs on average, and also
(something something standard deviations normal distributions), then it
is likely that the G component of the white man is relatively greater
compared to his black counterpart.
Thus, we should see a deeper regression to the mean in the black man’s
case for the same reason we see regression to the mean generally: the
expected error term is larger.
Note that if we swap realism for constructionism the same logic
applies: insofar as deals-with-structural-racism is different for
blacks and whites (hmm, seems to be) and gets passed down through the
generations more reliably than the O “error term” (positive childhood
experiences, good nutrition, libertarian free will to be really
effortful or whatever) it behaves like this G, and we should see
regression to the mean effects.
Hide ↑
* potatoe says:
May 26, 2014 at 11:05 pm ~new~
“Although I think this is less now, I don’t think the current
generation of successful blacks has had time to have grandchildren to
study.”
Maybe it’s more than you might think. Remember that it came out that
Wells Fargo (and I doubt they were alone in this) was specifically
targeting black people for subprime lending? These weren’t just “poor”
black people who were targeted. TNC also mentioned this in his article.
It’s hard to keep passing your money from generation to generation if
you have a giant target on your back for pilferers and thieves due to
your race.
Hide ↑
* spandrell says:
May 26, 2014 at 11:28 pm ~new~
The extent of regression depends on the mean of the particular
population; a 140IQ black man is way more rare than a 140IQ Jewish man,
say. Black people regress to the mean of black people, i.e. 85IQ.
There’s complicated math on this issue, check up on La Griffe or some
of Sailer’s older work.
Hide ↑
* ADifferentAnonymous says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:07 pm ~new~
The simple version is that a smart person from a stupid gene pool
probably has loads of recessive stupid genes, right?
Hide ↑
* bbartlog says:
January 28, 2016 at 11:18 pm ~new~
The simple version is that a smart person from a ‘stupid gene pool’
is more likely to have had a lucky draw on the shared environment
front, i.e. some (likely random) environmental influence will on
average account for more of his smarts.
Hide ↑
* Handle says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:42 am ~new~
“Can you explain why we would see reversion to the genetic mean of
their heritage? If genetics was involved in their success, presumably
they would have excellent genes that their children would inherit.”
Well, exactly, but you’re missing the point. The question is which is
really more important, talents/genes or just money. I guess the former,
while TNC / Klein (yes, I’ve read the article) say the latter. Part of
the way we could answer the question is to see what happens when we
just drop money on people when we would expect their descendants to
have merely average marketable talents. Lotteries are one way to do
this as you mentioned, but another way is to look for ‘tournament
markets’ in which only the top percent of a percent capture all the
huge gains, and the rest of the unselected losers of the tournament get
nothing.
It is very, very unlikely as a matter of probability that superstars
will have superstar kids, even with highly assortative marriage. They
may have very talented kids with great genes, but you need to have the
best of the best to ‘win’ in these tournament fields. On the other
hand, there are fields where decent gains are much more widely
distributed to a large fraction of people above a certain threshold of
talent. So, there are superstars in medicine and law and so on, but if
you are in the top 10% of cognitive talent you can usually get yourself
a much-better-than-median income stream by entering these categories of
profession, and if you marry another doctor or lawyer (itself much more
likely than marrying another superstar), then there is a much greater
chance that your progeny will also have the talent necessary to succeed
at that economic tier.
Another way to look at this question is to say, “What happens in a war
or a Chicago Fire or Great Depression and a huge fraction of people get
wiped out financially? Who rises to the top in subsequent generations?
Is it random, or correlated with marketable talents, and are those in
turn correlated with genes?
You want the whole matrix laid out. Rags to Riches, Rags to Rags,
Riches to Riches, and Riches to Rags. (For multiple generations too, of
course) TNC is saying we mostly see (Riches to Riches) + (Rags to Rags)
without the others, and that this is due to the legacy of racial
privilege. I say we see it all in America, but for different reasons:
Most (Riches to Riches) and (Rags to Rags) is probably genetic, the
same for (Rags to Riches) except for luck like lotteries or extreme
inheritances, but we also see plenty of (Riches to Rags) through either
reversion to the mean or inheritance dissipation or bad bets or bad
luck. We’ve all heard stories about newly wealthy people ‘blowing’
their fortune (MC Hammer?), and I think that’s a common aspect of human
nature.
As you pointed out, the question lurking behind all of this is the
correct attribution of one’s income, wealth, and life circumstances,
and the frame of debate here seems to where the appropriate mix or
synthesis is between two extreme narratives.
(1) On the one hand, you could say that people on average tend to earn
close to their marginal productivity during their lifetimes, and that
most of the wealth that most people have accumulated during their lives
is the result of savings out of that income stream, and not out of
bequests. Outside the top 1% or whatever, most people don’t inherit
much and moderate estates dissipate quickly. You could also say that’s
one’s marketable talents that correlate with marginal productivity also
originate in strongly heritable traits like genes for intelligence,
personality, attractiveness, and athletic ability. So in this story,
one’s station in life is mostly the result not of inherited wealth, or
racial social privilege, but inherited talents combined with ‘drive and
determination’ (wherever that comes from, probably somewhat genetic
too, I’ve certainly met lots of people who seem to born with it or
without it.)
Economically, it’s hard to explain how any class on average would
consistently be earning amounts greater than their average marginal
productivity because even if they were somehow not in competition with
another class, they remain in competition between themselves. There’s
no such thing as contemporary racial cartel that is able to extract
rents from the other races by prohibiting entry on the basis of race
and restricting the supply the other races can purchase, but that kind
of thing would be necessary to support the racial ‘undeserved gains’
claim.
In my own social milieu, this is what I tend to see. Middle class
people of various ethnicities and the whole spectrum of genealogical
history either in this country, or of wealthy or penurious backgrounds,
and who never inherited any significant financial wealth from their
ancestors – indeed often starting out broke or heavily in debt – but
with talent (most in the form of inherited brains) and hard work having
dug out of that hole and achieved success in life and a comfortable
monetary position. These people will have a hard time believing you if
you say, “It’s only because you’re European or Asian and the recipient
of discriminatory benefits.”
(2) The other story is that most of the wealth that most white people
have is the result of ‘tainted’ accumulated inheritance that is somehow
traceable to the surplus extracted from black slavery and other racial
social measures, and that most of the destitution amongst blacks is the
result of not having been able to possess this stolen inheritance.
What is the right mix between (1) and (2) as explanations? I think if
we restrict ourselves to -2 to +2 standard deviation of the
distribution of each population group, we will see that most people
don’t own much more than they’ve saved out of their own household
income, and that income, on average, is decently correlated with their
inheritable marketable abilities.
What TNC does well is to lay out the parade of horrors that is American
racial History while evading some of the more taboo details that are
pariah-bait if anyone tries to push back on them. For instance, if you
are a car insurance or mortgage-lending company and plug all the
actuarial data into a regression analysis and it says that blacks have
a greater risk of getting into an accident or defaulting, respectively,
even after accounting for all the usual suspect variables, then it is
‘racist’ to charge them different rates or offer them different
products? It’s debatable. Women used to get better auto insurance rates
on account of their gender, but now that’s prohibited because ‘sexist’
in some states, even though gender correlates strongly with reckless
driving.
But what TNC did not so to anywhere near the degree required is really
explain the origin of wealth and income for everyone else in the
economy. Yes, there are old-money families which are extreme cases, but
for the middle 90%, the explanation seems pretty close to my narrative
(1) above. And this is what Tyler Cowen – son of a bankrupt, and who
nevertheless does pretty well for himself somehow – was getting at
which refocusing the spotlight squarely on white wealth to show that
there is no there there.
Hide ↑
* Paul Torek says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:22 pm ~new~
> There’s no such thing as contemporary racial cartel that is able to
> extract rents from the other races by prohibiting entry on the
> basis of race and restricting the supply the other races can
> purchase
That seems to be one of the points in dispute.
Hide ↑
15. Oligopsony says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:37 pm ~new~
Can I just say that I find some of the moral intuitions really weird here?
Like, I’m all for reparations because it confiscates wealth and moves it
downwards. But inherited wealth is already unearned, so why are we stopping
there? Is it that we’re compensating slaves for the work they did, and
delivering it to their nearest heirs? That would sort of work in a TDT
sense, although at a substantive level I’m not sure atemporally giving
slaves more positive incentives to work hard (on assumption that people
care about their own far-future descendants more than other people’s) is
actually valuable. Atemporally punishing past slavers makes a bit more
sense, and even if we’re indiscriminate it probably works because it’s
reasonable to suspect they care more about far future whites than far
future blacks, I’ll have to remember that as a sophisticated argument for
cis scum dying, but it ultimately seems pretty inefficient. Like, children
will barely learn not to do things if you time-lag punishments by an hour
or something. Some of us are like that well into adulthood.
Hide
16. Andy says:
May 27, 2014 at 1:18 am ~new~
> (there’s also the slight confounding factor of the South being demolished
> during the Civil War, which could disprove Klein’s particular example
> while not necessarily supporting Clark or the general case)
For a class project, I made a map tracking changes in land value (measured
in dollars per acre, averaged across entire counties) from 1860 to 1870,
since the average land values were recorded with the decennial census.
(Side note: if you want to look at historical census data, NHGIS.org, a
project of the University of Minnesota, have it all, free as in beer, and
ask that you cite them and send them a copy of whatever you do with their
research. And they have boundary lines for all the decennial censuses too,
since county boundaries changed quite a bit decade to decade. Beautiful
stuff.)
I’d expected to find some value loss across the South, but once I adjusted
for inflation (40% between 1860 and 1870!) big parts of the South had lost
more than 75% of their land value. Some areas along the Mississippi River
had over 90% loss – some counties went from $40/acre to $2. The entire map
was a mixed bag – the biggest gain was in Marion County, WV, which went up
1533% after accounting for inflation.
But what struck me was the amount of damage across the entire South. A few
areas, like Atlanta, had isolated gains amid the sea of loss and woe, but
that’s odd – Atlanta gained even though it was burned to the ground, but
Savannah’s county, which was spared, lost more than Atlanta gained.
(If you want to see the whole thing, I can send you the map – because it’s
a 23MB PDF, I didn’t want to drop it on your inbox without warning. Not
posting it here because it has my name and school on it, and I’d rather not
it be public. Currently formatting it for web viewing.)
I’m pretty sure that it can be argued that while many southerners didn’t
pay in direct reparations at the time, the destruction of their economy,
lifestyle, and land value was a kind of massive punitive fine. I’m not sure
I agree.
Another interpretation follows a theory I heard but haven’t been able to
confirm – that Northern bankers devalued Southern land to screw over black
farmers who had been given confiscated land, but I’m not sure how to test
this with empirically.
Hide
17. Ghatanathoah says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:39 am ~new~
I think you can argue that almost no African Americans currently alive were
harmed by slavery, even if Klein is 100% right.
The argument for this was originally developed by Derek Parfit and
basically demonstrates that current African Americans are also
beneficiaries of slavery and institutionalized racism. If these things had
never existed history would be considerably different. People who ended up
having children might never have met, and even if they did they might have
had sex at a different time, resulting in different gametes being
fertilized. Instead of whoever currently exists being born, some different
person would have been born instead.
The end result is that all currently existing people owe their existence to
historical injustices. If you went back and time and stopped those
injustices you wouldn’t enrich the descendants of the people they happened
to. You’d be erasing those descendants from existence and replacing them
with different descendants.
So really, the only living people who can complain about the South’s
antebellum slavery are people whose lives are so terrible they’d prefer
that they’d have never been born at all. I suspect that these people are a
very small minority of the population.
Hide
* Vanzetti says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:51 am ~new~
Do you realize you can justify anything with this argument?
Hide ↑
* Creutzer says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:56 am ~new~
You cannot justify any future actions with it, which is a pretty
important limitation as justifications go.
And it does actually align with my intuitions here. It makes no sense
to say that any individual black person in the US was harmed by events
two hundred years past precisely because the counterfactual doesn’t
come out right.
I suppose the reason why we are sometimes inclined to
counterfactual-based arguments that the above strict line of reasoning
would reject is that our intuitive computation of counterfactuals is
not as stringent and does not have the same level of detail.
But even intuitively, you don’t exist in a counterfactual world where
your ancestors generations ago had a profoundly different
socio-economic status and would likely have engaged in different
reproductive behaviour.
Hide ↑
* anon says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:56 am ~new~
Rephrase: do you realize you can justify the Holocaust with this? If
you went back in time and killed Hitler, you’d be erasing the
descendants of everyone who was affected by the genocide.
Hide ↑
* Randy M says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:02 am ~new~
I have to point out that this discussion was in the of the novel
Pastwatch. A group of people discovered that they could possibly
travel through time and alter the past, and they do so to prevent the
spread of slavery in the new world, but before doing so they have to
consider (and have a global vote or something similar) that it will
mean the death or unmaking of every person currently alive and many
who lived in the intervening period.
In the end they decide to do so due to widespread ecological
catastrophe and the discovery that their own timeline was the result
of a previous attempt.
Hide ↑
* Ghatanathoah says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:04 pm ~new~
@anon
This brings up the ethics of time travel, which are a bizarre and
difficult questions. I think you are assuming that going back in time
and stopping the Holocaust is morally equivalent to a person alive at
that time managing to stop it. I don’t think it is.
If you use time travel to stop the Holocaust you may be (depending on
how time travel works) be committing an even bigger genocide, because
you would be destroying everyone in a timeline that had, in some
sense, existed.
By contrast if someone alive at the time of the Holocaust had stopped
they wouldn’t be destroying any preexisting future timelines (and
yes, I know “preexisting future timelines” is an oxymoron, but it’s
hard to use English to describe time travel).
There are some circumstances where you could justify time travel. For
instance, in “Terminator 2” or “X-Men: Days of Future Past” there are
so few people left alive in the future that the amount of people in
the present that the time travel saves outweighs the amount of people
in the future that it kills. The “Pastwatch” novel Randy M uses as an
example is similar, everyone is doomed soon anyway in that timeline.
But since the human population tends to grow in most cases time
travel will kill more than it saves.
This is of course assuming rules where time travel changes
everything. In a universe with other rules (like Doctor Who) it is
possible to make small changes without changing everything, so using
time travel to improve things is more justifiable. You won’t erase
everything by helping one person.
If I had been alive in 1940 I would have tried to stop Hitler.
However, I’m not sure if I would go back in time to stop him today
because I’d be killing billions of people.
Under normal circumstances, if you are making choices that affect the
future, and your choices will result in either one set of descendants
who are well off, or another set of descendants who are not as well
off, you should definitely pick the better off ones, all things being
equal (agreeing on a definition of “better off” is kind of hard
though). Neither of those sets of people exist in any sense, so you
aren’t harming the less well off ones by not creating them.
But in the case of time travel the less well off ones “already exist”
in some other doomed timeline and you’re murdering them to get a new
set of people. This, is, I think, gravely immoral. If some parents
killed their disabled child so that they would have enough money to
conceive and raise an able child we’d all agree they had done
something wrong.
Hide ↑
* Anonymous says:
May 28, 2014 at 12:35 pm ~new~
Rephrase: do you realize you can justify the Holocaust with this?
As long as we’re casually mentioning the Holocaust, you do realize
that the logic which says: “members of ethnic group A are one average
wealthier than members of ethnic group B, and some of that wealth
came from immoral exploitation of B by some members of A in the past,
therefore B has a moral right to strike back against A to make up for
it,” is very close to how the Holocaust was actually justified,
historically?
Hide ↑
* Ialdabaoth says:
June 26, 2014 at 3:48 pm ~new~
> But since the human population tends to grow in most cases time
> travel will kill more than it saves.
No, because time travel also saves / “creates” (same thing, really)
all the people that are born instead – which your logic seems to be
neglecting.
If you save 6 million Jews+others but condemn 6 billion post-WW2
lives to non-existence, that’s only a 1000:1 cost if you also prevent
anyone else from being born. But if in both timelines there are 7
billion people in 2014, then from 2014-perspective you’ve killed 7
billion people and saved/replaced them with 7 billion OTHER people.
Which … I guess is a net wash? Time travel morality is weird.
Hide ↑
* Troy says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:47 am ~new~
I don’t think Ghatanathoah was trying to justify slavery or other
historical injustices. I took his point to be that currently existing
people were not harmed by those injustices, and so do not deserve
reparations.
This is quite compatible with people in the past being substantially
harmed by said injustices, and with their being wrong for that reason.
Hide ↑
* Earnest_Peer says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:07 am ~new~
That argument sounds wrong even on face level: If you were harmed by
compound interest working against you, that harm doesn’t go away just by
pointing out that the source of the harm influenced whether or not you
were born.
Besides, I never really bought the related sorts of arguments:
“I cannot be in favor of abortion, because if my mother had aborted me I
wouldn’t even be here.”
“Your veil of ignorance is slipping.”
“Oops, sorry, tee hee.”
Hide ↑
* Ghatanathoah says:
June 26, 2014 at 3:51 pm ~new~
>If you were harmed by compound interest working against you, that harm
doesn’t go away just by pointing out that the source of the harm
influenced whether or not you were born.
That’s irrelevant because morality has no interest in reducing harm.
What it has an interest in reducing is uncompensated harm. It’s totally
okay to harm someone if harming them will result in good things
happening to them that compensate for that harm (of course, the good
things have to be good by their standards not yours).
If compound interest causes you harm, but it also causes a large amount
of good things to happen to you that outweigh that harm, then its
effect on you was good overall. That means that the only
African-Americans alive today that slavery harmed are the ones whose
lives are so terrible that they spend the majority of them wishing they
were dead.
>“Your veil of ignorance is slipping.”
This discussing is not about any sort of pure utilitarianism that uses
the Veil of Ignorance. This is a discussion related to nonutilitarian
concepts like Just Desserts and Retribution. In these case the identity
of the people we are debating is highly important and using a veil of
ignorance is not appropriate.
>Besides, I never really bought the related sorts of arguments:
“I cannot be in favor of abortion, because if my mother had aborted me
I wouldn’t even be here.”
I don’t buy that argument either, especially since it also makes you
against every other form of birth control, including abstinence. When
we’re considering moral questions that will affect the personal
identity of future generations I think we should just pick whatever
population is morally best and not consider the fact that it will
result in another population not existing to be a problem.
Of course, there is serious argument over what makes a population
morally best. Is it better to have a small population with high utility
or a large one with low utility? Should we try to create a diverse
population? Should we make people have human-like values or something
else? But that’s another discussion entirely.
But again, we’re not discussing how to choose a future population
through a veil of ignorance. We are discussing questions of justice,
reparations, and whether or not any specific person was wronged. And
while it is true that our current population is not as “morally good”
as a population in a world where slavery had never happened would be,
that does not mean any specific person was harmed and deserves
reparations for the harm they suffered.
Hide ↑
18. Nancy Lebovitz says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:56 am ~new~
I consider it plausible that racist policies have left whites generally
better off than blacks, but are still negative-sum. White are generally
somewhat worse off than they would have been, and blacks are generally a
lot worse off than they would have been.
There isn’t a huge pile of white wealth which was gained as a result of
slavery, segregation, and unequal government policies, there’s just damage,
and most of it was done to black people.
If true, how would this affect the plausibility of reparations?
Hide
* Randy M says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:50 am ~new~
Plausibility it terms of what? Elected officials opting for some kind of
reparations policy? (direct cash, rather than AA, anyway) Probably
wouldn’t effect it. Ironically, Democratic political power may increase
with immigration, but the case–and, I’d wager, support–for reparations
decreases as the proportion of society with their own family hardships or
successes unrelated to American history increases.
Has there been studies on immigrants support for Black American
reparations?
Hide ↑
* Paul Torek says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:30 pm ~new~
Re: paragraph 1 – exactly.
Answer to question: it probably doesn’t, because of what Ghatanathoah
said.
Hide ↑
19. naath says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:30 am ~new~
I think a big problem with comparing *by state* is that what the American
South under slavery had was a very small number of very rich slave-owners,
a large number of slaves, and also a large number of very poor
non-slave-owning non-slaves (who have to work for very low wages, because
the wage-payers could replace them with slaves if they demanded more). Even
if all the descendents of all these people are now equally (non-)wealthy it
would be a small number of rich people!
It is perhaps worth remembering that a lot of the money in the slave trade
went back to the “old world” – a lot of people in 18th century England made
their fortunes on the back of the slave trade, so you’d want to come
looking here for rich people rich off the back of slaves. Perhaps the
slave-owners of the America South spent all their money on slaves.
A different thing I read once (which may not be true, and I have no
citations) is that slave-run cotton and tobacco plantations were actually
very very badly managed and didn’t really make much money at all. The
slave-owning classes were able to sustain the *illusion* of being very rich
because slaves were cheap which meant “having lots of people keeping your
house nice” was cheap.
Hide
* he who posts slowly says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:20 am ~new~
A source that argues against your last paragraph is Time on the Cross,
which argues that in the right circumstances, such as cotton plantations,
actually existing slave labor was more productive per hour of labor.
Your second paragraph is not quite compatible with your first paragraph:
how could slave traders make so much money if slaves were so cheap? I
suppose you could reconcile it by saying that slave traders made money
selling the good slaves to the Caribbean sugar plantations, and the
leftovers were sold cheaply in America. (True, but not that cheap)
Hide ↑
20. Nestor says:
May 27, 2014 at 8:59 am ~new~
Old money is not inherited without strings, it’s an entailment that brings
responsibilities to the estate, they work more like corporations than
families in the conventional sense. It’s no accident the money stays
concentrated, this is old social technology that has been perfected
millenia ago.
Hide
21. Randy M says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:22 am ~new~
“Studies of modern-day lottery winners show much the same, albeit on a
much-reduced time scale”
This seems very important. Why would this be the case? The lesser time
scale bit, I mean. Some combination of:
-Lottery winners today include people who win much more than ~$60,000, so
the psychological effects are different
-Lottery winners today select from a pool of people less math savy, given
the difference in the odds
-The winners of the land lottery back then also tended to lose out in the
first generation, but historical records aren’t good enough to discern this
-our culture is now much less valuing of thrift and investment versus
consumption and instant gratification
-our average population has less of the successful genes, so the average
time to regress to mean is much shorter.
The last two explanations are the worrying ones.
Hide
* Nancy Lebovitz says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:42 am ~new~
Two more explanations: there’s a lot more cool stuff to buy these days.
Land is more obviously a valuable capital good than money is.
Hide ↑
* Randy M says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:55 am ~new~
I expect that’s true, thinking of things like world travel and Rolls
Royce, etc., but I’m ignorant of what the wealthy spent their money on
in the 1800’s; perhaps there were less technologically advanced luxury
items that nonetheless cost a lot and conveyed high status. Important
textiles from China, heirlooms, fine craftmanship, rare art, servants
etc.
But then again, these things are less hedonic–I expect–so perhaps the
pull was less even if there were outlets.
Hide ↑
* Nancy Lebovitz says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:07 am ~new~
There were certainly plenty of high-status items back then. However,
it wouldn’t surprise me if the toys, and possibly the sales methods,
have improved since then.
Hide ↑
* Paul Torek says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:34 pm ~new~
The second explanation is killer. Consider the vast difference in
response to opt-in versus opt-out choices. In those cases, the
difference is literally just lifting a finger (well, a hand with a pen
in it). Selling land is a lot more work.
Hide ↑
22. Patrick says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:54 am ~new~
Poor Coates. He writes a long article connecting reparations not with
slavery, but with white supremacy and the hundred plus years of post
slavery oppression and state sponsored terrorism. And no one notices,
anywhere, on any side.
Hide
* Erik says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:46 am ~new~
The article opens with “250 years of slavery”, more years than the other
items put together, describes a later period as “a second slavery”, uses
the word “slave” and conjugates thereof more often than “reparations” and
conjugates thereof, and repeatedly argues that America owes much of its
wealth to slavery:
> Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their
> backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was
> erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was
> derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor
> constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave
> society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the
> Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic
> transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever
> says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm,
> “says cotton.”
then ties wealth and slavery into reparations:
> Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make
> reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was
> built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The
> Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could
> be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the
> population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That
> number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added
> to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles
> Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something
> broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial
> justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
If Coates truly didn’t mean to mean to connect reparations with slavery,
I must say he’s a master of the red herring.
Hide ↑
* Patrick says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:04 pm ~new~
White supremacy = slavery plus all the other stuff that everyone
ignores, even though it’s present from the sub header of the article
onward.
“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty
years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing
policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will
never be whole.”
He’s making the point that talk of systemic racial injustice done for
profit, what he terms “plunder,” didn’t end in the mid 1800s.
Hide ↑
* Hainish says:
May 27, 2014 at 6:43 pm ~new~
Patrick, thank you for making this point.
Hide ↑
* Benjamin David Steele says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:34 pm ~new~
I don’t know how anyone argues against such obvious injustice. It
really doesn’t get much more obvious than that.
Hide ↑
* Hainish says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:27 pm ~new~
They can’t argue against it. So they just argue about . . . something
else.
Hide ↑
23. gattsuru says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:01 am ~new~
> Okay, so wealth lasts a really long time, and Klein thinks that’s because
> of compound interest and Clark thinks it’s because of “inescapably
> inherited social competence” which sounds a lot like a euphemism for
> genes.
I’m not sure this follows. Social competence as a unit seems simultaneously
far too complex to have developed in only a few thousand generations, prone
to rapidly changing ‘correct’ values, and too evolutionary important to
only show up only a small portion of the society. There’s good evidence
that intelligence has a large genetic factor, true, but there’s a lot of
other types of social competence. Adoption and twin studies have shown at
least a few traits that are linked to parenting : education seems a far
more reasonable explanation than a gene for accounting*. You’re a heavy
biological determinist, but even within that paradigm, there’s still
matters like lead exposure or early diet or other stuff that’s dependent on
the wealth of a parent.
* Yes, even if accountants don’t quite seem human some days.
Hide
* Earnest_Peer says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:26 am ~new~
Does it really sound impossible that humans spent the last 250.000 years
or so evolving towards more social skills? Our large brains must have
come from somewhere, and as far as I can tell, social skills are the most
likely ingredient (c.f. homo hypocritus).
I for one am not very surprised by the ‘genetic inheriting of money’ that
Clark proposes, because that means even beyond our ancestral environment
our genes still do exactly what they’re ‘supposed’ to do.
Hide ↑
* gattsuru says:
May 28, 2014 at 3:30 pm ~new~
I can believe that humans as a species evolved toward more/greater
social skills for 250,000 or 2.5 million years. I can’t believe that
we’ve spent that long evolving /differently/ from other humans. For
starters, you’ve got too many population bottlenecks, as recent as
60,000 years ago (thus, 2-4k generations rather than 12-15
generations), plus other more recent localized events that would
promote interbreeding.
But more fundamentally, until /very/ recently social success was about
as big a genetic motivator as it gets without being an actual sexual
function. That’s a whole lot of selection pressure, and you have to
come up with really complex stories to explain why this gene or group
of genes has such a large impact today, yet didn’t provide a major
reproductive advantage in the past.
Hide ↑
* Ben Southwood says:
June 11, 2014 at 3:52 am ~new~
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion
Hide ↑
24. Troy says:
May 27, 2014 at 11:07 am ~new~
Another point worth noting is that after you control for IQ, black income
is (IIRC) 97% of white income. (Source: The Bell Curve. As far as I know,
despite all the controversy over the book, this claim has not been
challenged.) As Herrnstein and Murray show in the rest of their book, and
as is well documented elsewhere, IQ is an extraordinarily good predictor of
life outcomes generally. Parsimony suggests that either IQ (or related
traits that IQ is a good predictor for) is a large part of the explanation
for the difference between black and white wealth, or that the latter
causes the former (or some combination). The latter direction of influence
seems less plausible to me — given the resilience of IQ tests, it’s
unlikely that, say, getting a worse paid job as an adult would lead you to
do worse on IQ tests. If that’s right, one of the most important things we
can do to try to improve life outcomes for black Americans is to raise
their IQ. The best (non-eugenic) ways to do this will likely involve
improving their nutrition, encouraging breastfeeding in the black
community, getting rid of lead in the environment, etc.
A rather more serious problem than low-paying jobs for American blacks, I
think, is unemployment. Here both government policies and black culture
probably play a contributing role. The black-white unemployment gap was
virtually nonexistent until the first minimum wage laws in the 1940s, which
effectively priced lower-skilled blacks out of the market. It has more or
less steadily increased since then, and has also been compounded by laws
disallowing IQ tests and criminal background checks on employees by
companies. Both have the effect of making employers use race as a predictor
for low IQ and criminal background, whereas if they could run the
tests/checks the usefulness of race as such a predictor would be screened
off by the tests/checks. (See, for example, this study showing that
employers were much more likely to hire African-Americans, especially men,
when they ran background checks:
http://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Holzer,_etal-PerceivedCriminality-oct2006.pdf).
So I think that there are things that the government can do to make
African-Americans better off, but aside from public health improvements
they are not embraced by most of those who today claim to be interested in
helping the poor.
Hide
25. Pingback: Today’s Interesting Reading: Putin, Reparations, Weakness of
Compound Interest, and Materiality, oh my. | Symptomatic Commentary
26. Army1987 says:
May 27, 2014 at 12:16 pm ~new~
> If Clark’s view is right, the best we can do is alleviate their suffering
> by making sure that being poor isn’t an especially unpleasant state and
> everyone has good access to social services.
Also, somehow encourage rich people to have more children and poor people
to have fewer, so that the next generations will have better “inescapably
inherited social competence”.
(Actually, doing that would also make sense even if Clark’s view was wrong,
so let’s just do that already. Problem is, how would we go about achieving
that?
Hide
27. CaptainBooshi says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:41 pm ~new~
I see a fair number of commenters conflating individual genetics with
racial genetics, so I though I would note that Clark specifically notes in
an interview:
> There is no evidence of any racial differences in average ability in any
> of the data that I have. If you look at ethnic groups who occur as
> doctors at more than average frequency within American society, they are
> mostly non-white—black Africans, black Haitians, Egyptian Copts, Iranian
> Muslims, Hindus, Chinese, Filipinos. The evidence is that any group can,
> under the right circumstances, become elite—or become an underclass group
> in a society.
He is pretty clearly arguing that genetics have a much larger effect on
individuals than they do on populations as a whole.
On an unrelated note, Scott is quite right in section IV that if this is
true, it should have huge implication for social policy, and we need more
research like this. For example, in that same interview, he notes that:
> when you look at a society like Sweden, which has undertaken many of
> these programs for many, many years, you find very little ability to
> actually change that rate of social mobility very much. In Sweden,
> however, the disadvantages from being in the bottom 10 percent of the
> social spectrum have been very significantly reduced compared to the
> United States.
and that:
> I think it’s an argument for saying we should limit income inequality,
> because, also, we don’t think high wages are playing that much of an
> incentive role in determining what people do with their lives.
Of course, I have no real hope that conclusively showing something is true
will have much of an effect on our actual politics in modern society (just
look at climate change!), but it would still be good to know in case that
ever changes.
Hide
* suntzuanime says:
May 27, 2014 at 3:53 pm ~new~
Clark seems to be conflating “whites aren’t the best” with “all races are
equivalent”, which strikes me as a sort of implicit white supremacism.
Dude seems to be saying “Obviously black Africans can’t have higher
ability than white Americans, that would be ridiculous. Clearly it’s all
just random.”
Hide ↑
* Multiheaded says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:18 pm ~new~
I consider myself an anti-racist, but an unqualified “black Africans
have higher ability than white Americans” still sounds more implausible
than the opposite (ok, sure, this sounds racist as fuck, and probably
is, and I’m sick of the whole scientific racism discourse); “all of our
cultural expectations are white-supremacist and systemically devalue
black Africans’ higher ability at things that used to matter in an
African context” might be more realistic.
I know that some of the scientific racists, like Steve Sailer, at least
say that black Americans are cognitively better than whites at some
things.
Hide ↑
* bbartlog says:
January 28, 2016 at 11:35 pm ~new~
Yes … for example rhythm: see
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid=1982-03330-001
Australian aborigines also have above-white visual memory (measured
by things like the ability to draw maps, for example) despite being
one of the lowest scoring racial groups known when it comes to
standard IQ tests.
Hide ↑
* peppermint says:
May 27, 2014 at 5:14 pm ~new~
…or maybe White supremacy is just a universally acknowledged fact, so
much so that rubbing it in people’s faces with White privilege is seen
as gauche.
Hide ↑
* suntzuanime says:
May 27, 2014 at 5:37 pm ~new~
Maybe, but on the other hand, definitely not.
Hide ↑
* Doug S. says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:48 pm ~new~
I’m hesitant to dive into this discussion, but is it possible that
being a black African makes you more likely to have musical talent?
(Consider the history of music in the U.S.: lots of white people became
famous musicians by copying the styles invented by black musicians that
were kept down by racism.)
Hide ↑
* Tom Hunt says:
June 9, 2014 at 7:24 pm ~new~
If some of these demographics which are overrepresented include large
proportions of immigrants to the US, that’s a confounding factor; those
who are able to immigrate as adults are likely in a high ability cohort
as regards their source populations. I seem to recall hearing that black
African immigrants to the US do comparatively quite well, better than
either native-born blacks or whites. This isn’t incompatible with the
race realist hypothesis.
Hide ↑
28. Anthony says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:32 pm ~new~
Quoting Gregory Clark:
I think it’s an argument for saying we should limit income inequality,
because, also, we don’t think high wages are playing that much of an
incentive role in determining what people do with their lives.
Ordinal versus cardinal. People don’t become doctors or lawyers because
they can make $700,000/year, they become doctors or lawyers because they
can make more income than 99% of people, whether that level is $700,000 or
$200,000. (Modulo past expenses – lowering doctor or lawyer incomes
substantially without also lowering the actual debts incurred probably
would drive off a lot of future doctors as well as many present ones.)
This is probably important to discussions of inequality, somehow.
Hide
* Paul Torek says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:39 pm ~new~
Seems plausible. You’ll get a test of your parenthetical speculation
pronto, because lawyers are in deep oversupply in the U.S. right now.
Hide ↑
* peterdjones says:
May 28, 2014 at 5:40 am ~new~
Doctors are paid more in the US than just than just about everywhere,
which leads to undesupply in other countries due to brain drains. The
same would not apply to lawyers,
Hide ↑
29. Benjamin David Steele says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:46 pm ~new~
If you’re really serious to see how money gets passed on across
generations, you would look at the direct descendents of slave owners. Of
course, the Civil War and Reconstruction wiped out a lot of their wealth.
Still, I’d suspect that at least some of those descendents of slave owners
are still wealthier than average.
It’s also important to keep in mind that not all slave owners were wealthy
in the first place, as many of them only owned a single slave. To better
test this issue, maybe the study would need to focus only on the
descendents of the wealthiest of slave owners (i.e., the slave owners who
benefited the most from slavery). Also, money has tended to past down to
sons and so you’d need to look at those carrying the surnames of the
wealthiest slave owners.
Another factor others also have mentioned is that a focus on states isn’t a
very useful way of measuring the long-term gains by slave-owning
descendents.
“But, anyway, if some of slavery alone’s “quadrillions of dollars” (that
Klein cites as practically besides the point, questionable as that figure
might be) survived elsewhere, for example in the northern US economy which
was rather reliant on Southern agriculture, you’d want to account for
that.”
Many wealthy Southerners would have left the South after the devastation of
the Civil War and the problems of Reconstruction. They likely went to the
North or to the West Coast. Furthermore, many wealthy Northerners invested
in or benefited from the Southern slave economy. The two economies were
intertwined. The Civil War caused much of the wealth of slave owners to be
shifted to the Northern economy.
The ultimate problem is there is no way to separate the slave factor from
every other factor of racial prejudice that has existed for centuries.
There are a number of excellent books that look at the data such as When
Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson, Sundown Towns by James W.
Loewen, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, etc.
Hide
30. Thomas M says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:52 pm ~new~
“While one could make the argument that the gains from slavery left
Mississippi and the Deep South to enrich all whites, this seems a bit
forced.”
OK, not all whites were enriched, but the gains from slavery absolutely
left Mississippi. The descendants of slave owners are not the rural poor
white people of Mississippi. Today’s rural poor are mostly descended from
yesterday’s rural poor. Slave owner families left the south to pursue more
lucrative industries. Now their descendants live in the wealthiest parts of
America. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that the gains from slavery were never
centered in the South at all– the textile industry was just a part of the
American economy, after all. I’d expect most of the prosperity created by
racial exploitation in general to end up in, say, New York, no matter how
much southerners hated the Yankees.
To put it another way: if you wanted to investigate how much wealth was
being generated using sweatshops in Vietnam, you could get some idea by
looking at the demographics of Vietnamese citizens. But a better indicator
would be the demographics of upper management at Nike.
In fact, I’d even assume that this principle generalizes out pretty well.
Consider: Detroit and the auto industry or Texas and the oil industry. One
might comfortably predict that a hundred years from now these industries
will be gone, and the host cities will suffer economic decline. But I can’t
really imagine that the future descendants of the current owners of Texaco
will be any less wealthy. They’ll just be located somewhere else, with
investments in something else.
Hide
* AJD says:
May 27, 2014 at 11:42 pm ~new~
> I’d expect most of the prosperity created by racial exploitation in
> general to end up in, say, New York, no matter how much southerners
> hated the Yankees.
(Anecdotally, note that the mayor of New York during the Civil War was a
supporter of the Confederacy.)
Hide ↑
* Thomas M says:
May 29, 2014 at 5:02 pm ~new~
I did not know this! Interesting.
Hide ↑
31. taintwhatyoudo says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:55 pm ~new~
The solution seems simple: reparations in the form of tax cuts for incomes
above 250k or so. Should be supported by conservatives; they love tax cuts,
and this way none of the money goes to the “thugs” and other
“undesirables”. Should be supported by the left – reparations will be a
huge progressive victory. Should be supported by the racists – at least the
money will go to those with good genes. Should be supported by anti-racists
– they and their friends are the ones who will get the money.
It solves all the practical problems: Who will be paid? How much will they
be paid? Who will pay? The tax break will last until black people are
represented proportionally among the one percenters, or maybe a little
overrepresented – gotta make up for the somewhat higher number of black
people among the poorest. It will go to whoever earns enough and is willing
to call themself black in public. And everyone will pay – people are used
to redistribution from the poor to the wealthy by now.
It works under Coates’s theory, as the additional money to the rich will
ensure that they get an even better staring position for the next
generation. It works under Clark’s theory – the rich are more likely to
have the “inescapably inherited” characteristics, and wealth concentrations
among them should persist better. It is a stangely just solution – if the
original injustices only were to the benefit of the few, so should the
reparations. It may solve all the symptoms and indicators yet none of the
actual problems. I wonder why it hasn’t been implemented yet.
Hide
* Multiheaded says:
May 28, 2014 at 5:12 am ~new~
What a modest proposal!
(Although I must admit that even in blatant satire like this, conflating
people who think like me with the American liberal elite – Should be
supported by the left… …they and their friends are the ones who will get
the money feels pretty damn insulting; I’d rather be called a
bloodthirsty Stalinist!)
Hide ↑
* Randy M says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:46 pm ~new~
“It is a stangely just solution – if the original injustices only were to
the benefit of the few, so should the reparations”
That sounds strange because it is not fitting any definition or intuition
of justice.
Hide ↑
* Nornagest says:
June 26, 2014 at 5:29 pm ~new~
This sort of justice?
Hide ↑
32. peppermint says:
May 27, 2014 at 5:13 pm ~new~
Yes! Finally! We absolutely have this responsibility. Catholics know that
the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance are murder, sodomy,
oppressing the poor, and defrauding a working man of his wages.
And today’s culture is full of subtle ways of oppressing the poor and
defrauding a working man of his wages. But it’s all okay, because it also
has transfer payments that do not work.
When we eliminate those transfer payments, we must at the same time switch
to a system that does not oppress the poor or defraud a working man of his
wages.
Hide
33. Pingback: Lightning Round – 2014/05/28 | Free Northerner
34. scientism says:
May 28, 2014 at 12:29 pm ~new~
It’s an issue of values and culture. The Swedish nobility have no doubt
continued to pass their values and culture from one generation to the next.
Lottery winners only get wealth. Wealth without the right kind of
upbringing regresses to mean. Wealth with the right kind of upbringing does
not. Immigrants bring traditional values from their home countries. Liberal
cultural reforms tend to hurt the poor more, since the elites essentially
have their own privately-run bubble of traditional culture (including
schools, churches, social clubs, societies, universities, etc). Genetics
are also a factor, but there are many more things to consider; it’s not
wealth vs. genetics.
Hide
* Nancy Lebovitz says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:14 pm ~new~
In addition to wealth and genetics, it probably matters if people are
connected in a social network which supports them being wealthy.
Hide ↑
* Douglas Knight says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:50 pm ~new~
As I said in my other comment, the data is not just lottery winners. Both
wealth and poverty regress to the family mean. There is huge variance in
a single generation, but it cancels out over many generations. Whether
the family trait is due to genes or upbringing, it is not just a matter
of being able to hold on to a windfall.
Hide ↑
35. Pingback: under the sea | The Casuist’s Razor
36. Mr. Cat says:
August 5, 2014 at 6:40 am ~new~
Edit#3’s “but then” is only logical in responding to that assumption if
society’s defined on a national or state level, rather than say, a cultural
or racial level which might even ignore those boundaries (especially
state).
Now I’m not saying that IS the case, only that the categorical “Well
obviously our society is a single society so that clearly didn’t happen”
implication is stupid.
Hide
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148 comments since
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* anon 2014-05-26 17:44
* B.B. 2014-05-26 17:54
* Oligopsony 2014-05-26 17:58
* suntzuanime 2014-05-26 18:00
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* jaimeastorga2000 2014-05-26 19:36
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* whales 2014-05-26 20:34
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* Ghatanathoah 2014-05-27 15:04
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* Multiheaded 2014-05-27 15:18
* Anthony 2014-05-27 15:32
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* Thomas M 2014-05-27 15:52
* taintwhatyoudo 2014-05-27 15:55
* peppermint 2014-05-27 16:13
* peppermint 2014-05-27 16:14
* White Girl 2014-05-27 16:27
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* AJD 2014-05-27 22:42
* Earnest_Peer 2014-05-28 03:07
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* scientism 2014-05-28 11:29
* Anonymous 2014-05-28 11:35
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* Hainish 2014-05-28 12:27
* anon 2014-05-28 12:48
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* bbartlog 2016-01-28 23:18
* bbartlog 2016-01-28 23:35